Letters to a GAY BLACK BOY

Letters to a GAY BLACK BOY
Author: Terry Dyer
Publisher:
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2020-07-10
Genre:
ISBN:

Letters to a GAY BLACK BOY takes an in-depth look into the life and development of Terry DeWayne Dyer. From the first to the last letter, he shares his journey with the world. The struggle with finding ourselves can be daunting and challenging. Often times people suffer in silence while creating their paths. He provides us with an authentic, raw, and emotional ride to finding himself. As the world continues to battle racial injustices on numerous levels, Letters to a GAY BLACK BOY shares a unique perspective so often not discussed. Motivated by homosexuality, race, family, and love, his first book sparks an inspiring and much needed conversation with our community. This stirring book will surely make you laugh and cry as each letter grabs your attention from the beginning to the end with sincerity.

Punch Me Up to the Gods

Punch Me Up to the Gods
Author: Brian Broome
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2021
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0358439108

Playful, poignant and wholly original, this coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity and addiction follows the author, a poet and screenwriter, as he recounts his experiences, revealing a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. --

Black Deutschland

Black Deutschland
Author: Darryl Pinckney
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2016-02-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374113815

An intoxicating, provocative novel of appetite, identity, and self-construction, Darryl Pinckney's Black Deutschland tells the story of an outsider, trapped between a painful past and a tenebrous future, in Europe's brightest and darkest city. Jed—young, gay, black, out of rehab and out of prospects in his hometown of Chicago—flees to the city of his fantasies, a museum of modernism and decadence: Berlin. The paradise that tyranny created, the subsidized city isolated behind the Berlin Wall, is where he's chosen to become the figure that he so admires, the black American expatriate. Newly sober and nostalgic for the Weimar days of Isherwood and Auden, Jed arrives to chase boys and to escape from what it means to be a black male in America. But history, both personal and political, can't be avoided with time or distance. Whether it's the judgment of the cousin he grew up with and her husband's bourgeois German family, the lure of white wine in a down-and-out bar, a gang of racists looking for a brawl, or the ravaged visage of Rock Hudson flashing behind the face of every white boy he desperately longs for, the past never stays past even in faraway Berlin. In the age of Reagan and AIDS in a city on the verge of tearing down its walls, he clambers toward some semblance of adulthood amid the outcasts and expats, intellectuals and artists, queers and misfits. And, on occasion, the city keeps its Isherwood promises and the boy he kisses, incredibly, kisses him back.

The GayBCs

The GayBCs
Author: M. L. Webb
Publisher: Quirk Books
Total Pages: 38
Release: 2019-10-08
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1683691636

A Moms Demand Action Book Club Pick “The perfect way to teach your kiddos LGBTQ+ vocab while celebrating the beauty of embracing yourself and others.”—KIWI Magazine A joyful celebration of LGBTQ+ vocabulary for kids of all ages! A playdate extravaganza transforms into a joyful celebration of friendship, love, and identity as four young friends sashay out of all the closets, dress up in a wardrobe fit for kings and queens, and discover the wonders of their imagination. In The GayBCs, M. L. Webb’s playful illustrations and lively poems delight in the beauty of embracing one’s truest self—from A is for Aro and Ace to F is for Family to T is for Trans. The GayBCs is a heartwarming and accessible gift to show kids and adults alike that every person is worthy of being celebrated. A bonus glossary offers opportunities for further discussion of complete terms, communities, and inclusive identities.

Queer Love in Color

Queer Love in Color
Author: Jamal Jordan
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2021-05-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1984857657

A photographic celebration of the love and relationships of queer people of color by a former New York Times multimedia journalist “Thank you, Jamal Jordan, for showing the world what true love looks like.”—Billy Porter Queer Love in Color features photographs and stories of couples and families across the United States and around the world. This singular, moving collection offers an intimate look at what it means to live at the intersections of queer and POC identities today, and honors an inclusive vision of love, affection, and family across the spectrum of gender, race, and age.

