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What the L?
By Kate Clinton. 2005
I mean "What the L ?" in a buoyant, smart-ass, get-a-load-of-this, relentlessly optimistic, might-as-well-live "What the L?" tone. A leap…
of faith, if you will. And I will. I am a faith-based comic. In addition to the frivolous, salutary pleasure of laughing, I believe in the power of laughter to subvert authority and promote democracy.I Am My Own Wife
By Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf. 1995
A soft-spoken transvestite wanting nothing more than to live as a hausfrau, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf instead was caught up in…
the most harrowing dramas of 20th century Europe, surviving both the Nazis and the Communists. I Am My Own Wife is her exquisitely written autobiography where she reveals her lifelong pursuit of sexual liberty. The memoirs of a transvestite Berliner, the story of the wonderful Gründerzeit museum, a look at German culture from the point of view of a permanent outsider, Charlotte's tale, like her life, is a surprising and provocative weave of sex, politics, and history.With the success of a new play about Charlotte, hailed by The New York Times as the "most stirring new work to appear on Broadway this fall," her story is reaching an entirely new readership of enthusiastic theater fans.Von Mahlsdorf was also the subject of a documentary, I Am My Own Woman (1993), directed by Rosa von Praunheim.James Merrill
By Langdon Hammer. 2015
Langdon Hammer has given us the first biography of the poet James Merrill (1926-95), whose life is surely one of…
the most fascinating in American literature. Merrill was born to high privilege and high expectations as the son of Charles Merrill, the charismatic cofounder of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch, and Hellen Ingram, a muse, ally, and antagonist throughout her son's life. Wounded by his parents' bitter divorce, he was the child of a broken home, looking for repair in poetry and love. This is the story of a young man escaping, yet also reenacting, the energies and obsessions of those powerful parents. It is the story of a gay man inventing his identity against the grain of American society during the eras of the closet, gay liberation, and AIDS. Above all, it is the story of a brilliantly gifted, fiercely dedicated poet working every day to turn his life into art. After college at Amherst and a period of adventure in Europe, Merrill returned to the New York art world of the 1950s (he was friendly with W. H. Auden, Maya Deren, Truman Capote, Larry Rivers, Elizabeth Bishop, and other midcentury luminaries) and began publishing poems, plays, and novels. In 1953, he fell in love with an aspiring writer, David Jackson. They explored "boys and bars" as they made their life together in Connecticut and later in Greece and Key West. At the same time, improbably, they carried on a forty-year conversation with spirits of the Other World by means of a Ouija board. The board became a source of poetic inspiration for Merrill, culminating in his prizewinning, uncanny, one-of-a-kind work The Changing Light at Sandover. In his virtuosic poetry and in the candid letters and diaries that enrich every page of this deliciously readable life, Merrill created a prismatic art of multiple perspectives and comic self-knowledge, expressing hope for a world threatened by nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. Holding this life and art together in a complex, evolving whole, Hammer illuminates Merrill's "chronicles of love & loss" and the poignant personal journey they record.From the Hardcover edition.How come the only thing my family tree ever grows is nuts?" Wade Rouse attempts to answer that question in…
his blisteringly funny new memoir by looking at the yearly celebrations that unite us all and bring out the very best and worst in our nearest and dearest. Family is truly the only gift that keeps on giving--namely, the gifts of dysfunction and eccentricity--and Wade Rouse's family has been especially charitable: His chatty yet loving mother dresses her sonas a Ubangi tribesman, in blackface, for Halloween in the rural Ozarks; his unconventional engineer ofa father buries his children's Easter eggs; his marvelouslyMartha Stewart-esque partner believes Barbie is his baby; his garage-sale obsessed set of in-laws areconvinced they can earn more than Warren Buffett by selling their broken lamps and Nehru jackets; hismutt Marge speaks her own language; and his oddball collection of relatives includes a tipsy Santa Clauswith an affinity for showing off his jingle balls. In the end, though, the Rouse House gifted Wade with love,laughter, understanding, superb comic timing, and a humbling appreciation for humiliation. Whether Wade dates a mime on his birthday to overcome his phobia of clowns or outruns a chubchasing boss on Secretary's Day, he captures our holidays with his trademark self-deprecating humor and acerbic wit. He paints a funny, sad, poignant, andoutlandish portrait of an an all-too-typical family that will have you appreciating--or bemoaning--yourown and shrieking in laughter.From the Hardcover edition.Modern Brides & Modern Grooms
