In My Butch Career Esther Newton tells the compelling, disarming, and at times sexy story of her struggle to write, teach, and find love, all while coming to terms with her identity. Newton recounts a series of traumas and conflicts, from being molested as a child to her failed attempts to live a "normal," straight life in high school and college. She discusses being denied tenure at Queens College and nearly again so at SUNY Purchase. With humor and grace, she describes her introduction to middle-class gay life and her love affairs. By age forty, where Newton's narrative ends, she began to achieve personal and scholarly stability in the company of the first politicized generation of out lesbian and gay scholars with whom she helped create gender and sexuality studies. Affecting and immediate, My Butch Career is a story of a gender outlaw in the making, an invaluable account of a beloved and influential figure in LGBT history, and a powerful reminder of only how recently it has been possible to be an openly queer academic.

In this one-of-a-kind anthology, lesbian sisters from several countries explore their relationships with one another. Through their words and photographs, both well-known and less-famous siblings reveal the many faces of lesbian sisterhood. Eighteen sets of lesbian sisters from Canada, the United States, Australia, Germany and Sweden share their insights and struggles in this fascinating chronicle of what it is like to grow up, come out, laugh, cry, work and live together, as sisters in a family and as lesbians in a world.

Barbara Hammer (b. 1939) is an American feminist artist known as a pioneer of queer experimental and documentary film. In October 2017, Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art will present a comprehensive solo exhibition to celebrate the depth and expa nse of Hammer's five decades of art making. Bringing together both known and previously unseen works of film and video, installations, works on paper, and material from her archive, the exhibition addresses critical themes that appear in Hammer's work, inc luding: lesbian representation, subjectivity, and sexuality; intimacy and sensation; and conditions and maintenance of life and illness. This exhibition highlights the resonating impact of Hammer's artistic narrative and material experimentation across dis ciplines within queer art history. Additionally, as part of this exhibition, we are putting together a publication that will touch on different aspects of Hammer's body of wor k and practice. The material included will look at her work in relationship to experimental queer cinema; lesbian sexuality and lesbian feminist history; hapticity and wildness; viruses, medicine, and environment; to name a few. We desire for the book to f eature a wide range of responses, from academic analysis to poetic interpretation, sprinkled with personal and artistic anecdotes. More of a hybrid monograph and catalogue raisonne, we are very excited that this book will be the first of its kind that cele brates five decades of Hammer's work.

Sappho sang her poetry to the accompaniment of the lyre on the Greek island of Lesbos over 2500 years ago. Throughout the Greek world, her contemporaries composed lyric poetry full of passion, and in the centuries that followed the golden age of archaic lyric, new forms of poetry emerged. In this unique anthology, today's reader can enjoy the works of seventeen poets, including a selection of archaic lyric and the complete surviving works of the ancient Greek women poets - the latter appearing together in one volume for the first time. Sappho's Lyre is a combination of diligent research and poetic artistry. The translations are based on the most recent discoveries of papyri (including 'new' Archilochos and Stesichoros) and the latest editions and scholarship. The introduction and notes provide historical and literary contexts that make this ancient poetry more accessible to modern readers. Although this book is primarily aimed at the reader who does not know Greek, it would be a splendid supplement to a Greek language course. It will also have wide appeal for readers of' ancient literature, women's studies, mythology, and lovers of poetry.

A compelling, harrowing, but ultimately uplifting story of resilience and self-discovery. A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby's extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby's story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism. As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual abuse by different adults, and in her teen years became alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby moved to Thunder Bay with her children to escape an abusive marriage. Abuse, compounded by racism, continued, but Chacaby found supports to help herself and others. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety; trained and worked as an alcoholism counsellor; raised her children and fostered many others; learned to live with visual impairment; and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in Thunder Bay.Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, humour, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people.

In this sweeping study of the mapping and remapping of male-male sexuality over four centuries of Japanese history, Gregory Pflugfelder explores the languages of medicine, law, and popular culture from the seventeenth century through the American Occupation. Pflugfelder opens with fascinating speculations about how an Edo translator might grapple with a twentieth-century text on homosexuality, then turns to law, literature, newspaper articles, medical tracts, and other sources to discover Japanese attitudes toward sexuality over the centuries. During each of three major eras, he argues, one field dominated discourse on male-male sexual relations: popular culture in the Edo period (1600-1868), jurisprudence in the Meiji period (1868-1912), and medicine in the twentieth century. This multidisciplinary and theoretically engaged analysis will interest not only students and scholars of Japan but also readers of gay studies, literary studies, gender studies, and cultural studies.

