Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies – serie

Investigating the way one breaks through taboos and becomes a self-realized adult, this memoir traces the author's childhood in rural Arizona, his relationship with a physically shrinking father, his eccentric teenage friendships, and his growing awareness of his sexuality among young gays.

That Gad Beck, a Jew in the Berlin of Nazi Germany, lived through the Holocaust at all is surprising. The fact that he lived it as a homosexual Jew who spent the entire war funnelling food, money and clothing to hidden Jews and helping smuggle others out of the country is amazing. It was love that gave him both the impetus and the strength to fight. The rise of National Socialism was tearing his family apart, destroying his school, thwarting his dream of emigration to Israel. Then the Nazis came for Manfred Lewin, Beck's first love, and for his family. Gad's love for Manfred gave him the courage to don a three-sizes-too-large Hitler Youth uniform, march into the transit camp where the Lewins were being held, and demand - and obtain, to his astonishment - the release of his lover. But Manfred would not leave without his family, and so went back into the camp. The Lewins did not survive. Coming of age as a gay man during the war and maintaining a series of romantic relationships while carrying on his resistance work, Beck reveals a tenacity and irrepressible spirit that is his real legacy. His determination to keep loving, living and believing in every human possibility without compromise - even in the face of the unthinkably monstrous - makes this quite a different story of the Holocaust.

When Sacvan Bercovitch s The American Jeremiad first appeared in 1978, it was hailed as a landmark study of dissent and cultural formation in America, from the Puritans writings through the major literary works of the antebellum era. For this long-awaited anniversary edition, Bercovitch has written a deeply thoughtful and challenging new preface that reflects on his classic study of the role of the political sermon, or jeremiad, in America from a contemporary perspective, while assessing developments in the field of American studies and the culture at large.

Put together 20 million frozen sperm, two funny women, and one impoverished stretch of Appalachia and what do you get? A wise and celebratory tale by Louise A. Blum, author of the critically acclaimed novel, Amnesty, who now uses her razor wit and deft precision to tell the story of her own life. With the help of a tiny sperm vial they call ""Dad,"" she and her partner decide to have a child, unleashing a storm of controversy in their small town. From a glowing feature article in the family section of a local newspaper to the resulting prayer vigils on the village green, the town responds in radically different ways to their presence. A depiction of small-town life with all its comforts and its terrors, this memoir will speak to anyone who's ever felt like an outsider in America.

Betty Berzon, renowned psychotherapist and author of the bestselling book Permanent Partners, tells her own incredible story here. Berzon's journey from psychiatric patient on suicide watch - her wrists tethered to the bed rails in a locked hospital ward - to her present role as a groundbreaking therapist and gay pioneer makes for purely compelling reading. Berzon is recognized today as a trailblazing co-founder of a number of important lesbian and gay organizations and as one of the first therapists to focus on means of developing healthy gay relationships and overcoming homophobia. Along her sometimes bumpy road to success she encountered such luminaries as Anais Nin, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Sitwells, Evelyn Hooker, and Paul Monette. It is, however, the intimate story of Berzon's own private passage toward self-discovery - from mental breakdown and suicide attempts, through hospitalization, eventual triumphant recovery, and her own coming out as an open lesbian at the age of forty - that makes this memoir an urgent, insightful, and deeply emotional testament to human survival.

Performance artist Tim Miller has performed infront of audiences all over the world. This volume gathers six of his best-known performances that chart the sexual, spiritual and political topography of his identity as a gay man: ""Some Golden States"", ""Stretch Marks"", ""My Queer Body"", ""Naked Breath"", ""Fruit Cocktail"" and ""Glory Box"". Each performance script is illustrated with photographs and accompanied by Miller's notes and comments. The book explores the tangible body blows - taken and given - of Miller's life and times as explored in his performance: the queer-basher's blow, the sweet blowing breath of a lover, the below-the-belt blow of AIDS/HIV, the psychic blows from a society that disrespects the humanity of lesbian and gay relationships. Miller's performance are full of the put-up-your-dukes and stand-your-ground of such day-to-day blows that make up being gay in America.

