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I Love My Computer Because My Friends Live in It: Stories from an Online Life
By Jess Kimball Leslie. 2017
I Love My Computer Because My Friends Live in It is tech analyst Jess Kimball Leslie's hilarious, frank homage to…
the technology that contributed so significantly to the person she is today. From accounts of the lawless chat rooms of early AOL to the perpetual high school reunions that are modern-day Facebook and Instagram, her essays paint a clear picture: That all of us have a much more twisted, meaningful, emotional relationship with the online world than we realize or let on. Coming of age in suburban Connecticut in the late '80s and early '90s, Jess looked to the nascent Internet to find the tribes she couldn't find IRL: fellow Bette Midler fans; women who seemed impossibly sure of their sexuality; people who worked with computers every day as part of their actual jobs without being ridiculed as nerds. It's in large part because of her embrace of an online life that Jess is where she is now, happily married, with a wife, son, and dog, and making a living of analyzing Internet trends and forecasting the future of tech. She bets most people would credit technology for many of their successes, too, if they could only shed the notion that it's as a mind-numbing drug on which we're all overdosing.Go the Way Your Blood Beats: On Truth, Bisexuality and Desire
By Michael Amherst. 2017
Using bisexuality as a frame, Go the Way Your Blood Beats questions the division of sexuality into straight and gay,…
in a timely exploration of the complex histories and psychologies of human desire. A challenge to the idea that sexuality can either ever be fully known or neatly categorised, it is a meditation on desire’s unknowability. Interwoven with anonymous addresses to past loves - the sex of whom remain obscure - the book demonstrates the universalism of desire, while at the same time the particularity of each individual act of desiring. Part essay, part memoir, part love letter, Go the Way Your Blood Beats asks us to see desire and sexuality as analogous with art - a mysterious, creative force, and one that remakes us in the act itself.My Miserable Lonely Lesbian Pregnancy
By Andrea Askowitz. 2008
Unfriending My Ex
By Kim Stolz. 2014
An incisive, hilarious, and brutally honest memoir about life online and about how our obsessive connectivity is making us more…
disconnected--from former reality show contestant, MTV VJ, restauranteur, and go-to voice for millenials.Social media and technology have fundamentally altered the way we do business, couple and break up, develop friendships, and construct our identities and our notions of aspiration and fame. We make decisions about where we'll go based on whether it's Instagrammable. We don't have friends, we have followers. For an entire generation, an experience not captured on social media might as well not have happened at all. As someone whose identity has been forged by reality TV (as a contestant on America's Next Top Model) and social media and mobile technology, Kim Stolz is deeply obsessed with the subject. She has a hard time putting her phone down. And yet she remembers what life was like before technology-induced ADD, before life had become a string of late-night texts, Snapchats, endless selfies, that sinking feeling you get when you realize you've hit reply all by mistake. It's hard to imagine now, but there was once a time before we wasted a full hour emptily clicking through a semi-stranger's vacation pictures on Facebook, a time before every ex, every meaningless fling was a mere click away. Unfriending My Ex (And Other Things I'll Never Do) is the first book to document the hilarity of the social media revolution from the inside; it chronicles a life filtered through our obsessive relationship with technology. The book is as eye-opening as it is entertaining as it proceeds through the various ways in which social media and mobile technology have generated empathy deficits and left us all with the attention spans of fruit flies...and the sad fact that in spite all of this, we find it impossible to switch our devices off. Smart, hilarious, and completely relatable, Unfriending My Ex (And Other Things I'll Never Do) captures our crazy moment, shining a bright light on the trials and tribulations of life online.The Todd Glass Situation: A Bunch of Lies about My Personal Life and a Bunch of True Stories about My 30-Year Career in Stand-Up Comedy
By Jonathan Grotenstein, Todd Glass. 2014
A hilarious, poignant memoir from comedian Todd Glass about his decision at age forty-eight to finally live openly as a…
