The discovery that a child is lesbian or gay can send shockwaves through a family. A mother will question how she's raised her son; a father will worry that his daughter will experience discrimination. From the child's perspective, gay and lesbian youth fear their families will reject them and that they will lose financial and emotional support. All in all, learning a child is gay challenges long-held views about sexuality and relationships, and the resulting uncertainty can produce feelings of anger, resentment, and concern.

Through a qualitative, multicultural study of sixty-five gay and lesbian children and their parents, Michael LaSala, a leading expert on this issue, outlines effective, practice-tested interventions for families in transition. His research reveals surprising outcomes, such as learning that a child is homosexual can improve familial relationships, including father-child relationships, even if a parent reacts strongly or negatively to the revelation. By confronting feelings of depression, anxiety, and grief head on, LaSala formulates the best approach for practitioners who hope to reestablish intimacy among family members and preserve family connections--as well as individual autonomy--well into the child's maturation. By restricting his study to parents and children of the same family, LaSala accurately captures the reciprocal effects of family interactions, identifying them as targets for effective treatment. "Coming Out, Coming Home" is also a valuable text for families, enabling adjustment through relatable scenarios and analyses.

In "Sappho in Early Modern England," Harriette Andreadis examines public and private expressions of female same-sex sexuality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Before the language of modern sexual identities developed, a variety of discourses in both literary and extraliterary texts began to form a lexicon of female intimacy. Looking at accounts of non-normative female sexualities in travel narratives, anatomies, and even marital advice books, Andreadis outlines the vernacular through which a female same-sex erotics first entered verbal consciousness. She finds that "respectable" women of the middle classes and aristocracy who did not wish to identify themselves as sexually transgressive developed new vocabularies to describe their desires; women that we might call bisexual or lesbian, referred to in their day as tribades, fricatrices, or "rubsters," emerged in erotic discourses that allowed them to acknowledge their sexuality and still evade disapproval.

A fascinating read for anyone seeking to understand the conflict between Christianity and LGBTQI individuals, this book is, as its editors proclaim, "a fearlessly wide vision of queer Christians finding a place within Christianity-and claiming their authentic experience and voice." Through essays by noted lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and intersex (LGBTQI) religion scholars, this important compilation summarizes the history and current status of LGBTQI theology, exploring its relationship to the policies, practices, and theology of traditional Christianity. Contributors contrast the "radically inclusive" thinking of LGBTQI theology with the "exclusivity" practiced by many Christian churches, explaining the reasoning of each and clarifying contentious issues. At the same time, the book highlights ways in which "queer" theology and practice benefit Christian congregations. Writing from the perspective of grassroots Christian LGBTQI movements, many of the contributors draw upon their own experiences. They provide graphic examples of the effects exclusion has on individuals, congregations, and denominations, and also share examples of inclusion and its effects. Equally important, the work creates the basis for dialogue between traditional churches and followers of LGBTQI theology, offering practical suggestions for Christian congregations that wish to put aside exclusionary policies and practices.

How can contemporary psychoanalysis be used to understand the sexuality and experiences of bisexual or lesbian women without marginalizing them? Burch explores how lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual women's experiences may be incorporated into psychoanalytic theory, arguing convincingly that the dynamics of lesbian and bisexual relationships are part of women's development and desires, rather than dysfunctions of them.

In his bestselling book "The Grapevine: A Report on the Secret World of the Lesbian" (1965), Jess Stearn announced that, contrary to the assumptions of many Americans, most lesbians appeared indistinguishable from other women. They could mingle "congenially in conventional society." Some were popular sex symbols; some were married to unsuspecting husbands. Robert J. Corber contends that "The Grapevine "exemplified a homophobic Cold War discourse that portrayed the femme as an invisible threat to the nation. Underlying this panic was the widespread fear that college-educated women would reject marriage and motherhood as aspirations, weakening the American family and compromising the nation's ability to defeat totalitarianism. Corber argues that Cold War homophobia transformed ideas about lesbianism in the United States. In the early twentieth century, homophobic discourse had focused on gender identity: the lesbian was a masculine woman. During the Cold War, the lesbian was reconceived as a woman attracted to other women. Corber develops his argument by analyzing representations of lesbianism in Hollywood movies of the 1950s and 1960s, and in the careers of some of the era's biggest female stars. He examines treatments of the femme in "All About Eve," "The Children's Hour," and "Marnie," and he explores the impact of Cold War homophobia on the careers of Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Doris Day.