Written in poet Michael Klein's uniquely passionate, unapologetic but humble voice, ""The End of Being Known"" explores the lines that define, yet also blur, the boundaries of sex, friendship, and compatibility. This collection of autobiographical essays probes the manifestations of sexual desire in its mystical variety: experiencing incest, falling in love, being a twin, and inhabiting the world of anonymous sex - in practice, and, in an essay about the Body Electric movement, as something recuperative and renewing. Each essay unfurls in a hybrid of poetry, narrative, and fragmentary literary devices. Here is an uncompromising gaze upon the quandaries of those whose sexual, emotional, and relational worlds collide, yielding no answer to the riddle of desire, yet finding meaning by piecing together personal examples of universal themes such as learning, through trial and error, about love and life.

Cleopatra’s Wedding Present is the rare book that captivates its reader from the first page. Like the best travel books, Robert Tewdwr Moss’s memoir of his travels through Syria resonates on many levels: as a profoundly telling vivisection of Middle Eastern society, a chilling history of ethnic crimes, a picaresque adventure story, a purely entertaining travelogue, and a poignant romance.Tewdwr Moss, a brilliant young writer who was murdered in London the day after he finished this book, left this lyrical gem as his legacy. He adeptly captures an essence of the Middle East that is foreign to most of us, but which becomes real with his astute observations of the region’s culture and explosive politics. He conveys what so many westerners find both fascinating and frightening in the Middle East, making no attempt to mask circumstances that are appalling and dangerous while also exotic, beautiful, and sometimes very funny.Mesopotamia, now present-day Syria, was part of Mark Anthony’s love gift to Cleopatra. Then and now, it is a land of mystery and love.The Wisconsin edition is only for sale in the United States and it's dependencies.

Long before Stonewall, young Air Force veteran Edward Field, fresh from combat in WWII, threw himself into New York's literary bohemia, searching for fulfillment as a gay man and poet. In this vivid account of his avant-garde years in Greenwich Village and the bohemian outposts of Paris' Left Bank and Tangier - where you could write poetry, be radical, and be openly gay - Field's intimate portraits of literary contemporaries such as Susan Sontag, Alfred Chester, May Swenson, and Frank O'Hara bring back the sadness, bawdiness, humor, and romanticism of the nigh-forgotten postwar bohemian subculture.

If I continue to tour for another twenty years, as I have for the last twenty-one, I will end up sleeping in at least 1000 hotel beds in my lifetime. For maximum poetic oomph, let's say 1001 beds...They symbolize a life and art dedicated to reaching out toward folks from Bozeman to Tampa. A life and art that has traveled widely and, I believe, reached a couple hundred thousand people with my stories of queer life and love. For a quarter century, Tim Miller has worked at the intersection of performance, politics, and identity, using his personal experiences to create entertaining but pointed explorations of life as a gay American man - from the perils and joys of sex and relationships to the struggles of political disenfranchisement and artistic censorship. This intimate autobiographical collage of Miller's professional and personal life reveals one of the celebrated creators of a crucial contemporary art form and a tireless advocate for the American dream of political equality for all citizens. Here we have the most complete Miller yet - a raucous collection of his performance scripts, essays, interviews, journal entries, and photographs, as well as his most recent stage piece ""Us"". This volume brings together the personal, communal, and national political strands that interweave through his work from its beginnings and ultimately define Miller's place as a contemporary artist, activist, and gay man.

Sex Talks to Girls chronicles the outward antics of a woman on an inward journey to self through the routes of religion, sex, sobriety, and kids. Recasting herself in this memoir as ""Molly Meek,"" Maureen Seaton interprets the emergence of Molly's identity in luxurious and very funny prose.Molly alternately finds herself in the surprising company of winos, swingers, and drag kings; in love with Jesus H. Christ and a butch named Mars; in charge of two children; writing stories that shrink painfully to poems without her permission; and incapable of figuring out how she landed in any of these predicaments. She is, by turns, a little saint, a Stepford wife, a bi-mom, and a femme with super powers. Her transformation—from near-nun to full-fledged sexual being, accidentally becoming conscious in the process and delighting in the spree—is the story of a life set on play and a woman heroically committed to seeing it through.

