Since 1958, twenty-five men and two women have forced the Supreme Court to consider whether the Constitution's promises of equal protection apply to gay Americans. Here Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price reveal how the nation's highest court has reacted to these cases--from the surprising 1958 victory of a tiny homosexual magazine to the 2000 defeat of a gay Eagle Scout. A triumph of investigative reporting, Courting Justice gives us an inspiring new perspective on the struggle for civil rights in America.

A woman raping another woman is unthinkable. This is not how women behave, society tells us. Our legal system is not equipped to handle woman-to-woman sexual assault, our women's services do not have the resources or even the words to reach out to its victims, and our lesbian and gay communities face hurdles in acknowledging its existence. Already dealing with complex issues related to their sexual identities, and frequently overwhelmed by shame, lesbian and bisexual survivors of such violence are among the most isolated of crime victims.
In a work that is sure to stir controversy, Lori B. Girshick exposes the shocking, hidden reality of woman-to-woman sexual violence and gives voice to the abused. Drawing on a nationwide survey and in-depth interviews, Girshick explores the experiences and reflections of seventy women, documenting what happened to them, how they responded, and whether they received any help to cope with the emotional impact of their assault. The author discusses how the lesbian community has silenced survivors of sexual violence due to myths of lesbian utopia, and considers what role societal homophobia, biphobia, and heterosexism has played in this silencing. Ranging from date and acquaintance rape, to domestic sexual abuse by partners, to sexual harassment in the workplace, these explicit and harrowing stories provide a fuller understanding of woman-to-woman sexual violence than exists anywhere else.
This provocative book offers much-needed insights on a subject rarely discussed in the literature on domestic violence, and it does so with compassion. Above all, it recommends how agencies can best provide services, outreach, and treatment to survivors of woman-to-woman rape and lesbian battering, using suggestions by the survivors themselves.

Psychoanalytic theories of lesbian development epitomize the difficulty in liberating psychoanalysis from the past. Psychoanalytic theory has traditionally adopted a clear position that a lesbian orientation represented some form of psychological abnormality. Thankfully -- but only very recently -- some influential feminist leaders have begun to rethink issues of gender and sexual orientation, removing heterosexuality from its privileged position as normal.

In "Lesbians and Psychoanalysis, " Judith M. Glassgold and Suzanne Iasenza bring together twenty-six of these pioneers in the field of lesbian psychoanalytic theory. Through insightful chapters based on years of clinical experience, each author helps to redefine psychoanalytic theory by reinventing its foundations from an affirmative perspective so that it better represents all peoples.

"Lesbians and Psychoanalysis" addresses several topics of emerging concern including multicultural diversity, self-disclosure, homophobia, transference/countertransference issues, bisexuality, and the changing nature of lesbian sexuality. In addition, the authors examine the influence of stigma on human development. In three sections -- Past, Present, and Future -- the authors in turn critique past theory, discuss current issues in therapy, and describe new directions in theory and practice. This is a book that is sure to appeal not only to members of the psychoanalytic community but also to all those who are interested in gay and lesbian studies, feminism, and psychology.

"Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano has written the best feminist study to date of Moraga's art in its richest aesthetic, cultural, and political implications. This book, I believe, is a major reading of a major Chicana intellectual. More than that, it is a sweeping reassessment of Chicano/a theater and of Moraga's reclamation of the Chicano/a movement, a model of literary and cultural historicism, and a searching and engaging exploration of the major critical issues in current Chicano/a discourse." --Jose David Saldivar, author of Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies In her work as poet, essayist, editor, dramatist, and public intellectual, Chicana lesbian writer Cherrie Moraga has been extremely influential in current debates on culture and identity as an ongoing, open-ended process. Analyzing the "in-between" spaces in Moraga's writing where race, gender, class, and sexuality intermingle, this first book-length study of Moraga's work focuses on her writing of the body and related material practices of sex, desire, and pleasure. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano divides the book into three sections, which analyze Moraga's writing of the body, her dramaturgy in the context of both dominant and alternative Western theatrical traditions, and her writing of identities and racialized desire. Through close textual readings of Loving in the War Years, Giving Up the Ghost, Shadow of a Man, Heroes and Saints, The Last Generation, and Waiting in the Wings, Yarbro-Bejarano contributes to the development of a language to talk about sexuality as potentially empowering, the place of desire within politics, and the intricate workings of racialized desire.

