LGBTQIA2+ Pride Month: eBooks

Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was the directive of President Clinton's 1993 military policy regarding gay and lesbian soldiers. This official silence continued a collective amnesia about the patriotic service and courageous sacrifices of homosexual troops. Ask and Tell recovers these lost voices, offering a rich chronicle of the history of gay and lesbian service in the U.S. military from World War II to the Iraq War. These veteran voices--harrowing, heroic, and on the record--reveal the extraordinary stories of ordinary Americans, men and women who simply did their duty and served their country in the face of homophobia, prejudice, and enemy fire.

In this thorough analysis, Leigh Moscowitz examines how prominent news outlets presented the gay marriage issue from 2003 to 2012, a time when intense news coverage focused unprecedented attention on gay and lesbian life. Building on in-depth interviews with activists and a comprehensive, longitudinal study of news stories, Moscowitz investigates these leaders' aims and how their frames, tactics, and messages evolved over time. In the end, media coverage of the gay marriage debate both aided and undermined the cause.

Outsports co-founder Cyd Zeigler tells the story of how sport has been radically transformed for LGBT athletes in the past four years. When Cyd Zeigler started writing about LGBT sports issues in 1999, no one wanted to talk about them. Today, this is a central conversation in American society that reverberates throughout the sports world and beyond. As a key figure in the LGBT sports movement, Zeigler tells the story of how sports have transformed for LGBT athletes, diving into key moments and issues that have shaped sports for LGBT people today.

The Gay Agenda: Claiming Space, Identity, and Justice claims and reclaims the language of "agenda" and turns the rhetoric of the religious right on its ear. The contributors provide insightful and sharp commentary on gay agendas for human rights, marriage and family, cultural influences, schooling and education, and politics and law.

In his gripping new book, Walter Frank offers an in-depth look at the court cases that were pivotal in establishing gay rights. But he also tells the story of those individuals who were willing to make waves by fighting for those rights, taking enormous personal risks at a time when the tide of public opinion was against them. Chronicling the past half-century of gay and lesbian history, Law and the Gay Rights Story offers a unique perspective on familiar events like the Stonewall Riots, the AIDS crisis, and the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

This timely book seeks to demonstrate the coherence of lesbian and gay studies. It introduces the reader to the principal inter-disciplinary approaches in the field and critically assesses their strengths and weaknesses. The gay and lesbian movement has emerged as a major political and cultural force. It poses a series of far reaching questions about the organization of identity, the operation of power and the limits of tolerance.

Engaging the whole spectrum of public-policy issues affecting gays and lesbians from a humanistic and philosophical approach, Richard Mohr uses the tools of his trade to assess the logic and ethics of gay rights. Focusing on ideas and values, Mohr's nuanced case for legal and social acceptance applies widely held ethical principles to various issues, including same-sex marriage, AIDS, and gays in the military.

Over four thousand gay and lesbian couples married in the city of San Francisco in 2004. In Queering Marriage, Katrina Kimport uses in-depth interviews with participants in the San Francisco weddings to argue that same-sex marriage cannot be understood as simply entrenching or contesting heterosexual privilege. Instead, she contends, these new legally sanctioned relationships can both reinforce as well as disrupt the association of marriage and heterosexuality. By posing the question--can queers "queer" marriage?--Kimport provides a nuanced, accessible, and theoretically grounded framework for understanding the powerful effect of heterosexual expectations on both sexual and social categories.

Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as "normal" or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary fields inform each other. McRuer examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and re-write those identities in order to insist that another world is possible.

This book of nineteen original essays by activists and academics documents and analyses the dramatic changes in lesbian and gay experience over the last twenty years. It charts the growth of lesbian and gay studies, and examines key issues around communities, identities, relationships, sexualities and politics.

Using interviews and other ethnographic materials from Texas and California, School's Out explores how teachers struggle to create a classroom persona that balances who they are and what's expected of them in a climate of pervasive homophobia. Catherine Connell's examination of the tension between the rhetoric of gay pride and the professional ethic of discretion insightfully connects and considers complicating factors, from local law and politics to gender privilege.

An in-depth look at America's changing gay neighborhoods. Gay neighborhoods, like the legendary Castro District in San Francisco and New York's Greenwich Village, have long provided sexual minorities with safe havens in an often unsafe world. But as our society increasingly accepts gays and lesbians into the mainstream, are "gayborhoods" destined to disappear? Amin Ghaziani provides an incisive look at the origins of these unique cultural enclaves, the reasons why they are changing today, and their prospects for the future.

