The Salome Ensemble probes the entangled lives, works, and passions of a political activist, a novelist, a screenwriter, and a movie actress who collaborated in 1920s New York City. Together they created the shape-shifting, genre-crossing Salome of the Tenements, first a popular novel and then a Hollywood movie. The title character was a combination Cinderella and Salome like the women who conceived her. Rose Pastor Stokes was the role model. Anzia Yezierska wrote the novel. Sonya Levien wrote the screenplay. Jetta Goudal played her on the silver screen. Ginsberg considers the women individually and collectively, exploring how they shaped and reflected their cultural landscape. These European Jewish immigrants pursued their own versions of the American dream, escaped the squalor of sweatshops, knew romance and heartache, and achieved prominence in politics, fashion, journalism, literature, and film.

The author explores the individual and cultural dilemma of homosexuality. With information drawn from research and personal interviews, Ms. Burnham offers unique insights into this controversial issue in order to "set the record straight" about a much misunderstood aspect of the human experience.

Literature that explored female homosexuality flourished in late nineteenth-century France. Poets, novelists, and pornographers, whether Symbolists, Realists, or Decadents, were all part of this literary moment. In Sapphic Fathers, Gretchen Schultz explores how these male writers and their readers took lesbianism as a cipher for apprehensions about sex and gender during a time of social and political upheaval.

Tracing this phenomenon through poetry (Baudelaire, Verlaine), erotica and the popular novel (Belot), and literary fiction (Zola, Maupassant, Peladan, Mendes), and into scientific treatises, Schultz demonstrates that the literary discourse on lesbianism became the basis for the scientific and medical understanding of female same-sex desire in France. She also shows that the cumulative impact of this discourse left tangible traces that lasted well beyond nineteenth-century France, persisting into twentieth-century America to become the basis of lesbian pulp fiction after the Second World War.

"Lifting the Spiritual Self-Esteem of the LGBT Community" is written for all people-whether heterosexual or members of the LGBT community-who are disgusted with the judgmental and discriminatory way that religions project and impose their beliefs onto the lives of others in the self-righteous name of God. Author Khepra Ka-Re Amente Anu provides source material for readers to counter and fight back against religious institutions, organizations, and individuals who condemn any lifestyle that does not conform to their own narrow ideology. He offers a critique of the man-made, mythological religions of Africa-Egypt/Ethiopia, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

With the exception of Buddhism, religions are violent; the scriptures of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are manuals that provide instructional and operational guidelines for the enslavement of humans. Hinduism promotes a brutal and discriminatory caste system, while Christianity and Judaism give instructions about enslaving children, breeding male and female slaves, and the beating and killing of slaves.

No benevolent God would approve of violence or slavery. Religions are nothing more than man-made myths that should be cast in the same light as Santa Claus, Peter Pan, or Tinker Bell.

Passions Between Women looks at stories of lesbian desires, acts and identities from the Restoration to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Far from being invisible, the figure of the woman who felt passion for women in this period was a subject of confusion and contradiction: she could be put in a freak show as a 'hermaphrodite', denounced as a 'tribade' or 'lesbian', revered as a 'romantic friend', jailed as a 'female husband' or gossiped about as a 'woman-lover', 'tommy' or 'Sapphist'. Through an examination of a wealth of new medical, legal and erotic source material, together with re-readings of classics of English literature, Emma Donoghue, author of the bestselling Room, uncovers the astonishing range of lesbian and bisexual identities described in British texts between 1668 and 1801. Female pirates and spiritual mentors, chambermaids and queens, poets and prostitutes, country idylls and whipping clubs all take their place in an intriguing panorama of lesbian lives and loves. 'Controversial, erotic and radical, Emma Donoghue's lesbian voyage of exploration outlines an astonishing spectrum of gender rebellion which creates a new map of eighteenth-century sexual territories and identities.' - Patricia Duncker, author of Hallucinating Foucault.