This book is about those thousands of women whose quest for a good life is hampered - and enhanced by their love of women. It is about me. It may also be about you or someone you love.

The office of rabbi is the most visible symbol of power and prestige in Jewish communities. Rabbis both interpret to their congregations the requirements of Jewish life and instruct congregants in how best to live this life. Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation documents a monumental change in Jewish life as eighteen lesbian rabbis reflect on their experiences as trailblazers in Judaism's journey into an increasingly multicultural world. In frank and revealing essays, the contributors discuss their decisions to become rabbis and describe their experiences both at the seminaries and in their rabbinical positions. They also reflect on the dilemma whether to conceal or reveal their sexual identities to their congregants and superiors, or to serve specifically gay and lesbian congregations. The contributors consider the tensions between lesbian identity and Jewish identity, and inquire whether there are particularly ""lesbian"" readings of traditional texts. These essays also ask how the language of Jewish tradition touches the lives of lesbians and how lesbianism challenges traditional notions of the Jewish family. ""'Today I am completely 'out' personally and professionally, and yet I have learned that the 'coming out' process never ends. Even today, I find myself in professional situations in which yet again I must reveal that I am a lesbian, yet again I must prove myself worthy of functioning professionally in the 'straight' world. I still encounter moments of awkwardness, some hostility, and some sense of exclusion as I negotiate the pathways of my professional life.""-Rabbi Leila Gal Berner, from Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation

This intriguing and authoritative book tracks stage representations of lesbians and gay men from Oscar Wilde to the present day. Alan Sinfield argues that, despite and because of censorship and discretion, twentieth-century theatre has been viewed as gay space. When we attune ourselves to the idioms of the different decades, theatre emerges as an important place for the circulation of images of homosexuality and for the exploration of concepts of gender and sexuality. Sinfield examines scores of British and American plays and playwrights, including works by Wilde, Maugham, Coward, Hellman, O'Neill, Rattigan, Williams, Le Roi Jones and Orton. He locates plays in the contexts in which they were produced and viewed, whether it be West End and Broadway or more bohemian little club theatres, Off-Broadway, and fringe. He discusses many women writers - from Djuna Barnes and Agatha Christie to Lorraine Hansberry and Caryl Churchill - and analyses the implications of homosexuality in their work.He explains why in the 1950s British and American plays began to differ in their representations of gays, how the 1960s produced an exuberant cultivation of 'kinky' humour and gay political activism in theatres, and what impact AIDS has had on theatrical productions. Sinfield concludes with provocative questions about the direction of new theatre writing, asserting that representations in theatre continue to challenge notions of our sexual potential. Alan Sinfield is professor of English literature at the University of Sussex. Among his many publications are 'Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain', 'Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading', 'The Wilde Century', and 'Cultural Politics - Queer Reading'.

Impossible Women fills a critical gap in queer theory by spotlighting representations of lesbian sexuality in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. Reading through the lens of feminist and psychoanalytic theory, Valerie Rohy considers texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kate Chopin, Henry James, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, and Elizabeth Bishop.Addressing American ideologies of reproduction and representation, Impossible Women suggests that lesbian figures are made to symbolize both the unrepresentable and the failures of meaning inherent in language. Rohy traces the ways lesbian sexuality relegated to the domain of the ineffable, yet endlessly subject to inscription appears in tropes of transference and displacement, the disembodied voice, repetition-compulsion, and the uncanny. Impossible Women also asks what cultural work such figures perform, locating lesbian desire in American literary history and engaging issues of genre and narrative, social formations such as the rhetoric of the "New Woman," and intersections of racism, sexism, and homophobia."

