"The claim 'I'm straight' is the psychosexual analogue of 'The check is in the mail': if you need to say it, your credit or creditability is already in doubt." So begins Paul Morrison's dazzling polemic, which takes as its point of departure Foucault's famous remark that sex is "the explanation for everything."

Combining psychoanalytic, literary, and queer theory, The Explanation for Everything seeks to account for the explanatory power attributed to homosexuality, and its relationship to compulsory heterosexuality. In the process, Morrison presents a scathing indictment of psychoanalysis and its impact on the study of sexuality. In bold but graceful leaps, Morrison applies his critique to a diversity of examples: subjectivity in Oscar Wilde, the cultural construction and reception of AIDS, the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, the practice of bodybuilding, and the contemporary reception of the sexual politics of fascism.

Analytical, witty and astute, The Explanation for Everything will challenge and amuse, establishing Paul Morrison as one of our most exciting cultural critics.

As part of the emerging new research on civic innovation, this book explores how sexual politics and gender relations play out in feminist struggles around body politics in Brazil, Colombia, India, Iran, Mexico, Nepal, Turkey, Nicaragua, as well as in East Africa, Latin America and global institutions and networks. From diverse disciplinary perspectives, the book looks at how feminists are engaged in a complex struggle for democratic power in a neoliberal age and at how resistance is integral to possibilities for change. In making visible resistances to dominant economic and social policies, the book highlights how such struggles are both gendered and gendering bodies. The chapters explore struggles for healthy environments, sexual health and reproductive rights, access to abortion, an end to gender-based violence, the human rights of LGBTIQA persons, the recognition of indigenous territories and all peoples' rights to care, love and work freely. The book sets out the violence, hopes, contradictions and ways forward in these civic innovations, resistances and connections across the globe.

Originally published in 1986 as 'Conversations with My Elders', this is a book of interviews with six men of the entertainment world: actors Sal Mineo and Rock Hudson, film directors George Cukor, Luchino Visconti and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and designer, photographer and author Cecil Beaton. Aside from their career successes, they had in common that they were gay and that during their lifetimes they managed to conceal their sexual orientation from the public. What makes these interviews so surprising is the fact that the subjects talk freely and frankly about their lives and their careers, and how their sexuality affected both. In his new preface, Hadleigh reflects on how attitudes towards homosexuality have and have not changed in the 15 years since the book's first publication.

The cultural and ethnic diversity of contemporary American society is represented in plays by women. These women playwrights of diverse backgrounds, however, are too infrequently seen on the stage or read in the classroom. This reference highlights the careers and work of more than 80 women playwrights whose writings portray the African American, Latina, Asian American and lesbian sensibility in the United States. Each profile includes a biographical sketch, a description of plays, a selected production history of each work, information on the availability of plays, awards won by the playwright, and a selected bibliography of critical articles and reviews. Introductory essays begin the volume, and the work concludes with a selected bibliography of major studies.

The ethnic and cultural diversity of the United States is well represented by contemporary dramatists. Women playwrights have made many contributions to American drama, and their plays portray a broad range of cultural experiences. These dramatists, however, are too frequently underrepresented on the stage and in the classroom. This reference book presents the African American, Latina, Asian American, and lesbian perspective in the United States. Many of the playwrights are established; others are emerging. Playwrights were selected based on the recommendations of theatre professionals and leading scholars, along with the production record of the writer and the production potential for the plays.

Included are alphabetically arranged entries for dramatists such as Maria Irene Fornes, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Adrienne Kennedy, Velina Hasu Houston, Holly Hughes, Lisa Loomer, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Wakako Yamauchi. Each entry includes a brief biographical narrative, descriptions of individual plays, a selected production history of each drama, information on the availability of both published and unpublished works, a listing of awards won by the playwright, and a selected bibliography of critical articles and reviews. The volume begins with introductory essays which overview the contributions of African American, Asian American, Latina, and lesbian women playwrights, providing a valuable context for the profiles that follow. The book concludes with a selected bibliography of major critical and scholarly studies.