gay man—and the reactions and support from his comedy pals, from Louis CK to Sarah Silverman. Growing up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 1970s was an easy life. Well, easy as long as you didn’t have dyslexia or ADD, or were a Jew. And once you added gay into the mix, life became more difficult. So Todd Glass decided to hide the gay part, no matter how comic, tragic, or comically tragic the results. It might have been a lot easier had he chosen a profession other than stand-up comedy. By age eighteen, Todd was opening for big musical acts like George Jones and Patti LaBelle. His career carried him through the Los Angeles comedy heyday in the 1980s, its decline in the 1990s, and its rebirth via the alternative comedy scene and the explosion in podcasting. But the harder he worked at his craft, the more difficult it became to manage his “situation.” There were the years of abstinence and half-hearted attempts to “cure” himself. The fake girlfriends so that he could tell relationship jokes onstage. The staged sexual encounters to burnish his reputation offstage. It took a brush with death to cause him to rethink the way he was living his life; a rash of suicides among gay teens to convince him that it was finally time to come out to the world. Now, Todd has written an open, honest, and hilarious memoir in an effort to help everyone—young and old, gay and straight—breathe a little more freely. Peppered with anecdotes from his life among comedy’s greatest headliners and tales of the occasionally insane lengths Todd went through to keep a secret that—let’s face it—he probably didn’t have to keep for as long as he did, The Todd Glass Situation is a front-row seat to the last thirty plus years of comedy history and a deeply personal story about one man’s search for acceptance.Teaching the Cat to Sit: A Memoir
By Michelle Theall. 2014
A compelling memoir of a gay Catholic woman struggling to find balance between being a daughter and a mother raising…
her son with a loving partner in the face of discrimination.From the time she was born, Michelle Theall knew she was different. Coming of age in the Texas Bible Belt, a place where it was unacceptable to be gay, Theall found herself at odds with her strict Roman Catholic parents, bullied by her classmates, abandoned by her evangelical best friend whose mother spoke in tongues, and kicked out of Christian organizations that claimed to embrace her--all before she'd ever held a girl's hand. Shame and her longing for her mother's acceptance led her to deny her feelings and eventually run away to a remote stretch of mountains in Colorado. There, she made her home on an elk migration path facing the Continental Divide, speaking to God every day, but rarely seeing another human being. At forty-three years of age and seemingly settled in her decision to live life openly as a gay woman, Theall and her partner attempt to have their son baptized into the Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church in the liberal town of Boulder, Colorado. Her quest to have her son accepted into the Church leads to a battle with Sacred Heart and with her mother that leaves her questioning everything she thought she knew about the bonds of family and faith. And she realizes that in order to be a good mother, she may have to be a bad daughter. Teaching the Cat to Sit examines the modern roles of motherhood and religion and demonstrates that our infinite capacity to love has the power to shape us all.Tweaked: A Crystal Memoir
By Patrick Moore. 2006
"There are moments when I suddenly realize that I'm a nice boy from Iowa who is entirely comfortable sitting in…
a room of freaks. " So begins Patrick Moore's unforgettable account of life as a crystal meth addict—a "tweaker. " Like a wild ride down Alice's rabbit hole with a guide who is darkly funny and heartbreakingly honest, Tweaked chronicles a twenty-year trip that stretches from Moore's lonely childhood in Iowa with his grandmother, Zelma—an alcoholic artist who, when loaded, turns frozen food into crafts projects —to the day he sits, naked, in a Los Angeles rental, hallucinating about psycho-robbers while talking to a possum he's sure is God. Along the way, there are acid trips at the V. F. W. , Dexetrim study halls with his Bad Girl Posse in the seventies, teeth-grinding nights of dancing and anonymous sex in New York City's hottest eighties clubs, taking pictures of Andy Warhol, losing friends and lovers, and navigating a Byzantine underworld of cookers, users, club kids, dealers, and colorful characters as intense as the drug itself. There is Lee, the glamorous, outr#65533; bad boy with a devastating wit and a taste for danger; Tony, the tweaker who likes to remove his eyebrows; Ding-Dong, the Depends-wearing, nearly blind housemate; Hisako, the artist and squatter with an impenetrable Japanese accent and a fondness for hot plate cooking; "Mother" Judy, the tough, butch rehab counselor who takes no prisoners, and countless others on the road from crystal meth hell to eventual sobriety. Candid, gripping, and ultimately triumphant, Tweaked is that rarest of memoirs—a tale so vivid and personal in the telling it feels like fiction, but every word is true.Trans Voices: Becoming Who You Are
By Declan Henry, Jane Fae, Professor Stephen Whittle OBE. 2017
Imagine what it must be like to feel you are a woman 'trapped' in a man's body. Or a man…
'trapped' in a woman's body. And what happens if you decide to reject your birth gender and become a trans man or a trans woman? Drawing on over one hundred interviews with individuals, this book is a compilation of the voices of those who have decided to undergo transition - both male-to-female and female-to-male. The book details the diverse experiences and challenges faced by those who transition, exploring a range of topics such as hormone treatments; reassignment surgeries; coming out; sex and sexuality; physical, emotional and mental health; transphobia; discrimination; and hate crime, as well as highlighting the lives of non-binary individuals and those who cross-dress to form a wider understanding of the varied ways in which people experience gender. This powerful book is an ideal introduction to those keen to understand more about contemporary trans issues as well as those questioning their own gender identity.Peregrinaciones profanas