Karla Jay's memoir of an age whose tumultuous social and political movements fundamentally reshaped American culture takes readers from her early days in the 1968 Columbia University student riots to her post-college involvement in New York radical women's groups and the New York Gay Liberation Front. In Southern California in the early 70s, she continued in the battle for gay civil rights and helped to organize the takeover of "The Ladies' Home Journal" and "ogle-in" - where women staked out Wall Street and whistled at the men.

What Tom Wolfe did for astronauts and Roger Angell did for baseball, journalists Lindsy Van Gelder and Pamela Robin Brandt do for lesbians in this landmark book.

Long misperceived as a separatist coven, a default option, or a sort of ladies' auxiliary to the gay men's movement, lesbian life has achieved a new visibility in the past few years. But for all the interest in who's out and who's not (yet), there's been surprisingly little understanding of the diversity and richness of lesbian experience.

This funny, lively, and perceptive book will change all that. Drawing on more than a hundred interviews with women around the country, and on their own keen wits and eyes, Van Gelder and Brandt have composed an unprecedented portrait of how gay women today -- "born" and "made," lipsticked and flannel-shirted alike -- think, feel, love, and live. Three major "tribal" events -- the long-running Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, "Dinah" (the annual Dinah Shore Golf Tournament and party circuit, a mecca for upwardly mobile luppies), and a cross-country trek with the activist Lesbian Avengers en route to the 1994 Stonewall commemoration -- provide points of entry into an exploration of lesbian identity, social dynamics, and politics that's as entertaining as it is revealing. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait that will resonate with lesbians themselves and reveal to their "neighbors" a world of unsuspected vibrancy and depth.

This resource for counselors who work with lesbian couples gives a clear assessment of the issues faced in working through their relationship within the context of their sexuality and society's oppression of lesbians.

The purpose of the Counseling and Pastoral Theology series is to address clinical issues that arise among particular populations currently neglected in the literature on pastoral care and counseling. This series is committed to enhancing both the theoretical base and the clinical expertise of pastoral caregivers by providing a pastoral theological paradigm that will inform both assessment and intervention with persons in these specific populations.

..". innovative and important thinking about the various relations between feminist theory, queer theory, and lesbian theory, as well as the possibility that liberation can be mutual rather than mutually exclusive." Lambda Book Report

"Challenging and interesting." Just Out

A collection of fifteen interdisciplinary essays examining the history, current condition, and evolving shape of lesbian alliances with U.S. feminists. Contributors explore the social and aesthetic significance of the terms "lesbian" and "feminist" with the interest of reforming and strengthening them."

Challenging widely held assumptions about postwar gay male culture and politics, Homosexuality in Cold War America examines how gay men in the 1950s resisted pressures to remain in the closet. Robert J. Corber argues that a form of gay male identity emerged in the 1950s that simultaneously drew on and transcended left-wing opposition to the Cold War cultural and political consensus. Combining readings of novels, plays, and films of the period with historical research into the national security state, the growth of the suburbs, and postwar consumer culture, Corber examines how gay men resisted the "organization man" model of masculinity that rose to dominance in the wake of World War II. By exploring the representation of gay men in film noir, Corber suggests that even as this Hollywood genre reinforced homophobic stereotypes, it legitimized the gay male "gaze." He emphasizes how film noir's introduction of homosexual characters countered the national "project" to render gay men invisible, and marked a deep subversion of the Cold War mentality. Corber then considers the work of gay male writers Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin, demonstrating how these authors declined to represent homosexuality as a discrete subculture and instead promoted a model of political solidarity rooted in the shared experience of oppression. Homosexuality in Cold War America reveals that the ideological critique of the dominant culture made by gay male authors of the 1950s laid the foundation for the gay liberation movement of the following decade.

