In January 2015, I asked 10 questions. These questions were answered by Transgender / Gender Queer individuals from all around the world that included: all walks of life, all shapes, sizes and ages with different beliefs and life experiences. I had no idea the profound responses I would receive. This book is an intricate look inside the personal lives of almost 40 people located in countries spanning from the United States all the way to small dot on the map called Slovenia. The words inside this book reach into the depths of the soul, awakening anyone who picks it up to read. This book is perfect for those who are new to the journey, for family and friends who want to learn more, or for anyone who loves reading about the fascinating journeys of others. You may laugh, you may cry. No doubt this book will make a lasting impression in your mind (and heart) for years to come. Real Stories. Real Lives. Real Answers.

"It is a living museum of a long-gone Jewish life and, supposedly, a testimony to the success of the French model of social integration. It is a communal home where gay men and women are said to stand in defiance of the French model of social integration. It is a place of freedom and tolerance where people of color and lesbians nevertheless feel unwanted and where young Zionists from the suburbs gather every Sunday and sometimes harass Arabs. It is a hot topic in the press and on television. It is open to the world and open for business. It is a place to be seen and a place of invisibility. It is like a home to me, a place where I feel both safe and out of place and where my father felt comfortable and alienated at the same time. It is a place of nostalgia, innovation, shame, pride, and anxiety, where the local and the global intersect for better and for worse. And for better and for worse, it is a French neighborhood."-from My Father and I Mixing personal memoir, urban studies, cultural history, and literary criticism, as well as a generous selection of photographs, My Father and I focuses on the Marais, the oldest surviving neighborhood of Paris. It also beautifully reveals the intricacies of the relationship between a Jewish father and a gay son, each claiming the same neighborhood as his own. Beginning with the history of the Marais and its significance in the construction of a French national identity, David Caron proposes a rethinking of community and looks at how Jews, Chinese immigrants, and gays have made the Marais theirs. These communities embody, in their engagement of urban space, a daily challenge to the French concept of universal citizenship that denies them all political legitimacy. Caron moves from the strictly French context to more theoretical issues such as social and political archaism, immigration and diaspora, survival and haunting, the public/private divide, and group friendship as metaphor for unruly and dynamic forms of community, and founding disasters such as AIDS and the Holocaust. Caron also tells the story of his father, a Hungarian Jew and Holocaust survivor who immigrated to France and once called the Marais home.

This is a book about werewolves and other shapeshifters written from the perspective of a gay, Pagan male. This first book in an anticipated trilogy of gay werewolf books starts with an overview of werewolf lore and then traces the histories, folklore, and mythologies of werewolves and shapeshifters through a number of cultures. Wherever possible links between werewolves and homosexuality are made. Themes include gender variant deities and heroes with wolf/werewolf associations; homosexual initiations and shapeshifting practices among ancient all-male warrior bands; gender-shifting shapeshifters; shamans who changed both shape and gender; animal-human hybrids; and related gay and bi positive myths. While most of the book focuses on male werewolves, information related to lesbians and transgender folks are scattered throughout the book. Additional chapters are devoted to she-wolves, gender-shifting, human-animal hybrids, werebears and bear worship, other were-creatures, and even Christian werewolves.

ImageOut, New York's longest running LGBTQ film festival, is proud to celebrate our 2015 issue of ImageOutWrite! ImageOutWrite, volume four, celebrates the writing of LGBTQ and allied writers. This edition showcases high quality poetry, fiction, and non-fiction that engages the reader with the diverse voices of local New York poets and writers.

Heldis Jones is an old acquaintance of Georgian Merchant. Heldis returns to Merton to develop and consider changing his way of life. The Professor Mike goes on a world tour promoting new perceptions of identity. Lord Mack decides to sell up his estates and retire. More children are born to the inhabitants of Merton promising a future to reflect the changes.

