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Sleep Like Death
Cinderella is dead, but Snow White fights on . . .
New York Times bestselling author Kalynn Bayron makes her highly anticipated return to the realm of fairy tales with this thrilling twist on the classic story of Snow White. Princess Eve was raised with one purpose: to destroy the Knight, an evil sorcerer who terrorizes Queens Bridge with his wicked magic. Her own unique magic--the ability to conjure weapons from nature--makes her a worthy adversary. Far too many of subjects of Queens Bridge have been devastated by the Knight's trickery. As she approaches her seventeenth birthday, Eve is ready to battle. But her mother, Queen Regina, has been acting bizarrely, talking to a strange mirror alone every night. Then a young man claiming to be the Knight's messenger appears and shares a shocking truth about Eve's past. Unsure of who to trust or what to do next, Eve must find the courage to do what she's always done: fight. But will it be enough to save her family and her queendom? -
A Quilt for David
The hidden history of a vulnerable gay man whose life and death were turned into tabloid fodder.
In the early 1990s, eight people living in a small conservative Florida town alleged that Dr. David Acer, their dentist, infected them with HIV. David's gayness, along with his sickly appearance from his own AIDS-related illness, made him the perfect scapegoat and victim of mob mentality. In these early years of the AIDS epidemic, when transmission was little understood, and homophobia rampant, people like David were villainized. Accuser Kimberly Bergalis landed a People magazine cover story, while others went on talk shows and made front page news.
With a poet's eulogistic and psychological intensity, Steven Reigns recovers the life and death of this man who also stands in for so many lives destroyed not only by HIV, but a diseased society that used stigma against the most vulnerable. It's impossible not to make connections between this story and how the twenty-first century pandemic has also been defined by medical misinformation and cultural bias.
Inspired by years of investigative research into the lives of David and those who denounced him, Reigns has stitched together a hauntingly poetic narrative that retraces an American history, questioning the fervor of his accusers, and recuperating a gay life previously shrouded in secrecy and shame.
"Much too long, suffering has been part of our collective queer legacy. We weather the storm of insult to character and seemingly irreconcilable injustice in tandem with the hope that the arc of time will bend towards justice; our time is now. A Quilt for David is a posthumous journal of vindication."--Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends
"A stunning homage to people with AIDS."--Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993
"I found this an incredibly moving book. Reigns deals in hard truths, revisioning one man's life and death, and our collective queer history."--Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
"A Quilt for David is amazing and so powerful, filled with anger and frustration . . . It's an unforgettable book."--Marie Cloutier, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY
"Told in short, occasionally haiku-like entries, Reigns has done what literature should: put the reader into the mind, the suffering, of another human being."--Andrew Holleran, author of Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited
"Steven Reigns lifts David Acer thirty years after his death to show the naked cost of violent, unexamined public opinion around the catastrophe of AIDS. This poetry masterfully documents the tangle of hatred and lies haunting a generation of survivors. I am often grateful for what poems give to me, most especially the ones in this book."--CAConrad, author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration
"This writing is energetic, alive, and uncensored. Through poetry and prose we glean a deep understanding of a life misunderstood and mischaracterized. Reigns goes to the mat to find out what really happened, and with his expert pacing we're right there with him."--Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones
"One of the most important roles a poet can assume is that of emotional historian. Reigns certainly understands that notion in this necessary and genre-bending book."--Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country
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Sold outThe Palace of Eros
