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Image one: E-book titled Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome: Sexuality, Identity, and Community in Early Modern Europe (2016) - synopsis: From the tenor of contemporary discussions, it would be easy to conclude that the idea of marriage between two people of the same sex is a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. Not so, argues Gary Ferguson in Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome. Making use of substantial fragments of trial transcripts, Gary Ferguson brings the story of a same-sex marriage to life in striking detail. He unearths an incredible amount of detail about the men, their sex lives, and how others responded to this information, which allows him to explore attitudes toward marriage, sex, and gender at the time. Emphasizing the instability of marriage in premodern Europe, Ferguson argues that same-sex unions should be considered part of the institution’s complex and contested history.
Image two: E-book titled Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (2014) - synopsis: In April 1895, Oscar Wilde stood in the prisoner’s dock of the Old Bailey, charged with “acts of gross indecency with another male person.” Wilde responded with a speech of legendary eloquence, defending love between men as a love “such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare.” Electrified, the spectators in the courtroom burst into applause. Although Wilde was ultimately imprisoned, the courtroom response to his speech signaled a revolutionary moment-the emergence into the public sphere of a kind of love that had always been proscribed in English culture. In this luminous work of intellectual history, Linda Dowling offers the first detailed account of Oxford Hellenism, the Victorian philosophical and literary movement that made possible Wilde's brief triumph and anticipated the modern possibility of homosexuality as a positive social identity.
Image one: E-book titled The Wedding Heard 'round the World: America's First Gay Marriage (2016) - synopsis: On September 3, 1971, Michael McConnell and Jack Baker exchanged vows in the first legal same-sex wedding in the United States. Their remarkable story is told here for the first time—a unique account of the passion and energy of the gay liberation movement in the sixties and seventies. At the dawn of the modern gay movement (while New York’s Stonewall riots and San Francisco’s emerging political activism bloomed), these two young men, themselves gay rights activists, insisted on making their commitment a legal reality.
Image two: E-book titled Intersex Narratives: Shifts in the Representation of Intersex Lives in North American Literature and Popular Culture (2016) - synopsis: This book explores representations of intersex persons, intersex communities, and intersex as a cultural concept and knowledge category by focusing on the emergence of intersex autobiographical stories and cultural productions like novels and TV series. The study turns its attention to the significant paradigm shift in the narratives on intersex that occurred within early 1990s intersex activism in response to biopolitical regulations of intersex bodies.
Image one: E-book titled Transgender Mental Health (2018) - synopsis: Societal awareness of transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) individuals is greater now than at any point in history. However, most professional training programs for mental health professionals provide little to no education regarding gender diversity. Transgender Mental Health squarely addresses this deficit. This guide forgoes clinical jargon in favor of accessible, straightforward language designed to educate clinicians on how to address the basic needs of the TGNC community, thus increasing access to mental health care for TGNC individuals, which has been sorely lacking to this point.
Image two: E-book titled Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco's Two-Spirit Community (2016) - synopsis: The first book to examine the correlation between mixed-race identity and HIV/AIDS among Native American gay men and transgendered people, Indian Blood provides an analysis of the emerging and often contested LGBTQ “two-spirit” identification as it relates to public health and mixed-race identity. Using surveys, focus groups, and community discussions to examine the experiences of HIV-positive members of San Francisco’s two-spirit community, Indian Blood provides an innovative approach to understanding how colonization continues to affect American Indian communities and opens a series of crucial dialogues in the fields of Native American studies, public health, queer studies, and critical mixed-race studies.
Image one: E-book titled Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman and Her Boys in the 1950s (2010) - synopsis: Vivacious, unconventional, candid, and straight, Helen Branson operated a gay bar in Los Angeles in the 1950s—America’s most anti-gay decade. After years of fending off drunken passes as an entertainer in cocktail bars, this divorced grandmother preferred the wit, variety, and fun she found among homosexual men. Enjoying their companionship and deploring their plight, she gave her gay friends a place to socialize. Though at the time California statutes prohibited homosexuals from gathering in bars, Helen’s place was relaxed, suave, and remarkably safe from police raids and other anti-homosexual hazards. In 1957 she published her extraordinary memoir Gay Bar, the first book by a heterosexual to depict the lives of homosexuals with admiration, respect, and love.