In January 2004, Showtime debuted The L Word, the first prime-time commercial drama to centre around lesbian characters. Over the course of six seasons, the show depicted the lives and loves of an evolving circle of friends in West Hollywood, California, and was widely read as evidence of changing social attitudes toward gay people. Building on immediate critical attention, the show reigned as Showtime's most popular for its first three seasons and earned a large and enthusiastic audience. In The L Word, author Margaret T. McFadden argues that the show is important for its subject matter, its extended and deeply literate commentary on the history of representation of lesbians in popular media, and the formal innovations it deployed to rewrite that history. McFadden shows that the programme's creators, led by executive producer Ilene Chaiken, were well aware of the assumptions and expectations that viewers would bring to it after a history of stereotypical depictions of lesbians on television. They sought to satisfy a diverse group of viewers who wanted honest and appealing portrayals of their lives while still attracting a large enough mainstream audience to make The L Word commercially viable. In five chapters, McFadden explores how the show tackled these problems of representation by using reflexivity as a strategy to make meaning, undertaking a complicitous critique of Hollywood, skillfully using a soap-drama format to draw in its audience and ultimately creating its own complex representation of a lesbian community. While deconstructing the history of misrepresentation of lesbians, The L Word's new modes of storytelling and new perspectives made many aspects of lesbian experience, history and culture visible to a large audience. Fans of the show as well as readers interested in cultural studies and gay and lesbian pop cultural history will enjoy this astute volume.

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "If we ever forgot that sisterhood is powerful, Julie R. Enszer's poetry reminds us--with frank wit, grief, compassion, and a clear sense of the joy and burden of love. Enszer is a poet of the body, of family, of 'the sighs and bellows of the heart, ' of music, of travel, of breast cancer, of the plague of AIDS, of black stockings worn to funerals. As the elegist of her lost sister, Enszer writes, 'She should be telling this story. / She was more descriptive than I.' As celebrant of the revolution that opened our society to the pleasures and realities of queerness, she writes of 'the look of defiance in our eyes' and remembers, 'Once we were the match / Once we were the flames.' SISTERHOOD gives off a good heat."--Alicia Ostriker

Book Description In 1979, Joanne Fleisher was leading the life of a typical suburban wife and mother. That is, until she fell in love with a female friend and her world was turned upside down. In Living Two Lives, Fleisher draws on her experiences, as well as on those of readers of her "Ask Joanne" advice column and support community (www.lavendervisions.com), to create a guide for women grappling with the difficult process of coming out while being married to a man. This second edition of Living Two Lives notes the many changes that have occurred since the original publication in 2005. Gays and lesbians are more visible in the media, in political discourse, and popular trends. Yet married women who come out later in life still feel confused and isolated; they face the burden of possibly breaking up a family and of changing their sexual identity. Fleisher updates the discussion of sexual identity, delves deeper into lesbian relationships, issues of coming out when older or without a partner, and the joys and challenges of stepfamilies. The expanded Resources section of this edition helps readers negotiate evolving internet and multimedia information to address their primary concerns. A licensed clinical social worker, Fleisher has conducted married women's weekend conferences, individual and couple therapy sessions, and national and international consultations for women who are navigating this journey of awakening. She brings a wealth of insight to this guide, addressing such issues as initial feelings of same-sex attraction, coming out to husbands and children, managing the roller coaster of emotions, making life-altering decisions, exploring lifestyle options, and moving into a new chapter of life.

Susan's childhood dream of becoming a mother has not diminished with the revelation, alarming both to herself and her bewildered family, that she does, in fact, 'bat for the other team'. Having made peace with her identity and having finally found a beloved partner, she is now faced with a daunting problem: with no penis around, how the hell do you make babies?

Time is of the essence: at 34 years old, Susan cannot afford to waste another moment. And so begins an unconventional journey to parenthood with some agonising decisions along the way. Should she accept help from a close and willing friend or go the anonymous sperm donor route? What are the legal and psychological implications of her options? How will her child be affected?