Perfect for fans of Circe and Black Sun, this bold and subversive feminist retelling of the Greek myth of Psyche and Eros explores the power of queer joy and freedom. Young, headstrong Psyche has captured the eyes of every suitor in town and far beyond with her tempestuous beauty, which has made her irresistible as a woman yet undesirable as a wife. Secretly, she longs for a life away from the expectations and demands of men. When her father realizes that the future of his family and town will be forever cursed unless he appeases an enraged Aphrodite, he follows the orders of the Oracle, tying Psyche to a rock to be ravaged by a monstrous husband. And yet a monster never arrives. When Eros, nonbinary deity of desire, sees Psyche, she cannot fulfill her promise to her mother Aphrodite to destroy the mortal young woman. Instead, Eros devises a plan to sweep Psyche away to an idyllic palace, hidden from the prying eyes of Aphrodite, Zeus, and the outside world. There, against the dire dictates of Olympus, Eros and Psyche fall in love. Each night, Eros visits Psyche under the cover of impenetrable darkness, where they both experience untold passion and love. But each morning, Eros flies away before light comes to break the spell of the palace that keeps them safe. Before long, Psyche's nights spent in pleasure turn to days filled with doubts, as she grapples with the cost of secrecy and the complexities of freedom and desire. Restless and spurred by her sisters to reveal Eros's true nature, she breaks her trust and forces a reckoning that tests them both--and transforms the very heavens. Told in bold and sparkling prose from "a brilliant and luminous writer" (Madeline Miller, New York Times bestselling author), The Palace of Eros transports us to a magical world imbued by divine forces as well as everyday realities, where palaces glitter with magic even as ordinary people fight for freedom in a society that fears the unknown.Sold out -
Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor But I Can't Relax
The breakout poetry collection in a multiform, poetic conversation between queer and trans artists and writers. Like meeting under a disco ball, or listening to Arthur Russell on the Staten Island Ferry, Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can't Relax proposes reading as a form of friendship. Conversational, inquisitive, and scrutinizing, this book goes out to anyone who has loved someone they'll never get to meet. "Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can't Relax gives me the same kind of excitement and imaginative heat that obsessing over the glossy photo middles of queer biographies does. These poems collectively form a watery slide between past and present, care and anxiety, form and formlessness, verb and noun. We can live large in the slippage between the relational and the overwhelmingly mysterious. It would be so easy to fall into a nostalgic hole, but charles isn't that kind of poet. Rather, we dance (or write) into the polymorphous dawn, "the extended cut, a technology for sensing forever." I'm grateful to have these poems for how they welcome us in through surreal syntax that then somehow forms a new grammar where metabolic harmony with cats and capybaras, zinnias and rambutans, is the norm, is the gay heaven." - Stacy Szymaszek "The poems in Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can't Relax possess astonishing depths of love in their arrangements of words and sounds, in their amusement with and within exuberant complexities, and in their utter resistance to giving in to harm and harm's byways. The long title poem, on and for and with Arthur Russell, is a cascade of forms and voices channeled through dance and the untouch into the continuousness of collective knowledge, movement and grief in the face of devastation. And then like Martin Wong, among many other sources of art and hope, charles theonia digs the way firemen smell, listens for sounds waiting for an open mouth, and knows 'Begin can be replaced with any word that brings you closer.' This book is a companion for life." - Anselm Berrigan "Lucky for us we dream in landscapes / beyond our experience," writes charles theonia in the long poem opening their electric debut collection, and readers are all the luckier for it. Brimming with a sense of the possible, among its many offerings are 'other arrangements of the self;' the dance of bodies (textual and not) entangled in sound; portals to multiple elsewheres--'Utopia: a compulsion to keep remaking this world.' This world can't become on its own, hence its gregarious erotics. Jump in!" - Mónica de la Torre "charles theonia's poems are everything!" - Tourmaline "Nothing is not gay, and neither space nor time can prevent people from touching in charles theonia's new collection of poems, Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor But I Can't Relax, in which language is motioned to meet desire, to rouse it, spark it, make it public and then make it echo--because why shouldn't it? theonia's poems are for creatures of feeling who want both/and. They arouse, resound and satisfy." - Shiv KotechaSold out -
The Dead Don't Need Reminding: In Search of Fugitives, Mississippi, and Black TV Nerd Shit