By Liza Monroy, Mark O'Connell. 2014
How to make any wedding liberating, brave, and sexy.This post-DOMA book is for any couple-same or opposite sex-seeking a personalized…
wedding that dignifies the relationship and the individual self. No "new normal" here-this guide emboldens you to harness your unique, brazen, queer truth; to be creative; and to plan your wedding your way.Every fiancé faces the question: How do I become something new without losing myself? Using his own story-from how he and his husband connected via MTV's The Real World to the real world of their marriage-author Mark O'Connell reflects on conflicts that arrive during wedding transitions, as well as various other transitions throughout your lives.As a psychotherapist, O'Connell offers ideas to bridge relational gaps with your partner, family, and friends. As a professional actor, he also offers insight into the ways your wedding is a theatrical production: how this can help you to conceptualize the event, consolidate your efforts, and increase creative collaboration as a couple. This will serve you not only on the day, but also for the rest of your time together.Whether we're straight, gay, or other, weddings inspire us to carve out more fun, freedom, recognition, life-space, love-space, and connubial space than we've ever had before.Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels
By Justin Vivian Bond. 2011
WINNER OF A 2012 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD"Like Bond, the memoir is droll, pensive and filled with zingers teetering between funny…
and ferocious."-The New York Times"Bond's fabulosity is matched by a trenchant wit, and [V's] over-the-top stories are smartly edged with politics, sexual or otherwise."-The New York TimesRecently hailed as "the greatest cabaret artist of [V's] generation" in The New Yorker, Mx. Justin Vivian Bond makes a brilliant literary debut with this staggeringly candid and hilarious novella-length memoir.With a recent diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, and news that V's first lover from childhood has been imprisoned for impersonating an undercover police officer, Bond recalls in vivid detail coming of age as a trans kid. Always haunted by the knowledge of being "different," Bond was further confused when the bully next door wanted to meet secretly. Their trysts went on for years, and made Bond acutely aware of sexual power and vulnerability. With inimitable style, Bond raises issues about LGBTQ adolescence, homophobia, parenting, and sexuality, while being utterly entertaining.Singer, songwriter, and Tony-nominated performance artist Mx. Justin Vivian Bond is an Obie, Bessie, and Ethyl Eichelberger Award winner. As one half of the performance duo Kiki and Herb, Bond has toured the world, headlining at Carnegie Hall, the Sydney Opera House, and London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, and starring in a Tony nominated run on Broadway, Kiki and Herb Alive on Broadway. Film credits include a role in John Cameron Mitchell's feature Shortbus. Bond has recently released two records, Dendrophile, and Silver Wells.Leave the Light On
By Jennifer Storm. 2010
A revealing, hopeful account of a young woman's ascent out of the bleak despair of addiction and how recovery helped…
her confront the traumas and secrets that kept her living in the dark for so long.Don't Get Me Started
By Kate Clinton. 1998
Kate Clinton's first book of irreverent humorLet's get one thing straight. I'm not. I'm out and proud. My closet was…
huge, complete with a foyer, turnstile, a few dead bolts, and a burglar alarm. It wasn't until I had lived and slept with a woman for a year that it occurred to me to ask, "Do you think we're lesbians?"Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man
By Thomas Page Mcbee. 2014
"Thomas Page McBee's Man Alive hurtled through my life. I read it in a matter of hours. It's a confession,…
