The Lesbian and Gay Movements: Assimilation or Liberation?

The Lesbian and Gay Movements: Assimilation or Liberation? is a history of post-Stonewall GLBTQ activism as seen through three focused battles: the AIDS crisis, the ban on gays in the military, and the conflict over gay marriage. Craig Rimmerman presents a detailed breakdown of each, assembling them into a supposed study of the differences and relative importance of assimilationist and liberationist strategies.

Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl

“Soup can sometimes take the place of language...” Marusya Bociurkiw writes in Comfort Food for Breakups, and as the aroma of my mother’s broth, sipped to ease sickness, floods my tongue, I too hunger for my mother’s absent touch, for my young daughter knees, for my queer body. Born in Canada to Ukrainian exiles, Bociurkiw weaves stories interspersed with recipes, travels, and tales of other refugees.

The Off Season

This book, the sequel to Murdock’s Dairy Queen, may be marketed for young adults, but it’s not the equivalent of Sweet Valley High or The Princess Diaries, as both the book and heroine D.J. Schwenk have their feet planted firmly in reality. D.J.

Un Amour à Taire (A Love to Hide)

Christian Faure’s A Love to Hide is a deeply powerful film. Set in Paris during the Nazi occupation of France, the film depicts the violent effects the Nazi criminalization of gayness. The story begins with Sara’s (Louise Monot) escape from her home, after Nazi’s have murdered her entire family. Out of desperation she contacts an old friend (and potential love interest), Jean, played with startling effect by Jérémie Renier.

Handbook of the Evolution of Human Sexuality

The style and content in a sentence: Professional enough for an academic, but thought provoking for the general public. If you’re reading this with thoughts that the “Evolution” part of this title might limit the diversity of coverage of “Human Sexuality,” read on. Most of what we might have learned about evolution and sex on public television, in high school biology, health class and even in psychology 101 leaves everything other than heterosexual, reproductive, cave-man sex in the archeological dust.

Swarm

If you love poetry—scratch that—if you love powerfully articulate, passionate prose meant to stir up your inner emotions and inspire you to stand up and create change, then you’ll love the brilliance that queer poet/activist Andrea Gibson serves up aplenty in Swarm. Primarily recorded in a bedroom, Swarm also contains a handful of live tracks that allow the listener to taste the raw energy of her live performance. The self-released album came out in 2004, yet the poignant words, occasionally accompanied by a backdrop of acoustic guitar, cut into you like knives and remain just as rel

Greatest Hits: The Road Less Traveled

I’ve always been a sporadic fan of Melissa Etheridge’s work; perhaps it’s because, to me, her lyrics often feel oddly a little sophmoric and platitudinously P.C.—even when her sound is rocking tough, true and primal. Her guitar sounds dangerous, but her words don’t. The disconnect in poetic feeling between her amazing guitar work and lackluster words is one of the reasons she’s not, up to now, been included on my ipod.

Andrea Gibson

Activist poet Andrea Gibson rations politics into five easy to swallow pills. Her self-titled five track DVD tackles the touchiest issues for queer activists today. From same sex union in “I do,” to rape in “Blue Blanket” and the hypocrisy of the yellow ribbon in her best performance of “For Eli,” Gibson is definitely on top of all the topics.

The Butterfly Effect

While reading the first half of Susan Hawthorne’s newest collection of lesbian poems, The Butterfly Effect, I found myself lost in footnotes. Each poem reads on the right page, while footnotes to the poem fill up the left page. Most of the time, the footnotes are as long as, if not longer, than the actual poem. At first, I thought this was a brilliant idea. Then I started to get slightly annoyed by the footnotes and felt that they were a little pompous and unnecessary.

Pretty Little Mistakes

Apparently back in the day, there was such a thing as a chose your own ending book. Until I picked up Heather McElhatton’s Pretty Little Mistakes, I had never read one. After reading the book, I am glad I hadn’t. I am fairly certain there was never the option to become a drug dealer in Europe or marry the abusive crystal meth addict doctor in Berkeley.

Sister Spit: The Next Generation (4/18/2007)

Some of you may have heard about the original Sister Spit tours in the mid- and late-1990’s. The tours were organized punk-rock band-style: a shoddy van with nights spent sleeping on floors of anarchist collectives and punk houses, but instead of music these tattoo-clad queer folks delivered words from their newly published books.

Berg's Queer Foot Porn

If you’ve lost your sense of humor about sex lately, Berg's Queer Foot Porn will help you get it back. Women are indisputably objectified in mainstream pornography and are constantly told what’s sexually acceptable—leaving little room for reality or a holistic view of sexuality. In a subversive effort to retaliate, Berg and her co-authors created a site full of campy, voyeuristic galleries of foot pornography.

Sticky Fingers: Queers Running the Stage Art Gamut (2/17/2007)

Sticky Fingers featured a medley of performances ranging from spoken word poetry to electro-rock by queer artists from across the eastern seaboard. Held at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, NY, the show was stimulating in its polymorphous perversity, the performances audacious in their satirical elements and guttural verve. Manhattan-based artist Chavisa Woods opened the night with her spoken word piece “No One is Ever Going to Touch You Like This.” Woods’ piece was a powerful inquiry the reality of passion and fantasy.

Rose of No Man's Land

The author of four memoirs—one of which being a graphic novel that has been optioned for cable—a book of poetry, and collected essays, columns, you name it, Michelle Tea’s first work of fiction, Rose of No Man’s Land is an absolute treat. And this goes for those you who haven’t been following her work for the past decade, too. You might call it a contemporary bildungsroman for the young, queer, working class female consciousness, or you might not. Any way you slice it, Tea has written a hilarious, grotesque, sometimes sad, but overall captivating story about a fourteen-year-old girl name Trisha Driscoll and what happens when she meets a girl named Rose.