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In The View From Here, some of the world's leading quer film directors and screenwriters - some mainstream, others who work defiantly from the margins - speak passionately and eloquently about the medium, and the challanges they face overcoming the demands of the Hollywood studio system and 'the market' to create films that are entertaining, engaging, and truthful.
Profiles Pedro Almodovar, Kenneth Anger, Gregg Araki, Bailey & Barbato, Cole & Dale, Bill Condon, Arthur Dong, Sandi Simcha DuBowski, Robert Epstein, Fernie & Weissman, Fox & Uchovsky, Glatzer & Westmoreland, John Greyson, Randal Kleiser, Bruce LaBruce, Robert Lepage, Craig Lucas, Don Mancini, John Cameron Mitchell, Lea Pool, Wakefield Poole, Ian Iqbal Rashid, Don Roos, Phillip B. Roth, Patricia Rozema, David Secter, Annie Sprinkle, Monika Treut, Rose Troche, Gus Van Sant, Rosa von Praunheim, John Waters...
Recommended. To order call 0207 278 7654.
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. To order call 0207 278 7654.
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 call 0207 278 7654.
Film and TV aficionados will relish this volume celebrating the actors, directors, screenwriters, and producers whose queer sensibilities infuse popular culture with brilliance, drama and wit. How did Liberace's costumes almost kill him? Which lesbian comedian spent her high school years as 'the best white cheerleader in Detroit'? The answers to these and countless other fascinating details glitter throughout this comprehensive and illustrated guide. This is the only reference book in which Tallulah Bankhead, Jean Cocteau, Judy Garland, Gus Van Sant, and Christine Vachon jostle for space. From Dorethy Arzner to John Waters, from Alla Nazimova to Divine, and from Paul Lynde to Ellen DeGeneres, it's a queer, queer world. Recommended. To order call 0207 278 7654.
Beginning with a look at the subcultural world of gay men in the early part of this century - particularly in New York and London - this facinating book analyzes the trends in dress adopted by gay men as well as the challenge gay style has made to mainstream men's fashion. The importance of dress choice to the formation of sexual identity is highlighted, as is gay influence on punk and the fashion industry as a whole. The rise of new dress choice in the wake of gay liberation is analyzed with particular emphasis on the masculinization of gay dress. The importance of the body to gay culture is addressed, from physique magazines of the 1950s, through to tattooing and body piercing, and their origins in the S&M scene. A facinating and well researched read. To order call 0207 278 7654.
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 call 0207 278 7654.
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.
To order call 0207 278 7654.
'...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 call 0207 278 7654.
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.
To order call 0207 278 7654.
'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
The acclaimed Proust biographer William C. Carter portrays Marcel Proust's amorous adventures and misadventures from adolescence through his adult years, supplying where appropriate the novelist's own sensitive, intelligent, and often disillusioned observations about love and sexuality. Proust is revealed as a man agonizingly caught between the constant fear of public exposure as a homosexual and the need to find and express love. In telling the story of Proust in love, Carter also shows how the author's experiences became major themes in his novel In Search For Lost Time. Carter discusses Proust's adolescnect sexual experiences, his disastrous brothel visit meant to cure homosexual inclinations, and his first great loves. He also addresses the duel Proust fought after the journalist Jean Lorrain alluded to his homosexuality in print, his flirtations with respectable women and high-class prostitutes, and his affairs with young men of the servant class. With new revelations about Proust's love life and a gallery of photographs, the book provides an unprecedented glimpse of Proust's gay Paris.
To order call 0207 278 7654.
Few books have had the social, cultural, and scholarly impact of John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerence, and Homosexuality. Arguing that neither the Bible nor the Christian tradition was nearly as hostile to homoeroticism as was generally thought, its initial publication sent shock waves through university classroooms and religious congregations. Twenty-five years later, the aftershocks still reverberate. The Boswell Thesis brings together fifteen leading scholars at the intersection of religious and sexuality studies to comment on this book's immense impact, the endless debates it generated, and the many contributions it has made to our culture.
The essays in this excellent volume examine a variety of aspects of Boswell's interpretation of events in the development of sexuality from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, including a Roman emperor's love letters to another man; suspicions of sodomy amoung medieval monks, knights, and crusaders; and the gender-bending visions of Christian saints and mystics. Also included are discussions of Boswell's career, including his influence amoung gay and lesbian Christians and his role in academic debates between essentialists and social constructionists. Elegantly written, thoroughly researched and thought-provoking.
To order call 0207 278 7654.
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 call 0207 278 7654.
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. To order call 0207 278 7654.
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 call 0207 278 7654.