it's a poem, it's a time warp, it's a brilliant work of art. I bow down to McBee-his humility, his sense of humor, his insightfulness, his structural deftness, his ability to put into words what is often said but rarely, with such visceral clarity and beauty, communicated."-Heidi Julavits, author of The Vanishers and The Uses of EnchantmentWhat does it really mean to be a man?In Man Alive, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer that question by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life&mash;one, his otherwise ordinary father who abused him as a child, and the other, a mugger who almost killed him. Standing at the brink of the life-changing decision to transition from female to male, McBee seeks to understand these examples of flawed manhood and tells us how a brush with violence sent him on the quest to untangle a sinister past, and freed him to become the man he was meant to be.Man Alive engages an extraordinary personal story to tell a universal one-how we all struggle to create ourselves, and how this struggle often requires risks. Far from a transgender transition tell-all, Man Alive grapples with the larger questions of legacy and forgiveness, love and violence, agency and invisibility.Praise for Man Alive:"Man Alive is a sweet, tender hurt of a memoir ... about forgiveness and self-discovery, but mostly it's about love, so much love. McBee takes us in his capable hands and shows us what it takes to become a man who is gloriously, gloriously alive."-Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and An Untamed State"Thomas Page McBee's story of how he came to claim both his past and his future is by turns despairing and hopeful, exceptional and relatable. To read it is to witness the birth of a fuller, truer self. I loved this book."-Ann Friedman, columnist, New York Magazine"'Whoever's child I am, my body belongs to me,' McBee writes, and his book is an elegant, generous transcription of the journey toward this incandescent, non-aggrandized, life-sustaining form of self-possession-the kind that emanates from dispossession, rather than running from it."-Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning"Exquisitely written and bristling with emotion, this important book reminds us of how much vulnerability and violence inheres to any identity. A real achievement of form and narrative."-Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of FailureAbout the Author:Thomas Page McBee was the "masculinity expert" for VICE and writes the columns "Self-Made Man" for The Rumpus and "The American Man" for Pacific Standard. His essays and reportage have appeared in the the New York Times, TheAtlantic.com, Salon, and BuzzFeed, where he was a regular contributor on gender issues. He lives in New York City where he works as the editor of special projects at Quartz, and is currently at work on a book about modern American masculinity.ender have appeared in The New York Times and via TheAtlantic.com, VICE, BuzzFeed, and Salon. Thomas gives lectures on masculinity and media narratives across the country. He lives in New York City.Swish
By Joel Derfner, Elton John. 2013
A hilarious and deeply moving account of one man's journey from stereotype to truth.Joel Derfner is a knitter, an aerobics…
instructor, a cheerleader, a go-go dancer, and a musical theater composer, but when he realizes one day that he's a walking gay cliché he embarks on a quest for deeper meaning. A very, very funny quest for deeper meaning. And whether he's confronting the demons of his past at a GLBT summer camp, using the Internet to "meet" men--many, many men--or going undercover to a conference of ex-gays, he discovers that what he's looking for--and sometimes even finds, hidden underneath the surface of everyday life--is his own identity. In the tradition of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, yet with its own particular flair, Swish is a story told with not just wit but humor; not just candor but honesty; and not just compassion but humanity.Swish is the best book about being gay I've ever read. But it's not just about being gay; it's about being human.Elton JohnIn a culture where we disguise vulnerability with physical perfection and material success, Derfner skewers heartache with Wildean wit . . . [Derfner is] the next Noël Coward.Out.comDerfner's writing is perfect. . . . He's your best friend. He's your brother. He is you.EDGE Los AngelesSometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant, always clever, and unpredictable.Philadelphia Gay NewsA Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir
By Daisy Hernandez. 2014
A coming-of-age memoir by a Colombian-Cuban woman about shaping lessons from home into a new, queer life In this lyrical,…