Roof's ambitious, wide-ranging book links narrative theory, theories of sexuality, and gay and lesbian theory to explore the place of homosexuality, and specifically the lesbian, in the tradition of western narrative. According to Freud, perversions are the necessary obstacles in a heroic plot of normal heterosexual development; and homosexuality is the nineteenth century's classic case of perversion. Roof builds on Freud to illustrate that a structural understanding of narrative enforces a heterosexual paradigm, a sense of meaning that provides psychological stability for the reader. Looking at film, television, and lesbian novels, Roof explores how ideas of narrative and sexuality inform, determine, and reproduce one another. She identifies the paradigmatic lesbian story, its unvarying repetition, and how it might be recast. Understanding identification as a narrative practice, and narrative as typically heterosexual and reproductive, Roof shows how sexuality and narrative must be disentangled to alter oppressive social practices. "Come As You Are" marks a significant contribution to lesbian and gay studies, psychoanalytic theory, and feminism.

Renowned feminist philosopher Claudia Card courageously explores the complex ethical and political questions lesbians face regarding their identities and their relationship both within and outside the lesbian communities.

This text explores what it is like to be part of both the lesbian and Jewish communities, suggesting ways in which lesbians can reconcile these seemingly discordant elements of their identity. It advocates the acceptance of lesbians into the Jewish tradition by offering new interpretations of the Torah traditionally regarded as prohibitive of homosexuality. The book counters the millennia of "Midrashim" (scholarly comment on the Torah) condemning gays and lesbians, by examining the culture of biblical lawgivers and the culture of the commentators themselves. By examining passages from Scripture and by featuring texts that portray Jewish lesbians as role models in a new cultural canon, the author presents a case for the integration of the lesbian voice into Jewish experience.

Elizabeth English explores the aesthetic dilemma prompted by the censorship of Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928. Faced with legal and financial reprisals, women writers were forced to question how they might represent lesbian identity and desire. Modernist experimentation has often been seen as a response to this problem, but English breaks new ground by arguing that popular genre fictions offered a creative strategy against the threat of detection and punishment. Her study examines a range of responses to this dilemma by offering illuminating close readings of fantasy, crime, and historical fictions written by both mainstream and modernist authors. English introduces hitherto neglected women writers from diverse backgrounds and draws on archival material examined here for the first time to remap the topography of 1920s-1940s lesbian literature and to reevaluate the definition of lesbian modernism.

Lesbian life in America continues to evolve. As Lillian Faderman writes, there are "no constants with regard to lesbianism," except that lesbians prefer women.

In this book, Faderman reclaims the story of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks to today's diverse lifestyles. Faderman samples from journals, unpublished manuscripts, songs, media accounts, novels, medical literature, pop culture artifacts, and rich firsthand testimony with lesbians of all races, ages, and classes, uncovering a surprising narrative of unparalleled depth and originality.

#1 Best Seller in Trivia & Fun Facts, Questions & Answers, Curiosities & Wonders, and Cults & Demonism Think You Know About Sexual Customs Around Our World? Have Fun and Enjoy Some Surprises!This book is a humorous glimpse of a wide range of stereotype-busting sexual, relationship and romantic mores around the world. It is fun, interesting, and eye-opening! For example, places where women control the mating game, set marriage rules, and marry one another for political power. The fact that it's all true also makes it fascinating. Take a romp through a rollicking worldwide tour with LOL views of extraordinary sexual customs. It will astound and regale you. At the same time, it proves sex is like happiness - universally sought but subjectively enjoyed.

"This book is a succinct, pedagogically designed introduction. As classroom text, Sullivan's work is heady with vibrant debate and slim heuristics; her intellectual clarity is stunning."
--"Choice"

A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory explores the ways in which sexuality, subjectivity and sociality have been discursively produced in various historical and cultural contexts.

