A groundbreaking new history of urban cruising through the lenses of urban poets The Poetics of Cruising explores the relationship between cruising, photography, and the visual in the work of leading poets, from Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century to Eileen Myles in the twenty-first. What is it that happens, asks Jack Parlett, and what is it that is sought, in this often transient moment of perception we call cruising, this perceptual arena where acts of looking between strangers are intensified and eroticized? Parlett believes that this moment is not only optical in nature but visual: a mode of looking that warrants comparison with the ways in which we behold still and moving images. Whether it's Whitman's fixation with daguerreotypes, Langston Hughes's hybrid photographic works, or Frank O'Hara's love of Hollywood movie stars, argues Parlett, the history of poets cruising abounds with this intermingling between the verbal and the visual, the passing and the fixed. To look at someone in the act of cruising, this history suggests, is to capture, consider, and aestheticize, amid the flux and instantaneity of urban time. But it is also to reveal the ambivalence at the heart of this erotic search, where power may be unevenly distributed across glances, and gendered and racialized bodies are marked. Thus, in identifying for the first time this confluence of cruising, poetry, and visual culture, Parlett concludes that the visual erotic economy associated with gay cruising today, exemplified by the photographic grid of an app like Grindr, is not a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. Innovative, astute, and highly readable, and drawing on compelling archival material, The Poetics of Cruising is a must for scholars of queer and LGBTQ literature and culture, modern and contemporary poetry, visual studies, and the history of sexuality.

A Queer Love Story presents the first fifteen years of letters between Jane Rule - novelist and the first widely recognized "public lesbian" in North America - and Rick Bebout, journalist and editor with the Toronto-based Body Politic, an important incubator of LGBT thought and activism. Rule lived in a remote rural community on Galiano Island in British Columbia but wrote a column for the magazine. Bebout resided in and was devoted to Toronto's gay village. At turns poignant, scintillating, and incisive, their exchanges include ruminations on queer life and the writing life even as they document some of the most pressing LGBT issues of the '80s and '90s, including HIV/AIDS, censorship, and state policing of desire.

Motivated by the death of his partner, Adams seeks to redefine the closet as a relational construct between all people and all sexualities. The closet is explored at each stage--entering it, inhabiting it, and coming out of it--and strategies are offered for reframing difficult closet experiences. Adams makes use of interviews, personal narratives, and autoethnography to analyze lived, relational experiences of sexuality. This is a must have for scholars and students of gender studies, qualitative research, and for any reader who has felt the closet's reach.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, Budapest was a burgeoning cosmopolitan metropolis. Known at the time as the "Pearl of the Danube," it boasted some of Europe's most innovative architectural and cultural achievements, and its growing middle class was committed to advancing the city's liberal politics and making it an intellectual and commercial crossroads between East and West. In addition, as historian Anita Kurimay reveals, fin-de-siecle Budapest was also famous for its boisterous public sexual culture, including a robust gay subculture. Queer Budapest is the riveting story of non-normative sexualities in Hungary as they were understood, experienced, and policed between the birth of the capital as a unified metropolis in 1873 and the decriminalization of male homosexual acts in 1961. Kurimay explores how and why a series of illiberal Hungarian regimes came to tolerate, protect, and contain queer life. She also explains how the precarious coexistence between the illiberal state and queer community ended abruptly at the close of World War II. A stunning reappraisal of sexuality's political implications, Queer Budapest recuperates queer communities as an integral part of Budapest's--and Hungary's--modern incarnation.

For fans of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Meg-John Barker's Queer, Fine is an essential graphic memoir about the intricacies of gender identity and expression. As Rhea Ewing neared university graduation in 2012, they became consumed by the question: What is gender? This obsession sparked a quest in their quiet Midwest town, where they anxiously approached both friends and strangers for interviews to turn into comics. A decade later, their project has exploded into a fantastical and informative portrait of a surprisingly vast community spread across the America. Questions such as How do you identify? invited deep and honest accounts of adolescence, taking hormones, changing pronouns-and how these experiences can differ depending on culture, race and religion. Amidst beautifully rendered scenes emerges Ewing's own visceral story growing up in rural Kentucky, grappling with their identity as a teenager and ultimately finding themself through art-and by creating something this very fine.