In Toward Stonewall, Nicholas Edsall provides a much-needed synthesis, drawing upon both scholarly and popular writings to chart the development of homosexual subcultures in the modern era and the uneasy place they have occupied in Western society. Toward Stonewall illuminates not only the subcultures that are its primary subject but the larger societies from which they emerged.

Although transgender people are increasingly represented in academic studies and popular culture, they rarely have the opportunity to add their own voices to the conversation. In this remarkable book, Jackson Shultz records the stories of more than thirty Americans who identify as transgender. Giving voice to a diverse group of individuals, the book raises questions about gender, acceptance, and unconditional love.

Based on 150 in-depth interviews, this text brings together the voices of sex- and gender-diverse people who speak with absolute candor about their lives.

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.

Asexuality can be defined as an enduring lack of sexual attraction. Thus, asexual individuals do not find (and perhaps never have) others sexually appealing. The time is right for a better understanding of this sexual orientation, written by an expert in the field who has conducted studies on asexuality and who has provided important contributions to understanding asexuality. This timely resource will be one of the first books written on the topic for general readers, and the first to look at the historical, biological, and social aspects of asexuality.

"Celluloid Activist "is the biography of gay-rights giant Vito Russo, the man who wrote "The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies," commonly regarded as the foundational text of gay and lesbian film studies and one of the first to be widely read. A founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and cofounder of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Russo lived at the center of the most important gay cultural turning points in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Contrary to popular notions, today's LGBT movement did not begin with the Stonewall riots in 1969. Long before Stonewall, there was Franklin Kameny (1925-2011), one of the most significant figures in the gay rights movement. In Gay Is Good, Long collects Kameny's historically rich letters, revealing some of the early stirrings of today's politically powerful LGBT movement. This volume collects approximately 150 letters from 1958 to 1975, a critical period in Kameny's life during which he evolved from a victim of the law to a vocal opponent of the law, to the voice of the law itself.

One of the highest-paid studio contract directors of his time, George Cukor was nominated five times for an Academy Award as Best Director. In publicity and mystique he was dubbed the "women's director" for guiding the most sensitive leading ladies to immortal performances. But behind the "women's director" label lurked the open secret that set Cukor apart from a generally macho fraternity of directors: he was a homosexual, a rarity among the top echelon. Patrick McGilligan's biography reveals how Cukor persevered within a system fraught with bigotry while becoming one of Hollywood's consummate filmmakers.

In The Masks of Mary Renault, Zilboorg explores Renault's identity as a gifted writer and a sexual woman in a society in which neither of these identities was clear or easy. Although Renault's life was anything but ordinary, this fact has often been obscured by her writing. The daughter of a doctor, she grew up comfortably and attended a boarding school in Bristol. She received a degree in English from St. Hugh's College in Oxford in 1928, but she chose not to pursue an academic career. Instead, she decided to attend the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, where she trained to be a nurse. It was during her nurse's training that Renault met Julie Mullard, who became her lifelong companion. This important lesbian relationship both resolved and posed many problems for Renault, not the least of which was how she was to write about issues at once intensely personal and socially challenging.

In 1959, the year Terry Galloway turned nine, the voices of everyone she loved began to disappear. Ever since that first real-life performance, Galloway has used theater, whether onstage or off, to defy and transcend her reality. With disarming candor, she writes about her mental breakdowns, her queer identity, and living in a silent, quirky world populated by unforgettable characters.

In Montgomery Clift, Queer Star she maps the development of Clift's subversive image over the span of his entire career, approaching Clift as a queer signifier who defied normative cultural structures. From the sexually ambivalent ""beautiful boy"" of his early films, to the seemingly asexual, transgressive, and often distressed man of his last years, Girelli argues that Clift shows remarkable consistency as a star: his presence always challenges established notions of virility, sexuality, and bodily ""normality.""

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.

By all accounts, David Kaufman, M.D., had a good life--he was married to a woman he loved, had three children, and a fulfilling career as a radiologist. But as the years passed, he realized that he could no longer deny who he was--he was a gay man. However, before he could tell his wife, she told him she needed to talk to him about an important issue. It was then that she confided in him that she had accepted the growing awareness that she was gay. Her announcement surprised him, but made it easier for him to tell her he, too, was gay. In Untying the Knot, David Kaufman shares a unique story of coming out and how he and his former wife have helped each other on their separate journeys into new lives.