Allan D. Hunter came out as genderqueer in 1980, more than 20 years before “genderqueer” was trending. He decided that women's studies in academia was the proper place to discuss these ideas about gender, so he headed to New York to major in women's studies as one of the first male students to do so.
Derek, a genderqueer sissy male, decides that a women's studies class in college would be a good place to engage people in discussions about gender. Derek has reason to worry that he's invading women's space by attending women's studies classes. At the same time, he's a minority within that space, and, as a gender-nonconforming sissy in the 1980s, a person with a gender identity that wasn't acknowledged and recognized yet, he's been somewhat marginalized by gender himself.
The story follows Derek down Oklahoma highways and into heroin dens in Harlem and the homeless shelters of 1980s New York City, as the determined but not always practical Derek pursues his dream. The story delves into the complexities of privilege and social identity in ways that challenge assumptions about power and marginalization.
This book is a typical first-person account of a student in a program (medical, in this case) who encounters some discrepancies between the idealistically-drawn portrait of how a medical school is supposed to operate and the actual realities in which jealousies, territoriality, and the ongoing scramble to acquire and defend power within the institution play a major role. The main character is naïve to such considerations until they are made apparent to him.
This is a novel about doctors: what they do to each other and to their patients. And what their patients do to them. The heroes are young doctors, fresh out of medical school and taking the blame for disease and random disaster.
This book is a feminist memoir about being in a groundbreaking organization that proclaimed to the world that lesbians exist, refusing to be erased.
They used street theatre to draw attention (the "fire eating" to which the book title refers). The participants faced a lot of litmus testing, such as being targeted as racially offensive for using the phrase "freedom ride" for non-race centric activity; and the author testifies to both misogyny and homophobia in the left in the US, Paris, and Cuba.
When Kelly Cogswell plunged into New York's East Village in 1992, she had just come out. An ex-Southern Baptist born in Kentucky, she was camping in an Avenue B loft, scribbling poems, and playing in an underground band, trying to figure out her next move. A couple of months later she was consumed by the Lesbian Avengers, instigating direct action campaigns, battling cops on Fifth Avenue, mobilizing 20,000 dykes for a march on Washington, D.C., and eating fire-literally-in front of the White House.
At once streetwise and wistful, Eating Fire is a witty and urgent coming-of-age memoir spanning two decades,…
This book is a feminist memoir that focuses on the passionate experience of being politically connected with others, and juxtaposes that with the divisiveness and the unfortunate polarization of identity politics.
She also makes a strong case for a nuanced reading of political situations, showing how simplistic knee-jerk litmus testing becomes toxic within any movement, no matter how righteous the cause.
When Lise Weil came out in 1976, she came out into a land that was all on fire. Lesbian desire was the pulsing center of an entire way of life, a culture, a movement. The air throbbed with possibility. At the center of In Search of Pure Lust is Weil’s immersion in this culture, this movement: the grand experiment of lesbian feminism of the ’70s and ’80s. She and the women around her lived in a state of heightened erotic intensity that was, she believed, the source of their most vital knowledge. Desire was their guiding light. But after fifteen…
This story is the memoir of a very butch lesbian, which is an identity that juxtaposes very oddly and awkwardly against how our culture thinks of motherhood and pregnancy.
This tongue-in-cheek depiction makes for a clever skewering of the tension between one's internal identity and the perceptions of others, and the complexities of stepping outside the identity role that one has chosen to occupy.
First pregnancy can be a fraught, uncomfortable experience for any woman, but for resolutely butch lesbian Teek Thomasson, it is exceptionally challenging.
Teek identifies as a masculine woman in a world bent on associating pregnancy with a cult of uber-femininity. Teek wonders, “Can butches even get pregnant?”
Of course, as she and her pragmatic femme girlfriend Vee discover, they can. But what happens when they do? Written and illustrated by A.K. Summers, and based on her own pregnancy, Pregnant Butch strives to depict this increasingly common, but still underrepresented experience of queer pregnancy with humor and complexity—from the question of…
This tale is the autobiographical account of a married man who, when his wife gets an especially nice promotion opportunity, agrees with her that it makes more sense for him to stay at home with their young girl child.
He takes his role and its responsibilities seriously. His story is mostly the story of what is involved being the domestic partner on a day-to-day basis, but braided into that is the specifically gendered experience of doing all that as a male person in this society.
Lincoln Menner is finding out just how hard it is to be a woman. When his wife Jo was offered her dream job, Linc supported her wholeheartedly, leaving his thriving landscape business in Los Angeles and moving to Rochester, New York. This was a chance to escape the cloying needs and atrocious tastes of his celebrity clientele, start over in fresh surroundings, and spend a little quality time with their three-year-old daughter, Violet.
But Linc had no idea what it really meant to be a househusband: To stay home every day, folding laundry, cleaning soap scum, and teaching his little…
James Malloy is a ferry captain--or used to be, until he was unceremoniously fired and replaced by a "girl" named Courtney Farris. Now, instead of piloting Brenton Island’s daily lifeline to the glitzy docks of Newport, Rhode Island, James spends his days beached, bitter, and bored.
When he discovers a plan for a private golf course on wilderness sacred to his dying best friend, James is determined to stop such "improvements." But despite Brenton's nickname as "Cooperation Island," he's used to working solo. To keep historic trees and ocean shoreline open to all, he'll have to learn to cooperate with other islanders--including Captain Courtney, who might just morph from irritant to irresistible once James learns a secret that's been kept from him for years.
Loner James Malloy is a ferry captain-or used to be, until he was unceremoniously fired and replaced by a girl named Courtney Farris. Now, instead of piloting Brenton Island's daily lifeline to the glitzy docks of Newport, Rhode Island, James spends his days beached, bitter, and bored.
When he discovers a private golf course staked out across wilderness sacred to his dying best friend, a Narragansett Indian, James is determined to stop such "improvements." But despite Brenton's nickname as "Cooperation Island," he's used to working solo. To keep rocky bluffs, historic trees, and ocean shoreline open to all, he'll have…
