The Velvet Rage

The Velvet Rage
Author: Alan Downs
Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong Books
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2006-04-25
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780738210612

The gay male world today is characterized by seductive beauty, artful creativity, flamboyant sexuality, and, encouragingly, unprecedented acceptability in society. Yet despite the progress of the recent past, gay men still find themselves asking, "Are we really better off?" The inevitable byproduct of growing up gay in a straight world continues to be the internalization of shame, a shame gay men may strive to obscure with a fa?ade of beauty, creativity, or material success. Drawing on contemporary psychological research, the author's own journey to be free of anger and of shame, as well as the stories of many of his friends and clients, The Velvet Rage outlines the three distinct stages to emotional well-being for gay men. Offering profoundly beneficial strategies to stop the insidious cycle of avoidance and self-defeating behavior, The Velvet Rage is an empowering book that will influence the public discourse on gay culture, and positively change the lives of gay men who read it.

The Book of (More) Delights

The Book of (More) Delights
Author: Ross Gay
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2023-09-19
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1643755471

From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.

Since I Laid My Burden Down

Since I Laid My Burden Down
Author: Brontez Purnell
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2017-05-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 155861432X

An uninhibited portrait of growing up gay in 1980s Alabama: exploring art and sex with “more layered insight than the page count should allow” (Hanif Abdurraqib, MTV News). DeShawn lives a high, creative, and promiscuous life in San Francisco. But when he’s called back to his cramped Alabama hometown for his uncle’s funeral, he’s hit by flashbacks of handsome, doomed neighbors and sweltering Sunday services. Amidst prickly reminders of his childhood, DeShawn ponders family, church, and the men in his life, prompting the question: Who deserves love? A modern American classic, Since I Laid My Burden Down is a raw and searing look into the intersections of memory, Blackness, and queerness. “Performance artist Purnell beautifully captures a personality through introspection and memory in this slim novel . . . a compelling portrait of a particular disaffected kind of gay youth caught between religion, culture, and desire.” —Publishers Weekly “It’s a true novel, chaptered, and bound, that not only holds its own as queer literature, with its unapologetically misanthropic narrative, but also expands upon it.” —San Francisco Chronicle “An antidote to the rigamarole of gay lit.” —Mask Magazine “Slim yet potently realized, with a lot to ponder.” —The Bay Area Reporter “Since I Laid My Burden Down has a fearless (sometimes reckless) humor as Brontez Purnell interrogates what it means to be black, male, queer; a son, an uncle, a lover; Southern, punk, and human. An emotional tightrope walk of a book and an important American story rarely, if ever, told.” —Michelle Tea, author of Castle on the River Vistula

Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter

Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter
Author: Alison Wearing
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-05-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 034580757X

NATIONAL BESTSELLER (The Globe and Mail) A moving memoir about growing up with a gay father in the 1980s, and a tribute to the power of truth, humour, acceptance and familial love. A true "It GOT Better" story. Alison Wearing led a largely carefree childhood until she learned, at the age of 12, that her family was a little more complex than she had realized. Sure her father had always been unusual compared to the other dads in the neighbourhood: he loved to bake croissants, wear silk pyjamas around the house, and skip down the street singing songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. But when he came out of the closet in the 1970s, when homosexuality was still a cardinal taboo, it was a shock to everyone in the quiet community of Peterborough, Ontario—especially to his wife and three children. Alison’s father was a professor of political science and amateur choral conductor, her mother was an accomplished pianist and marathon runner, and together they had fed the family a steady diet of arts, adventures, mishaps, normal frustrations and inexhaustible laughter. Yet despite these agreeable circumstances, Joe’s internal life was haunted by conflicting desires. As he began to explore and understand the truth about himself, he became determined to find a way to live both as a gay man and also a devoted father, something almost unheard of at the time. Through extraordinary excerpts from his own letters and journals from the years of his coming out, we read of Joe’s private struggle to make sense and beauty of his life, to take inspiration from an evolving society and become part of the vanguard of the gay revolution in Canada. Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is also the story of “coming out” as the daughter of a gay father. Already wrestling with an adolescent’s search for identity when her father came out of the closet, Alison promptly “went in,” concealing his sexual orientation from her friends and spinning extravagant stories about all of the “great straight things” they did together. Over time, Alison came to see that life with her father was surprisingly interesting and entertaining, even oddly inspiring, and in fact, there was nothing to hide. Balancing intimacy, history and downright hilarity, Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is a captivating tale of family life: deliciously imperfect, riotously challenging, and full of life’s great lessons in love. Alison brings her story to life with a skillfully light touch in this warm, heartfelt and revelatory memoir.