This is the first book to comprehensively examine Latin America's literary response to the deadly HIV virus. Proposing a bio-political reading of AIDs in the neoliberal era, Lina Meruane examines how literary representations of AIDS enter into larger discussions of community, sexuality, nation, displacement and globalization.

In this extraordinary history, James Driscoll reveals the untold story of how AIDS activists, by thwarting bureaucratic plans imposed by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA), both saved HIV patients and rescued the FDA itself from a self-inflicted public health catastrophe. By 1996, accelerated approval of AIDS drug cocktails transformed AIDS from a death sentence to a manageable disease. That approval, however, came only after years of struggle pitting AIDS activists against the hidebound culture of the Food and Drug Administration, which wanted to run lengthy efficacy trials required for full approval and possibly delay the drugs at a cost of tens of thousands of lives. Driscoll's courageous efforts, which are an important personal part of the story, navigated conflicts among AIDS activist groups as they struggled with both major American political parties to be heard and respected. He examines the effect of AIDS activism on the LGBT community, its views of itself, and its place in modern American society. Additional materials analyze FDA mistakes, drug pricing, and other contemporary challenges for the LGBTs community.

The past decade has seen an extraordinary outpouring of research, writing, and talk about lesbian and gay sexuality, triggered in part by the confluence of the AIDS epidemic, the feminist sex wars, and the development of queer studies. Yet many lesbian and gay writers and readers have been frustrated by recurring gaps and absences in the queer studies approach to sexuality, as well as by the limitations of explicit queer community discourse around sex.

Opposite Sex brings the sex back into queer studies, making real bodies, acts, and desires central to analysis of the complex relationships between male and female homosexualities, and their impact on lesbian and gay culture. The contributors to this volume--scholars, artists, activists, and journalists--redress the remarkable dearth of thoughtful discourse about the many ways in which lesbian and gay men are implicated--and viewed within--in each other's sexual realities.

Opposite Sex includes writing by lesbians and gay men about each other's bodies, interpretations of different male and female homosexual sex cultures, and reflections on the history, sociology, and politics of changing discourses around queer sexuality. Passionate and challenging, this anthology shows the rich and complex forms through which individuals and communities make meaning from their quotidian sexual impulses, their utopian sexual mores, and their idiosyncratic sexual acts.

The contributors include Roberto Bedoya, Kaucylia Brooke, Lawrence Chua, Linnea Due, Sandra Lee Golvin, Jewelle Gomez, Francisco J. Gonzalez, Della Grace, Amber Hollibaugh, Robert Jensen, Kate Kane, Elizabeth A. Kelly, Monica Majoli, Mimi McGurl, Robert Reid-Pharr, Gayle Rubin, Lawrence Schimel, Richard Schimpf, and Susan Stryker.

Here, Bjorklund shows that Swedish literary discourses on lesbianism provocatively contrast with a widely accepted view that attitudes toward homosexuality have gradually become more tolerant. The lasting power of negative discourses upends the assumption that Sweden's progressive laws reflect progressive attitudes toward homosexuality."

This book examines how sports journalists covered the historic coming out stories of National Basketball Association (NBA) veteran Jason Collins and football All-American Michael Sam in the context of sports' "toy department" reputation as a field whose standards are often criticized as lacking in rigor and depth compared to other forms of journalism. Employing a media sociology approach, reporting about Collins and Sam is addressed in the book via three content analysis studies and interviews with two prominent sports journalists. An overview of other pertinent research is provided along with a detailed account of both athletes' stories. This work should appeal to readers interested in sports journalism, the role of sport in society, and media coverage of gay professional athletes.

This international collection of essays forms a vibrant picture of the scope and diversity of contemporary queer performance. Ranging across cabaret, performance art, the performativity of film, drag and script-based theatre it unravels the dynamic relationship performance has with queerness as it is presented in local and transnational contexts.