coming-of-age memoir, Daisy Hernández chronicles what the women in her Cuban-Colombian family taught her about love, money, and race. Her mother warns her about envidia and men who seduce you with pastries, while one tía bemoans that her niece is turning out to be "una india" instead of an American. Another auntie instructs that when two people are close, they are bound to become like uña y mugre, fingernails and dirt, and that no, Daisy's father is not godless. He's simply praying to a candy dish that can be traced back to Africa. These lessons--rooted in women's experiences of migration, colonization, y cariño--define in evocative detail what it means to grow up female in an immigrant home. In one story, Daisy sets out to defy the dictates of race and class that preoccupy her mother and tías, but dating women and transmen, and coming to identify as bisexual, leads her to unexpected questions. In another piece, NAFTA shuts local factories in her hometown on the outskirts of New York City, and she begins translating unemployment forms for her parents, moving between English and Spanish, as well as private and collective fears. In prose that is both memoir and commentary, Daisy reflects on reporting for the New York Times as the paper is rocked by the biggest plagiarism scandal in its history and plunged into debates about the role of race in the newsroom. A heartfelt exploration of family, identity, and language, A Cup of Water Under My Bed is ultimately a daughter's story of finding herself and her community, and of creating a new, queer life.From the Hardcover edition.A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet
By Judy Grahn. 2012
Winner of the Independent Publisher Book "IPPY" Award and an American Book Award! Rooted in a Chicana/Latina/indigenous geographic and cultural…
sensibility, the stories of flesh to bone take on the force of myth, old and new, giving voice to those who experience the disruption and violence of the borderlands. In these nine tales, Silva metes out a furious justice—a whirling, lyrical energy—that scatters the landscape with bones of transformation, reclamation, and healing. …An original and authentic voice…with a unique vision. A blend of indigenismo and folktales retold in a modern vein…these stories come from the clouds, from spirits of ancient ancestors, from the oblique corners of the human consciousness…A new and engaging duende is born. —Alejandro Murguia, author of This War Called Love If Chagall had written, he would have painted words in the fierce brushstrokes of ire’ne lara silva’s stories. If Remedios Varo had told stories, she would have wound the tendrils of her magic the way ire’ne lara silva paints her world. —Cecile Pineda, author Devil’s Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step ire’ne lara silva writes about what’s between dark shadow and daylight, when, as on the Day of the Dead, we are so aware of the sacred. Though fiction, ire’ne’s prose seems to transform into chanting verse. —Dagoberto Gilb, author of Before the End, After the Beginning: StoriesIn her brilliant fiction debut, flesh to bone, ire’ne lara silva uses hauntingly lyrical language to tell stories cast in the Latin American tradition of Juan Rulfo and Maria Luisa Bombal. But, do not mistake this work for magical realism. The fantastical elements, raw voices, and shifting realities inhabit an emotional, psychological, and all-too-physical landscape of loss and violence. Life-affirming and intense, the stories sweep us into another world where we come face to face with the deepest truths. Brava! —Norma Cantú, author of Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la FronteraNací para ser breve: María Elena Walsh. El arte, la pasión, la historia, el amor
By Gabriela Massuh. 2017
Nací para ser breve se transforma en una máquina delicada y precisa, que da cuenta -mientras vela, mientras desnuda- de…
las particularidades del mundo intelectual porteño desde los años cincuenta y, más allá, de la historia social del país en el siglo XX. Pero también de una mirada profunda sobre los vínculos. En la intimidad, aquellos encuentros en los que repasaban tarde a tarde su vida intelectual, artística y afectiva fueron un subterfugio para superar el dolor y la incertidumbre. Massuh pregunta para estar cerca de la persona querida. Pregunta porque la intrigan las formas que toma el talento en un artista. Pregunta porque en esas respuestas parece estar no solo el modo de entenderla, sino también la clave de la propia búsqueda existencial. Las grabaciones, transcriptas a páginas oficio, revisadas de puño y letra por la protagonista y guardadas durante décadas en cajas, esperaron el tiempo propicio para la relectura. Enlazados amorosamente las ideas y los recuerdos de ambas, Nací para ser breve se transforma en una máquina delicada y precisa, que da cuenta -mientras vela, mientras desnuda- de las particularidades del mundo intelectual porteño desde los años cincuenta y, más allá, de la historia social del país en el siglo XX. Pero también de una mirada profunda sobre los vínculos. Porque, como dice la autora de este libro, "no hay nada más desgarrador que revivir la juventud en voces o imágenes que dan constancia de la inexorable materia de la que estamos hechos: el tiempo".After the Stroke: A Journal
