With The New Gay For Pay, Julia Himberg takes a critical eye to the operations behind and beyond the camera which take place in the various offices of media professionals: showrunners, producers, market researchers, public relations experts and political campaigners…. read more
Law and the Gay Rights Story provides an illuminating overview of the often-contentious intersection between American jurisprudence and the gay rights movement…. read more
Pleading in the Blood is the first full-length book on performance artist Ron Athey and its editor, Dominic Johnson, quickly locates Athey not as a member of the punk and queer cultures of the 1980s and 90s (though these, of course, are crucial), but as the narrator of his own life…. read more
Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie (The Feminist Press) may very well be the most revolutionary queer text to hit bookstores since Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet. The book was first published in France in 2008 and is only now being translated into English, by writer-journalist-translator Bruce Benderson. Part memoir (what Preciado classifies as “autotheory”), part queer theory,… read more
In addition to revealing some of his thought processes, the content of his final journals, A Heaven of Words as edited by Jerry Rosco, cements Wescott’s significant role in gay cultural history…. read more
The popular narrative of gay liberation seems inseparable from the urban landscape. From the drag balls of 1920s Harlem to the Stonewall Riots to the devastation of HIV/AIDS, rural America’s participation in gay history is largely restricted to its renowned repressiveness, propelling gay men and women to coastal cities where they find tolerance and each… read more
In Red-Inked Retablos, author Rigoberto González recalls speaking to a literature class where a young man approached him with a question. The student asked González, if growing up gay in the Latino community was so difficult, why he continues to go back to it. González quickly responded, “Because I love my people.”… read more
“Murder is the complete annihilation of another person. Not to be simplistic or flip, but it’s the ultimate way of saying ‘I want to be alone!'”
David McConnell’s new book, American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men (Akashic Books), ostensibly about men who kill gay men, contains insight after insight into the culture of masculine identity.
In Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search For Identity (Scribner), psychologist Andrew Solomon poses a fundamental question: How do you nurture a child who is nothing like you? … read more
Music for Porn (Nightboat Books) is a linguistic symphony of the fetishization and politicization of the body of the “soldier” and an exploration of intimacy and desire…. read more