Reflections of a Rock Lobster

Reflections of a Rock Lobster
Author: Aaron Fricke
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2013-08-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781484881903

The Author's 21st-Century Revised Edition! Part coming-of-age story, part love story, part courtroom drama...and ALL TRUE! This is a moving account of what gay pride can really mean in a small New England town. First published in 1981, this new edition has been revised by the author and includes over 20 pages of new material and illustrations including a new Epilog and Post Script, pictures from the stage adaptation, and Rock Lobster trivia!

Bringing the Shovel Down

Bringing the Shovel Down
Author: Ross Gay
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 85
Release: 2011-01-23
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0822991195

Bringing the Shovel Down maps the long and arduous process of being inculcated with the mythologies of state and power, the ramifications of that inculcation (largely, the loss of our humanity in the service of maintaining those mythologies), and finally, what it might mean, what it might provide us, if we were to transform those myths. The book, finally, has one underlying question: How might we better love one another?

Born This Way

Born This Way
Author: Paul Vitagliano
Publisher: Quirk Books
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2012-10-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1594746001

Sure to become a modern LGBTQ+ pride classic, this “amazing” celebration of the pains and joys of growing up gay features personal stories from around the world (The Huffington Post) Based on the hugely popular blog of the same name, Born This Way shares 100 different memories of growing up LGBTQ+. Childhood photographs are accompanied by sweet, funny—and at times, heartbreaking—personal stories. Collected from around the world and dating from the 1940s to today, these memories speak to the hardships of an unaccepting world and the triumph of pride, self-love, and self-acceptance. This intimate little book is a wonderful gift for all members of the LGBTQ+ community as well as their friends and families. Like Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, Born This Way gives young people everywhere the courage to say, “Yes, I’m gay. And I was born this way. I’ve known it since I was very young, and this is my story.”

The Binding

The Binding
Author: Bridget Collins
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2019-04-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062838113

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE Proclaimed as “truly spellbinding,” a “great fable” that “functions as transporting romance” by the Guardian, the runaway #1 international bestseller "A rich, gothic entertainment that explores what books have trapped inside them and reminds us of the power of storytelling. Spellbinding.” — TRACY CHEVALIER Imagine you could erase grief. Imagine you could remove pain. Imagine you could hide the darkest, most horrifying secret. Forever. Young Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a strange letter arrives summoning him away from his family. He is to begin an apprenticeship as a Bookbinder—a vocation that arouses fear, superstition, and prejudice amongst their small community, but one neither he nor his parents can afford to refuse. For as long as he can recall, Emmett has been drawn to books, even though they are strictly forbidden. Bookbinding is a sacred calling, Seredith informs her new apprentice, and he is a binder born. Under the old woman’s watchful eye, Emmett learns to hand-craft the elegant leather-bound volumes. Within each one they will capture something unique and extraordinary: a memory. If there’s something you want to forget, a binder can help. If there’s something you need to erase, they can assist. Within the pages of the books they create, secrets are concealed and the past is locked away. In a vault under his mentor’s workshop rows upon rows of books are meticulously stored. But while Seredith is an artisan, there are others of their kind, avaricious and amoral tradesman who use their talents for dark ends—and just as Emmett begins to settle into his new circumstances, he makes an astonishing discovery: one of the books has his name on it. Soon, everything he thought he understood about his life will be dramatically rewritten. An unforgettable novel of enchantment, mystery, memory, and forbidden love, The Binding is a beautiful homage to the allure and life-changing power of books—and a reminder to us all that knowledge can be its own kind of magic.

Gay Girl, Good God

Gay Girl, Good God
Author: Jackie Hill Perry
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2018-09-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1462751237

“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.

Small Town Gay

Small Town Gay
Author: Logan Lee
Publisher:
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2021-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9781737268512

Central Kentucky is known for cornfields, blue-ribbon sows, industrial sites, and tractor parades. In the summer, families sip sweet tea on the porch beneath lavender sunsets and watch the day go down. Every fried chicken supper hits the spot, and cafes off the beaten path give patrons reason to sing karaoke and come alive with their kin. For those cut from the cloth of prior generations, central Kentucky provides the quintessential small-town experience-stay in church, graduate, go to work on the farm, marry young, own a home, build a family, repeat.For the other ones, who desire an alternate route, dream beyond the fold, reject societal norms and hold progressive opinions, Mercer can be challenging. For a once closeted gay, like Logan Lee, the tiny, conservative corner of his hometown presents an opportunity to transcend and forgive cultural expectations, and probe readers to be open-minded.In his breakout memoir Small Town Gay, Lee shares his experience of reconciling his sexuality at a young age, with no like role models to look to for guidance. With a heart for education, he strives to be that example for the next generation, by inviting children, parents, and allies of the LGBTQ+ community to unify in the name of voice, tolerance, unconditional love, and above all things-home.