The alarm and anxiety unleashed by the Great Recession found fascinating expression across popular culture. Harried survivors negotiated societal collapse in The Walking Dead. Middle-class whites crossed the literal and metaphorical Mexican border on Breaking Bad or coped with a lack of freedom among the marginalized on Orange Is the New Black. Camilla Fojas uses representations of people of color, the incarcerated, and trans/queers--vulnerable populations all--to work through the contradictions created by the economic crisis and its freefalling aftermath. Television, film, advertising, and media coverage of the crisis created a distinct kind of story about capitalism and the violence that supports it. Fojas shows how these pop culture moments reshaped social dynamics and people's economic sensibilities and connects the ways pop culture reflected economic devastation. She also examines how these artifacts illuminated parts of society usually kept off-screen or on the margins even as they defaulted to stories of white protagonists.

It is a well known fact that our population of persons aged 65 and over are growing at a faster rate than any other demographic. Older adults are now living longer more complex lives than previous generations. Recent census data confirms the emergence of a growing, more visible older Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered (GLBT) community. In spite of the diversity that now exists in older GLBT communities, very little is known about their contemporary experiences and healthcare needs.

What is needed is a more inclusive understanding of older GLBT family and community life. As a result, this book will educate community professionals about the experiences of older GLBT adults and the issues they face within their families and communities. In particular, physical and mental health, family relationships, and individual development are explored in this textbook.

This multidisciplinary approach to GLBT aging will also benefit undergraduate students, graduate students, and academics specializing in anthropology, education, family studies, gerontology, health studies, human development, psychology, social work, and sociology. For that matter, anyone currently researching or working with older sexual communities.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of GLBT Family Studies.

LGBT older adults experience issues and challenges that are unique, including institutional heteronormativity, heterosexism in organizations, and homophobia among caregivers and social service providers. This book presents a diverse group of scholars, activists, social service providers, and researchers from around the globe examining current research, practices, and policies on aging among LGBT individuals. This revealing source lays out the significant challenges faced not only by this aging sexual minority population, but also for their social service providers-and those who train them. The chapters explore the Greater London area Polari Project, the adjustments made in the long-running HIV support group at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, and the Liberation Psychology workshops in Ireland for lesbian and transgendered persons. This volume can serve as an excellent teacher resource for engaging undergraduate and graduate students in various professions who will be working with older LGBT adults. This text is extensively referenced and includes tables to clearly present research. This book is a valuable source for program administrators and supervisors, human behavior researchers, psychologists and psychotherapists, social planners and policy specialists, community developers and organizers, case managers, direct service practitioners involved with LGBT communities, educators, and students. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services.

Proposing a radical vision of cinema's queer globalism, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt explore how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making. Whether in its exploration of queer cinematic temporality, the paradox of the queer popular, or the deviant ecologies of the queer pastoral, Schoonover and Galt reimagine the scope of queer film studies. The authors move beyond the gay art cinema canon to consider a broad range of films from Chinese lesbian drama and Swedish genderqueer documentary to Bangladeshi melodrama and Bolivian activist video. Schoonover and Galt make a case for the centrality of queerness in cinema and trace how queer cinema circulates around the globe-institutionally via film festivals, online consumption, and human rights campaigns, but also affectively in the production of a queer sensorium. In this account, cinema creates a uniquely potent mode of queer worldliness, one that disrupts normative ways of being in the world and forges revised modes of belonging.

The metropolis has been the near exclusive focus of queer scholars and queer cultures in America. Asking us to look beyond the cities on the coasts, Scott Herring draws a new map, tracking how rural queers have responded to this myopic mindset. Interweaving a wide range of disciplines--art, media, literature, performance, and fashion studies--he develops an extended critique of how metronormativity saturates LGBTQ politics, artwork, and criticism. To counter this ideal, he offers a vibrant theory of queer anti-urbanism that refuses to dismiss the rural as a cultural backwater.

