Mobile is simultaneously a typical and unique city in the postwar United States. It was a quintessential boomtown during World War II. That prosperity was followed by a period of rapid urban decline and subsequent attempts at revitalizing (or gentrifying) its downtown area. As in many other US cities, urban renewal, integration, and other socioeconomic developments led to white flight, marginalized the African American population, and set the stage for the development of LGBTQ+ community building and subculture. Yet these usually segregated segments of society in Mobile converged once a year to create a common identity, that of a Carnival City. Carnival in Alabama looks not only at the people who participated in Mardi Gras organizations divided by race, gender, and/or sexual orientation, but also investigates the experience of "marked bodies" outside of these organizations, or people involved in Carnival through their labor or as audiences (or publics) of the spectacle. It also expands the definition of Mobile's Carnival "tradition" beyond the official pageantry by including street maskers and laborers and neighborhood cookouts. Using archival sources and oral history interviews to investigate and analyze the roles assigned, inaccessible to, or claimed and appropriated by straight-identified African American men and women and people who defied gender and sexuality normativity in the festivities (regardless of their racial identity), this book seeks to understand power dynamics through culture and ritual. By looking at Carnival as an "invented tradition" and as a semiotic system associated with discourses of power, it joins a transnational conversation about the phenomenon.

Young adult literature featuring LGBTQ characters is booming. In the 1980s and 1990s, only a handful of such titles were published every year. Recently, these numbers have soared to over one hundred annual releases. Queer characters are also appearing more frequently in film, on television, and in video games. This explosion of queer representation, however, has prompted new forms of longstanding cultural anxieties about adolescent sexuality. What makes for a good "coming out" story? Will increased queer representation in young people's media teach adolescents the right lessons and help queer teens live better, happier lives? What if these stories harm young people instead of helping them? In Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture, Derritt Mason considers these questions through a range of popular media, including an assortment of young adult books; Caper in the Castro, the first-ever queer video game; online fan communities; and popular television series Glee and Big Mouth. Mason argues themes that generate the most anxiety about adolescent culture - queer visibility, risk taking, HIV/AIDS, dystopia and horror, and the promise that "It Gets Better" and the threat that it might not - challenge us to rethink how we read and engage with young people's media. Instead of imagining queer young adult literature as a subgenre defined by its visibly queer characters, Mason proposes that we see "queer YA" as a body of transmedia texts with blurry boundaries, one that coheres around affect - specifically, anxiety - instead of content.

For many decades, the LGBTQ+ community has been plagued by strife and human rights violations. Members of the LGBTQ+ community were often denied a right to marriage, healthcare, and in some parts of the world, a right to life. While these struggles are steadily improving in recent years, disparities and discrimination still remain from the workplace to the healthcare that this community receives. There is still much that needs to be done globally to achieve inclusivity and equity for the LGBTQ+ community. The Research Anthology on Inclusivity and Equity for the LGBTQ+ Community is a comprehensive compendium that analyzes the struggles and accomplishments of the LGBTQ+ community with a focus on the current climate around the world and the continued impact to these individuals. Multiple settings are discussed within this dynamic anthology such as education, healthcare, online communities, and more. Covering topics such as gender, homophobia, and queer theory, this text is essential for scholars of gender theory, faculty of both K-12 and higher education, professors, pre-service teachers, students, human rights activists, community leaders, policymakers, researchers, and academicians.

This book explores queer identity in Morocco through the work of author and LGBT activist Abdellah Taia, who defied the country's anti-homosexuality laws by publicly coming out in 2006. Engaging postcolonial, queer and literary theory, Tina Dransfeldt Christensen examines Taia's art and activism in the context of the wider debates around sexuality in Morocco. Placing key novels such as Salvation Army and Infidels in dialogue with Moroccan writers including Driss Chraibi and Abdelkebir Khatibi, she shows how Taia draws upon a long tradition of politically committed art in Morocco to subvert traditional notions of heteronormativity. By giving space to silenced or otherwise marginalised voices, she shows how his writings offer a powerful critique of discourses of class, authenticity, culture and nationality in Morocco and North Africa.

Pretended is a vivid historical, political and cultural account of schools and teaching under Section 28, a law that banned schools in the UK from promoting homosexuality as a 'pretended family relationship'. Catherine Lee was a teacher in schools for each of the 15 years that Section 28 was law (between 1988 and 2003). In Pretended, she considers the landscape for lesbian and gay teachers leading up to, during and after Section 28. Drawing on her diary entries from the Section 28 era, Lee poignantly recalls the challenges and incidents affecting her and thousands of other teachers during this period of state-sanctioned homophobia. She reveals how these diaries led to her involvement in the 2022 feature film Blue Jean, and describes how this unexpected opportunity helped her to make peace with Section 28. Pretended will resonate with every lesbian and gay teacher who experienced Section 28 and will shock those who previously knew nothing about this law. Crucially, Pretended will explain to those who were lesbian and gay students during Section 28 why they never saw people like them in the curriculum, never had a role model and never had an adult in school to talk to about their identity.