Natural Transitioning(TM) (NT) was founded by Tristan Skye in 2008. It is the process of transitioning from female to male (FTM) by raising the testosterone levels your body already naturally produces without injecting synthetic testosterone. In this book, you will uncover years of dedicated research and my personal experience as a transgender man developing this alternative method of transitioning. This second edition is quite different from the first and takes a truly natural, holistic approach, with guidance from naturopathic doctors (from both the United States and Canada), Chinese medical practitioners and herbalists. Not only is this a guide book that will help you transition without synthetic hormones, it is also a guide book to help you achieve a greater health for your overall being.

Through an examination of post-1997 Thai cinema and video art Arnika Fuhrmann shows how vernacular Buddhist tenets, stories, and images combine with sexual politics in figuring current struggles over notions of personhood, sexuality, and collective life. The drama, horror, heritage, and experimental art films she analyzes draw on Buddhist-informed conceptions of impermanence and prominently feature the motif of the female ghost. In these films the characters' eroticization in the spheres of loss and death represents an improvisation on the Buddhist disavowal of attachment and highlights under-recognized female and queer desire and persistence. Her feminist and queer readings reveal the entangled relationships between film, sexuality, Buddhist ideas, and the Thai state's regulation of heteronormative sexuality. Fuhrmann thereby provides insights into the configuration of contemporary Thailand while opening up new possibilities for thinking about queer personhood and femininity.

'Knowledge is an enemy to bigotry.' William Bonzo has, as promised, followed his very popular book DON'T ASK, DO TELL - that brave little tome that came into print in October 2010 when the debate about gays in the military was raging, a book of honest appraisal of the situation from the probing and entertaining eyes of a man who had successfully served in the military and dared to give the insider picture. Now he returns with a new book, described as a 'sequined sequel to Don't Ask, Do Tell' that opens even more windows not only to the situation of prejudice present in the military but also to the true facts of what happens while serving as an 'openly gay' man in his final tour of duty in the US Navy. It bubbles with Bonzo's inimitable style of prose and shares a road map of how he adjusted to 'coming out' and the manner in which he found happiness at last - living a life of honesty and joy. Bonzo opens his story in Hawaii with a tender reflection at the graveside of his deceased partner and shares that train of memory with us the reader, taking us back to his aborted attempt to resign from the Navy when he landed in New Zealand to discover his tour of duty was extended for two years while the Operation Deep Freeze in Antarctica usurped all available Navy forces: Bonzo would be in charge of the Commissary He adjusts to the language and culture and climate of New Zealand in a series of hilarious introductions, finds his assigned staff devoted and friendly, and discovers the beauty of the quality of life in his 'new home'. And then, after his discharge, he elects to stay as long as allowed in his beloved New Zealand. The remainder of the book details his gradual emergence into the gay life in Christchurch, finding a lover, taking on two teenagers as sons - lads without parents who hung out in the local gay bar, his settling in a new apartment in the common part of town and his transition from a life as a closeted gay man to a popular, warmly loving, exceptionally bright and hunky gay man. The friends he makes and the manner in which he conducts his life weds him to the Isle of New Zealand, a place he would always refer to as home despite the fact that his visa was only two years in length. He bids a touching farewell to New Zealand, his partner and his 'sons', travels to Australia and other ports where he comes to understand the freedom of being a man no longer needing to hide in the closet. This journey is in many ways a story of how one man 'came out' into a world he could barely imagine. And this journey is a rollercoaster ride that eventually returns us to his home in Hawaii - back to the graveside where he starts his memoir, sadly reflecting on the loss of his New Zealand family in the earthquake of February 2011. One of the many aspects of William Bonzo's writing style is his sprinkling of quotations from a diverse group of people. For instance, while serving in the Navy as an escort to an Admiral he inserts the following quote from Dr. Seuss: 'Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.' It is that sort of intelligent humor that provides the glowing sequins of this sequel. William Bonzo has been through the trials of a closeted man in the military and survived, and not only did he survive but he grew in dignity and became an inspiration to all men and women who have found themselves in that prison. But more importantly he has opened that closet door to acceptance and understanding and discovery, sharing the joy of being who he is and finding a world of affection and rewards beyond his expectations. This book is a lighthouse, a tribute, and a nudge in the side as well as a hearty embrace to all his fellow travelers. And as far as this book is concerned, this is one of the most sensitive, hilarious, and warmly pleasurable rides to be released in a long time.