"This book demonstrates Case s continued dominance of the field of lesbian performance studies.... Case s dense, rich, and complex work very likely will be a central text for anyone interested in debating the changing theoretical landscape for performance studies and queer theory. All readers interested in what the future might hold for scholarship in the humanities should study Case s thought-provoking work, which is an essential addition to any college or university s collection." Choice

..". this is a book that is enormously provocative, that will make you think and feel connected with the latest speculation on the implications of the electronic age we inhabit." Lesbian Review of Books

..". definitely required reading for any future-thinking lesbian." Lambda Book Report

The Domain-Matrix is about the passage from print culture to electronic screen culture and how this passage affects the reader or computer user. Sections are organized to emulate, in a printed book, the reader s experience of computer windows. Case traces the portrait of virtual identities within queer and lesbian critical practice and virtual technologies."

Electroshock. Hysterectomy. Lobotomy. These are only three of the many "cures" to which lesbians have been subjected in this century. How does a society develop such a profound aversion to a particular minority? In what ways do images in the popular media perpetuate cultural stereotypes about lesbians, and to what extent have lesbians been able to subvert and revise those images? This book addresses these and other questions by examining how lesbianism has been represented in American popular culture in the twentieth century and how conflicting ideologies have shaped lesbian experiences and identity. In the first section, "Inventing the Lesbian," Sherrie A. Inness explores depictions of lesbians in popular texts aimed primarily at heterosexual consumers. She moves from novels of the 1920s to books about life at women's colleges and boarding schools, to such contemporary women's magazines as Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Vogue. In the next section, "Forms of Resistance," Inness probes the ways in which lesbians have refashioned texts intended for a heterosexual audience or created their own narratives. One chapter shows how lesbian readers have reinterpreted the Nancy Drew mysteries, looking at them from a distinctly "queer" perspective. Another chapter addresses the changing portrayal of lesbians in children's books over the past two decades. The last section, "Writing in the Margins," scrutinizes the extent to which lesbians, themselves a marginalized group, have created a society that relegates some of its own members to the outskirts. Topics include the geographic politics of lesbianism, the complex issue of "passing," and the meaning of butch identity in twentieth-century lesbian culture.

This pioneering collection of essays explores some of the many and varied ways that women might use a particular idea of being lesbian to invent themselves, to understand how they are connected in the world, and to imagine notions of community. Focused through an anthropological lens, contributors explore a wide range of expressions that bind different lesbian communities together--from dance club culture to lesbian wedding ceremonies, from lesbian life in the 1920s to lesbian motherhood today.
As a whole, "Inventing Lesbian Cultures" in America shows how communities and identities allow for a sense of collective meaning for lesbians today. Defined in terms of culture, the activities, alliances, and identities that make up the experience of being lesbian imbue their lives with dignity and stability. "Inventing Lesbian Cultures" in America will become required reading for anyone interested in gender and sexual identity.

Written by lesbians of different ages, races and religions,and compiled by one of the gay movement's best-known writers and activists,these original essays give vibrant voice to the diversity of the lesbian experience. Celebrating the many ways in which the lesbian experience is unique from all others, many of these pieces focus on specific lesbian concerns such as sexual practices, raising children and higher incidence of certain illnesses.Beyond pointing out these differences, the essays also provide a comprehensive view of the many phases of lesbian life by covering diverse topics like body piercing, coming out and work. Short narratives, To Mother or Not to Mother," Confessions of a Lesbian Vampire," About Being an Old Lesbian in Love," and more,complement and enrich the main essays, adding a unique personal tone to the collection. A mix of the serious and the irreverent, Dyke Life is an important contribution to gay and lesbian literature.

"Allen's work is virtually unique among American writers. Itillustrates a deep knowledge of the issues raised by the postmodernists, yet shedoes not succumb to the playing field, constructing instead her own philosophicaldirection and aesthetic." -- Sarah Hoagland

Jeffner Allenshapes a poetic politics that transforms textual and everyday realities. Thesurprising, resilient, and transformative windings of lesbian writing and lesbianlives -- a poetics of sinuous movement, the turning of women to women -- informsthese reflections.