This collection of interviews with gay activists and artists is like going to dinner with people you’d love to know but don’t, and Phil Gambone is the perfect stand-in for the reader: impressively prepared, sympathetic, and smart.—Andrew Holleran, author of Grief: A Novel For two years, Philip Gambone traveled the length and breadth of the United States, talking candidly with LGBTQ people about their lives. In addition to interviews from David Sedaris, George Takei, Barney Frank, and Tammy Baldwin, Travels in a Gay Nation brings us lesser-known voices—a retired Naval officer, a transgender scholar and ""drag king,"" a Princeton philosopher, two opera sopranos who happen to be lovers, an indie rock musician, the founder of a gay frat house, and a pair of Vermont garden designers. In this age when contemporary gay America is still coming under attack, Gambone captures the humanity of each individual. For some, their identity as a sexual minority is crucial to their life's work; for others, it has been less so, perhaps even irrelevant. But, whether splashy or quiet, center-stage or behind the scenes, Gambone's subjects have managed—despite facing ignorance, fear, hatred, intolerance, injustice, violence, ridicule, or just plain indifference—to construct passionate, inspiring lives. ""By asking good questions and really listening, Philip Gambone opens an illuminating window into the minds, hearts, and guts of a fabulous array of extraordinary Americans. At this critical time in America's decades-long movement toward LGBTQ equality, you really shouldn’t miss this view.""—Will Fellows, author of Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest

National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Memoir.Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned to the Orthodox Jewish campus as a woman—Joy Ladin. In Through the Door of Life, Joy Ladin takes readers inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self.With unsparing honesty and surprising humour, Ladin wrestles with both the practical problems of gender transition and the larger moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions that arise. Ladin recounts her struggle to reconcile the pain of her experience living as the “wrong” gender with the pain of her children in losing the father they love. We eavesdrop on her lifelong conversations with the God whom she sees both as the source of her agony and as her hope for transcending it. We look over her shoulder as she learns to walk and talk as a woman after forty-plus years of walking and talking as a man. We stare with her into the mirror as she asks herself how the new self she is creating will ever become real.Ladin’s poignant memoir takes us from the death of living as the man she knew she wasn’t, to the shattering of family and career that accompanied her transition, to the new self, relationships, and love she finds when she opens the door of life.

In the second of his trio of acclaimed memoirs, Rigoberto González looks at his past through a startling lens: hunger. A childhood of neglect, adolescent yearnings, and adult desire for a larger world, another lover, a different body—all are explored by González in a series of heartbreaking and poetic vignettes.

When Joel Derfner's boyfriend proposed to him, there was nowhere in America the two could legally marry. That changed quickly, however, and before long the two were on what they expected to be a rollicking journey to married bliss. What they didn't realise was that, along the way, they would confront not just the dilemmas every couple faces on the way to the altar—what kind of ceremony would they have? what would they wear? did they have to invite Great Aunt Sophie?—but also questions about what a relationship can and can't do, the definition of marriage, and, ultimately, what makes a family.Add to the mix a reality show whose director forces them to keep signing and notarising applications for a wedding license until the cameraman gets a shot she likes; a family marriage history that includes adulterers, arms smugglers, and poisoners; and discussions of civil rights, Sophocles, racism, grammar, and homemade Ouija boards—coupled with Derfner's gift for getting in his own way—and what results is a story not just of gay marriage and the American family but of what it means to be human.

Denton Welch (1915–48) died at the age of thirty-three after a brief but brilliant career as a writer and painter. The revealing, poignant, impressionistic voice that buoys his novels was much praised by critics and literati in England and has since inspired creative artists from William S. Burroughs to John Waters. His achievements were all the more remarkable because he suffered from debilitating spinal and pelvic injuries incurred in a bicycle accident at age eighteen.Though German bombs were ravaging Britain, Welch wrote in his published work about the idyllic landscapes and local people he observed in Kent. There, in 1943, he met and fell in love with Eric Oliver, a handsome, intelligent, but rather insecure “landboy”—an agricultural worker with the wartime Land Army. Oliver would become a companion, comrade, lover, and caretaker during the last six years of Welch’s life. All fifty-one letters that Welch wrote to Oliver are collected and annotated here for the first time. They offer a historical record of life amidst the hardship, deprivation, and fear of World War II and are a timeless testament of one young man’s tender and intimate emotions, his immense courage in adversity, and his continual struggle for love and creative existence.

In these moving, often surprising essays, award-winning author and comedian Bob Smith writes about facing life with ALS, his rich, funny experience of fatherhood before and after his diagnosis, and about his enduring relationship with nature, which inspires him to fight for his survival and for the future of his two children. Aiming his potent, unflinching wit at such public concerns as global warming and environmental destruction, he also articulates how the wild world is a visual and vocal echo that we’re still alive.