By May Sarton. 1988
An intimate and uplifting memoir chronicling May Sarton's efforts to regain her health, art, and sense of self after suffering…
from a stroke Feeling cut off and isolated--from herself most of all--after suffering a stroke at age 73, May Sarton began a journal that helped her along the road to recovery. She wrote every day without fail, even if illness sometimes prevented her from penning more than a few lines. From her sprawling house off the coast of Maine, Sarton shares the quotidian details of her life in the aftermath of what her doctors identified as a small brain hemorrhage. What they did not tell her was the effect it would have on her life and work. Sarton's journal is filled with daily accounts of the weather, her garden, beloved pets, and her concerns about losing psychic energy and no longer feeling completely whole. A woman who had always prized her solitude, Sarton experiences feelings of intense loneliness. When overwhelmed by the past, she tries to find comfort in soothing remembrances of her travels, and struggles to learn to live moment by moment. As Sarton begins to regain her strength, she rejoices in the life "recaptured and in all that still lies ahead." Interspersed with heartfelt recollections about fellow poets and aspiring writers who see in Sarton a powerful muse, this is a wise and moving memoir about life after illness.The Pox Lover: An Activist's Decade in New York and Paris
By Anne-Christine D Adesky. 2017
The Pox Lover is a personal history of the turbulent 1990s in New York City and Paris by a pioneering…
American AIDS journalist, lesbian activist, and daughter of French-Haitian elites. In an account that is by turns searing, hectic, and funny, Anne-christine d'Adesky remembers "the poxed generation" of AIDS—their lives, their battles, and their determination to find love and make art in the heartbreaking years before lifesaving protease drugs arrived. D'Adesky takes us through a fast-changing East Village: squatter protests and civil disobedience lead to all-night drag and art-dance parties, the fun-loving Lesbian Avengers organize dyke marches, and the protest group ACT UP stages public funerals. Traveling as a journalist to Paris, an insomniac d'Adesky trolls the Seine, encountering waves of exiles fleeing violence in the Balkans, Haiti, and Rwanda. As the last of the French Nazis stand trial and the new National Front rises in the polls, d'Adesky digs into her aristocratic family's roots in Vichy France and colonial Haiti. This is a testament with a message for every generation: grab at life and love, connect with others, fight for justice, keep despair at bay, and remember.Someone Was Here: Profiles in the AIDS Epidemic
By George Whitmore. 1988
Three powerful profiles of men and women whose lives were changed forever by the AIDS epidemic "Some of my reasons…
for wanting to write about AIDS were altruistic, others selfish. AIDS was decimating the community around me; there was a need to bear witness. AIDS had turned me and others like me into walking time bombs; there was a need to strike back, not just wait to die. What I didn't fully appreciate then, however, was the extent to which I was trying to bargain with AIDS: If I wrote about it, maybe I wouldn't get it. My article ran in May 1985. But AIDS didn't keep its part of the bargain." --George Whitmore, The New York Times Magazine Published at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Someone Was Here brings together three stories, reported between 1985 and 1987, about the human cost of the disease. Whitmore writes of Jim Sharp, a man in New York infected with AIDS, and Edward Dunn, one of the many people in Jim's support network, who volunteers with the Gay Men's Health Crisis organization in the city. Whitmore also profiles a mother, Nellie, who drives to San Francisco to bring her troubled son, Mike, home to Colorado where he will succumb to AIDS. Finally, Whitmore tells of the doctors and nurses working on the AIDS team in a South Bronx hospital, struggling to treat patients afflicted with an illness they don't yet fully understand. Expanded from reporting that originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Someone Was Here is a tragic and deeply felt look at a generation traumatized by AIDS, published just one year before George Whitmore's own death from the disease.Boy Erased: A Memoir
By Garrard Conley. 2016
"The power of Conley’s story resides not only in the vividly depicted grotesqueries of the therapy system, but in his…