The Whole Lesbian Sex Book was the first-ever sex guide to offer information and encouragement for all women who desire women - lesbian, bisexual, butch, femme, androgynous, and transgender. First published in 1999, it's been lauded for its thoroughness, enthusiastic tone, and creative, nonjudgmental approach to lesbian sex in all its rich variety. (Library Journal lamented, "Why can't more heterosexual sex manuals be this good?") Now, five years later, sex educator Felice Newman has completely updated this classic guide. There is new information throughout, up-to-date research, fresh quotes from women who share their real-world experiences, a greatly expanded resource guide, new illustrations, and an entire new chapter on sex and partnership. Topics include: Where to find sex partners (and how to talk to your lovers about sex). Discovering your desires and fantasies. How to have all the orgasms you desire-G-spot orgasms, multiple orgasms, extended orgasms, and ejaculation. Why communication is the most important erotic skill you can offer your partners. How masturbation can improve your sex life. Expert how-to information on cunnilingus, anal sex, vaginal fisting, and other favourite lesbian sex techniques. How to choose vibrators, dildos, and harnesses, and get the most out of your sex toys. And much more.

Drawing on original research from medical texts, psychiatric case histories, pioneering statistical surveys, first-person accounts, legal cases, sensationalist journalism, and legislative debates, Jennifer Terry has written a nuanced and textured history of how the century-old obsession with homosexuality is deeply tied to changing American anxieties about social and sexual order in the modern age.
Terry's overarching argument is compelling: that homosexuality served as a marker of the "abnormal" against which malleable, tenuous, and often contradictory concepts of the "normal" were defined. One of the few histories to take into consideration homosexuality in both women and men, Terry's work also stands out in its refusal to erase the agency of people classified as abnormal. She documents the myriad ways that gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities have coauthored, resisted, and transformed the most powerful and authoritative modern truths about sex. Proposing this history as a "useable past," "An American Obsession" is an indispensable contribution to the study of American cultural history.

Robson tackles controversial legal questions, including the treatment of lesbian criminal defendants; lesbianism and violence; the courts' tendency to resort to stereotypes, such as "the good lesbian" and "the bad lesbian"; the numerous debates enveloping same-sex marriage; and the outcome of child custody cases involving lesbians. She also repudiates the recent habit of legal theorists to address lesbians as "alternative family."

In an inventive and controversial collection of essays, sociologist Susan Krieger considers the many forms of wealth, both material and emotional, that women pass on to each other. This domestic heritage - the 'family silver' - is the keystone for a discussion of mother-daughter relationships, intimate relationships between lesbians, ties between students and feminist teachers, the dilemmas of women in academia as well as in the broader work world, and the importance of female separatism. Drawing on her experiences as a lesbian, a feminist, and a teacher, Krieger presents a stunning critique of higher education. She argues for acknowledging gender in all areas of women's lives and for valuing women's inner realities and outer forms of expression. Krieger has developed a distinctly feminist approach to understanding and scholarship. Her style is self-revelatory, emotional, and at the same time deeply analytical. Her essays pioneer a new method of locating, defining, and honoring female values. "The Family Silver" includes a thought-provoking discussion of gender roles among women, including the author's experience of being mistaken for a man; an exploration of teaching in a feminist classroom; and, a description of the controversy that resulted when the author refused to allow a hostile male student to take one of her courses. Beautifully written, "The Family Silver" addresses issues of central concern to feminists, postmodernists, and queer theorists and encourages new insights into how gender profoundly affects us all.

What experiences do women have when they come to identify themselves as lesbian? What happens when they consider telling family and friends about their sexual identity? This book examines these questions on the basis of interviews with individuals and other source materials. Coming out can only be understood, the author stresses, against the backdrop of a firmly heterosexist society. The dominant heterosexual culture tends to freeze gender divisions in such a way as to polarize sexual identities.

The author focuses more upon the isolated lesbian, rather than upon political lesbianism. Coming out is seen to be a complex and emotional process, but one that is potentially highly rewarding. Lesbians, Markowe shows, have to struggle with both their 'invisibility' in the predominantly heterosexual culture, but also with perceptions of threat and abnormality. Coming out to family and heterosexual friends involves risks and benefits. Case studies of lesbian women are discussed in the context of the threat to, and reconstruction of, identity which the coming-out process presumes.