The Pox Lover is a personal history of the turbulent 1990s in New York City and Paris by a pioneering American AIDS journalist, lesbian activist, and daughter of French-Haitian elites. In an account that is by turns searing, hectic, and funny, Anne-christine d'Adesky remembers ""the poxed generation"" of AIDS—their lives, their battles, and their determination to find love and make art in the heartbreaking years before lifesaving protease drugs arrived.D'Adesky takes us through a fast-changing East Village: squatter protests and civil disobedience lead to all-night drag and art-dance parties, the fun-loving Lesbian Avengers organize dyke marches, and the protest group ACT UP stages public funerals. Traveling as a journalist to Paris, an insomniac d'Adesky trolls the Seine, encountering waves of exiles fleeing violence in the Balkans, Haiti, and Rwanda. As the last of the French Nazis stand trial and the new National Front rises in the polls, d'Adesky digs into her aristocratic family's roots in Vichy France and colonial Haiti. This is a testament with a message for every generation: grab at life and love, connect with others, fight for justice, keep despair at bay, and remember.

An outcast gay Mormon travels from his Washington, DC, home to Antarctica—by bus.A devout young boy in rural Ohio, Andrew Evans had his life mapped for him: baptism, mission, Brigham Young University, temple marriage, and children of his own. But as an awkward gay kid, bullied and bored, he escaped into the glossy pages of National Geographic and the wide promise of the world atlas. The Black Penguin is Evans’s memoir, travel tale, and love story of his eventual journey to the farthest reaches of the map, a wild yet touching adventure across some of the most astonishing landscapes on Earth.Ejected from church and shunned by his family as a young man, Evans embarks on an ambitious overland journey halfway across the world. Riding public transportation, he crosses swamps, deserts, mountains, and jungles, slowly approaching his lifelong dream and ultimate goal: Antarctica. With each new mile comes laughter, pain, unexpected friendship, true weirdness, unsettling realities, and some hair-raising moments that eventually lead to a singular discovery on a remote beach at the bottom of the world.Evans’s 12,000-mile voyage becomes a soulful quest to balance faith, family, and self, reminding us that, in the end, our lives are defined by the roads we take, the places we touch, and those we hold nearest.

As an awkward gay kid—bullied, bored, and eventually ejected from the Mormon Church—Andrew Evans escaped into the glossy pages of National Geographic and the wide promise of the world atlas. The Black Penguin chronicles his journey riding public transportation toward his ultimate goal: Antarctica. Part memoir, part travel tale, and part love story, with each new mile comes laughter, pain, unexpected friendships, true weirdness, and hair-raising moments that eventually lead to a singular discovery on a remote beach at the bottom of the world.

Denise Chanterelle DuBois's transformation into a woman wasn't easy. Born as a boy into a working-class Polish American Milwaukee family, she faced daunting hurdles: a domineering father, a gritty 1960s neighborhood with no understanding of gender nonconformity, trouble in school, and a childhood so haunted by deprivation that neckbone soup was a staple. Terrified of revealing her inner self, DuBois lurched through alcoholism, drug dealing and addiction, car crashes, dangerous sex, and prison time. Dennis barreled from Wisconsin to California, Oregon, Canada, Costa Rica, New York, Bangkok, and Hawaii on a joyless ride.Defying all expectations, DuBois didn't crash and burn. Embracing her identity as a woman, she remade herself. Writing with resolute honesty and humor, she confronts both her past and her present to tell an American story of self-discovery.

A disabled foreigner in Japan, a society historically hostile to difference, Kenny Fries finds himself on a journey of profound self-discovery. As he visits gardens, experiences Noh and butoh, and meets artists and scholars, he discovers disabled gods, one-eyed samurai, blind chanting priests, and atomic bomb survivors. When he is diagnosed as HIV positive, all his assumptions about Japan, the body, and mortality are shaken, requiring him to find a way to reenter life on new terms.

Kenny Fries embarks on a journey of profound self-discovery as a disabled foreigner in Japan, a society historically hostile to difference. As he visits gardens, experiences Noh and butoh, and meets artists and scholars, he also discovers disabled gods, one-eyed samurai, blind chanting priests, and A-bomb survivors. When he is diagnosed as HIV positive, all his assumptions about Japan, the body, and mortality are shaken, and he must find a way to reenter life on new terms.

