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Gay Shame
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Barebacking - when gay men deliberately abandon condoms and embrace unprotected sex - has incited a great deal of shock but very little contemplation. Purposely flying in the face of decades of safe-sex campaigning and HIV/AIDS awareness initiatives, barebacking is unquestionably radical behavior, behavior that most people would rather condemn than understand. Thus the time is ripe for "Unlimited Intimacy", Tim Dean's riveting investigation into barebacking and the distinctive subculture that has grown around it. Audacious and undeniably provocative, Dean's profoundly reflective account is neither a manifesto nor an apology; instead, it is a searching analysis that tests the very limits of the study of sex in the twenty-first century. Dean's extensive research into the subculture provides a tour of the scene's bars, sex clubs, and Web sites; offers an explicit but sophisticated analysis of its pornography; and, documents his own personal experiences in the culture. But ultimately, it is HIV that animates the controversy around barebacking, and "Unlimited Intimacy" explores how barebackers think about transmitting the virus - especially the idea that deliberately sharing it establishes a new network of kinship among the infected. According to Dean, intimacy makes us vulnerable, exposes us to emotional risk, and forces us to drop our psychological barriers. As a committed experiment in intimacy without limits - one that makes those metaphors of intimacy quite literal - barebacking thus says a great deal about how intimacy works. Written with a fierce intelligence and uncompromising nerve, "Unlimited Intimacy" will prove to be a milestone in our understanding of sexual behavior. To order by e-mail click here:
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Pornification presents an international overview of how pornography - from softcore to hardcore, gay to straight, female to male, black to white - infiltrates and proliferates through our media. Porn is everywhere; from the suggestiveness of music videos to the explicit discussions of popular magazines; from the erotica of advertising to the refashioning of sex acts into art works; from a small garage industry to an internet empire. The media immerses us in the pornographic aesthetic. Now integral to popular culture, porn is part of our everyday lives. Sexual desire is commodified, pornified and the media leads the way. Exploring music videos, alt porn sites, Cosmogirls and Gaydar online forums, H&M's street advertising, retro pin-ups, film and educational sex videos alike, Pornification analyses the transformation of porn in today's media and its impact on our culture. To order by e-mail click here:
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"In this fascinating and disturbing book, two writers with prose styles and intellectual styles that are at once famously identifiable and intimately personal celebrate the possibility of relationships that defy identity and undo personality." - Stephen Greenblatt "This is a beautifully crafted book, one that underscores how the social life of the psyche is a matter of risk, wager, suspense, excitation, bodies, talk, and all manner of things both dangerous and sustaining." - Judith Butler"
Over the course of a distinguished career, critic Leo Bersani has tackled a range of issues in his writing, and this collection gathers together some of his finest work. Beginning with one of the foundations of queer theory - his famous meditation on how sex leads to a shattering of the self, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" - this volume charts the inspired connections Bersani has made between sexuality, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics. Over the course of these essays, Bersani grapples with thinkers ranging from Plato to Descartes to Georg Simmel. Foucault and Freud recur as key figures, and although Foucault rejected psychoanalysis, Bersani contends that by considering his ideas alongside Freud's, one gains a clearer understanding of human identity and how we relate to one another. For Bersani, art represents a crucial guide for conceiving new ways of connecting to the world, and so, in many of these essays, he stresses the importance of aesthetics, analyzing works by Jean Genet, Caravaggio, Proust, Pedro Almodovar, and Jean-Luc Godard. Documenting over two decades in the life of one of the best minds working in the humanities today, "Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays" is a unique opportunity to explore the fruitful career of a formidable intellect.
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The first full-length title in English on the celebrated photographer Claude Cahun whose work was rediscovered in the 1980s, this lively and original book looks at Cahun and her oeuvre in the contexts of the turbulent times in which she lived. Surveying standard postmodernist approaches to Cahun, born Lucy Schwob, Doy goes further, positioning her photographs as part of her life as a woman, lesbian and political activist in the early twentieth century. She considers Cahun's relationships with Symbolism and then Surrealism and her approach to dress and masquerade, assessing the images in the context of the situation of women at the time and within the prevailing fashion and beauty culture. She also pays attention to her curious images of constructed objects and re-evaluates the status of her small-scale snapshots as photographs. Enormously readable, Claude Cahun at last provides a fuller picture of this important artist's life and work.