This book addresses policy research on homophobic and transphobic bullying in schools. It covers quantitative and qualitative research into policy impacts for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex students. It draws on a large-scale Australian study of the impacts of different kinds of policy at the national, state, sector and school level. The study covers over 80 policies, interviews with key policy informants and survey data from 3,134 GLBTIQ students. Since new guidelines were released by UNESCO, homophobic and transphobic bullying in schools has become a key area of interest around the world. There has been much pressure on educational leadership to engage with these issues since the UN released international human rights legislation on sexual orientation and gender identity that have implications for student rights. The book presents statistically significant correlations between specific types of state and school level education policies that explicitly named homophobia/ GLBTIQ student issues, and lowered incidence of homophobic bullying, lowered risk of suicide and self-harm for these students. It includes stories from policy makers on how the policies came to be (through lawsuits, ministerial inquiries and political activism), right through to the stories of students themselves and how they individually felt the impacts of policies or policy lacks. International contexts of homophobic and transphobic bullying are discussed, as well as recent transnational work in this field. The book considers the different types of collaborations that can lead to further policy development, the transferability of the research and some of the benefits and problems with transnational policy adoptions.

No one can doubt that Muslim cultures and Muslim populations are under intense scrutiny in the west and worldwide. Moreover, queer politics has been increasingly drawn into this contemporary Islamophobia. This book presents a detailed interdisciplinary study of the issues surrounding homosexuality and Muslim cultures, drawing on sociological theories of modernity and modernization, evidence of Muslim homo-eroticism in historical and contemporary context, and contemporary political ideas of queer politics, multiculturalism and international development. The book presents an original theoretical framework that describes the ways in which both queer and Muslim politics are caught up in a process of triangulation that asserts the superiority of western civilization. Using an intersectional framework, it also begins to map a way out of this oppositional understanding of homosexuality and Islam, both by drawing on the evidence of the complexity of lived experience for Queer Muslims and by challenging the euro-centric conceits of queer political and social theory.

Much debate exists over the proper religious perspective on transgender realities and people. This volume examines transgender in the major world religions. Extensive consideration is given to Christianity, including the arguments presented both against transgender behaviors and by supporters of transgender people. Religions covered include Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto, and indigenous religions such as Native American religions of the United States.

Near a small village on the edge of civilisation there exists a large, seemingly endless ruin reaching deep down into the depths of the earth. Nobody seems to know just how far it goes, but many explorers, adventurers and curious looky-loos are willing to find out. The village of Adratea was founded by those not afraid of a little darkness, a little danger. This is the story of one particular adventure that went quite wrong, at least for one poor soul. A sexy tale of courage, friendship, love, lust, and impromptu gardening.

What do we mean when we talk about 'queer teachers'? The authors here grapple with what it means to be sexually or gender diverse and to work as a school teacher within four national contexts: Australia, Ireland, the UK and the USA. This new volume offers academics, educators and students a provocative exploration of this pivotal topic.

Coming out is the process of acknowledging same-sex attractions to oneself and to others. It is both a personal and a public process. For many gay and bisexual students, college marks a pivotal point where for the first time they feel free to explore their same-sex attractions. This book is about the struggles students face in coming out. The focus is twofold: the experiences individuals face in coming to terms with their sexual identity and the process of developing a group identity. The development of a group identity involves a degree of political investment. For some students, becoming political means adopting a queer persona. As one student noted, Queer is kind of an in your face' attitude toward heterosexism and homophobia. A primary focus of this book revolves around the notion of queer identity and how students engage as cultural workers seeking both campus and societal change.

This study is about lesbian feminists in London in the late 1980s. It was a period when their community was experiencing considerable conflict and transition, as ideas about gender and sexuality on which their political beliefs were based were being challenged within their own community. The book goes through their public and personal lives, looking at how they coped with the challenges and the complex world of London, and how they began to change as a result.