By Fernando Noy. 2018
Elegido Reina del célebre carnaval de Salvador Bahía, personaje central de la vida cultural argentina y animador gay inigualable de…
la escena under desde hace cuatro décadas, Fernando Noy cuenta todo en un libro imperdible donde conviven lo más granado de los habitués de los bares porteños de los 60 a las leyendas del tropicalismo. De Pizarnik a Caetano Veloso, de Mercedes Sosa a Tanguito, de Sumo a María Luisa Bemberg, Noy se ha convertido en el cronista más desenfadado de una historia que pedía a gritos su Homero. «¿Quién nos quita lo brillado?, se pregunta Fernando Noy y sigue el consejo de su amigo Pedro Lemebel que solía decirle, con sabiduría de Machi: 'No hables más, Noy: escríbelo'. Y finalmente lo hizo. Aquí están sus memorias, estas Peregrinaciones profanas, puro vértigo de purpurina, cemento y rincones donde el desamparo se convierte en jardín secreto. El propio nacimiento anunciado por la caída de un jinete mapuche; una cartografía del deseo suburbano con las locas del Oeste en los años 60; los náufragos hippies en flor; las temporadas en París o Bahía. Y, por supuesto, las amistades sagradas de Alejandra Pizarnik, Marosa Di Giorgio, María Luisa Bemberg, Batato Barea, Paco Jamandreu, Alejandro Urdapilleta y tantos más. Entre carnavales, lisergia y poetas, desfilan las deidades de Noy y él nos bendice con su misticismo afro-celta, sus túnicas y collares, su inefable paso andrógino que es maravilla, desafío y carcajada.»Mariana Enríquez «Cuando no existía la palabra queer la poeta, la vedette, la actriz, nuestro Fernando Noy, la estaba inventando. Lean estas memorias danzantes de la reina de la fiesta de la libertad y el arte.»Gabriela Cabezón Cámara «Sabíamos que Noy, poeta 24 horas, tenía el don de adelantarse al futuro. Ahora sabemos que es capaz de atravesar la memoria de su tiempo y recuperar un pasado por venir, impredecible, lleno de promesas.»Liliana Viola Noy va narrando un laberinto de encuentros increíbles, pero siempre reales. De la niñez patagónica a la adolescencia del yire hermafrodita con las locas del Oeste en los 60, a la fugaz militancia frustrada por su homosexualidad. El nacimiento alucinógeno y anfetamínico de venta libre en farmacias del hippismo se sobrexpone con el descubrimiento de la bohemia del Di Tella. La crónica de sus amistades son el índice onomástico de la Historia de la Cultura y el Espectáculo de la Argentina de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Cuando la Junta Militar prohibía los carnavales, Noy se coronaba reina en Bahía, donde se había exiliado. Trepado al árbol de un neuropsiquiátrico parisino donde había sido internado por tratar de recuperar "sus" joyas de faraona en medio de un viaje con drogas, ve llegar a Jackie O. y María Callas al hospital donde acababa de morir Aristóteles Onassis... Quien se anime a seguir, en estas páginas plagiadas a sí mismo, su incesante deambular, encontrará un mundo fantástico, sobreimpreso con purpurina, visible de noche. Y también para quienes buscan las claves de una fiesta eterna y compartida.Indestructible
By Cristy Road. 2006
The follow up to Green Zine #14; Cristy Road now offers up a novel about her years in grade school…
and high school in Miami - valiantly trying to figure out and defend her gender identity, cultural roots, punk rock nature, and mortality. You know that the artwork alone in here makes this a page turner and the whole package more exciting. Cristy has always existed to remind us of the strength and ability of punk youth - for addressing things like rape, homophobia, and misogyny. This is no exception; giving voice to every frustrated 15 year old girl under fire from her peers for being queer or butch or punk.Stories for Boys: A Memoir
By Gregory Martin. 2012
In this memoir of fathers and sons, Gregory Martin struggles to reconcile the father he thought he knew with a…
man who has just survived a suicide attempt; a man who had been having anonymous affairs with men throughout his thirty-nine years of marriage; and who now must begin his life as a gay man. At a tipping point in our national conversation about gender and sexuality, rights and acceptance, Stories for Boys is about a father and a son finding a way to build a new relationship with one another after years of suppression and denial are given air and light.Martin's memoir is quirky and compelling with its amateur photos and grab-bag social science and literary analyses. Gregory Martin explores the impact his father's lifelong secrets have upon his life now as a husband and father of two young boys with humor and bracing candor. Stories for Boys is resonant with conflicting emotions and the complexities of family sympathy, and asks the questions: How well do we know the people that we think we know the best? And how much do we have to know in order to keep loving them?Now in one volume: Three exquisite meditations on nature, healing, and the pleasures of the solitary life from a New…