The decade of the 1970s is commonly remembered for its kitschy contributions to popular culture -- bean-bag chairs, platform shoes, bell-bottoms, disaster movies, disco, hot tubs, and hot pants. In The House That Jill Built, Becki Ross offers a rare view of this decade -- one that shows community-based activism challenging the prevailing tenets of individualism and conspicuous consumerism. Ross explores the dedicated struggle of a largely white, middle-class group of lesbian feminists to subvert the history of lesbian invisibility and persecution by claiming a collective, empowering, public presence in Toronto during the mid- to late 1970s. Gathering information from archival sources and numerous interviews with lesbians who were active in the feminist, left, and gay-liberation movements in the 1970s, Ross provides a window onto complex developments in community, identity, and visionary politics. She uses the Lesbian Organization of Toronto (LOOT, 1976-80) as a centrepiece, tracing the route that LOOT members took in enacting their desire to politicize the personal, in order to be lesbian in all aspects of their lives. Ross investigates the properties intrinsic to 'lesbian nationalism': fashion, sexuality, relationships, living arrangements, group membership, service provision, cultural production, and political strategy-making. The House That Jill Built convincingly analyses the significant achievements of lesbian feminism in the 1970s as well as the limitations of identity-based organizing. The book is especially useful for those interested in the fields of women's studies, cultural studies, queer theory, and social movements.

With "the bracingly rational passion of a writer who can think and feel at the same time" (The Wall Street Journal), Bruce Bawer exposes the heated controversy over gay rights and presents a passionate plea for the recognition of common values, "a place at the table" for everyone.

In "Lesbian Utopics," Annamarie Jagose surveys the construction of the lesbian and finds her in a cultural space that is both everywhere and, of all places, nowhere. The "lesbian," in other words, is symbolically central, yet culturally marginal.
Challenging the often unquestioned hegemony of gay studies over lesbian studies, Jagose provides a truly evocative and compelling theory of the lesbian. In drawing upon the work of such theorists as Eve Kosofky Sedgwick and Luce Irigaray, she suggestively articulates a theory of "lesbian" spacew which symbolically exceeds the boundaries of understanding and comprehension. Jagose argues that the culturally constructed category of the "lesbian"--the symbolic logic of which goes beyond traditional cultural limits and regulations--is also simultaneously and, quite provocatively, also the product of those regimes of power. It is this explosive tension that Jagose emphasizes in her reading of various conceptions of the "lesbian." In examining this construction, Jagose surveys a diverse range of texts (sonnets, essays, and novels) spanning the cultural terrain of Mexico and Australia, the US and France. She concludes with a reading of Cindy Crawford as signifying the emergence of lesbian utopics within pop culture. common: they both represent the category "lesbian" as a utopic space, one which exceeds structures of regulation. "Lesbian Utopics" argues that the ways in which "lesbian" is used assumes the characteristics of a utopic site: one outside, and other than the norm, and has placed on it an excess of cultural legislation.
Reading a broad variety of works by five women (Irigaray, Nicole Brossard, Marilyn Hacker, Mary Fallon andGloria Anzaldua, Annamarie Jagose makes the argument for "lesbian" as not just an exterior and alterior category, but one which is produced by the very cultural laws whose mandate the category seems to defy and transcend. Using Foucault as a means of examining the texts, the author producesa reading which contends that "lesbian" is emphatically "interior" to culture, produced by the mechanisms of proscripted heterosexuality.
"Lesbian Utopics" concludes that the illusion of "outside"-ness promised by the appelation of lesbian is in literal terms a utopic space: ("ou-topos," no place.) This is an important, valuable and controversial addition to lesbian and gay studies, and should interest those in feminist theory and literary criticism.

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.

No one is brought up to be gay. Lacking the formal support systems --families, schools, churches -- gay men rely on their folklore in interacting withone another and to relieve the pressures of belonging to a stigmatized group. Jokesand other forms of humor, language, and personal experience narratives help gay mento identify and communicate with one another -- even in straight settings.

More Man than You'll Ever Be explores the uses of gay men'sfolklore. Wheter funny or sad, poignant or shocking, each story and joke containsmessages, sometimes surprising ones. Goodwin decodes some of these messages to helpus understand not only the gay subculture but also ourselves.