An inspirational memoir-meets-manifesto by Danica Roem, the nation's first openly trans person elected to US state legislature Danica Roem made national headlines when--as a transgender former frontwoman for a metal band and a political newcomer--she unseated Virginia's most notoriously anti-LGBTQ 26-year incumbent Bob Marshall as state delegate. But before Danica made history, she had to change her vision of what was possible in her own life. Doing so was a matter of storytelling: during her campaign, Danica hired an opposition researcher to dredge up every story from her past that her opponent might seize on to paint her negatively. In wildly entertaining prose, Danica dismantles all the stories her opponents tried to hedge against her, showing how through brutal honesty and loving authenticity, it's possible to embrace the low points, and even transform them into her greatest strengths. Burn the Page takes readers from Danica's lonely, closeted, and at times operatically tragic childhood to her position as a rising star in a party she's helped forever change. Burn the Page is so much more than a stump speech: it's an extremely inspiring manifesto about how it's possible to set fire to the stories you don't want to be in anymore, whether written by you or about you by someone else--and rewrite your own future, whether that's running for politics, in your work, or your personal life. This book will not just encourage people who think they have to be spotless to run for office, but inspire all of us to own our personal narratives as Danica does.

In the United States and Europe, an increasing emphasis on equality has pitted rights claims against each other, raising profound philosophical, moral, legal, and political questions about the meaning and reach of religious liberty. Nowhere has this conflict been more salient than in the debate between claims of religious freedom, on one hand, and equal rights claims made on the behalf of members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, on the other. As new rights for LGBT individuals have expanded in liberal democracies across the West, longstanding rights of religious freedom - such as the rights of religious communities to adhere to their fundamental teachings, including protecting the rights of conscience; the rights of parents to impart their religious beliefs to their children; and the liberty to advance religiously-based moral arguments as a rationale for laws - have suffered a corresponding decline. Timothy Samuel Shah, Thomas F. Farr, and Jack Friedman's volume, Religious Freedom and Gay Rights brings together some of the world's leading thinkers on religion, morality, politics, and law to analyze the emerging tensions between religious freedom and gay rights in three key geographic regions: the United States, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe. What implications will expanding regimes of equality rights for LGBT individuals have on religious freedom in these regions? What are the legal and moral frameworks that govern tensions between gay rights and religious freedom? How are these tensions illustrated in particular legal, political, and policy controversies? And what is the proper way to balance new claims of equality against existing claims for freedom of religious groups and individuals? Religious Freedom and Gay Rights offers several explorations of these questions.

This fascinating book demonstrates the diversity of Connecticut's women's feminist activities in pre- and post-suffrage eras and refutes the notion that feminist activism died out with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

To read this book is to glimpse gay culture in its first morning. . . . It offers a comprehensive and poignant overview of a very special moment in gay culture. Read it, and if you're still too macho to weep, or too insufficiently radical/feminist to scream, at least shed a tear for lost innocence."
--"The Advocate"

The influence of gays and lesbians on language, literature, theater, poetry, dance, music, and the arts is unmeasurable. In the era before AIDS, gay and lesbian culture had a defining, if unrecognized, influence on American life, an influence that is only now being acknowledged.

This reissue of the classic anthology, "Lavender Culture," serves as a provocative, dynamic, and wide-ranging reminder of American gay and lesbian culture in the days before the status of gay people received widespread attention in the media, religion, and politics, before Newsweek saw it fit to feature a cover story on LESBIANS, and before gays and lesbians took center stage in America's cultural landscape.

Here we find the young, assertive voices of such activists, authors, and artists as Rita Mae Brown, Barbara Grier, John Stoltenberg, Julia Penelope, Andrea Dworkin, Andrew Kopkind, Jane Rule, Arthur Bell, Charlotte Bunche, and dozens more. Including essays on such diverse subjects as gay bath houses, the gay male image in classical ballet, images of gays in rock music, Judy Garland, lesbian humor, sports and machismo, the growing business of women's music, and the Cleveland bar scene in the 1940s, Lavender Culture, with new introductory essays by the editors and Cindy Patton, offers a panoply of gay and lesbian life, tracing the current influence and visibility of gay and lesbianculture back to its origins.