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How did the queer subject come to occupy such a central, and in many respects, contradictory place in the modern world of the early twentieth century? What role has capitalism played in the development of modern gay and lesbian identities? Materializing Queer Desire focuses on the figure of the dandy to explore how and why gay and lesbian subjects became heroes of modern life. Elisa Glick argues that the gay subject emerged out of the specifically modern, capitalist contradiction between the public world of production and industry and the private world of consumption and pleasure. Boldly bringing modernism into dialogue with Marxist and queer theory, Glick offers an innovative, materialist account of modern queer consciousness that challenges tendencies to oppose "private" eroticism and the systems of value that govern "public" interests. In the process she illuminates the connections between aesthetic, sexual, and social formations in modern life--between modernity's disruptive, "queer" desires and their unfolding in an increasingly rationalized society. To order by e-mail click here:
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Nearly one male in six has been the victim of sexual abuse during childhood or adolescence, yet this abuse remains a taboo subject, even among victims. In "Don't Tell", Michel Dorais gives the victims a voice, providing a sensitive analysis of their traumas and self-questioning, and offering strategies for coping. "Don't Tell" examines the effects of sexual abuse on the emotional and sexual life of men, including their sense of self and their personal relationships.Using first-hand accounts, Dorais shows that certain reactions are specific to male victims as they attempt to preserve their physical integrity and conceptions of masculinity. He provides innovative strategies for both prevention and treatment that will be of use to those who have suffered abuse as well as to their families and all those who are trying to help them - spouses, friends, social workers, and therapists. Jean-Paul Roger, author of "L'inevitable", reflects on the importance of shared testimony in helping victims come to terms with their abuse and on the ongoing struggle this presents over the course of their lives. To order by e-mail click here:
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Ang Lee's film Brokeback Mountain exploded the myth of the American Cowboy as a tough, gruff, and grizzled loner. Queer Cowboys exposes, through books by legendary Western writers such as Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, and Owen Wister, how same-sex intimacy and homoerotic admiration were key aspects of Westerns well before Brokeback's 1960s West, and well before the word "homosexual" was even invented. Chris Packard introduces readers to the males-only club of journalists, cowboys, miners, Indians, and vaqueros who defined themselves by excluding women and the cloying ills of domesticity. He recovers a forgotton culture of exclusively masculine, sometimes erotic, and often intimate camaraderie in the fiction, photography, and theatrical performances of the 1800s Wild West. To order by e-mail click here:
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Homosexuality is still taboo in the Arab countries. While clerics denounce it as a heinous sin, newspapers, reluctant to address it directly, talk cryptically of 'shameful acts' and deviant behaviour'. Despite growing acceptance of sexual diversity in many parts of the world, attitudes in the Middle East have been hardening against it. In this absorbing account, journalist Brian Whitaker paints a disturbing picture of people who live secrective, often fearful lives; of daughters and sons beaten and ostracised by their families or sent to be 'cured' by psychiatrists; of men imprisoned and flogged for 'behaving like women'; of others who have been jailed simply for trying to find love on the Internet. Amid all the talk of reform in the Middle East, homosexuality is one issue that almost everyone in the region would prefer to ignore, and yet there are pockets of change and tolerance. Deeply informed and engagingly written, Unspeakable Love draws long overdue attention to a crucial subject. To order by e-mail click here:
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Gothic fiction explores the worlds of sexual and social transgression, and in the eigtheenth and nineteenth centuries it remained semirespectable in spite of its lurid scenes of sexual violence and interpersonal abuse. Haggerty's Queer Gothic argues that gothic fiction itself helped to shape thinking about sexual matters and animated the darker shadows of the dominant fiction with materials that anticipated later developments in the fields of sexology and psychology
Haggerty raises a variety of issues, including the uses of loss to invoke homoerotically inflected horror, the ways in which gothic monstrosity mimics same-sex desire, and the use of gothic Cathlolicism to demarcate particularly excessive versions of sexual transgression. Haggerty is the professor of English at the University of California, Riverside.