This brilliant, adult nonfiction debut from the acclaimed MG author and poet weaves two personal narratives of recovery and reclamation, spliced with a dazzle of pop-culture The Dead Don't Need Reminding is a braided story of Julian Randall's return from the cliff edge of a harrowing depression and his determination to retrace the hustle of a white-passing grandfather to the Mississippi town from which he was driven amid threats of tar and feather. Alternatively wry, lyrical, and heartfelt, Randall transforms pop culture moments into deeply personal explorations of grief, family, and the American way. He envisions his fight to stay alive through a striking medley of media ranging from Into the Spiderverse and Jordan Peele movies to BoJack Horseman and the music of Odd Future. Pulsing with life, sharp, and wickedly funny, The Dead Don't Need Reminding is Randall's journey to get his ghost story back. -
Sold outQueer Love in Color
A photographic celebration of the love and relationships of queer people of color by a former New York Times multimedia journalist "Thank you, Jamal Jordan, for showing the world what true love looks like."--Billy Porter Queer Love in Color features photographs and stories of couples and families across the United States and around the world. This singular, moving collection offers an intimate look at what it means to live at the intersections of queer and POC identities today, and honors an inclusive vision of love, affection, and family across the spectrum of gender, race, and age.Sold out -
Sold outHot Boy Summer
Four gay teens in Texas have the summer of their lives while discovering important truths about realness, belonging, and friendship in this joyful young adult contemporary novel for fans of Adam Silvera and Becky Albertalli. Mac has never really felt like he belonged. Definitely not at home--his dad's politics and toxic masculinity make a real connection impossible. He thought he fit in on the baseball team, but that's only because he was pretending to be someone he wasn't. Finding his first gay friend, Cammy, was momentous; finally, he could be his authentic self around someone else. But as it turned out, not really. Cammy could be cruel, and his "advice" often came off way harsh. And then, Mac meets Flor, who shows him that you can be both fierce and kind, and Mikey, who is superhot and might maybe think the same about him. Over the course of one hot, life-changing summer, Mac will stand face-to-face with desire, betrayal, and letting go of shame, which will lead to some huge discoveries about the realness of truly belonging. Told in Mac's infectious, joyful, gay AF voice, Hot Boy Summer serves a tale as important as hope itself: four gay teens doing what they can to connect and have the fiercest summer of their lives. New friendships will be forged, hot boys will be kissed...and girl, the toxic will be detoxed.Sold out -
The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams
"On these pages, Eve Adams rises up, loves, rebels--her times, eerily resembling our own." --Joan Nestle, cofounder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives and author of A Restricted Country
- 2022 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist Historian Jonathan Ned Katz uncovers the forgotten story of radical lesbian Eve Adams and her long-lost book Lesbian LoveBorn Chawa Zloczewer into a Jewish family in Poland, Eve Adams emigrated to the United States in 1912, took a new name, befriended anarchists, sold radical publications, and ran lesbian-and-gay-friendly speakeasies in Chicago and New York. Then, in 1925, Adams risked all to write and publish a book titled Lesbian Love.
Adams's bold activism caught the attention of the young J. Edgar Hoover and the US Bureau of Investigation, leading to her surveillance and arrest. Adams was convicted of publishing an obscene book and of attempted sex with a policewoman sent to entrap her. Adams was jailed and then deported back to Europe, and ultimately murdered by Nazis in Auschwitz. In The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams, acclaimed historian Jonathan Ned Katz has recovered the extraordinary story of an early, daring activist.Carefully distinguishing fact from fiction, Katz presents the first biography of Adams, and the publisher reprints the long-lost text of Adams's rare, unique book Lesbian Love
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Sold outDon't Be a Drag
Two rival drag kings competing for a crown might just win each other's hearts.
Backstage at the gay bar where Beau performs, Briar just wants to be a fly on the wall, but she can't stand by when the cute but conceited drag king Spencer Read tries to put down another up-and-coming performer. To prove to him that even a brand-new performer could knock him off his pedestal, Briar signs up for the annual drag king competition. There's just one flaw in her plan: Briar has never done drag before. With the help of her brother and a few new friends, Briar becomes Edgar Allan Foe, a drag king hellbent on taking Spencer down. But unless she can learn how to shake her anxiety and perform, she doesn't stand a chance of winning Drag King of the Year, overcoming her depression and inner demons, or avoiding falling for her enemy, who might not be so bad after all.