Impassioned and provocative, Another Country expands the possibilities of queer studies beyond its city limits. Herring leads his readers from faeries in the rural Midwest to photographs of white supremacists in the deep South, from Roland Barthes's obsession with Parisian fashion to a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel set in the Appalachian Mountains, and from cubist paintings in Lancaster County to lesbian separatist communes on the northern California coast. The result is an entirely original account of how queer studies can--and should--get to another country.

Lesbian and gay citizens today enjoy a much broader array of rights and obligations and a greater ability to live their lives openly in both the U.S. and Canada. However, while human rights protections have been exponentially expanded in Canada over the last twenty years, even basic protections in areas such as employment discrimination are still unavailable to many in the United States. This book examines why these similar societies have produced such divergent policy outcomes, focusing on how differences between the political institutions of the U.S. and Canada have shaped the terrain of social movement and counter-movement mobilization. It analyzes cross-national variance in public policies toward lesbians and gay men, especially in the areas of the decriminalization of sodomy, the passage of anti-discrimination laws, and the enactment of measures to recognize same-sex relationships.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was one of the most significant literary theorists of the last forty years and a key figure in contemporary queer theory. In this engaging and inspiring guide, Jason Edwards:

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• introduces and explains key terms such as affects, the first person, homosocialities, and queer taxonomies, performativities and cusps
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• considers Sedgwick's poetry and textile art alongside her theoretical texts
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• encourages a personal as well as an academic response to Sedgwick's work, suggesting how life-changing it can be
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• offers detailed suggestions for further reading
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Written in an accessible and direct style, Edwards indicates the impact that Sedgwick's work continues to have on writers, readers, and literary and cultural theory today.

A special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Futurity, innocence, and childish subversion-as concepts, as frameworks-have yet to catch up to where the child has moved in the present century. The contributors to this issue explore topics that are both vital and challenging for current queer studies, including paradoxical exportations of the U.S. "innocent" child abroad, the queer child under same-sex marriage law, child revolutionaries' actions in Egypt, and the colonial afterlife of the boarding school for indigenous children. Following the twists and turns of children now, contributors confront how race, gender, and sexuality are made to live and grow in children's bodies. Contributors Paul Amar, Julian Gill-Peterson, Clifford J. Rosky, Rebekah Sheldon, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Mary Zaborskis

This book brings together some of the most exciting, original and cuttingedge work being conducted on contemporary queer China. The volume includes original essays by some of the most prolific and central queer activists and artists in the PRC, placing their writing alongside work by emergent and established scholars from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds. The book offers unique perspectives by presenting primary accounts of the creative and multi-faceted strategies that activists and community organizers have developed in their various activities. The volume also presents rich, empirical evidence of every-day queer lives across China, offering a unique record not only of cosmopolitan community and activist perspectives but also of voices and experiences from a broad range of locations and identifications. As a whole it offers invaluable insights into sexual and gender diversity in China today. Queer/Tongzhi China thus breathes as it speaks, providing through its diverse approaches a different understanding of queer China than standard mono-ethnographies or social-scientific documentaries.

A compelling examination of the social and legal experiences of lesbian, bisexual, and queer stepparent families Lesbian, bisexual, and queer families formed after the dissolution of a marriage face a range of obstacles. In Queer Stepfamilies, Katie L. Acosta offers a wealth of insight into their complex experiences as they negotiate parenting among multiple parents and family-building in a world not designed to meet their needs. Drawing on in-depth interviews, Acosta follows the journeys of more than forty families as they navigate a legal and social landscape that fails to recognize their existence. Acosta contextualizes the legal realities of LGBTQ stepparent families and considers the actions these parents take to protect their families in the absence of comprehensive policies or laws geared to meet their needs. Queer Stepfamilies reveals the obstacles these families face in family courts during divorce proceedings and custody cases, and highlights their distrust of courts when it comes to acting in their children's best interests, especially in the event of an origin parent's death. As LGBTQ families continue to make social and legal strides in acceptance and recognition, this important book shows how queer stepparents find ways to make their unconventional families work, despite the many social and legal obstacles they encounter. Acosta provides a fresh perspective, broadening our understanding about families in the twenty-first century.