Taking place examines feminist and queer alternative art spaces across Canada and the United States from the late-1960s to the present. It looks at how queer and feminist artists working in the present day engage with, respond to and challenge the institutions they have inherited. Through a series of regional case studies, the book interrogates different understandings of 'alternative' space and the possibilities the term affords for queer and feminist artistic imaginaries. -- .

- There is a gap in the market for a practical book about working psychoanlaytically with LGBTQ clients. - Includes contributions from prominent clinicians working today in the UK, US and Australia. - Covers a range of topics, from the psychosexual to aging, transgenderism to parenting.

This comprehensive second edition inspires therapists to utilize clinical work to pragmatically address intersectional oppressions, lessen the burden of minority stress, and implement effective LGBTQ affirmative therapy. A unique and important contribution to LGBTQ literature, this handbook includes both new and updated chapters reflecting cutting-edge intersectional themes like race, ethnicity, polyamory, and monosexual normativity. A host of expert contributors outline the best practices in affirmative therapy, inspiring therapists to guide LGBTQ clients into deconstructing the heteronormative power imbalances that undermine LGBTQ relationships and families. There is also an increased focus on clinical application, with fresh vignettes included throughout to highlight effective treatment strategies. Couple and family therapists and clinicians working with LGBTQ clients, and those interested in implementing affirmative therapy in their practice, will find this updated handbook essential.

Against easy framings of hijras that render them marginalized, Saria shows how hijras makes the normative Indian family possible. The book also shows that particular practices of hijras, such as refusing to use condoms or comply with retroviral regimes, reflect not ignorance or irresponsibility but rather a specific idiom of erotic asceticism arising in both Hindu and Islamic traditions. This idiom suffuses the densely intertwined registers of erotics, economics, and kinship that inform the everyday lives of hijras and offer a repertoire of self-fashioning distinct from the secularized accounts within the horizon of public health programmes and queer theory. Engrossingly written and full of keen insights, the book moves from the small pleasures of the everyday laughter, flirting, and teasing to impossible longings, kinship networks, and economies of property and of substance in order to give a fuller account of trans lives and of Indian society today.

'Do I practice safe sex? If you're talking about carrying around pepper spray for all the freaks I come across, yeah I'm looking into it.' Most people go to parties for free booze, good music and the chance of copping off with someone hot, but Rich Harrison got much more than he bargained for after meeting an eccentric young gigolo. Talked into trying his hand at becoming a male escort, Rich revels in the idea of raking in the money - after all, who wouldn't want to be paid for something they enjoyed? In between his tragic clients with bizarre fetishes, Rich still holds out hope to meet his Mr Right and fall in love, and after a chance meeting with a handsome stranger, perhaps he's met him...or has he? Follow Rich on his hilarious journey as he tries to balance his new job, a potential boyfriend, two alcoholic best friends and a mentor who has a passion for hot men and sushi.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Foreword.

Winner of the 2007 Alan Bray Memorial Book Award, given by the GL/Q Caucus of the MLA

aThe members of the Committee were especially impressed by McRuer's original intervention in the area of queer studies, one that not only sheds light on the important new area of disability studies, but brings it into conversation with a variety of disciplinary perspectives, from composition studies to performance art. McRuer's book combines the public and the private work of queer studies in surprisingly new ways.a
--Ed Madden, Gay and Lesbian Caucus for the MLA

aA wonderful combination of humor, theory, intellectual, and personal insights... A valuable and well-written study.a
--Disability Studies Quarterly

"A compelling case that queer and disabled identities, politics, and cultural logics are inexorably intertwined, and that queer and disability theory need one anothera]. Makes clear that no cultural analysis is complete without attention to the politics of bodily ability and alternative corporealities."
--Elizabeth Freeman, author of "The Wedding Complex"

"Important and significant for its attempt to find the common ground between disability studies and queer studies. This deftly written and very readable book will appeal to a wide range of readers who are increasingly fascinated by the biocultural interplay between the body, sexuality, gender, and social identity."
--Lennard Davis, author of "Bending Over Backwards"

Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, andidentities are represented as "normal" or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary fields inform each other.

Drawing on feminist theory, African American and Latino/a cultural theories, composition studies, film and television studies, and theories of globalization and counter-globalization, Robert McRuer articulates the central concerns of crip theory and considers how such a critical perspective might impact cultural and historical inquiry in the humanities. Crip Theory puts forward readings of the Sharon Kowalski story, the performance art of Bob Flanagan, and the journals of Gary Fisher, as well as critiques of the domesticated queerness and disability marketed by the Millennium March, or Bravo TV's "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." McRuer examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and re-write those identities in order to insist that another world is possible.

