Dear Queer Self: An Experiment in Memoir

Dear Queer Self: An Experiment in Memoir
Author: Jonathan Alexander
Publisher:
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2022-03-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781946724465

An unvarnished accounting of one man's struggle toward sexual and emotional maturity. In this unconventional memoir, Jonathan Alexander addresses wry and affecting missives to a conflicted younger self. Focusing on three years--1989, 1993, and 1996--Dear Queer Self follows the author through the homophobic heights of the AIDS epidemic, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of Bill Clinton, and the steady advancements in gay rights that followed. With humor and wit afforded by hindsight, Alexander relives his closeted college years, his experiments with his sexuality in graduate school, his first marriage to a woman, and his budding career as a college professor. As he moves from tortured self-denial to hard-won self-acceptance, the author confronts the deeply uncomfortable ways he is implicated in his own story. More than just a coming-out narrative, Dear Queer Self is both an intimate psychological exploration and a cultural examination--a meshing of inner and outer realities and a personal reckoning with how we sometimes torture the truth to make a life. It is also a love letter, an homage to a decade of rapid change, and a playlist of the sounds, sights, and feelings of a difficult, but ultimately transformative, time.

Finding Out

Finding Out
Author: Michelle A. Gibson
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2013-02-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1452235287

By combining accessible introductory and explanatory material with primary texts and artifacts, this text/reader explores the development and growth of LGBT identities and the interdisciplinary nature of sexuality studies. Authors Meem, Gibson, and Alexander clearly situate debates and readings within clear contexts (History, Literature and the Arts, Media and Politics), providing students with a coherent framework and comprehensive introduction to LGBT studies. While this emerging field is complex, multifaceted, and interdisciplinary (and therefore often inaccessible to students), Finding Out - through its instructional apparatus, primary texts, and organization - provides the ideal introduction for today's students. Contents: I. HISTORY 1. Before Identity: The Ancient World through the Nineteenth Century 2. Sexology: Constructing the Modern Homosexual 3. Toward Liberation 4. Stonewall and Beyond II. POLITICS 5. Nature, Nurture, and Identity 6. Inclusion and Equality 7. Queer Diversities 8. Intersectionalities III. LITERATURE AND THE ARTS 9. Homo-sexed Art and Literature 10. Lesbian Pulp Novels and Gay Physique Pictorials 11. Queer Transgressions 12. Censorship and Moral Panic IV. MEDIA 13. Film and Television 14. Queers and the Internet 15. The Politics of Location: Alternative Media and the Search for Queer Space

Martin and John

Martin and John
Author: Dale Peck
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2006-08-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780374530303

In Martin and John, Dale Peck weaves together two sets of stories to create a haunting, heartrending portrait of an artist in our time. The first is told episodically by John, a hustler in New York, who falls in love with Martin, a man dying of AIDS. Interwoven with these stories is a second set, in which characters named Martin and John appear, but living different lives. The resulting novel is a work of stunning originality that is "inspired and brilliant" (The Nation).

Wonderstruck

Wonderstruck
Author: Brian Selznick
Publisher: Scholastic
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2015-09-03
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1407166557

Ben's story takes place in 1977 and is told in words. Rose's story in 1927 is told entirely in pictures. Ever since his mother died, Ben feels lost. At home with her father, Rose feels alone. When Ben finds a mysterious clue hidden in his mother's room, both children risk everything to find what's missing.

SHOUT

SHOUT
Author: Laurie Halse Anderson
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2019-03-12
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 0670012106

A New York Times bestseller and one of 2019's best-reviewed books, a poetic memoir and call to action from the award-winning author of Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson! Bestselling author Laurie Halse Anderson is known for the unflinching way she writes about, and advocates for, survivors of sexual assault. Now, inspired by her fans and enraged by how little in our culture has changed since her groundbreaking novel Speak was first published twenty years ago, she has written a poetry memoir that is as vulnerable as it is rallying, as timely as it is timeless. In free verse, Anderson shares reflections, rants, and calls to action woven between deeply personal stories from her life that she's never written about before. Described as "powerful," "captivating," and "essential" in the nine starred reviews it's received, this must-read memoir is being hailed as one of 2019's best books for teens and adults. A denouncement of our society's failures and a love letter to all the people with the courage to say #MeToo and #TimesUp, whether aloud, online, or only in their own hearts, SHOUT speaks truth to power in a loud, clear voice-- and once you hear it, it is impossible to ignore.

Sexual Fluidity

Sexual Fluidity
Author: Lisa M. Diamond
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2008
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780674026247

Is love “blind” when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender,” say some respondents.Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women’s sexuality—and of the central importance of love.

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir
Author: Jenn Shapland
Publisher: Tin House Books
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2020-02-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1947793292

Winner of the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for the National Book Award Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered—an icon and idol—alongside your own? Jenn Shapland’s celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America’s most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love. Shapland is a graduate student when she first uncovers letters written to Carson McCullers by a woman named Annemarie. Though Shapland recognizes herself in the letters, which are intimate and unabashed in their feelings, she does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. Her curiosity gives way to fixation, not just with this newly discovered side of McCullers’s life, but with how we tell queer love stories. Why, Shapland asks, are the stories of women paved over by others’ narratives? What happens when constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualize in straight spaces? And what might the tracing of McCullers’s life—her history, her secrets, her legacy—reveal to Shapland about herself? In smart, illuminating prose, Shapland interweaves her own story with McCullers’s to create a vital new portrait of one of our nation’s greatest literary treasures, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.

Lesbian Crushes and Bulimia

Lesbian Crushes and Bulimia
Author: Natasha Holme
Publisher: CreateSpace
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2014-07-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781500350505

In 1989 nineteen-year-old Natasha is obsessively in love with her former teacher, Miss Williams. The tattoo she flashes around says so. Natasha meets Alex, a girl her own age, who questions her about the tattoo. An awkward romance is born. In this real-life teenage diary Natasha records her panic at a looming LESBIAN relationship. To lose some excess fat, she starves herself of food ... whilst working in a chip shop. And just to make sure she's gay, Natasha drags five boys into bed in the space of a week, a sin for which the sexuality police threaten to kick her out of the university Lesbian and Gay Society. In this coming out story and love story, Natasha struggles with clumsy attempts at heterosexuality, the sickening effects of weight loss techniques, disapproving shaven-headed lesbians, and sexual harassment in the chip shop.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened

Let's Pretend This Never Happened
Author: Jenny Lawson
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2012-04-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101573082

The #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside

Black Boy Out of Time

Black Boy Out of Time
Author: Hari Ziyad
Publisher: Little A
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2021-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781542091312

An eloquent, restless, and enlightening memoir by one of the most thought-provoking journalists today about growing up Black and queer in America, reuniting with the past, and coming of age their own way. One of nineteen children in a blended family, Hari Ziyad was raised by a Hindu Hare Kṛṣṇa mother and a Muslim father. Through reframing their own coming-of-age story, Ziyad takes readers on a powerful journey of growing up queer and Black in Cleveland, Ohio, and of navigating the equally complex path toward finding their true self in New York City. Exploring childhood, gender, race, and the trust that is built, broken, and repaired through generations, Ziyad investigates what it means to live beyond the limited narratives Black children are given and challenges the irreconcilable binaries that restrict them. Heartwarming and heart-wrenching, radical and reflective, Hari Ziyad's vital memoir is for the outcast, the unheard, the unborn, and the dead. It offers us a new way to think about survival and the necessary disruption of social norms. It looks back in tenderness as well as justified rage, forces us to address where we are now, and, born out of hope, illuminates the possibilities for the future.