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Image one: E-book titled A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder (2016) - synopsis: A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby’s extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby’s story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety; trained and worked as an alcoholism counselor; raised her children and fostered many others; learned to live with visual impairment; and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in her adopted city, Thunder Bay, Ontario. Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, humor, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people.
Image two: E-book titled Left Handed, Son of Old Man Hat: A Navajo Autobiography (2018) - synopsis: Left Handed (Navajo) (1868–?) was a Diné man who was born at Hweéldi (the Bosque Redondo prison camp), where the American military held Navajos from 1863 to 1868, and then returned to the Navajo homeland with his family. At the time of Walter Dyk’s interviews about his life, he was positioned as an elder who had lived well and prospered. With a simplicity as disarming as it is frank, Left Handed tells the story of his life as he learns the Navajo lifeway, which is founded on the principles of honesty, foresightedness, and self-discipline.
Image one: E-book titled Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II - synopsis: During the nineteenth century, American schools for deaf education regarded sign language as the natural language of Deaf people, using it as the principal mode of instruction and communication. These schools inadvertently became the seedbeds of an emerging Deaf community and culture. But beginning in the 1880s, an oralist movement developed that sought to suppress sign language, removing Deaf teachers and requiring deaf people to learn speech and lip reading. Historians have all assumed that in the early decades of the twentieth century oralism triumphed overwhelmingly. Susan Burch shows us that everyone has it wrong; not only did Deaf students continue to use sign language in schools, hearing teachers relied on it as well. In Signs of Resistance, Susan Burch persuasively reinterprets early twentieth century Deaf history: using community sources such as Deaf newspapers, memoirs, films, and oral (sign language) interviews, Burch shows how the Deaf community mobilized to defend sign language and Deaf teachers, in the process facilitating the formation of collective Deaf consciousness, identity and political organization.
Image two: E-book titled Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS - synopsis: Serving as a vital supplement to the existing scholarship on AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s, Viral Cultures is the first book to critically examine the archives that have helped preserve and create the legacy of those radical activities. Marika Cifor charts the efforts activists, archivists, and curators have made to document the work of AIDS activism in the United States and the infrastructure developed to maintain it, safeguarding the material for future generations to remember these social movements and to revitalize the epidemic's past in order to remake the present and future of AIDS. Drawing on large institutional archives such as the New York Public Library, as well as those developed by small, community-based organizations, this work of archival ethnography details how contemporary activists, artists, and curators use these records to build on the cultural legacy of AIDS activism to challenge the conditions of injustice that continue to undergird current AIDS crises.
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Image one: E-book titled Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subculture of the Punk and Hardcore Generation (2011) - synopsis: Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation is a vibrant, in-depth, and visually appealing history of punk, which reveals punk concert flyers as urban folk art. David Ensminger exposes the movement’s deeply participatory street art, including flyers, stencils, and graffiti. This discovery leads him to an examination of the often-overlooked presence of African Americans, Latinos, women, and the LGBTQ community who have widely impacted the worldviews and music of this subculture.
Image two: E-book titled Ripped, Torn, and Cut: Pop, Politics, and Fanzines from 1976 (2018) - synopsis: Offers a collection of original essays exploring the motivations behind - and the politics within - the multitude of fanzines that emerged in the wake of British punk from 1976 that would be cut and pasted in bedrooms across the UK. From these, glimpses into provincial cultures, teenage style wars, and formative political ideas may be gleaned.
Image one: Art and Poetry Month
Image two: E-book titled Lockdown Cultures: The Arts and Humanities in the Year of the Pandemic, 2020-21 (2022) - synopsis: This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analyzed 2020–21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past.
Image three: E-book titled Building Fires in the Snow: A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction and Poetry (2016) - synopsis: Diversity has always been central to Alaska identity, as the state’s population consists of people with many different backgrounds, viewpoints, and life experiences. This book opens a window into these diverse lives, gathering stories and poems about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer life into a brilliant, path-breaking anthology. In these pages we see the panoply of LGBTQ life in Alaska today, from the quotidian urban adventures of a family—shopping, going out, working—to intimate encounters with Alaska’s breathtaking natural beauty.
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.
