Loving Mountains, Loving Men is the first book-length treatment of a topic rarely discussed or examined before: gay life in Appalachia. Appalachians are known for their love of place, yet many gays and lesbians from the mountains flee to urban areas. Jeff Mann tells the story of one who left and then returned, who insists on claiming and celebrating both regional and erotic identities. In memoir and poetry, Mann describes his life as an openly gay man who has remained true to his mountain roots. Mann first describes his upbringing in Hinton, a small town in southern West Virginia, as well as his realization of his homosexuality, his early experiences of homophobia, his coterie of supportive lesbian friends, and his initial attempts to escape his native region in hopes of finding a freer life in urban gay communities. Mann depicts his difficult search for a romantic relationship, the family members who have given him the strength to defy convention, his anger against religious intolerance and the violence of homophobia, and his love for the rich folk culture of the Highland South. His character and values shaped by the mountains, Mann has reconciled his homosexuality with both traditional definitions of Appalachian manhood and his own attachment to home and kin. Loving Mountains, Loving Men is the compelling, universal story of making peace with oneself and the wider world. AUTHOR INFORMATION---Jeff Mann is a professor of creative writing at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia. He is the author of a collection of poetry, Bones Washed with Wine, and a memoir, Edge. SIDEBAR QUOTE---"The sheer beauty of the prose in the memoir and the language of thepoetry is incredible. This is one of the great watershed books of Appalachian literature. Its contribution to the field of Appalachian studies and gay/gender studies is significant." ---Danny L. Miller, coeditor of An American Vein: Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature

Imre is one of the first openly gay American novels with a happy ending. Described by the author as ""a little psychological romance,"" the narrative follows two men who meet by chance in a cafe; in Budapest, where they forge a friendship that leads to a series of mutual revelations and gradual disclosures. With its sympathetic characterizations of homosexual men, Imre's 1906 publication marked a turning point in English literature. This edition includes material relating to the novels origins, contemporary writings on homosexuality, other writings by Prime-Stevenson, and a contemporary review.

"Intimate Activism" tells the story of Nicaraguan sexual-rights activists who helped to overturn the most repressive antisodomy law in the Americas. The law was passed shortly after the Sandinistas lost power in 1990 and, to the surprise of many, was repealed in 2007. In this vivid ethnography, Cymene Howe analyzes how local activists balanced global discourses regarding human rights and identity politics with the contingencies of daily life in Nicaragua. Though they were initially spurred by the antisodomy measure, activists sought to change not only the law but also culture. Howe emphasizes the different levels of intervention where activism occurs, from mass-media outlets and public protests to meetings of clandestine consciousness-raising groups. She follows the travails of queer characters in a hugely successful telenovela, traces the ideological tensions within the struggle for sexual rights, and conveys the voices of those engaged in "becoming" "lesbianas" and "homosexuales" in contemporary Nicaragua.

A definitive collection of original essays on queer politics From Harvey Milk to ACT UP to Proposition 8, no political change in the last two decades has been as rapid as the advancement of civil rights for LGBTQ people. As we face a critical juncture in progressive activism, political science, which has been slower than most disciplines to study the complexity of queer politics, must grapple with the shifting landscape of LGBTQ rights and inclusion. LGBTQ Politics analyzes both the successes and obstacles to building the LGBTQ movement over the past twenty years, offering analyses that point to possibilities for the movement's future. Essays cover a range of topics, including activism, law, and coalition-building, and draw on subfields such as American politics, comparative politics, political theory, and international relations. LGBTQ Politics presents the full range of methodological, ideological, and substantive approaches to LGBTQ politics that exist in political science. Analyses focused on mainstream institutional and elite politics appear alongside contributions grounded in grassroots movements and critical theory. While some essays celebrate the movement's successes and prospects, others express concerns that its democratic basis has become undermined by a focus on funding power over people power, attempts to fragment the LGBTQ movement from racial, gender and class justice, and a persistent attachment to single-issue politics. A comprehensive, thought-provoking collection, LGBTQ Politics: A Critical Reader will give rise to continued critical discussion of the parameters of LGBTQ politics.

A detailed description of sexual practices and bonds among Latino males in Guadalajara, Mexico using a combination of ethnographic techniques and participant observations.