The book begins by putting gay and lesbian sexuality and politics in historical context and demonstrates how and why queer theory emerged in the West in the late twentieth century. Sullivan goes on to provide a detailed overview of the complex ways in which queer theory has been employed, covering a diversity of key topics including: race, sadomasochism, straight sex, fetishism, community, popular culture, transgender, and performativity. Each chapter focuses on a distinct issue or topic, provides a critical analysis of the specific ways in which it has been responded to by critics (including Freud, Foucault, Derrida, Judith Butler, Jean-Luc Nancy, Adrienne Rich and Laura Mulvey), introduces key terms, and uses contemporary cinematic texts as examples.

In "Queer Activism in India," Naisargi N. Dave examines the formation of lesbian communities in India from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Based on ethnographic research conducted with activist organizations in Delhi, a body of letters written by lesbian women, and research with lesbian communities and queer activist groups across the country, Dave studies the everyday practices that constitute queer activism in India.

Dave argues that activism is an ethical practice comprising critique, invention, and relational practice. She investigates the relationship between the ethics of activism and the existing social norms and conditions from which activism emerges. Through her analysis of different networks and institutions, Dave documents how activism oscillates between the potential for new social arrangements and the questions that arise once the activists' goals have been achieved. "Queer Activism" in India addresses a relevant and timely phenomenon and makes an important contribution to the anthropology of queer communities, social movements, affect, and ethics.

The Ladies of Llangollen is the first book length critical study of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, whose 1778 elopement and five decades of "retirement" turned them into eighteenth century celebrities and pivotal figures in the historiography of female same-sex desire. Debates within the history of sexuality have long foundered over questions of what constitutes "proof" of past sexual desires and practices, and the nature of Butler and Ponsonby's intimacy has been deemed inimical to productive critical consideration. In this ground-breaking study Fiona Brideoake attends to the archive of their shared life-written, performed, and enacted in the vernacular of the everyday-to argue that they embodied an early iteration of female celebrity in which their queerness registered less as the mark of some specified non-normativity than as the effect of their very public, very visible resistance to sexual legibility. Throughout their lives and afterlives, Butler and Ponsonby have been figured as chaste romantic friends, prototypical lesbians, Bluestockings, Romantic domestic archetypes, and proleptically feminist modernists. The Ladies of Langollen demonstrates that this heterogeneous legacy discloses the queerness of their performatively instantiated identities.

"One of the greatest achievements of modern literature." -Richard Howard "A major achievement . . . . Genet transforms experiences of degradation into spiri tual exercises and hoodlums into bearers of the majesty of love." -Saturday Review "This book recreates for the reader Genet's magic world, one of dazzling beauty charged with novelty and excitement." -Bettina Knapp "Genet would have deserved international standing for this novel alone. . . . He succeeds to an amazing degree in creating poetry from the profoundest degradation." -The Times (London)

Winner, Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Anthology Winner, Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, Publishing Triangle Awards A Ms. magazine, Refinery29, and Lambda Literary Most Anticipated Read of 2021 A groundbreaking collection tracing the history of intellectual thought by Black Lesbian writers, in the tradition of The New Press's perennial seller Words of Fire African American lesbian writers and theorists have made extraordinary contributions to feminist theory, activism, and writing. Mouths of Rain, the companion anthology to Beverly Guy-Sheftall's classic Words of Fire, traces the long history of intellectual thought produced by Black Lesbian writers, spanning the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. Using "Black Lesbian" as a capacious signifier, Mouths of Rain includes writing by Black women who have shared intimate and loving relationships with other women, as well as Black women who see bonding as mutual, Black women who have self-identified as lesbian, Black women who have written about Black Lesbians, and Black women who theorize about and see the word lesbian as a political descriptor that disrupts and critiques capitalism, heterosexism, and heteropatriarchy. Taking its title from a poem by Audre Lorde, Mouths of Rain addresses pervasive issues such as misogynoir and anti-blackness while also attending to love, romance, "coming out," and the erotic. Contributors include: Barbara Smith Beverly Smith Bettina Love Dionne Brand Cheryl Clarke Cathy J. Cohen Angelina Weld Grimke Alexis Pauline Gumbs Audre Lorde Dawn Lundy Martin Pauli Murray Michelle Parkerson Mecca Jamilah Sullivan Alice Walker Jewelle Gomez