This book draws on the analytic and political dimensions of queer, alongside the analytic and political usefulness of emotion, to navigate legal interventions aimed at progressing the rights of LGBT people. Scholars, activists, lawyers, and judges concerned with eliminating violence and discrimination against LGBT people have generated passionate conversations about pursuing law reform to make LGBT injuries, intimacies, and identities visible, while some challenge the ways legal systems marginalise queer minorities. Senthorun Sunil Raj powerfully contributes to these ongoing conversations by using emotion as an analytic frame to reflect on the ways case law seeks to "progress" the intimacies and identities of LGBT people from positions of injury. This book catalogues a range of cases from Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom to unpack how emotion shapes the decriminalisation of homosexuality, hate crime interventions, anti-discrimination measures, refugee protection, and marriage equality. While emotional enactments in pro-LGBT jurisprudence enable new forms of recognition and visibility, they can also work, paradoxically, to cover over queer intimacies and identities. Raj innovatively shows that reading jurisprudence through emotions can make space in law to affirm, rather than disavow, intimacies and identities that queer conventional ideas about "LGBT progress", without having to abandon legal pursuits to protect LGBT people. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of human rights law, gender and sexuality studies, and socio-legal theory.

This book addresses the 'three moments' in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) asylum seekers' and refugees' efforts to secure protection: The reasons for their flight, the Refugee Status Determination process, and their integration into the host community once they are recognized refugee status.The first part discusses one of the most under-researched areas within the literature devoted to asylum claims based on sexual orientation and gender identity, namely the reasons behind LGBTI persons' flight. It investigates the motives that drive LGBTI persons to leave their countries of origin and seek sanctuary elsewhere, the actors of persecution, and the status quo of LGBTI rights. Accordingly, an intersectional approach is employed so as to offer a comprehensive picture of how a host of factors beyond sexual orientation/gender identity impact this crucial first stage of LGBTI asylum seekers' journey.In turn, the second part explores the challenges that LGBTI asylum seekers face during the RSD process in countries of asylum. It first examines these countries' interpretations and applications of the process in relation to the relevant UNHCR guidelines and questions the challenges including the dominance of Western conceptions and narratives of sexual identity in the asylum procedure, heterogeneous treatment concerning the definition of a particular social group, and the difficulties related to assessing one's sexual orientation within the asylum procedure. It subsequently addresses the reasons for and potential solutions to these challenges.The last part of the book focuses on the integration of LGBTI refugees into the countries of asylum. It first seeks to identify and describe the protection gaps that LGBTI refugees are currently experiencing, before turning to the reasons and potential remedies for them.

Through focusing on the sexual politics that have emerged out of post-apartheid South Africa, Spurlin investigates textual and cultural representations of same-sex desire outside of the Euroamerican axes of queer culture and politics, and considers the ways in which queer cultural productions in southern Africa do not merely intersect with western queer identity politics and cultural representations but also resist them. "Imperialism Within the Margins" therefore provides an engaged and much-needed critique of the long-present "heterosexist" biases of postcolonial studies and the "western" biases of academic queer theory.

In Unseen Flesh Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice. Focusing on the trauma caused by interactions with gynecologists, Falu draws on in-depth ethnographic work among the Black lesbian community to reveal their profoundly negative affective experiences within Brazil’s deeply biased medical system. In the face of such entrenched, intersectional intimate violence, Falu’s informants actively pursue well-being in ways that channel their struggle for self-worth toward broader goals of social change, self care, and communal action. Demonstrating how the racist and heteronormative underpinnings of gynecology erase Black lesbian subjecthood through mental, emotional, and physical traumas, Falu explores the daily resistance and abolitionist practices of worth-making that claim and sustain Black queer identity and living. Falu rethinks the medicalization of race, sex, and gender in Brazil and elsewhere while offering a new perspective on Black queer life through well-being grounded in relationships, socioeconomic struggles, the erotic, and freedom strivings.

Significant historic and archaeological sites affiliated with two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer history in the United States are examined in this unique volume. The importance of the preservation process in documenting and interpreting the lives and experiences of queer Americans is emphasized. The book features chapters on archaeology and interpretation, as well as several case studies focusing on queer preservation projects. The accessible text and associated activities create an interactive and collaborative process that encourages readers to apply the material in a hands-on setting.