Compares today's same-sex marriage movement to the experiences of black people in the mid-nineteenth century. The staggering string of victories by the gay rights movement's campaign for marriage equality raises questions not only about how gay people have been able to successfully deploy marriage to elevate their social and legal reputation, but also what kind of freedom and equality the ability to marry can mobilize. Wedlocked turns to history to compare today's same-sex marriage movement to the experiences of newly emancipated black people in the mid-nineteenth century, when they were able to legally marry for the first time. Maintaining that the transition to greater freedom was both wondrous and perilous for newly emancipated people, Katherine Franke relates stories of former slaves' involvements with marriage and draws lessons that serve as cautionary tales for today's marriage rights movements. While "be careful what you wish for" is a prominent theme, they also teach us how the rights-bearing subject is inevitably shaped by the very rights they bear, often in ways that reinforce racialized gender norms and stereotypes. Franke further illuminates how the racialization of same-sex marriage has redounded to the benefit of the gay rights movement while contributing to the ongoing subordination of people of color and the diminishing reproductive rights of women. Like same-sex couples today, freed African-American men and women experienced a shift in status from outlaws to in-laws, from living outside the law to finding their private lives organized by law and state licensure. Their experiences teach us the potential and the perils of being subject to legal regulation: rights-and specifically the right to marriage-can both burden and set you free.

Winner, LGBT Studies Lammy Award presented by Lambda Literary Neither queer theory nor queer activism has fully reckoned with the role of race in the emergence of the modern gay subject. In A Taste for Brown Bodies, Hiram Perez traces the development of gay modernity and its continued romanticization of the brown body. Focusing in particular on three figures with elusive queer histories-the sailor, the soldier, and the cowboy- Perez unpacks how each has been memorialized and desired for their heroic masculinity while at the same time functioning as agents for the expansion of the US borders and neocolonial zones of influence. Describing an enduring homonationalism dating to the "birth" of the homosexual in the late 19th century, Perez considers not only how US imperialist expansion was realized, but also how it was visualized for and through gay men. By means of an analysis of literature, film, and photographs from the 19th to the 21st centuries-including Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Anne Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," and photos of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison-Perez proposes that modern gay male identity, often traced to late Victorian constructions of "invert" and "homosexual," occupies not the periphery of the nation but rather a cosmopolitan position, instrumental to projects of war, colonialism, and neoliberalism. A Taste for Brown Bodies argues that practices and subjectivities that we understand historically as forms of homosexuality have been regulated and normalized as an extension of the US nation-state, laying bare the tacit, if complex, participation of gay modernity within US imperialism.

A straight white girl can kiss a girl, like it, and still call herself straight-her boyfriend may even encourage her. But can straight white guys experience the same easy sexual fluidity, or would kissing a guy just mean that they are really gay? Not Gay thrusts deep into a world where straight guy-on-guy action is not a myth but a reality: there's fraternity and military hazing rituals, where new recruits are made to grab each other's penises and stick fingers up their fellow members' anuses; online personal ads, where straight men seek other straight men to masturbate with; and, last but not least, the long and clandestine history of straight men frequenting public restrooms for sexual encounters with other men. For Jane Ward, these sexual practices reveal a unique social space where straight white men can-and do-have sex with other straight white men; in fact, she argues, to do so reaffirms rather than challenges their gender and racial identity. Ward illustrates that sex between straight white men allows them to leverage whiteness and masculinity to authenticate their heterosexuality in the context of sex with men. By understanding their same-sex sexual practice as meaningless, accidental, or even necessary, straight white men can perform homosexual contact in heterosexual ways. These sex acts are not slippages into a queer way of being or expressions of a desired but unarticulated gay identity. Instead, Ward argues, they reveal the fluidity and complexity that characterizes all human sexual desire. In the end, Ward's analysis offers a new way to think about heterosexuality-not as the opposite or absence of homosexuality, but as its own unique mode of engaging in homosexual sex, a mode characterized by pretense, dis-identification and racial and heterosexual privilege. Daring, insightful, and brimming with wit, Not Gay is a fascinating new take on the complexities of heterosexuality in the modern era.

The AIDS epidemic soured the memory of the sexual revolution and gay liberation of the 1970s, and prominent politicians, commentators, and academics instructed gay men to forget the sexual cultures of the 1970s in order to ensure a healthy future. But without memory there can be no future, argue Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed in this exploration of the struggle over gay memory that marked the decades following the onset of AIDS. Challenging many of the assumptions behind first-wave queer theory, If Memory Serves offers a new perspective on the emergence of contemporary queer culture from the suppression and repression of gay memory. Drawing on a rich archive of videos, films, television shows, novels, monuments, paintings, and sculptures created in the wake of the epidemic, the authors reveal a resistance among critics to valuing-even recognizing-the inscription of gay memory in art, literature, popular culture, and the built environment. Castiglia and Reed explore such topics as the unacknowledged ways in which the popular sitcom Will and Grace circulated gay subcultural references to awaken a desire for belonging among young viewers; the post-traumatic (un)rememberings of queer theory; and the generation of "ideality politics" in the art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the film Chuck & Buck, and the independent video Video Remains. Inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre's insight that "the possession of a historical identity and the possession of a social identity coincide," Castiglia and Reed demonstrate that memory is crafted in response to inadequacies in the present-and therefore a constructive relation to the past is essential to the imagining of a new future.