An anthology of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies's most provactive LGBT scholarship This compendious, cutting-edge volume offers a broad array of the most provocative gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender scholarship produced by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) over the first decade (1986-1996) of its existence at the CUNY Graduate School. CLAGS has had a profound and legitimizing influence on the establishment of gay and lesbian studies as a discipline. Thousands have attended its events, featuring hundreds of scholars, activists, and cultural workers; many thousands more have lamented how they would have liked to have been there. With this book, they finally, vicariously, can be. Divided into five parts-on identities as they revolve around gender and sexuality; on the terrains of homosexual history; on mind-body relations; on laws and economics; and on policy issues related to gay youth, AIDS, and aging-A Queer World offers a compelling panorama of gay and lesbian life. Featuring the work, among others, of such figures as Yukiko Hanawa, Will Roscoe, Jewelle L. Gomez, Jonathan Ned Katz, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Jeffrey Escoffier, Janice M. Irvine, Kendall Thomas, Gilbert Herdt, Vivien Ng, Douglas Crimp, Walt Odets, Serena Nanda, Cindy Patton, Michael Moon, William Byne, and Randolph Trumback, A Queer World is distinctive in its focus on the social sciences and issues relating to public policy. Consisting largely of previously unpublished essays, this volume-and its companion volume Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures-is an invaluable addition to the bookshelf of anyone interested in the study of sexuality.

The relationship between the Hebrew heroes David and Jonathan has caught the attention of popular and scholarly writers alike. Yet there is little agreement about the nature of this relationship that speaks of a love between two men that 'surpasses the love of a man for a woman' (2 Sam. 1.26). Weighing the arguments of scholars including Nissinen, Stone and Zehnder, Heacock produces a meta-critical analysis of the many interpretations of the relationship between David and Jonathan, identifying three dominant readings: the traditional political-theological interpretation, the homoerotic interpretation, and the homosocial interpretation. After outlining the three interpretive approaches, Heacock considers the evidence cited to support each: namely, themes in the David and Jonathan narrative and related biblical texts, ancient political treaties, laws pertaining to homogenital behaviour in the ancient Mediterranean world, and the heroic tales of the Gilgamesh Epic and Homer's Iliad. By applying recent epistemological shifts in knowledge as developed in the interdisciplinary fields of sexuality studies, queer studies and ancient studies, Heacock emphasizes the inescapability of the modern reader's cultural context when reading the narrative, particularly the influence of modern discourses of sexuality. Rather than suggest an alternative historical reading, Heacock turns the debate on its head by abandoning claims to historical veracity and embracing the input of the contemporary queer reader. Using queer theory and reader-response criticism, he offers a reading of the relationship between David and Jonathan through the lens of contemporary gay male friendships. This queer reading not only celebrates manly love in its numerous forms, but also adds a self-critical voice to the discussion that exposes the heteronormative assumptions underlying the questions often asked of the narrative.

This reference work provides important information about the role academic research has played in the ever-evolving laws covering homosexuality. A comprehensive overview of homosexuality and the law, this fascinating dictionary opens with a history of the Gay Rights Movement which started in Germany during the l860s with Karl Heinrich Ulrich, the "Grandfather of Gay Liberation," who wrote 12 books including, Researches on the Riddle of Love Between Men. Homosexuals were later herded into Nazi concentration camps, where 50,000 of them died. When the war ended, Allied commanders forced homosexuals to finish their prison sentences. This book has 112 entries on subjects such as absurd sex laws, the Crittendon Report, the Boy Scouts, the l996 Defense of Marriage Act, surgical alterations, discrimination, sodomy, loitering, wills, and more. A nearly 100 page appendix details state and local laws. The book includes a list of advocacy organizations and other references, a table of cases, and an extensive bibliography. Includes thoughtful coverage of transsexual, transgendered, and intersexed legal concerns Presents the most current information on the legal status of homosexuals in an easily navigated dictionary format

This turn-of-the-century moment - when queer love has become increasingly visible in both popular culture and socio-political realms - provides an ideal occasion for a critical examination of same-sex love stories in the media. Focusing primarily on film and televisual texts from the ten years before and after the millennium, the essays collected in Queer Love in Film and Television ask how recent films and television programs play with, imitate, subvert, mock, critique, and queer the romantic narrative conventions so common in Western culture. The collection follows the trajectory of the conventional romance narrative, from the pursuit of romantic love to the creation of families, and then it pushes further, into marginal regions where conventional narratives fail to venture, and then turns back to consider how that narrative is itself transformed (or queered) through adaptation.