lyrical writing about sexuality and love.” —Los Angeles Times“This brave and bracing memoir is an urgent reminder that America remains a place where queer people have to fight for their lives... Boy Erased is a necessary, beautiful book.” —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to YouA beautiful, raw and compassionate memoir about identity, love and understanding. The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality. When Garrard was a nineteen-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to “cure” him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life. Through an institutionalized Twelve-Step Program heavy on Bible study, he was supposed to emerge heterosexual, ex-gay, cleansed of impure urges and stronger in his faith in God for his brush with sin. Instead, even when faced with a harrowing and brutal journey, Garrard found the strength and understanding to break out in search of his true self and forgiveness. By confronting his buried past and the burden of a life lived in shadow, Garrard traces the complex relationships among family, faith, and community. At times heart-breaking, at times triumphant, this memoir is a testament to love that survives despite all odds.Here Come the Brides!: Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage
By Michele Kort, Audrey Bilger. 2012
Marriage today isn't what it used to be: for better, not for worse. As same-sex weddings are becoming more common,…
the classic love-story happy ending is taking on a decidedly new twist, everyone has a fresh role to play, and supporters and opponents of gay marriage alike are finding themselves in the midst of a revolution that's redefining marriage-both as a personal choice and as an institution-as we know it. InHere Come the Brides!,editors Audrey Bilger and Michele Kort gather together the voices of women taking part in-and shaping-this major historical shift. Representing a diversity of points of view in terms of race, class, ethnicity, and gender identification, this collection of essays, stories, and visual images takes a multidimensional look at how opening up the traditional order of "man and wife" to include the possibility of "wife and wife" is altering our social landscape. From wedding pictures and images of protest signs to comical anecdotes and sober philosophical analyses,Here Come the Brides!is an exploration of how the legalization of same-sex marriages has irrevocably changed the way lesbians think about their unions and their lives-and a celebration of the dream of lesbian happily-ever-afters.Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity
By Candace Walsh. 2012
"Recipes and cookbooks, meals and mouthfuls have framed the way Candace Walsh sees the world for as long as she…
can remember, from her frosting-spackled childhood to her meat-eschewing college years to her post-college phase as a devoted Martha Stewart's Entertaining disciple. In Licking the Spoon, Walsh tells how, lacking role models in her early life, she turned to cookbook authors real and fictitious (Betty Crocker, Martha Stewart, Mollie Katzen, Daniel Boulud, and more) to learn, unlearn, and redefine her own womanhood. Through the lens of food, Walsh recounts her life's journey-from unhappy adolescent to straight-identified wife and mother to divorcee in a same-sex relationship-and she throws in some dishy revelations, a-ha moments, take-home tidbits, and mouth-watering recipes for good measure. A surprising and rambunctiously liberating tale of cooking and eating, loving and being loved, Licking the Spoon is the story of how-accompanied by pivotal recipes, cookbooks, culinary movements, and guides-one woman learned that you can not only recover but blossom after a comically horrible childhood if you just have the right recipes, a little luck, and an appetite for life's next meal. "--Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women
By Candace Walsh, Ph.D. Lisa Diamond, Laura André. 2010
The new buzzword in female sexuality is "sexual fluidity"-the idea that for many women, sexual identity can shift over time,…
often in the direction of same-sex relationships. Examples abound in popular culture, from actress Cynthia Nixon, who left her male partner of 15 years to be with a woman, to writer and comedienne Carol Leifer, who divorced her husband for the same reason.In a culture increasingly open to accepting this fluidity, Dear John, I Love Jane is a timely, fiercely candid exploration of female sexuality and personal choice. The book is comprised of essays written by a broad spectrum of women, including a number of well-known writers and personalities. Their stories are sometimes funny, sometimes painful-but always achingly honest-accounts of leaving a man for a woman, and the consequences of making such a choice.Arousing, inspiring, bawdy, bold, and heartfelt, Dear John, I Love Jane is an engrossing reflection of a new era of female sexuality.