Told with disarming honesty, Making Finn is a warm, witty and moving first-person account of two women's quest to create a family.

Drawing on the incredible wealth of diversity of languages, cultures and movements in which lesbian feminisms have been articulated, this book confronts the historic devaluation of lesbian-feminist politics within Anglo-American discourse and ignites a transnational and transgenerational discussion regarding the relevance of lesbian feminisms in today's world, a discussion that challenges the view of lesbian feminism as static and essentialist. Through careful consideration of contemporary debates, these writers, theorists, academics and activists consider the wider place of lesbian feminisms within queer theory, post-colonial feminism, and the movement for LGBT rights. It considers how lesbian feminisms can contribute to discussions on intersectionality, engage with trans activism and the need for trans-inclusion, to ultimately show how lesbian feminisms can offer a transformative approach to today's sexual and gender politics.

our bodies are beauty inducers is a fantastic and fantastical exploration of gender and the physical ground upon which it plays. hastain's words explode the amorphous domain where bodies and beauty meet. Electrifying and kinetic, hastain's work shatters and reassembles the physical into intersecting recombinant zones of meaning: the physical induces beauty in the eyes of the other and true beauty received by the other removes otherness...

Ever wondered why there's no female voice as bold, erotic, unflinching, and revealing as Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, or Philip Roth? There is. It belongs to Susie Bright. From fearful Irish Catholic Girl Scout to gun-toting teenage revolutionary -- and finally the The Avatar of American Erotica (The New York Times) -- Bright's life story is shaped as much by America's sexual awakening as the national sexual landscape was altered by Bright herself. In Big Sex Little Death, Bright introduces us to her influences and experiences, including her early involvement with notorious high school radicals The Red Tide, as well as the magazine she cofounded in the 1980s, On Our Backs -- which turned the lesbian and bisexual community upside down before it took the straight world by storm. Explosive yet intimate, Big Sex Little Death is pure Susie: bold, free-spirited, and unpredictable -- larger than life, yet utterly true to life.

Este libro es una declaraci n de amor, un dolor abierto al desamor, el desnudar el alma y dejar al descubierto todos y cada uno de los sentimientos.

In this first in-depth study of female homosexuality in the Spanish Empire for the period from 1500 to 1800, Velasco presents a multitude of riveting examples that reveal widespread contemporary interest in women's intimate relations with other women. Her sources include literary and historical texts featuring female homoeroticism, tracts on convent life, medical treatises, civil and Inquisitional cases, and dramas. She has also uncovered a number of revealing illustrations from the period.

The women in these accounts, stories, and cases range from internationally famous transgendered celebrities to lesbian criminals, from those suspected of "special friendships" in the convent to ordinary villagers.

Velasco argues that the diverse and recurrent representations of lesbian desire provide compelling evidence of how different groups perceived intimacy between women as more than just specific sex acts. At times these narratives describe complex personal relationships and occasionally characterize these women as being of a certain "type," suggesting an early modern precursor to what would later be recognized as divergent lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities.

This collection of classic titles by Beauvoir her most well know writings, The Second Sex and The Ethics Of Ambiguity as well as a biography of her life and a rare interview on her book The Second Sex. French writer and feminist, and Existentialist. She is known primarily for her treatise The Second Sex (1949), a scholarly and passionate plea for the abolition of what she called the myth of the "eternal feminine." It became a classic of feminist literature during the 1960s. Her novels expounded the major Existential themes, demonstrating her conception of the writer's commitment to the times. She Came To Stay (1943) treats the difficult problem of the relationship of a conscience to "the other." Of her other works of fiction, perhaps the best known is The Mandarins (1954), a chronicle of the attempts of post-World War II intellectuals to leave their "mandarin" (educated elite) status and engage in political activism. She also wrote four books of philosophy, including The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). Several volumes of her work are devoted to autobiography which constitute a telling portrait of French intellectual life from the 1930s to the 1970s. In addition to treating feminist issues, de Beauvoir was concerned with the issue of aging, which she addressed in A Very Easy Death (1964), on her mother's death in a hospital. In 1981 she wrote A Farewell to Sartre, a painful account of Sartre's last years. Simone de Beauvoir revealed herself as a woman of formidable courage and integrity, whose life supported her thesis: the basic options of an individual must be made on the premises of an equal vocation for man and woman founded on a common structure of their being, independent of their sexuality. Table of Contents: The Second Sex, On the publication of The Second Sex, interview The Ethics of Ambiguity, Biography