Advances in LGBTQ rights in the recent past-marriage equality, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the expansion of hate crimes legislation-have been accompanied by a rise in attacks against trans, queer and/or gender-nonconforming people of color. In Atmospheres of Violence, theorist and organizer Eric A. Stanley shows how this seeming contradiction reveals the central role of racialized and gendered violence in the United States. Rather than suggesting that such violence is evidence of individual phobias, Stanley shows how it is a structuring antagonism in our social world. Drawing on an archive of suicide notes, AIDS activist histories, surveillance tapes, and prison interviews, they offer a theory of anti-trans/queer violence in which inclusion and recognition are forms of harm rather than remedies to it. In calling for trans/queer organizing and worldmaking beyond these forms, Stanley points to abolitionist ways of life that might offer livable futures.

One of Stylist's best new books for April. 'A book about love, identity, acceptance and the freedom to write, paint, compose and wear corduroy breeches with gaiters. To swear, kiss, publish and be damned. It is vastly entertaining and often moving ... There isn't a page without an entertaining vignette' The Times. The extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place - Paris, Between the Wars - fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer. They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own - forming a community around them in Paris. Each of these four central women interacted with a myriad of others, some of the most influential, most entertaining, most shocking and most brilliant figures of the age. Diana Souhami weaves their stories into those of the four central women to create a vivid moving tapestry of life among the Modernists in pre-War Paris.

For much of Europe, the interwar period was one of cultural expansion and diversion and increased visibility for lesbians. While historical research on Germany during the period immediately after the First World War has been extensively studied by historians through the lens of gender and sexuality-with an implicit emphasis on the "masculine" dimension of queer female sexuality-the Dutch context has been virtually ignored. Through careful and sensitive studies of medico-social discourses, media representations, and literary depictions of queer femininity, Different from the Others recovers the submerged history of queer feminine women in both Germany and the Netherlands. Cyd Sturgess provides a theoretical analysis that makes key empirical contributions to the history of Dutch gays and lesbians while reframing our collective understanding of queer femininity more broadly.

With contributions from established and emerging scholars, this collection draws on original research to consider recent theoretical and methodological debates, shifts in law and policy, and social and cultural changes around sexuality. The book bridges identified gaps between theory, research methods and practice, and lived experiences across time and place. It reflects on the current wave of interdisciplinary work, setting out new ways of conceptualizing and researching sexuality and explores persistently marginalized, re-traditionalized and normative sexual practices, subjectivities and identities. This distinctive consideration of innovative contributions from across the humanities and social sciences places emergent debates, enduring legacies and new queries within its 'reflections' and 'futures'.

Lost Causes stages a polemical intervention in the discourse that grounds queer civil rights in etiology -- that is, in the cause of homosexuality, whether choice, "recruitment," or biology. Reading etiology as a narrative form, political strategy, and hermeneutic method in American and British literature and popular culture, it argues that today's gay arguments for biological determinism accept their opponents' paranoia about what Rohy calls "homosexual reproduction"-that is, nonsexual forms of queer increase-preventing more complex ways of considering sexuality and causality. This study combines literary texts and psychoanalytic theory--two salient sources of etiological narratives in themselves -- to reconsider phobic tropes of homosexual reproduction: contagion in Borrowed Time, bad influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray, trauma in The Night Watch, choice of identity in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and dangerous knowledge in The Well of Loneliness. These readings draw on Lacan's notion of retroactive causality to convert the question of what causes homosexuality into a question of what homosexuality causes as the constitutive outside of a heteronormative symbolic order. Ultimately, this study shows, queer communities and queer theory must embrace formerly shaming terms -- why should the increase of homosexuality be unthinkable? -- while retaining the critical sense of queerness as a non-identity, a permanent negativity.

This book is part of a new generation of historical research that challenges prevailing arguments for the medical and legal construction of male homosexual identities in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. British society could not tolerate the discussion necessary to form medical or legal concepts of 'the homosexual'. The development of masculinity as a social status is examined, for its influence in shaping societal attitudes towards sex and sexuality between men and fostering resistance to any kind of recognition of these phenomena. Imperatives to bolster masculinity as a social status precluded public recognition of the existence of sex and sexuality between men, even in terms that were hostile and pejorative.