The belief of many in the early sexual liberation movements was that capitalism's investment in the norms of the heterosexual family meant that any challenge to them was invariably anti-capitalist. In recent years, however, lesbian and gay subcultures have become increasingly mainstream and commercialized - as seen, for example, in corporate backing for pride events - while the initial radicalism of sexual liberation has given way to relatively conservative goals over marriage and adoption rights. Meanwhile, queer theory has critiqued this 'homonormativity', or assimilation, as if some act of betrayal had occurred. In Sex, Needs and Queer Culture, David Alderson seeks to account for these shifts in both queer movements and the wider society, and argues powerfully for a distinctive theoretical framework. Through a critical reassessment of the work of Herbert Marcuse, as well as the cultural theorists Raymond Williams and Alan Sinfield, Alderson asks whether capitalism is progressive for queers, evaluates the distinctive radicalism of the counterculture as it has mutated into queer, and distinguishes between avant-garde protest and subcultural development. In doing so, the book offers new directions for thinking about sexuality and its relations to the broader project of human liberation.

As a way of understanding identity, the concept of rootedness hasincreasingly been subjected to acerbic political and theoretical critiques.Politically, roots narratives have been criticized for attempting to policeidentity through a politics of purity-excluding anyone who doesn't sharethe same narrative. Theoretically, a critique of essentialism has led toa suspicion against essence and origins regardless of their politicalimplications. The central argument of Queer Roots for the Diaspora is that, in spiteof these debates around the concept of roots, ultimately the desire forroots contains the "roots" of its own deconstruction. The book considersalternative root narratives that acknowledge the impossibility of returningto origins with any certainty; welcome sexual diversity; acknowledge theirown fictionality; reveal that even a single collective identity can be rootedin multiple ways; and create family trees haunted by the queer otherspatrilineal genealogy seems to marginalize. The roots narratives simultaneously assert and question rooted identitieswithin a number of diasporas-African, Jewish, and Armenian. By lookingat these together, one can discern between the local specificities of anysingle diaspora and the commonalities inherent in diaspora as a globalphenomenon. This comparatist, interdisciplinary study will interestscholars in a diversity of fields, including diaspora studies, postcolonialstudies, LGBTQ studies, French and Francophone studies, Americanstudies, comparative literature, and literary theory.

This open access book seeks to understand how politics is being made in a pluralistic sense, and explores how these political struggles are challenging and transforming gender, sexuality, and colonial norms. As researchers located in Sweden, a nation often cited as one of the most gender-equal and LGBTQ-tolerant nations, the contributions investigate political processes, decolonial struggles, and events beyond, nearby, and in between organizations, states, and national territories. The collection represents a variety of disciplines, and different theoretical conceptualizations of politics, feminist theory, and postcolonial and queer studies. Students and researchers with an interest of queer studies, gender studies, critical whiteness studies, and civil society studies will find this book an invaluable resource.

