The Tragedy Of Todays Gays

No one raises an eyebrow if you suggest that a guy who arranges his furniture just so, rolls his eyes in exaggerated disbelief, likes techno music or show tunes, and knows all of Bette Davis's best lines by heart might, just possibly, be gay. But if you assert that male homosexuality is a cultural practice, expressive of a unique subjectivity and a distinctive relation to mainstream society, people will immediately protest. Such an idea, they will say, is just a stereotype-ridiculously simplistic, politically irresponsible, and morally suspect. The world acknowledges gay male culture as a fact but denies it as a truth. David Halperin, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies, dares to suggest that gayness is a specific way of being that gay men must learn from one another in order to become who they are. Inspired by the notorious undergraduate course of the same title that Halperin taught at the University of Michigan, provoking cries of outrage from both the right-wing media and the gay press, How To Be Gay traces gay men's cultural difference to the social meaning of style. Far from being deterred by stereotypes, Halperin concludes that the genius of gay culture resides in some of its most despised features: its aestheticism, snobbery, melodrama, adoration of glamour, caricatures of women, and obsession with mothers. The insights, impertinence, and unfazed critical intelligence displayed by gay culture, Halperin argues, have much to offer the heterosexual mainstream.

Thirty-nine-year-old Fred Lemish had always hoped that love would find him by the age of forty, and with four days to go, he begins a compulsive, yet humorous, search for that love and commitment, in a classic novel of gay life. Reprint.

The definitive book on lesbians and gay men in the US military. Randy Shilts, author of the classic documentary history of the AIDS epidemic And The Band Played On, was acclaimed for his ability to take epic histories and molding them into gripping, intimate narratives. Conduct Unbecoming, his groundbreaking exploration of lesbians and gays in the military, came out of hundreds of interviews conducted with servicepeople at all levels of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps and intense research uncovering thousands of documents resulting in a unique history of gays in the military as well as the persecution of gays in the military. Conduct Unbecoming will leave readers moved and imbued with a better understanding of the pressing situation in our nation's military. "A sober, thoroughly researched and engrossingly readable history on the subject. [Shilts's] chronicle is excellent military history, closely woven with an enthralling analysis of the changing definitions of sexuality and personal relationships in American society....[A] landmark book....Remarkable." --New York Times Book Review "A masterpiece of investigative reporting...Shilts has shown us the honor homosexuals have brought, and continue to bring, to the uniforms they wear and the country they serve." - Boston Globe "Gays, we are told, would damage morale in the military. Shilts documents the fact that morale has already been eaten away by hypocrisy, contradictions, and favoritism...This book will be to gay and lesbian liberation what Betty Friedan's was to early feminism or Rachel Carson's to ecological consciousness. No fair-minded person can read Conduct Unbecoming and consider the present system defensible. - USA Today "Gripping reading....the history of homosexual people and the movement for gay/lesbian equality in the United States can nowhere be more clearly told." - Los Angeles Times

The long-awaited new novel by America's master playwright and activist—a radical reimagining of our history and our hopes and fears Forty years in the making, The American People embodies Larry Kramer's vision of his beloved and accursed homeland. As the founder of ACT UP and the author of Faggots and The Normal Heart, Kramer has decisively affected American lives and letters. Here, as only he can, he tells the heartbreaking and heroic story of one nation under a plague, contaminated by greed, hate, and disease yet host to transcendent acts of courage and kindness. In this magisterial novel's sweeping first volume, which runs up to the 1950s, we meet prehistoric monkeys who spread a peculiar virus, a Native American shaman whose sexual explorations mutate into occult visions, and early English settlers who live as loving same-sex couples only to fall victim to the forces of bigotry. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton revel in unexpected intimacies, and John Wilkes Booth's motives for assassinating Abraham Lincoln are thoroughly revised. In the twentieth century, the nightmare of history deepens as a religious sect conspires with eugenicists, McCarthyites, and Ivy Leaguers to exterminate homosexuals, and the AIDS virus begins to spread. Against all this, Kramer sets the tender story of a middle-class family outside Washington, D.C., trying to get along in the darkest of times. The American People is a work of ribald satire, prophetic anger, and dazzling imagination. It is an encyclopedic indictment written with outrageous love.

An investigative account of the medical, sexual, and scientific questions surrounding the spread of AIDS across the country.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture is a vibrant and rapidly evolving segment of the American mosaic. This book gives students and general readers a current guide to the people and issues at the forefront of contemporary LGBTQ America. Included are more than 600 alphabetically arranged entries on literature and the arts, associations and organizations, individuals, law and public policy concerns, health and relationships, sexual issues, and numerous other topics. Entries are written by distinguished authorities and cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. Students in social studies, history, and literature classes will welcome this book's illumination of American cultural diversity. LGBTQ Americans have endured many struggles, and during the last decade in particular they have made tremendous contributions to our multicultural society. Drawing on the expertise of numerous expert contributors, this book gives students and general readers a current overview of contemporary LGBTQ American culture. Sweeping in scope, the encyclopedia looks at literature and the arts, associations and organizations, individuals, law and public policy concerns, health and relationships, sexual practices, and various other areas. Entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. While extensive biographical entries give readers a sense of the lives of prominent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Americans, the many topical entries provide full coverage of the challenges and contributions for which these people are known. The encyclopedia supports the social studies curriculum by helping students learn about cultural diversity, and it supports the literature curriculum by helping students learn about LGBTQ writers and their works.

Ten years of infertility issues culminate in the destruction of music therapist Zoe Baxter's marriage, after which she falls in love with another woman and wants to start a family, but her ex-husband, Max, stands in the way.

“I used to be a lesbian.” In Gay Girl, Good God, author Jackie Hill Perry shares her own story, offering practical tools that helped her in the process of finding wholeness. Jackie grew up fatherless and experienced gender confusion. She embraced masculinity and homosexuality with every fiber of her being. She knew that Christians had a lot to say about all of the above. But was she supposed to change herself? How was she supposed to stop loving women, when homosexuality felt more natural to her than heterosexuality ever could? At age nineteen, Jackie came face-to-face with what it meant to be made new. And not in a church, or through contact with Christians. God broke in and turned her heart toward Him right in her own bedroom in light of His gospel. Read in order to understand. Read in order to hope. Or read in order, like Jackie, to be made new.

“An astonishingly beautiful book. The best gay novel written by anyone of our generation.”—Harper’s “Through the sweat and haze of longing come piercing insights – about the closeness of gay male friendship, about the vanity and imperfections of men. The more one reads the novel, we realise that what Holleran has given us is our very own queer (queerer?) Great Gatsby: its decadence, its fear, its violence, its ecstasy, its transience.”—The Guardian Andrew Holleran’s landmark novel of a young man's search for love and companionship in New York’s emerging gay world in the 1970s, with a new introduction by Garth Greenwell. Young, astonishingly beautiful, and tired of living a lie, Anthony Malone trades life as a seemingly straight small-town lawyer for the decadence of New York’s emerging gay scene—an odyssey that takes him from Manhattan’s Everard baths and after hour discos, to lavish orgies on Fire Island and parks after dark. Rescuing Malone from a possessive lover and shepherding him through his immersion in this life of fierce joys and cheap truths is the flamboyant Sutherland, a high-camp quintessential queen. But for Malone, the endless city nights and Fire Island days are close to burning out, and despite Sutherland’s abundant attentiveness and glittering world-weary wisdom, Malone soon realizes what he is truly looking for may not be found in these beautiful places, where life is crowded, and people are forever outrunning their own desires and death.