This book will be of interest to second year undergraduates and above working in the fields of women's studies, social psychology and the psychology or sociology of gender.

All original to this volume, these evocative essays by such scholars as Robyn Wiegman, Elizabeth Grosz, and Judith Roof examine a realm as yet untouched in literary and cultural criticism and gender theory, a specifically lesbian postmodern.

The essays trace, on the one hand, how some lesbian cultural theory and production foreground a politics of difference and marginality and thereby critique patriarchal and heterosexual hegemony. On the other hand, some essays note how a postmodern aesthetic, with its valorization of difference, sexual plurality, and gender blurring, assists lesbian cultural production.

Among the topics discussed are the shifting definitions of "lesbian" and "postmodern"; the potential "and" danger of this new conceptual territory in theory, literary and visual representation, and popular culture; the lesbian in Hollywood film; actors Jodie Foster and Sandra Bernhard; and works by Jeanette Winterson, Michelle Cliff, and Gloria Anzaldua.

Throughout, contributors address the interrelated questions and issues of class, race, ethnicity, postcolonialism, and commodification.

Mignon R. Moore brings to light the family life of a group that has been largely invisible - gay women of color - in a book that challenges long-standing ideas about racial identity, family formation, and motherhood. Drawing from interviews and surveys of one hundred black gay women in New York City, "Invisible Families" explores the ways that race and class have influenced how these women understand their sexual orientation, find partners, and form families. In particular, the study looks at the ways in which the past experiences of women who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s shape their thinking, and have structured their lives in communities that are not always accepting of their openly gay status. Overturning generalizations about lesbian families derived largely from research focused on white, middle-class feminists, "Invisible Families" reveals experiences within black American and Caribbean communities as it asks how people with multiple stigmatized identities imagine and construct an individual and collective sense of self.

E. Patrick Johnson's Honeypot opens with the fictional trickster character Miss B. barging into the home of Dr. EPJ, informing him that he has been chosen to collect and share the stories of her people. With little explanation, she whisks the reluctant Dr. EPJ away to the women-only world of Hymen, where she serves as his tour guide as he bears witness to the real-life stories of queer Black women throughout the American South. The women he meets come from all walks of life and recount their experiences on topics ranging from coming out and falling in love to mother/daughter relationships, religion, and political activism. As Dr. EPJ hears these stories, he must grapple with his privilege as a man and as an academic, and in the process he gains insights into patriarchy, class, sex, gender, and the challenges these women face. Combining oral history with magical realism and poetry, Honeypot is an engaging and moving book that reveals the complexity of identity while offering a creative method for scholarship to represent the lives of other people in a rich and dynamic way.

Everyone makes mistakes in relationships at one time or another. Sometimes they learn from those mistakes. Other times, they return to those behaviors and cycle through failed relationship after failed relationship. Sometimes those behaviors become an addiction to love that may leave a person feeling unhappy, unfulfilled, lonely, or worse. Lesbian Love Addiction: Understanding the Urge to Merge and How to Heal When Things go Wrong makes visible the elements of love addiction that many lesbians suffer from. Love addiction for lesbians comes in many forms. Some struggle by sexually acting out and others are serial relationship junkies, jumping from one relationship into the next. Some are addicted to the high of falling in love and once that wears off don't know how to handle the day-to-day realities of a committed relationship. Some are even addicted to fantasy and intrigue, while others are love avoidants and sexual anorexics. Love avoidants may be able to get into a relationship but once they are fully committed, struggle with feeling smothered. Others may avoid intimate or sexual relationships all together, becoming sexually anorexic. Some may even vacillate between all of these. The underlying component and common denominator in all of these scenarios is the "Urge to Merge." Lesbian Love Addiction is designed to help ameliorate at least part of this problem. Lauren D. Costine offers insight for lesbians, bisexual women in relationships with women, queer women, and more specifically, any woman who loves women, as well as their family and friends, and health care professionals, into the psychology of lesbian love addiction. It will give those who struggle with and suffer from love addiction ways to understand, cope, and heal from this debilitating addiction. It will give those who work with this population new tools to use to do this more effectively. Mostly, it will help lesbians understand their relationship failures and how to heal from problems associated with them, so they may grow and cultivate happier, more fulfilling connections in the future.