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'...terrific...with superb scholarship and inspired analyses, Haggerty's rereading of major (and minor) works of Gothic fiction and drama through the lens of modern developments in queer studies will make a resounding splash.' Hans Turley
'Smartly written, intensively researched and vigilantly argued...Whether analyzing a painting or the words of a political speech, Meyer comes across as a cool but engaged observer. Most importantly, he's a good storyteller and he has a facinating story to tell.' Holland Cotter, New York Times
'This genuinely groundbreaking book charts the unexpectedly productive as well as restrictive effect of queers' multiple encounters with censorship over the course of the last century. Beautifully written and illustrated, Meyer's study combines significant historical research and reflection with richly insightful interpretations of queer art to illuminate the history of twentieth-century American art and culture as a whole as well as the distinctive and little known history of gay artists.' George Chauncey To order by e-mail click here:
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Reading Edmund White is like sharing a cafe table with a witty professor, a clove-smoking aesthete, and a boy of fifteen. You never know who will speak the next line, but you know it will turn your head. Whether praising Nabokov's sensuality, critiquing Elton John's walk ("as though he's a wind-up doll that's been overwound and sent heading for the top of the stairs"), or describing serendipitous moments in his seven-year-long research into the life of Genet, Edmund White is unfailingly observant, erundite, and entertaining.
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'Everything White publishes is ingratiating and intelligent, building on wide, even unexpected learning, an instinctive turn toward the autobiographical and anecdotal, and a firm desire to remind us that writers and artists and performers must be understood in the light of the historical moment...Certainly, anyone who loves 'arts and letters' even half as much as Edmund White will enjoy this fine collection by this admirable American writer.' Washington Post Book World
Gay, straight, bisexual; how much does sexual orientation matter to a teenager's mental health or sense of identity? Savin-Williams argues that the standard image of gay youth presented by mental health researchers- as depressed, isolated, drug-dependant, even suicidal- may have been exaggerated even twenty years ago, and is far from accurate today. This book gives us a refreshing and frequently controversial introduction to confident, competent, upbeat teenagers with same-sex desires. With a conversational style, personal history, and intimate interviews with teens. Recommended. To order by e-mail click here:
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Are people born gay, or does upbringing or even conscious personal choice play a part? The ongoing row between gay-rights activists and the conservative lobby over this buring question has now raged for many years. But the science that both groups employ in their arguments, this book asserts, is not merely outmoded but often fallacious. Since the ground-breaking work of Simon Le Vay and Dean Hamer in the early 1990s into the biological causes of homosexuality, a tremendous amount of new research has been carried out by scientists, who now understand a great deal more about the biology of sexual attraction. Born Gay is the first book for the general reader to provide a summary of this new research. The authors provide compelling new evidence that sexual orientation is largely innate and demistify much of the confusion about such frequently misused terms as 'the gay brian' and 'the gay gene'. A facinating study.
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In this one-stop, no-nonsense introduction to the work of postmodern sex and gender thorist, internationally known gender activist Riki Wilchins clearly explains the key ideas that have shaped contemporary sex and gender studies. Using straightforward prose and concrete examples from LGBT politics-as well as her own life-Wilchins makes thinkers like Derrida, Focault, and Judith Butler easily accessible to students, activists, and others who are interested in some of the most compelling and divisive issues of the last 100 years.
" Riki Wilchins is the Emma Goldman of the movement for gender rights. Anyone interested in the ontology of gender and the future of queer politics will find this an enlightening and invaluable book." Patrick Califia
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This is the rare, detailed and ingenious socio-sexual study from the 1970s of sex between men in public toilets. The book makes an important and imaginative contribution to sociology's growing interest in deviant sexual activity. It shows that many presuppositions about casual homosexual encounters are false; notably that the majority of participants are exclusively homosexual (most, indeed, turn out to be married) or even that in the rest of their life-style they stand out from their fellow citizens as in any way unusual. It demonstrates that many ideas about sexual deviance, based previously on clinical or coutroom evidence, are misguided and provides a remarkable insight into this area of human behaviour. Tearoom Trade is a core text on a number of university course lists. To order by e-mail click here:
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