When the modern struggle for gay rights erupted - most notably at a bar called Stonewall in Greenwich Village - in the summer of 1969, most religious traditions condemned homosexuality; psychiatric experts labeled people who were attracted to others of the same sex "crazy"; and forty-nine states outlawed sex between people of the same gender. Four decades later, in June 2011, New York legalized gay marriage - the most populous state in the country to do so thus far. The armed services stopped enforcing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, ending a law that had long discriminated against gay and lesbian members of the military. Successful social movements are always extraordinary, but these advances were something of a miracle. Political columnist Linda Hirshman recounts the long roads that led to these victories, viewing the gay rights movement within the tradition of American freedom as the third great modern social-justice movement, alongside the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement. Drawing on an abundance of published and archival material, and hundreds of in-depth interviews, Hirshman shows, in this astute political analysis, how the fight for gay rights has changed the American landscape for all citizens - blurring rigid gender lines, altering the shared culture, and broadening our definitions of family. From the Communist cross-dresser Harry Hay in 1948 to New York's visionary senator Kirsten Gillibrand in 2010, the story includes dozens of brilliant, idiosyncratic characters. Written in vivid prose, at once emotional and erudite, Victory is an utterly vibrant work of reportage and eyewitness accounts, revealing how, in a matter of decades, while facing every social adversary-church, state, and medical establishment - a focused group of activists forged a classic campaign for cultural change that will serve as a model for all future political movements.

'Zest for Life' is how lesbians describe their experience of menopause. This book suggests that the experience of menopause can be significantly altered through shifting perceptions about body image. Based on a survey of over one hundred women, Kelly's research shatters the myths promoted by the pharmaceutical companies and the medical industry. Instead of the false eternal youth presented to women, this book shows that many other factors are involved in how we experience our bodies.

Make sure your Catholic school's LGBT students are getting the support they need Creating Safe Environments for LGBT Students is a comprehensive training guidebook for educators who are committed to diversity and the full inclusion of LGBT students in every aspect of the Catholic high school experience. Based on five years of pilot testing in Catholic schools, this unique book emphasizes safe-staff training in integrating the Church's pastoral, social, and moral dimensions with the special needs of LGBT students. The book presents strategies and resources for building safer schools, helpful materials for communicating with parents, and general guidelines for developing and maintaining professional helping relationships with LGBT students. Based on a training the trainer model, Creating Safe Environments for LGBT Students encourages the development of grassroots leadership within the school. This unique book promotes a positive framework for navigating the challenging landscape of the Catholic tradition and the LGBT experience as it helps to establish anti-harassment and anti-bullying protocols for school environments and models for developing LGBT student support groups and gay/straight student alliances. The book promotes role-play by students, alumni, teachers, and parentsa hallmark of the ministry work and training methods of the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minoritiesand is flexible enough to allow each school's individual climate and culture to be respected. Creating Safe Environments for LGBT Students includes: * first-hand stories from students and teachers * realistic, dynamic, and creative role-play scenarios that explore various relationships between students, teachers, parents, administrators, and the school board * opening prayer and meditation rituals * a special foreword by Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton, one of the few Catholic bishops to publicly affirm LGBT persons * an extensive bibliography and glossary regarding the experiences, language, culture, and spirituality of LGBT youth * the latest research findings on at-risk behaviors of LGBT teenagers * training handouts that are easy to duplicate and use as transparencies * a manual log that can be used as a training diary * and much more!Creating Safe Environments for LGBT Students is an essential resource for faculty and staff members at Catholic high schools, particularly school administrators, chaplains, campus ministers, psychologists, social workers, and counselors.

The History of Gay People in Alcoholics Anonymous documents and honors the ways thousands of LGBT people have carried Alcoholics Anonymous' message. This illuminating chronicle includes interviews and documents that detail the compelling history, recovery, and wisdom of gay people in AA. The book examines the challenges AA faced as the fellowship endeavored to become a more inclusive and cohesive community. The first-person accounts narrate the important work of influential gay and straight AA members that led key events in AA's history. The author includes material on the steps and traditions of AA, and on becoming an ally to LGBT people on the road to recovery. Topics in The History of Gay People in Alcoholics Anonymous include: the gay origins of AA's Third Tradition a comparison of treatments for alcoholism and homosexuality compelling portraits of sober gay life in the 1950s and 1960s the debate in AA over meetings for gay alcoholics interviews with members and co-founders of the first gay AA meetings the history of the first gay AA/Al-Anon conference interviews with pioneering gay addiction professionals the history of AA pamphlet "AA and the Gay/Lesbian Alcoholic" Alcoholics Together, and why a parallel AA organization for gay alcoholics formed in southern California strategies AA's gay members developed to make their meetings simultaneously safe and public-and why some of them are still necessary today much more The History of Gay People in Alcoholics Anonymous is an enlightening book for members of the LGBT and heterosexual recovering community, alcoholism and addiction professionals, as well as physicians, counselors, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, clergy, historians, sociologists, educators, students, and anyone interested in learning more about AA or this aspect of the community's history.

