With this inspiring book of meditations, every day brings a reminder of "the wholeness and beauty of our nature, of the glad spirit that dances in each one of us."

Addressing the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, "Glad Day "speaks to the issues that touch everyone, regardless of sexual orientation: change, fear, self-disclosure, faith in a power greater than ourselves, success and failure, and openness to ourselves and others. Written with a poet's grace, these daily meditations are interwoven with reference to the transforming experiences of coming out and of recovery. As the meditations foster a "daily conversation with the Spirit," they lovingly conjure the mutual trust and compassion that lead to a rich, fulfilling life.

These exquisite love poems, some of them clearly addressed to women, were written by the visionary and passionate genius of Mexican letters, the seventeenth-century nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. In this volume they are translated into the idiom of our own time by poets Joan Larkin and Jaime Manrique. Some of them are rooted in Renaissance courtly conventions; others are startlingly ahead of their time, seemingly modern in the naked power of the complex sexual feelings they address.

In the first anthology to survey the full range of gay men's autobiographical writing from Walt Whitman to the present, ""Gay American Autobiography"" draws excerpts from letters, journals, oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies to provide examples of the best life writing over the last century and a half. Volume editor David Bergman guides the reader chronologically through selected writings that give voice to every generation of gay writers since the nineteenth century, including a diverse array of American men of African, European, Jewish, Asian, and Latino heritage. Documenting a range of life experiences that encompass tattoo artists and academics, composers and drag queens, hustlers and clerks, it contains accounts of turn-of-the-century transvestites, gay rights activists, men battling AIDS, and soldiers attempting to come out in the army. Each selection provides important insight on the wide spectrum of ways gay men have defined and lived their lives, highlighting how self-awareness changes an author's experience. The volume includes an introduction by Bergman and headnotes for each of the nearly forty entries. Bringing many out-of-print and hard-to-find works to new readers, this challenging and comprehensive anthology chronicles American gay history and life struggles over the course of the past 150 years.

Long before Stonewall, young Air Force veteran Edward Field, fresh from combat in WWII, threw himself into New York's literary bohemia, searching for fulfillment as a gay man and poet. In this vivid account of his avant-garde years in Greenwich Village and the bohemian outposts of Paris' Left Bank and Tangier - where you could write poetry, be radical, and be openly gay - Field's intimate portraits of literary contemporaries such as Susan Sontag, Alfred Chester, May Swenson, and Frank O'Hara bring back the sadness, bawdiness, humor, and romanticism of the nigh-forgotten postwar bohemian subculture.

The act of "coming out" has the power to transform every aspect of a woman's life: family, friendships, career, sexuality, spirituality. An essential element of self-realization, it is the unabashed acceptance of one's "outlaw" standing in a predominantly heterosexual world.

These accounts -- sometimes heart-wrenching, often exhilarating -- encompass a wide breadth of backgrounds and experiences. From a teenager institutionalized for her passion for women to the mother who must come out to her young sons at the risk of losing them -- from the cautious academic to the raucous liberated femme -- each woman represented here tells of forging a unique path toward the difficult but emancipating recognition of herself. Extending from the 1940s to the present day, these intensely personal stories in turn reflect a unique history of the changing social mores that affected each woman's ability to determine the shape of her own life. Together they form an ornate tapestry of lesbian and bisexual experience in the United States over the past half-century..