Thornapple Press – serie

Even as the broader LGBT community enjoys political and societal advances in North America, the bisexual community still today contends with decades of misinformation stereotyping them as innately indecisive, self-loathing, and untrustworthy. Claiming the B in LGBT strives to give bisexuals a seat at the table. This guidebook to the history and future of the bisexual movement fuses a chronology of bisexual organizing with essays, poems, and articles detailing the lived experiences of bisexual activities struggling against a dominant culture driven by norms of monosexual attraction, compulsory monogamy, and inflexible notions of gender expression and identity. Kate Harrad's anthology of a thriving identity yearning to realize itself provides a vision of bisexuality that is beyond gay and straight, rather than left to merely occupy the space between.

Attachment theory has entered the mainstream, but most discussions focus on how we can cultivate secure monogamous relationships. What if, like many people, you're striving for secure, happy attachments with more than one partner? Polyamorous psychotherapist Jessica Fern breaks new ground by extending attachment theory into the realm of consensual nonmonogamy. Using her nested model of attachment and trauma, she expands our understanding of how emotional experiences can influence our relationships. Then, she sets out six specific strategies to help you move toward secure attachments in your multiple relationships. Polysecure is both a trailblazing theoretical treatise and a practical guide.

As polyamory continues to make its way into the mainstream, more and more people are exploring consensual nonmonogamy in the hope of experiencing more love, connection, sex, freedom, and support. While for many, the move expands personal horizons, for others, the transition can be challenging, leaving them blindsided and overwhelmed. Beyond the initial transition to nonmonogamy, many struggle with the root issues beneath the symptoms of broken agreements, communication challenges, increased fighting, and persistent jealousy. Polyamorous psychotherapist Jessica Fern shares the insights she has gained through thousands of hours working with clients in consensually nonmonogamous relationships. Using a grounded theory approach, she explores the underlying challenges that nonmonogamous individuals and partners can experience after their first steps, offering practical strategies for transforming them into opportunities for new levels of clarity and intimacy. Polywise provides both the conceptual framework to better understand the shift from monogamy to nonmonogamy and the tools to navigate the next steps, allowing you to not just survive in open relationships, but thrive in them.

Polyamory can be fun, sweet and even liberating. But ethical nonmonogamy can also take work. In A Polyamory Devotional, relationship coach Evita 'Lavitaloca' Sawyers streamlines the vast abstractions of 'working on yourself' into a guided tour of rigorous self-reflection. Building upon her wealth of experience in fostering the journey from monogamy to nonmonogamy, Sawyers invites you to ask yourself the big questions. Can compersion and jealousy coexist? How do we hold space for hurt we didn't cause? Through 365 daily prompts, you are encouraged to develop the tools of emotional diligence that will serve you for a lifetime. For those eager to love authentically but overwhelmed by the emotional process of polyamory, this is your reminder that you don't have to do it alone.

Talking about consent can feel overwhelming, especially for young people who may be navigating their own boundaries for the first time. In Say More, consent culture activist Kitty Stryker guides teenagers in exploring what consent means to them. This timely and practical workbook allows the reader to work at their own pace and in their own way, with concrete examples from Kitty's own youth, prompts inspired by questions teens have asked her and comprehensive resources to encourage further exploration and introspection.

Balancing a devotion to activism with personal relationships can be incredibly difficult. Kitty Stryker shares her experience as an activist, street medic, and relationship educator to help others pursue the important work while maintaining healthy relationships and without burning out. Both a call to action and a candid memoir, Stryker is open about what she has learned and her perceived limitations. Recognizing that it can feel overwhelming to know how to effectively make change, she encourages readers to consider how they can best advocate for causes they believe in, presenting different types of activism, and urging readers to honestly examine their own hesitations. She also emphasizes that without taking care of our interpersonal relationships, many people burn out of activism at the very time when we need more people on the ground, and offers practical strategies to avoid this and to encourage healthy relationships.

Queerphobic and transphobic messaging can arrive from nearly any direction, and once queer and trans people are exposed to the fear, disgust and judgement people have for otherness, it can easily fester into internalized oppression. In a society that promotes the narrative of self-loathing queers, loving and accepting ourselves can be hard to imagine, let alone achieve. Author and activist Mx. Nillin Lore has first-hand insight into the complex inner journey of decluttering the guilt, shame and anxiety that can feed our inner discriminator and in Carry On, they provide a guided expedition through the source material of our own erasure. A self-reflective journey and a toolset for dismantling inflammatory inner frameworks, this is a practical and encouraging guide for those ready and willing to unpack their internalized queerphobic and transphobic baggage.

At 23, Theresa Kishkan met an artist who became obsessed with her. She was young, she was flattered, and the situation quickly overwhelmed her. He drew and painted her for a few months, after which she went away for a year. When she returned, she was determined not to resume the relationship. But the artist made contact with her after the birth of her first child and became a family friend, bringing gifts of paintings. Those images hung in Theresa's home, and one in particular reminded her almost daily of her younger self, in ways both positive and not so much. She avoided looking too closely at his images of her and at his long, passionate and often troubling letters. Decades later, while sorting old correspondence, she was taken back to those early days and began, at last, to write about her relationship with the now-deceased artist. The Art of Looking Back is a meditation on the male gaze, on reclaiming one's younger self, and on agency: how we lose it, how we find it again. This poetic memoir asks questions about older men and younger women and girls, and the persistence of that dynamic in art.

A deeply personal, provocative portrait of how race, culture and sexuality intersect to reshape what it means to be an Asian man in North America today. What does it mean to be an Asian man in North America? In this timely and insightful memoir, Ryan Cho unpacks ideas about masculinity and Asian men in a world of stereotypes and social expectations. Drawing from his own experiences and interviews with other Asian men and nonbinary people, Cho explores how culture, sexuality and race combine to influence identity. Along the way, he meets people redefining what masculinity means to them and discusses what we can do to steward a version of masculinity that is inclusive, progressive and authentic.Candid, challenging and personal, Brotherhood is a Constant Possibility invites readers to question the roles Asian men have been “allowed” to play and to imagine broader and more nuanced ways of thinking about masculinity and men.

A fierce, lucid meditation on the ethics and ecstasies of power.What are we doing when we erotically dominate another? Most kink resources focus on technique, safety and consent while overlooking less tangible elements that are equally important in defining the shape and quality of a scene. Informed by Métatron Lau’s years of first-hand experience as a dominant, The Fundamentals of Erotic Dominance explores skills that are often absent in mainstream kink education. In this groundbreaking work, Lau dismantles the mechanics of kink to uncover its deeper truths: trust, reciprocity, vulnerability and the raw intelligence of the body. Moving beyond manuals, she explores what happens when people enter the unpredictable space of power and surrender, and how that space can support greater attunement, eroticism and transformation. Aimed at people with some experience of kink and looking for the language to discuss the subtler aspects of BDSM, this thoughtful resource blends theory, practice and cultural critique to articulate a new ethic of erotic power. In Lau’s vision, domination is not control for its own sake but a form of radical attention—one that restores connection between mind and body, self and other, suffering and joy.

How can we create secure, happy attachments with multiple partners? This set of two books and a fold-out poster is a practical toolkit for building secure attachments in polyamory.In Polysecure, psychotherapist Jessica Fern extends attachment theory into the realm of consensual nonmonogamy. The accompanying folded poster displays her HEARTS framework—six specific strategies to help you move toward secure attachments in multiple relationships—and The Polysecure Workbook provides practical prompts to explore your own attachment history and reasons for practicing nonmonogamy. The Complete Polysecure Bundle provides the tools needed to navigate multiple loving relationships and to build personal security.