Burdened by poverty, illiteracy, and vulnerability as Mexican immigrants to California's Coachella Valley, three generations of González men turn to vices or withdraw into depression. As brothers Rigoberto and Alex grow to manhood, they are haunted by the traumas of their mother's early death, their lonely youth, their father's desertion, and their grandfather's invective. Rigoberto's success in escaping—first to college and then by becoming a writer—is blighted by his struggles with alcohol and abusive relationships, while Alex contends with difficult family relations, his own rocky marriage, and fatherhood.Descending into a dark emotional space that compromises their mental and physical health, the brothers eventually find hope in aiding each other. This is an honest and revealing window into the complexities of Latino masculinity, the private lives of men, and the ways they build strength under the weight of grief, loss, and despair.

In this candid and revelatory memoir, Erin O. White shares her hunger for both romantic and divine love, and how these desires transformed her life. In the late 1990s, she spent Saturday nights with her girlfriend and Sunday mornings in Catholic confirmation classes. But when the Church closed its doors to her, she was faced with a question: What does a lesbian believer do with her longing for God? Given Up for You explores these yearnings with bittersweet conviction, plumbing the depths of heart and soul.

In the throes of a classic midlife crisis, Lori Soderlind takes a sabbatical from her community college job as a journalism professor. She sets out to travel across America's rusting heart with her fourteen-year-old dog, Colby, and a used camping trailer. Making pit stops in places like Buffalo and Rockford, she explores a deeply conflicted country going through its own crises and transformations. Even as she struggles with her own impulses, she finds life and resilience among the seemingly forlorn, abandoned artifacts of former industrial glory.With humanity and humor, Soderlind's journey introduces quirky folks along the way, including Swannie Jim of Silo City and his fawn pit bull, Champ. She attempts to channel muckraking journalist Ida M. Tarbell and celebrates complicated characters, including Robert De Niro's heartbroken veteran in The Deer Hunter. Ultimately a romance - of Soderlind's love for America, her dog, the long-term partner she left behind, and the childhood crush she remembers with a big, aching pang - The Change offers daring and often hilarious insights into loss and acceptance, especially when it takes a while to get there.

Men I've Never Been recounts Michael Sadowski's odyssey as a boy who shuns his own identity-and, ultimately, his sexual orientation-in order to become who he thinks he's supposed to be. Beginning with the memory of a four-year-old sitting in a dingy dive bar, sounding out newspaper headlines while his boasting father collects drinks from onlookers, each chapter highlights a different image of manhood that Sadowski saw at home, at school, or on television-from sports heroes, hunters, and game show hosts to his charismatic but hard-drinking father. As he learns not to talk, laugh, cry, or love, he retreats further behind a stoic mask of silence-outwardly well-functioning but emotionally isolated, sinking under the weight of the past.  Through wrenching tragedy and tense, life-threatening challenges, Sadowski learns to find love, purpose, and healthy self-regard. In coming to understand his identity and his place within his family, he meditates on the power of real human connection and comes to grasp the damage of his troubled upbringing and the traumas caused by toxic masculinity. By turns comic and tragic, this nuanced memoir uncovers the false selves we create to get along in the world and the price we pay to maintain them.

Plain tells the story of Mary Alice Hostetter’s journey to define an authentic self amid a rigid religious upbringing in a Mennonite farm family. Although endowed with a personality “prone toward questioning and challenging,” the young Mary Alice at first wants nothing more than to be a good girl, to do her share, and—alongside her eleven siblings—to work her family’s Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, farm. She feels fortunate to have been born into a religion where, as the familiar hymn states, she is “safe in the arms of Jesus.” As an adolescent, that keen desire for belonging becomes focused on her worldly peers, even though she knows that Mennonites consider themselves a people apart. Eventually she leaves behind the fields and fences of her youth, thinking she will finally be able to grow beyond the prohibitions of her church. Discovering and accepting her sexuality, she once again finds herself apart, on the outside of family, community, and societal norms.This quietly powerful memoir of longing and acceptance casts a humanizing eye on a little-understood American religious tradition and a woman’s striving to grow within and beyond it.