Bower House – serie

For more than four decades, between 1969 and 2010, the remote former mining town of Trinidad, Colorado was the unlikely crossroads for approximately six thousand medical pilgrims who came looking for relief from the pain of gender dysphoria. The surgical skill and nonjudgmental compassion of surgeons Stanley Biber and his transgender protege Marci Bowers not only made the phrase "Going to Trinidad" a euphemism for gender confirmation surgery in the worldwide transgender community, but also turned the small outpost near the New Mexico border into what The New York Times once called "the sex-change capital of the world."

The full story of that nearly forgotten chapter in gender and medical history has never been told-until now. Award-winning writer Martin J. Smith spent two years researching not only the stories of Trinidad, Biber, and Bowers, but also tracking the lives of many transgender men and women who sought their services. The result is "Going to Trinidad," which focuses on the complicated pre- and post-surgery lives of two Biber patients-Claudine Griggs and Walt Heyer-who experienced very different outcomes. Through them, Smith takes readers deep into the often-mystifying world of gender, genitalia, and sexuality, and chronicles a fascinating segment of the human species that's often misunderstood by those for whom gender remains a mostly binary male-or-female equation.

The stories of Trinidad's surgeons and transgender pilgrims provide an important opportunity to better understand the millions of complex individuals whose personal struggle is complicated by today's quicksand of cultural pressures and prejudices. More than six thousand transgender men and women left Trinidad hoping that hormone therapy and surgical relief was the right prescription for their pain. For most it was, but not for all, and their experiences offer important and timely insights for those struggling to understand this sometimes confounding human condition.

In Sandstone Seduction, Katie Lee collects her most creative writing, written over her lifetime, telling us about the events that shaped her life, and her encounters with water and rock. As always, her writing is deeply personal, remarkably candid, and abundantly frank. Katie Lee speaks her mind; she does not hold back. She listened to the water and absorbed its lessons for more than sixty years; she knows well that we have a lot to learn about the flow of our lives.

David Brower, who has always regretted the Sierra Club's failure to save the Glen Canyon, called it The Place No One Knew. But Katie Lee was among a handful of people who knew the 170 miles of Glen Canyon very well. She'd made sixteen trips down the river, even named some of the side canyons. Glen Canyon and the river that ran through it had changed her life. Her descriptions of a magnificent desert oasis and its rich archaeological ruins are a paean to paradise lost. In 1963, the US Government's Bureau of Reclamation (the “Wreck-the-Nation Bureau”, Katie calls it) shut off the flow of the Colorado River at Glen Canyon Dam, beginning the process of flooding this natural treasure. Three generations have been born since the dam was built, and in a few more decades there may be no one alive who will have known the place. Katie Lee didn't forget Glen Canyon, and she didn't want anyone else to forget it either. She tells us what there was to love about Glen Canyon and why we should miss it.

The canyon had great personal significance for her: She had gone to Hollywood to make her career as an actress and a singer, but the river kept calling her back, showing her a better way to live. Sheeloquently weaves her personal story into her breathtaking descriptions of the trips she made down the canyon. In later years, Katie found allies in her struggle to restore the canyon. The Glen Canyon Institute has been joined by the Sierra Club in calling for the draining of Lake Powell (”Rez Foul”, in Katie's words), and the idea is being debated on editorial pages across the country and in congressional hearings. All My Rivers Are Gone celebrates a great American landscape, mourns its loss, and challenges us to undo the damage and forever prevent such mindless destruction in the future.

Take a drive into the literary landscape of Colorado. Meet Kent Haruf's bachelor ranchers in the Eastern Plains, ride the old cattle trails with Larry McMurtry, rail against nuclear weapons with Allen Ginsberg, go drinking at jazz clubs with Jack Kerouac, climb the highest peaks with Isabella Bird and Enos Mills, explore the cave dwellings of Mesa Verde with Willa Cather.

Reading Colorado, a high-octane road trip through the diverse literary landscapes of Colorado, highlights the words of native people, the journals of exploration, the stories of early mining and agricultural frontiers, urban tales reflecting the emergence and growth of Denver and the Front Range, and a diverse range of contemporary voices, from the Plains to the Peaks, who invite the reader into their home towns.

The travel guide format is perfect for exploring the Centennial state in a hammock strung between pines, on the couch with your feet kicked up by the fire, or by hitting the road with your favorite traveling companion. The guide includes many writers not yet anthologized and others who have become household names, and the place-based focus makes it easy to jump around to the parts of Colorado you're most interested in. It will deepen personal maps and enhance road trips for residents, visitors, and armchair travelers alike.