York Times–bestselling author. In a long life spent recording her personal observations, poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton redefined the journal as a literary form. This extraordinary volume collects three of her most beloved works. Journal of a Solitude: Sarton’s bestselling memoir chronicles a solitary year spent at the house she bought and renovated in the quiet village of Nelson, New Hampshire. Her revealing insights are a moving and profound reflection on creativity, oneness with nature, and the courage it takes to be alone. Plant Dreaming Deep: Sarton’s intensely personal account of how she transformed a dilapidated eighteenth-century farmhouse into a home is a loving, beautifully crafted memoir illuminated by themes of friendship, love, nature, and the struggles of the creative life. Recovering: In this affecting diary of one year’s hardships and healing, Sarton focuses on her sixty-sixth year, which was marked by the turmoil of a mastectomy, the end of a treasured relationship, and the loneliness that visits a life of chosen solitude. By turns uplifting, cathartic, and revelatory, Sarton’s journals still strike a chord in the hearts of contemporary readers. Through them, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, “we are able to see our own experiences reflected in hers and we are enriched.”David Hockney: The Biography, 1975-2012
By Christopher Simon Sykes. 2011
Drawing on exclusive and unprecedented access to David Hockney's extensive archives, notebooks, and paintings, interviews with family, friends, and on…
Hockney himself, Christopher Simon Sykes provides a colorful and intimate portrait of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.Born in 1937, David Hockney grew up in a northern English town during the days of postwar austerity. By the time he was ten years old he knew he wanted to be an artist, and after leaving school he went on to study at Bradford Art College and later at the Royal College of Art in London. Bursting onto the scene at the Young Contemporaries exhibition, Hockney was quickly heralded as the golden boy of postwar British art and a leading proponent of pop art. It was during the swinging 60s in London that he befriended many of the seminal cultural figures of the generation and throughout these years Hockney's career grew. Always absorbed in his work, he drew, painted and etched for long hours each day, but it was a scholarship that led him to California, where he painted his iconic series of swimming pools. Since then, the most prestigious galleries across the world have devoted countless shows to his extraordinary work.In the seventies he expanded his range of projects, including set and costume design for operas and experiments with photography, lithography, and even photocopying. Most recently he has been at the forefront the art world's digital revolution, producing incredible sketches on his iPhone and iPad, and it is this progressive thinking which has highlighted his genius, vigor and versatility as an artist approaching his 75th birthday.In this, the first volume of Hockney's biography, detailing his life and work from 1937 - 1975, Sykes explores the fascinating world of the beloved and controversial artist whose career has spanned and epitomized the art movements of the last five decades.Photographs of My Father
By Paul Spike. 2016
At the National Council of Churches Robert Spike had organized American churches to support the passage of both the…
Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act to march in Selma and to organize in Mississippi An important white leader in the black civil rights struggle he helped the LBJ White House pass legislation and write crucial civil rights speeches In the midst of what he described as the dirtiest fight of my life struggling to save a federal Mississippi education program he was viciously murdered in Columbus Ohio The murder was never solved Very little effort went into finding the murderer The Columbus police and the FBI hinted the unsolved murder was connected to Spike s undisclosed gay life During his father s rise in the civil rights movement Paul Spike lived a life typical of a young man in the 1960s finding his way through a labyrinth of booze drugs and girls At Columbia University he was active in the 1968 student rebellion and friends with many SDS radicals That rootless life ended with his father s murder Paul Spike lives in London where he writes about politics literature film and travel for a wide range of newspapers and magazinesLeft-Handed
By Jonathan Galassi. 2012
An emotionally riveting collection that tells a powerful story of passion, loss, and transformation. Left-handed unfolds in the manner of…
an intense, searching novella. At its center is a one-way dialogue with an elusive character who beguiles and torments but also inspires the unnamed narrator, who at midlife is telling the tale. These poems--decisive, wrenching, exquisite--show an overpowering force, at once disruptive and creative, invading a settled existence. They take us from the streets of New York City to a house in the country, from the island of Naxos to the Roman Forum. They reach back to the sonnets of Shakespeare but find inspiration, too, in contemporary life. Naked and raw, lyrical yet formally inventive, rich with the melancholy wisdom of age, this is a work of resonant and shimmering beauty.Lawfully Wedded Husband: How My Gay Marriage Will Save the American Family
By Joel Derfner. 2013
When Joel Derfner's boyfriend proposed to him, there was nowhere in America the two could legally marry. That changed quickly,…