Coming Out, Coming In: Nurturing the Well-Being and Inclusion of Gay Youth in Mainstream Society describes the process of a oecoming ina to a welcoming and nurturing family, from both the teen's and the parents' perspective. Linda Goldman draws on her personal and professional experience as a school guidance counselor, child and adolescent therapist, parent, and a member of the national group PFLAG to build a common language and a new paradigm for understanding sexual orientation and gender identity as a part of mainstream culture. Through the information, exercises, anecdotes, and extensive bibliography of additional resources provided in the book, parents, school administrators and educators, community groups and counselors will find the tools needed to facilitate nurturing and safe environments for our LGBT youth.

In Feels Right Kemi Adeyemi presents an ethnography of how black queer women in Chicago use dance to assert their physical and affective rights to the city. Adeyemi stages the book in queer dance parties in gentrifying neighborhoods, where good feelings are good business. But feeling good is elusive for black queer women whose nightlives are undercut by white people, heterosexuality, neoliberal capitalism, burnout, and other buzzkills. Adeyemi documents how black queer women respond to these conditions: how they destroy DJ booths, argue with one another, dance slowly, and stop partying altogether. Their practices complicate our expectations that life at night, on the queer dance floor, or among black queer community simply feels good. Adeyemi's framework of "feeling right" instead offers a closer, kinesthetic look at how black queer women adroitly manage feeling itself as a complex right they should be afforded in cities that violently structure their movements and energies. What emerges in Feels Right is a sensorial portrait of the critical, black queer geographies and collectivities that emerge in social dance settings and in the broader neoliberal city. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Gay men and lesbians present humorous and hard-hitting accounts of the need to belong . . . somewhere Why would a lesbian raised in a Jewish home have a sudden desire to be a tough-talking Catholic girl? And why would a gay man travel to Ireland in a desperate attempt to escape his hillbilly roots? Identity EnvyWanting to Be Who We're Not explores the connections gay men and lesbians have to religions, races, ethnicities, classes, families of origin, and genders not their own. This unique anthology takes both humorous and serious looks at the identities of others as queer writers explore their own identity envies in personal essays, memoirs, and other creative nonfiction. Gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered, intersex, and other sexual minorities often feel marginalized by mainstream culture and have a need to belong somewhere, to claim a group as their own. This surprising book presents stories of identity envy that are humorous and hard-hitting, poignant and provocative, written with energy, wit, and candor by many of your favorite writers-and some exciting newcomers. Identity EnvyWanting to Be Who We're Not includes: Gerard Wozek's King Fu-infused Chasing the Grasshopper Max Pierce's fantasy of being a Child Star that helped him through a troubled family life Lori Horvitz's Shiksa in my Living Room D. Travers Scott's EuroTex Perry Brass's A Serene Invisibility: Turning Myself into a Christian Girl Jim Tushinski's ode to Lost in Space, The Perfect Space Family Al Cho's unlikely identification with Laura Ingalls Wilder characters, Farmer Boy Irish-American John Gilgun wishes he could be one of those Italian-American Boys Joan Annsfire rejects her Jewish heritage to become Catholic schoolgirl Corinne O'Donnell in The Promise of Redemption Andrew Ramer's Tales of a Male Lesbian city slicker Mike McGinty's life with the cattle folk, You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Helen and much more! Identity EnvyWanting to Be Who We're Not is a must-read for anyone who appreciates good writingespecially gay and lesbian readers who know what it's like to wish you were someone else.