Same-sex unions have been recorded in the history of a number of cultures, but marriages or socially-accepted unions between same-sex partners were rare or nonexistent in other cultures. In the late 20th century, religious rites of marriage without legal recognition became increasingly common. This text follows the history of marriage equality up to the United States Supreme Court's landmark decision of OBERGEFELL V. HODGES.

When the U.S. military repealed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," its official policy on homosexuality in the services, Captain Stephen Snyder-Hill was serving in Iraq. After years enduring the culture of fear and secrecy for gay soldiers, Snyder-Hill submitted a video to a Republican primary debate, asking the participants' whether, if elected, they would extend spousal benefits to legally married gay and lesbian soldiers. His video was booed by the audience on national television. Snyder Hill's story riveted the nation's attention from national news shows to an episode of HBO's "The Newsroom" to comments by President Obama. Soldier of Change not only captures the media frenzy as Snyder-Hill took his place at the forefront of this modern civil rights movement, but also documents his twenty-year journey as a gay man in the army which culminated in the most important battle of his life: defending the disenfranchised.

A history of one of Sydney's largest subcultures - one that's been hidden from history despite gay men's influence on Sydney's social, cultural, economic and political life. Garry Wotherspoon's Gay Sydney is an updated version of his 1991 classic, City of the Plain, written in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Wotherspoon traces the shifts that have occurred since then, including majority support for marriage equality and antidiscrimination legislation. He also ponders the parallel evaporation of a distinctly gay sensibility and the disappearance of once-packed gay bars. This book also tells the story of gay Sydney across a century, looking at secret gay life, the never-ending societal debates about sex and the role of social movements in the '60 and '70s in effecting change. Wotherspoon gets personal too, writing about his own experiences and the changes he has observed in Sydney's gay life, having been a long-time resident of Oxford Street at the very heart of Sydney's gay community.

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story-mostly lesbians and including women of color-measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability. At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

As Editor-in-Chief at TheFabFemme.com, Aryka Randall has become the authority on Girl+Girl love, especially for women of color. Now in her first book, She's Just Not That Into You, Randall tells her story and gets the conversation heated up on queer dating, relationships, open commitments, living arrangements, work, money, love, sex and lust. She's Just Not That Into You covers everything from reality checks your friends won't give you and learning to love yourself to avoiding toxic relationships and why serial dating often leads to disaster - the kind of advice any young woman in love or looking for love needs.

a comedy philosophy fantasy where the villagers of Merton Worthshire people such as Professor Philosopher Mike Georgian Merchant Heldis Jones the Reverend Freddie Lawrenns Tommy and Johnny Faust husband and wife Bill and Joy Eva Goode and many others love and discuss philosophy in search of what seems a mythic and evasive Absolute Truth their thoughts and adventures take them abroad to Venezuela and other places around the world they live learn and laugh together discovering new minds and ways of perceiving

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 Rural queer experience is often hidden or ignored, and presumed to be alienating, lacking, and incomplete without connections to a gay culture that exists in an urban elsewhere. Queering the Countryside offers the first comprehensive look at queer desires found in rural America from a genuinely multi-disciplinary perspective. This collection of original essays confronts the assumption that queer desires depend upon urban life for meaning. By considering rural queer life, the contributors challenge readers to explore queer experiences in ways that give greater context and texture to modern practices of identity formation. The book's focus on understudied rural spaces throws into relief the overemphasis of urban locations and structures in the current political and theoretical work on queer sexualities and genders. Queering the Countryside highlights the need to rethink notions of "the closet" and "coming out" and the characterizations of non-urban sexualities and genders as "isolated" and in need of "outreach." Contributors focus on a range of topics-some obvious, some delightfully unexpected-from the legacy of Matthew Shepard, to how heterosexuality is reproduced at the 4-H Club, to a look at sexual encounters at a truck stop, to a queer reading of TheWizard of Oz. A journey into an unexplored slice of life in rural America, Queering the Countryside offers a unique perspective on queer experience in the modern United States and Canada.