By analysing research into links between low psychological wellbeing and sexual risk-taking behaviours that occur in men who have sex with men (MSM), this book demonstrates what impact social and psychological interventions could have on MSM at risk of poor sexual outcomes. At the heart of the book is Identity Process Theory, co-developed by the author, a social psychological theory of identity construction, threat and coping. The book considers the emerging debates in MSM's health, such as the use of Grindr and 'chemsex', and also explores the socio-structural factors, such as homophobia and stigma, that threaten the self-identity of MSM. The book offers principles and techniques from this theory that can be used as an effective intervention and therapeutic model with MSM to build more positive identities and reduce sexual risk-taking.

Ten years after its original publication, Roman Homosexuality remains the definitive statement of this interesting but often misunderstood aspect of Roman culture. Learned yet accessible, the book has reached both students and general readers with an interest in ancient sexuality. This second edition features a new foreword by Martha Nussbaum, a completely rewritten introduction that takes account of new developments in the field, a rewritten and expanded appendix on ancient images of sexuality, and an updated bibliography.

The first book to look critically at digital technologies and the role they play within queer lives in contemporary India This pioneering interdisciplinary collection works across mainstream and alternative spaces such as Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Grindr and gay men's health websites. These digital platforms are then situated within the contemporary socio-political conjuncture in India, offering a way of understanding queerness and Indian-ness in contemporary India. Queering in this book does not simply refer to a sexual category rather queerness is a mode of dispossession through which certain bodies are rendered as bodies marked for discipline and regulation. This book takes on diverse strands of queer theory in order to name the ways neoliberalism, nationalism, digital technologies, and movements for queer rights converge with each other within present day India. This analytical approach to queerness in India is the first of its kind and the result is a pioneering interdisciplinary collection.

Bech proposes a novel interpretation of the nature of masculinity and its connections with homosexuality. Besides a critical discussion of existing theories in the area, the author also analyses a rich variety of other materials, including novels, films and other literature. "When Men Meet "represents both an analysis of the places in which encounters occur - the railway station, the park, the disco, the consulting room, the stadium - but is also a metaphor for key aspects of modernity. In analysing the nature of the modern social world, Bech makes use of insights from Adorno and Benjamin as well as Sartre and Heidegger.

Modernity and sexuality, Bech argues, are both intertwined and changing. He concludes by proposing that, having been created by modernity, 'the homosexual' is now disappearing in conjunction with the changes transforming modernity itself.

This book contains the work of seven leading anthropologists on the subject of ritualized homosexuality, and it marks the first time that anthropologists have systematically studied cross-cultural variations in homosexual behavior in a non-Western culture area. The book as a whole indicates that contemporary theories of sex and gender development need revision in light of the Melanesian findings.

"A View from the Bottom" offers a major critical reassessment of male effeminacy and its racialization in visual culture. Examining portrayals of Asian and Asian American men in Hollywood cinema, European art film, gay pornography, and experimental documentary, Nguyen Tan Hoang explores the cultural meanings that accrue to sexual positions. He shows how cultural fantasies around the position of the sexual "bottom" overdetermine and refract the meanings of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality in American culture in ways that both enable and constrain Asian masculinity. Challenging the association of bottoming with passivity and abjection, Nguyen suggests ways of thinking about the bottom position that afford agency and pleasure. A more capacious conception of bottomhood--as a sexual position, a social alliance, an affective bond, and an aesthetic form--has the potential to destabilize sexual, gender, and racial norms, suggesting an ethical mode of relation organized not around dominance and mastery but around the risk of vulnerability and shame. Thus reconceived, bottomhood as a critical category creates new possibilities for arousal, receptiveness, and recognition, and offers a new framework for analyzing sexual representations in cinema as well as understanding their relation to oppositional political projects.

Ever since they were young, Peggy Cryden noticed her children's gender expression did not correspond with society's expectations of their biological gender. In this moving and honest memoir, Peggy details the experiences and challenges of raising both a gay son and a gay, transgender son and shares her family's journey of adversity and growth, which has helped inform her work as a psychotherapist. Beginning with her own unconventional upbringing and personal relationships, the second half of the book follows her children from birth to adulthood and through their numerous experiences including coming out, depression, hate crime, relationships, school and various aspects to do with transitioning (legal, physical, medical, social) as well as their appearances in the media as a family. This book is insightful, charming and thought-provoking, and through levity and humour, offers a positive approach to parenting outside of convention.