In this text Bernadette Brooten examines female homoeroticism and the role of women in the ancient Roman world. Employing a range of cultural sources, from medical texts to astrological horoscopes, Brooten finds evidence of marriages between women, and discusses the surgical procedure of clitoridectomy as a method of controlling female homoeroticism. She establishes the fact that condemnations of female homoerotic practices were based on widespread awareness of sexual love between women. Contrary to the common scholarly notion that early Christian sexual ethics were fundamentally different from those of the surrounding culture, Brooten contends that early Christians and their Roman neighbours shared a view of the "natural order" of society.

The unprecedented increase in lesbian representation over the past two decades has, paradoxically, coincided with queer theory's radical transformation of the study of sexuality. In Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory, Clara Bradbury-Rance argues that this contradictory context has yielded new kinds of cinematic language through which to give desire visual form. By offering close readings of key contemporary films such as Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Water Lilies and Carol alongside a broader filmography encompassing over 300 other films released between 1927 and 2018, the book provokes new ways of understanding a changing field of representation. Bradbury-Rance resists charting a narrative of representational progress or shoring up the lesbian's categorisation in the newly available terms of the visible. Instead, she argues for a feminist framework that can understand lesbianism's queerness. Drawing on a provocative theoretical and visual corpus, Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory reveals the conditions of lesbian legibility in the twenty-first century.

In 1857 the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who was fascinated by lesbianism, created a scandal with Les Fleurs du Mal [The Flowers of Evil]. This collection was originally entitled "The Lesbians" and described women as "femmes damnees," with "disordered souls" suffering in a hypocritical world. Then twenty years later, lesbians in Paris dared to flaunt themselves in that extraordinarily creative period at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries which became known as the Belle Epoque. Lesbian Decadence, now available in English for the first time, provides a new analysis and synthesis of the depiction of lesbianism as a social phenomenon and a symptom of social malaise as well as a fantasy in that most vibrant place and period in history. In this newly translated work, praised by leading critics as "authoritative," "stunning," and "a marvel of elegance and erudition," Nicole G. Albert analyzes and synthesizes an engagingly rich sweep of historical representations of the lesbian mystique in art and literature. Albert contrasts these visions to moralists' abrupt condemnations of "the lesbian vice," as well as the newly emerging psychiatric establishment's medical fury and their obsession on cataloging and classifying symptoms of "inversion" or "perversion" in order to cure these "unbalanced creatures of love." Lesbian Decadence combines literary, artistic, and historical analysis of sources from the mainstream to the rare, from scholarly studies to popular culture. The English translation provides a core reference/text for those interested in the Decadent movement, in literary history, in French history and social history. It is well suited for courses in gender studies, women's studies, LGBT history, and lesbianism in literature, history, and art.

In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry James's "The Bostonians, " Castle shows how a lesbian presence can be identified in the literature, history, and culture of the past three centuries.