Sex Talks to Girls chronicles the outward antics of a woman on an inward journey to self through the routes of religion, sex, sobriety, and kids. Recasting herself in this memoir as ""Molly Meek,"" Maureen Seaton interprets the emergence of Molly's identity in luxurious and very funny prose. Molly alternately finds herself in the surprising company of winos, swingers, and drag kings; in love with Jesus H. Christ and a butch named Mars; in charge of two children; writing stories that shrink painfully to poems without her permission; and incapable of figuring out how she landed in any of these predicaments. She is, by turns, a little saint, a Stepford wife, a bi-mom, and a femme with super powers. Her transformation from near-nun to full-fledged sexual being, accidentally becoming conscious in the process and delighting in the spree is the story of a life set on play and a woman heroically committed to seeing it through.

Prairie Fairies draws upon a wealth of oral, archival, and cultural histories to recover the experiences of queer urban and rural people in the prairies. Focusing on five major urban centres, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, Edmonton, and Calgary, Prairie Fairies explores the regional experiences and activism of queer men and women by looking at the community centres, newsletters, magazines, and organizations that they created from 1930 to 1985. Challenging the preconceived narratives of queer history, Valerie J. Korinek argues that the LGBTTQ community has a long history in the prairie west, and that its history, previously marginalized or omitted, deserves attention. Korinek pays tribute to the prairie activists and actors who were responsible for creating spaces for socializing, politicizing, and organizing this community, both in cities and rural areas. Far from the stereotype of the isolated, insular Canadian prairies of small towns and farming communities populated by faithful farm families, Prairie Fairies historicizes the transformation of prairie cities, and ultimately the region itself, into a predominantly urban and diverse place.

She Called Me Woman is a collection of first-hand accounts by a community telling their stories on their own terms. This engaging and groundbreaking collection of queer women's narratives includes stories of first time love and curiosity, navigating same-sex feelings and spirituality, growing up gender non-conforming and overcoming family and society's expectations. What does it means to be a queer Nigerian? How does one embrace the label of `woman'? While some tell of self-acceptance, others talk of friendship and building a home in the midst of the anti-same sex marriage law. The narrators range from those who knew they were gay from a very early age to those who discovered their attraction to the same sex later in life. The stories challenge the stereotypes of what we assume is lesbian, bisexual, gay, and *trans in Nigeria and they offer us a raw, first-hand look into the lives and realities of our family, friends, neighbours and co-workers who are queer.

This book recognizes that intense public battles are being waged in the U.S. over the rights of LGB people to form legally and culturally recognized families. Their families are under a kind of sociopolitical scrutiny at this historical moment that compels us all to take stock of our strategies of family-building and, more broadly, the meaning of family in the U.S. today. Through in-depth, open-ended, qualitative interviews with 61 self-identified lesbian, gay, and bisexual people regarding how they came to have children or remain childless/childfree, this book reveals the challenges posed by homophobia and discrimination and showcases the creative strategies, resilience, and resourcefulness of lesbians, bisexuals, and gays as they build families (with or without children) after coming out. From descriptions of how the early process of coming out affected the desire to parent or remain childfree, to stories about the impact of homophobia and discrimination on the decision-making process, to the dynamics within couples that lead to becoming parents or remaining childfree, to examining how cultural notions of the strength of biology are employed when having children, to accounts of how the closet can be used strategically when bringing children into a family, their voices form the heart of this book. In a sociopolitical context in which gay, lesbian, and bisexual people often have to struggle to access the array of rights and opportunities that are afforded to most heterosexual people without question, addressing the questions raised in this book is an urgent and necessary endeavor.

This book demonstrates that everyday interactions and struggles over the right words to use are at the heart of the experience of those in same-sex marriages. At a time when same-sex marriage is on the cusp of becoming legal across the United States, the authors demonstrate through in-depth interviews and rich survey data how the use of relationship terms by married lesbians is tied to a variety of factors that influence how their identities are shaped and presented across social contexts. Via rich anecdotes of how married lesbians navigate the social sphere through their varied use or avoidance of the use of the term wife, this volume is provides groundbreaking insights into how social change is being constructed and made sense of through an examination of real-life interactions with family and friends, on the job, and across service and casual encounters. The authors introduce us to the concept of contextual identity to explain how history and social context inspire cultural change. This first-of-its-kind analysis demonstrates how the first lesbians to marry have navigated acceptance and rejection, insecurity and political strength through their use of language in daily interactions. This book will surely resonate with anyone interested in understanding how married lesbians are presenting themselves at this historical juncture where social change and linguistic nuance are colliding.