The Torture Letters

The Torture Letters
Author: Laurence Ralph
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2020-01-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022672980X

Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.

My Dear Boy

My Dear Boy
Author: Rictor Norton
Publisher:
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1998
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Gay Love Letters Through The Centuries Writers range from Kings and aristocrats, musicians and artists, soldiers and monks, to farm labourers, political activists, hustlers and drag queens. Illustrated.

A Better Man

A Better Man
Author: Michael Ian Black
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022-05-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1643752049

"Raw, intimate, and true . . . A Better Man cracked me wide open, and it's a template for the conversation we need to be having with our boys." --Peggy Orenstein, bestselling author of Boys & Sex A poignant look at boyhood, in the form of a heartfelt letter from comedian Michael Ian Black to his teenage son before he leaves for college, and a radical plea for rethinking masculinity and teaching young men to give and receive love. In a world in which the word masculinity now often goes hand in hand with toxic, comedian, actor, and father Michael Ian Black offers up a way forward for boys, men, and anyone who loves them. Part memoir, part advice book, and written as a heartfelt letter to his college-bound son, A Better Man reveals Black's own complicated relationship with his father, explores the damage and rising violence caused by the expectations placed on boys to "man up," and searches for the best way to help young men be part of the solution, not the problem. "If we cannot allow ourselves vulnerability," he writes, "how are we supposed to experience wonder, fear, tenderness?" Honest, funny, and hopeful, Black skillfully navigates the complex gender issues of our time and delivers a poignant answer to an urgent question: How can we be, and raise, better men?

How We Fight for Our Lives

How We Fight for Our Lives
Author: Saeed Jones
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2020-07-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1501132741

From award-winning poet Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives—winner of the Kirkus Prize and the Stonewall Book Award—is a “moving, bracingly honest memoir” (The New York Times Book Review) written at the crossroads of sex, race, and power. One of the best books of the year as selected by The New York Times; The Washington Post; NPR; Time; The New Yorker; O, The Oprah Magazine; Harper’s Bazaar; Elle; BuzzFeed; Goodreads; and many more. “People don’t just happen,” writes Saeed Jones. “We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The ‘I’ it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, ‘I am no longer yours.’” Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir about a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves. An award-winning poet, Jones has developed a style that’s as beautiful as it is powerful—a voice that’s by turns a river, a blues, and a nightscape set ablaze. How We Fight for Our Lives is a one-of-a-kind memoir and a book that cements Saeed Jones as an essential writer for our time.

Gay Is Good

Gay Is Good
Author: Michael G. Long
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2014-11-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0815652917

Contrary to popular notions, today’s LGBT movement did not begin with the Stonewall riots in 1969. Long before Stonewall, there was Franklin Kameny (1925–2011), one of the most significant figures in the gay rights movement. Beginning in 1958, he encouraged gay people to embrace homosexuality as moral and healthy, publicly denounced the federal government for excluding homosexuals from federal employment, openly fought the military’s ban against gay men and women, debated psychiatrists who depicted homosexuality as a mental disorder, identified test cases to advance civil liberties through the federal courts, acted as counsel to countless homosexuals suffering state-sanctioned discrimination, and organized marches for gay rights at the White House and other public institutions. In Gay Is Good, Long collects Kameny’s historically rich letters, revealing some of the early stirrings of today’s politically powerful LGBT movement. These letters are lively and colorful because they are in Kameny’s inimitable voice—a voice that was consistently loud, echoing through such places as the Oval Office, the Pentagon, and the British Parliament, and often shrill, piercing to the federal agency heads, military generals, and media personalities who received his countless letters. This volume collects approximately 150 letters from 1958 to 1975, a critical period in Kameny’s life during which he evolved from a victim of the law to a vocal opponent of the law, to the voice of the law itself. Long situates these letters in context, giving historical and biographical data about the subjects and events involved. Gay Is Good pays tribute to an advocate whose tireless efforts created a massive shift in social attitudes and practices, leading the way toward equality for the LGBT community.