This is a rarity in contemporary writing, a truly bilingual enterprise, as in Susana Chavez-Silverman's previous memoir, Killer Cronicas. Chavez-Silverman switches between English and Spanish, creating a linguistic mestizaje that is still a surprise encounter in the world of letters today, and the author is one of a small but growing band of writers to embrace bilingualism as a literary force. Also like Killer Cronicas, each chapter in Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles is a "cronica," a vignette that began as intimate diary entries and e-mails and letters to lovers, friends, and ghosts from the past. These episodic chapters follow Chavez-Silverman's personal history, from California to South Africa and Australia and back, from unfathomable loss to deeply felt joy. Readers drawn into this witty book will confront their own conceptions of boundaries, borders, languages, memories, and spaces. Por su white, insouciant, papery look, por su semejanza a la amapola (scentless, a fin de cuentas, no obstante esa famosa escena de la Wicked Witch of the West, purring evilly, "Poppies, poppies will put them to sleep. Sleeeep, sleep . . ."), when I leaned in to sniff, I hadn't been expecting any scent at all. Y por eso, el cool, familiar mounds of damp masa harina, Mercado Libertad en verano scent, es-por lo utterly inesperado-lo mas disturbingly, comfortingly, hechizante que tienen las paper flowers. Stay with me a while. Busquemos, together, mas strange familiars. -excerpt from chapter 1, "Diary Inside/Color Local Cronica"

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.

Visible: A Femmethology, the only two-volume anthology devoted to femme identity, calls the LGBTQI community on its prejudices and celebrates the diversity of individual femmes. Award-winning authors, spoken-word artists, and new voices come together to challenge conventional ideas of how disability, class, nationality, race, aesthetics, sexual orientation, gender identity and body type intersect with each contributor's concrete notion of femmedom.

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.

Increasingly in mainstream discourse and rhetoric, there only seems to be one very serious and conservative face to Islam, Muslim communities, and their governments. Mainstream modern Islamic hermeneutics condemn homosexual orientations, sometimes with punishments as severe as death. Nevertheless, there were also instances in Muslim history, culture, and society where religiosity was playful not punitive, where the sexual body was inscribed with markers of pleasure not those of perdition. Exploring instances within the Arabian Islamic Empire that negate impressions about Muslim cultures as eternally monolithic, conservative, and orthodox, we can come to a better and more nuanced understanding of the complexities of former and contemporary Muslim civilizations. The question of gay and lesbian human rights in the Muslim world is a topical and pressing one, and the need now for alternative ways of approaching Islam in the modern world is more important than ever. The answers to today's modern crisis in human rights for LGBTIQ people lies in looking at the past and highlighting elements that can assist in the creation of a more equitable future. This publication discovers and brings to the English reader an array of surviving texts penned by Muslim scholars discussing female samesex desire. From the tolerant days of the Abbasid caliphate to the celebratory text of Yusuf Tifashi in the thirteenth century and onwards toward growing strictures and greater intolerance, Arabo-Islamic Texts reveals a dynamic and lively discourse on sexuality in the Arabo-Islamic empire. The English translation of a lecture delivered in Arabic in Haifa by Samar Habib is also included in this book.