The Classics were core to the curriculum and ethos of the intensely homosocial Victorian and Edwardian public schools, yet ancient homosexuality and erotic pedagogy were problematic to the educational establishment, which expurgated classical texts with sexual content. This volume analyses the intimate and uncomfortable nexus between the Classics, sex, and education primarily through the figure of the schoolmaster Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge (1890-1918), whose clandestine writings not only explore homoerotic desires but also offer insightful comments on Classical education. Now a marginalized figure, Bainbrigge's surviving works - a verse drama entitled Achilles in Scyros featuring a cross-dressing Achilles and a Chorus of lesbian schoolgirls, and a Latin dialogue between schoolboys - vividly demonstrate the queer potential of Classics and are marked by a celebration of the pleasures of sex and a refusal to apologize for homoerotic desire. Reprinted here in their entirety, they are accompanied by chapters setting them in their social and literary context, including their parallels with the writings of Bainbrigge's contemporaries and near contemporaries, such as John Addington Symonds, E. M. Forster, and A. E. Housman. What emerges is a provocative new perspective on the history of sexuality and the place of the Classics within that history, which demonstrates that a highly queer version of Classics was possible in private contexts.

This book provides an overview of research and practice dealing with the specific needs of gay and bisexual men living with prostate cancer, as well as the special psychosocial needs of their partners. The intention is twofold: to provide insight into the unique experiences and concerns of gay or bisexual men living with prostate cancer in order to inform and assist future research, clinical practice and supportive care, and policy; and to ensure that the needs of gay and bisexual men are recognized and advanced on the mainstream prostate cancer agenda. Featuring both cutting-edge research and powerful portraits of gay and bisexual men living with prostate cancer, this book will be indispensable for health care, oncology, and mental health practitioners who seek to address their specific experiences and challenges.

"Queer Pollen" discusses three notable black queer twentieth century artists--painter and writer Richard Bruce Nugent, author James Baldwin, and filmmaker Marlon Riggs--and the unique ways they turned to various media to work through their experiences living as queer black men. David A. Gerstner elucidates the complexities in expressing queer black desire through traditional art forms such as painting, poetry, and literary prose, or in the industrial medium of cinema. This challenge is made particularly sharp when the terms "black" and "homosexuality" come freighted with white ideological conceptualizations. Gerstner adroitly demonstrates how Nugent, Baldwin, and Riggs interrogated the seductive power and saturation of white queer cultures, grasping the deceit of an entrenched cultural logic that defined their identity and their desire in terms of whiteness. Their work confounds the notion of foundational origins that prescribe the limits of homosexual and racial desire, perversely refusing the cordoned-off classifications assigned to the "homosexual" and the "raced" body. "Queer Pollen" articulates a cinematic aesthetic that unfolds through painting, poetry, dance, novels, film, and video that marks the queer black body in relation to matters of race, gender, sexuality, nation, and death.

Amputation need not always signify castration; indeed, in Jack London's fiction, losing a limb becomes part of a process through which queerly gendered men become properly masculinized. In her astute book, Vulnerable Constitutions, Cynthia Barounis explores the way American writers have fashioned alternative-even resistant-epistemologies of queerness, disability, and masculinity. She seeks to understand the way perverse sexuality, physical damage, and bodily contamination have stimulated-rather than created a crisis for-masculine characters in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literature. Barounis introduces the concept of "anti-prophylactic citizenship"-a mode of political belonging characterized by vulnerability, receptivity, and risk-to examine counternarratives of American masculinity. Investigating the work of authors including London, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, and Eli Clare, she presents an evolving narrative of medicalized sexuality and anti-prophylactic masculinity. Her literary readings interweave queer theory, disability studies, and the history of medicine to demonstrate how evolving scientific conversations around deviant genders and sexualities gave rise to a new model of national belonging-ultimately rewriting the story of American masculinity as a story of queer-crip rebellion.

In postapartheid Cape Town-Africa's gay capital-many Pentecostal men turned to "ex-gay" ministries in hopes of "curing" their homosexuality in order to conform to conservative Christian values and African social norms. In Desire Work Melissa Hackman traces the experiences of predominantly white ex-gay men as they attempt to forge a heterosexual masculinity and enter into heterosexual marriage through emotional, bodily, and religious work. These men subjected themselves to daily self-surveillance and followed prescribed behaviors such as changing how they talked and walked. Ex-gay men also saw themselves as participating in the redemption of the nation, because South African society was perceived as suffering from a crisis of masculinity in which the country lacked enough moral heterosexual men. By tying the experience of ex-gay men to the convergence of social movements and public debates surrounding race, violence, religion, and masculinity in South Africa, Hackman offers insights into the construction of personal identities in the context of sexuality and spirituality.