however, and before long the two were on what they expected to be a rollicking journey to married bliss. What they didn't realize was that, along the way, they would confront not just the dilemmas every couple faces on the way to the altar--what kind of ceremony would they have? what would they wear? did they have to invite Great Aunt Sophie?--but also questions about what a relationship can and can't do, the definition of marriage, and, ultimately, what makes a family. Add to the mix a reality show whose director forces them to keep signing and notarizing applications for a wedding license until the cameraman gets a shot she likes; a family marriage history that includes adulterers, arms smugglers, and poisoners; and discussions of civil rights, Sophocles, racism, grammar, and homemade Ouija boards--coupled with Derfner's gift for getting in his own way--and what results is a story not just of gay marriage and the American family but of what it means to be human.The Best Party of Our Lives
By Sarah Galvin. 2015
This moving collection of true stories about gay weddings shows how LGBT couples have overcome cultural and personal obstacles to…
their unions, made wedding traditions their own, and what everyone can learn from them. Told in a series of essays that mimics the course of a traditional wedding, from engagement to walking down the aisle to the honeymoon and beyond, The Best Party of Our Lives invites readers to reflect on what makes their own relationships unique, and the significance of public celebrations of love. With chapters each focusing on a different couple's love story, the challenges they faced, and the lessons they learned, the book offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of the changing face of marriage. The perspective these trailblazing couples gain by examining and remaking marriage for themselves will inform anyone who is planning a wedding and inspire anyone who has ever been in love.From the Trade Paperback edition.The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir)
By Clifford Chase. 2014
An Amazon Book of the Month, February 2014 From the author of the cult classic Winkie, an extraordinarily honest, shockingly…
funny memoir of a man torn between isolation and connection In shimmering prose that weaves among intimate confessions, deadpan asides, and piercing observations on the fear and turmoil that defined the long decade after 9/11, Clifford Chase tells the stories that have shaped his adulthood. There are his aging parents, whose disagreements sharpen as their health declines; and his beloved brother, lost tragically to AIDS; and his long-term boyfriend--always present, but always kept at a distance. There is also the revelatory, joyful music of the B-52s, Chase's sexual confusion in his twenties, and more recently, the mysterious appearance in his luggage of weird objects from Iran the year his mother died. In the midst of all this is Chase's singular voice--incisive, wry, confiding, by turns cool or emotional, always engaging. The way this book is written--in pitch-perfect fragments--is crucial to Chase's deeper message: that we experience and remember in short bursts of insight, terror, comedy, and love. As ambitious in its form as it is in its radical candor, The Tooth Fairy is the rare memoir that can truly claim to rethink the genre.Teaching the Cat to Sit: A Memoir
By Michelle Theall. 2014
A compelling memoir of a gay Catholic woman struggling to find balance between being a daughter and a mother raising…
her son with a loving partner in the face of discrimination. From the time she was born, Michelle Theall knew she was different. Coming of age in the Texas Bible Belt, a place where it was unacceptable to be gay, Theall found herself at odds with her strict Roman Catholic parents, bullied by her classmates, abandoned by her evangelical best friend whose mother spoke in tongues, and kicked out of Christian organizations that claimed to embrace her—all before she’d ever held a girl’s hand. Shame and her longing for her mother’s acceptance led her to deny her feelings and eventually run away to a remote stretch of mountains in Colorado. There, she made her home on an elk migration path facing the Continental Divide, speaking to God every day, but rarely seeing another human being. At forty-three years of age and seemingly settled in her decision to live life openly as a gay woman, Theall and her partner attempt to have their son baptized into the Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church in the liberal town of Boulder, Colorado. Her quest to have her son accepted into the Church leads to a battle with Sacred Heart and with her mother that leaves her questioning everything she thought she knew about the bonds of family and faith. And she realizes that in order to be a good mother, she may have to be a bad daughter. Teaching the Cat to Sit examines the modern roles of motherhood and religion and demonstrates that our infinite capacity to love has the power to shape us all.Oliver Sacks: The Last Interview
By Oliver Sacks. 2016
An extraordinary collection of interviews with the beloved doctor and author, whose research and books inspired generations of readers.Oliver Sacks--called…
"the poet laureate of medicine" by the New York Times--illuminated the mysteries of the brain for a wide audience in a series of richly acclaimed books, including Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and numerous The New Yorker articles. In this collection of interviews, Sacks is at his most candid and disarming, rich with insights about his life and work. Any reader of Oliver Sacks will find in this book an entirely new way of looking at a brilliant writer.