Image two: E-book titled Long before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America (2007) - synopsis: Although the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City symbolically mark the start of the gay rights movement, individuals came together long before the modern era to express their same-sex romantic and sexual attraction toward one another, and in a myriad of ways. Some reflected on their desires in quiet solitude, while others endured verbal, physical, and legal harassment for publicly expressing homosexual interest through words or actions. Long before Stonewall seeks to uncover the many iterations of same-sex desire in colonial America and the early Republic, as well as to expand the scope of how we define and recognize homosocial behavior.
Image one: E-book titled Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer (2008) - synopsis: Bayard Rustin was a unique twentieth-century American radical voice. A homosexual, World War II draft resister, and ex-communist, he made enormous contributions to the civil rights, socialist, labor, peace, and gay rights movements in the United States, despite being viewed as an ‘outsider’ even by fellow activists. Rustin was a humanist who championed the disadvantaged and oppressed, regardless of identity. In Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer, Jerald Podair examines the life and career of a man who shaped virtually every aspect of the modern civil rights movement as a theorist, strategist, and spokesman.
Image two: E-book titled Somebody To Love: The Life, Death, and Legacy of Freddie Mercury (2016) - synopsis: Including interviews from Freddie Mercury’s closest friends in the last years of his life, along with personal photographs, Somebody To Love is an authoritative biography of a great man and performer. Within the pages of this book are previously unknown and startling facts about the singer and his life, moving details on his lifelong search for love and personal fulfilment, and of course his tragic contraction of a then killer disease in the mid-1980s. Woven throughout Freddie’s life is the shocking story of how the HIV virus came to hold the world in its grip, cruelly labelled “The Gay Plague.” The death of this vibrant and spectacularly talented rock star, shook the world of medicine as well as the world of music. Somebody to Love finally puts the record straight and pays detailed tribute to the man himself.
Image one: E-book titled Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (2000) - synopsis: In his wicked readings of film favorites, Alexander Doty takes us to the queer side of criticism, offering fresh and controversial views of the stars, the plots, and the directors of our best loved and most iconic films. Arguing against the assumptions that only explicitly gay films are subject to gay readings, he looks at six classics and reads them for their queer potential. With both affection and scholarly rigor, he teases out the lesbian fantasy inherent in The Wizard of Oz, the gay nightmare narrative of The Cabinet of Dr. Calagari, the bisexual erotics of Gentlemen Prefer Blonds, the queerness of Norman Bates, and more.
Image two: E-book titled Transgender Cinema (2019) - synopsis: Transgender Cinema gives readers the big picture of how trans people have been depicted on screen. Beginning with a history of trans tropes in classic Hollywood cinema, from comic drag scenes in Chaplin’s The Masquerader to Garbo’s androgynous Queen Christina, and from psycho killer queers to The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s outrageous queen, it examines a plethora of trans portrayals that subsequently emerged from varied media outlets, including documentary films, television serials, and world cinema. Along the way, it analyzes milestones in trans representation, like The Crying Game, Boys Don’t Cry, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and A Fantastic Woman.
Image one: E-book titled Pocket Guide to LGBTQ Mental Health: Understanding the Spectrum of Gender and Sexuality (2020) - synopsis: A down-to-earth, informative, and affirming manual for mental health clinicians working with patients of diverse gender and sexual identities. In recent years, people have begun to grapple with these issues in a healthier, more public way, and mental health practitioners must be prepared to meet their patients with the knowledge, understanding, and grasp of the context in which patients live their lives. The editors have brought their specialized knowledge to the project and, along with contributors who are experts in the field of LGBTQ mental health, have created a book of uncommon empathy. The volume's structure is simple, consistent, and effective, with 10 chapters covering lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, pansexual, and allied individuals.
Image two: E-book titled Black LGBT Health in the United States: The Intersections of Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation (2016) - synopsis: Black LGBT Health in the United States: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation focuses on the mental, physical, and spiritual aspects of health, and considers both risk and resiliency factors for the Black LGBT population. Contributors to this collection intimately understand the associations between health and intersectional anti-Black racism, heterosexism, homonegativity, biphobia, transphobia, and social class. This collection fills a gap in current scholarship by providing information about an array of health issues like cancer, juvenile incarceration, and depression that affect all subpopulations of Black LGBT people, especially Black bisexual-identified women, Black bisexual-identified men, and Black transgender men.