'Engaging, revealing, at times simply astonishing: Anne Lister's diaries are an indispensable read for anyone interested in the history of gender, sexuality, and the intimate lives of women' SARAH WATERS 'The Lister diaries are the Dead Sea Scrolls of lesbian history; they changed everything. By resurrecting them and editing them with such loving attention and intelligence, Helena Whitbread has earned the gratitude of a whole generation' EMMA DONOGHUE When this volume of Anne Lister's diaries was first published in 1988, it was hailed as a vital piece of lost lesbian history. The editor, Helena Whitbread, had spent years painstakingly researching and transcribing Lister's extensive journals, much of which were written in an elaborate code - what Lister called her 'crypthand', which allowed her to record her life in intimate, and at times, explicit, detail. Until then, Anne Lister's lesbianism had been supressed or hinted at; this was the first time her story had been told. Anne Lister defied the role of nineteenth-century womanhood: she was bold, fiercely independent, a landowner, industrialist, traveller and lesbian - a woman who lived her life on her own terms. '[Anne Lister's] sense of self, and self-awareness, is what makes her modern to us. She was a woman exercising conscious choice. She controlled her cash and her body. At a time when women had to marry, or be looked after by a male relative, and when all their property on marriage passed to their husband, Anne Lister not only dodged the traps of being female, she set up a liaison with another woman that enhanced her own wealth and left both of them free to live as they wished . . . The diaries gave me courage' JEANETTE WINTERSON These diaries include the years 1816-1824. The second volume, continuing Anne's story, THE SECRET DIARIES OF MISS ANNE LISTER: NO PRIEST BUT LOVE, is now available.

The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature examines literary representations of lesbian sexuality, identities, and communities, from the medieval period to the present. In addition to providing a helpful orientation to key literary-historical periods, critical concepts, theoretical debates and literary genres, this Companion considers the work of such well-known authors as Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Alison Bechdel and Sarah Waters. Written by a host of leading critics and covering subjects as diverse as lesbian desire in the long eighteenth century and same-sex love in a postcolonial context, this Companion delivers insight into the variety of traditions that have shaped the present landscape of lesbian literature.

In late nineteenth-century England, "mannish" women were considered socially deviant but not homosexual. A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did this shift occur? "Citizen, Invert, Queer" illustrates that the equation of female masculinity with female homosexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of changes in national and racial as well as sexual discourses in early twentieth-century public culture. Incorporating cultural histories of prewar women's suffrage debates, British sexology, women's work on the home front during World War I, and discussions of interwar literary representations of female homosexuality, Deborah Cohler maps the emergence of lesbian representations in relation to the decline of empire and the rise of eugenics in England. Cohler integrates discussions of the histories of male and female same-sex erotics in her readings of New Woman, representations of male and female suffragists, wartime trials of pacifist novelists and seditious artists, and the interwar infamy of novels such as Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness" and Virginia Woolf's "Orlando." By examining the shifting intersections of nationalism and sexuality before, during, and after the Great War, this book illuminates profound transformations in our ideas about female homosexuality.

Acclaimed for his intricate, incisive, and often controversial explorations of art, literature, and society, Leo Bersani now addresses homosexuality in America. Hardly a day goes by without the media focusing an often sympathetic beam on gay life--and, with AIDS, on gay death. Gay plays on Broadway, big book awards to authors writing on gay subjects, Hollywood movies with gay themes, gay and lesbian studies at dozens of universities, openly gay columnists and even editors at national mainstream publications, political leaders speaking in favor of gay rights: it seems that straight America has finally begun to listen to homosexual America. Still, Bersani notes, not only has homophobia grown more virulent, but many gay men and lesbians themselves are reluctant to be identified as homosexuals. In Homos, he studies the historical, political, and philosophical grounds for the current distrust, within the gay community, of self-identifying moves, for the paradoxical desire to be invisibly visible. While acknowledging the dangers of any kind of group identification (if you can be singled out, you can be disciplined), Bersani argues for a bolder presentation of what it means to be gay. In their justifiable suspicion of labels, gay men and lesbians have nearly disappeared into their own sophisticated awareness of how they have been socially constructed. By downplaying their sexuality, gays risk self-immolation--they will melt into the stifling culture they had wanted to contest. In his chapters on contemporary queer theory, on Foucault and psychoanalysis, on the politics of sadomasochism, and on the image of "the gay outlaw" in works by Gide, Proust, and Genet, Bersani raises the exciting possibility that same-sex desire by its very nature can disrupt oppressive social orders. His spectacular theory of "homo-ness" will be of interest to straights as well as gays, for it designates a mode of connecting to the world embodied in, but not reducible to, a sexual preference. The gay identity Bersani advocates is more of a force--as such, rather cool to the modest goal of social tolerance for diverse lifestyles--which can lead to a massive redefining of sociality itself, and of what we might expect from human communities.