When eighteen-year-old Briar Vincent's mental health takes a turn for the worst, her parents send her to spend the summer in New York City with her older brother, Beau, also known as the drag queen Bow Regard.Sold out -
Thirsty: A Novel
From Jas Hammonds, award-winning author of We Deserve Monuments, comes an unflinching novel about addiction that Courtney Summers, New York Times bestselling author of Sadie and I'm the Girl, called "sensitively wrought and gorgeously written."
It's the summer before college and eighteen-year-old Blake Brenner and her girlfriend, Ella, have one goal: join the mysterious and exclusive Serena Society. The sorority promises status and lifelong connections to a network of powerful, trailblazing women of color. Ella's acceptance is a sure thing--she's the daughter of a Serena alum. Blake, however, has a lot more to prove. As a former loner from a working-class background, Blake lacks Ella's pedigree and confidence. Luckily, she finds courage at the bottom of a liquor bottle. When she drinks, she's bold, funny, and unstoppable--and the Serenas love it. But as pledging intensifies, so does Blake's drinking, until it's seeping into every corner of her life. Ella assures Blake that she's fine; partying hard is what it takes to make the cut . . . But success has never felt so much like drowning. With her future hanging in the balance and her past dragging her down, Blake must decide how far she's willing to go to achieve her glittering dreams of success--and how much of herself she's willing to lose in the process. -
This Has Always Been a War: The Radicalization of a Working Class Queer
Capitalism has infiltrated every aspect of our personal, social, economic, and sexual lives. By examining the politics of gender, environment and sexuality, we can see the ways straight, cis, white, and especially male upper-class people control and subvert the other--queer, non-binary, BIPOC, and female bodies--in order to keep the working lower classes divided. Patriarchy and classism are forms of systemic violence which ensure that the main commodity of capitalism--a large, disposable, cheap, and ideally subjugated work force--is readily available. There is a lot wrong with the ways we live, work, and treat each other. In essays that are both accessible and inspiring, Lori Fox examines their confrontations with the capitalist patriarchy through their experiences as a queer, non-binary, working-class farm hand, labourer, bartender, bush-worker, and road dog, exploring the ugly places where issues of gender, sexuality, class, and the environment intersect. In applying the micro to the macro, demonstrating how the personal is political and vice versa, Fox exposes the flaws in believing that this is the only way our society can or should work. Brash, topical, and passionate, This Has Always Been a War is not only a collection of essays, but a series of dispatches from the combative front lines of our present-day culture.Sold out -
Bodies and Barriers: Queer Activists on Health
LGBT people pervasively experience health disparities, affecting every part of their bodies and lives. Yet many are still grappling to understand the mutually reinforcing health care challenges that lead to worsened health outcomes. Bodies and Barriers informs health care professionals, students in health professions, policymakers, and fellow activists about these challenges, providing insights and a road map for action that could improve queer health.
Through artfully articulated, data-informed essays by twenty-six well-known and emerging queer activists--including Alisa Bowman, Jack Harrison-Quintana, Liz Margolies, Robyn Ochs, Sean Strub, Justin Sabia-Tanis, Ryan Thoreson, Imani Woody, and more--Bodies and Barriers illuminates the health challenges LGBT people experience throughout their lives and challenges conventional wisdom about health care delivery. It probes deeply into the roots of the disparities faced by those in the LGBT community and provides crucial information to fight for health equity and better health outcomes.
The contributors to;Bodies and Barriers look for tangible improvements, drawing from the history of HIV/AIDS in the U.S. and from struggles against health care bias and discrimination. At a galvanizing moment when LGBT people have experienced great strides in lived equality, but our health as a community still lags, here is an indispensable blueprint for change by some of the most passionate and important health activists in the LGBT movement today.
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Gay Girl Prayers
A collection of poetry reclaiming Catholic prayers and biblical passages to empower girls, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
The extreme level of sass in Emily Austin's Gay Girl Prayers does not mean that this collection is irreverent. On the contrary, in rewriting Bible verses to affirm and uplift queer, feminist, and trans realities, Austin invites readers into a giddy celebration of difference and a tender appreciation for the lives and perspectives of "strange women."
Packed with zingy one liners, sexual innuendo, self-respect, U-Hauling, and painfully earnest declarations of love, this is gayness at its best, harnessed to a higher purpose and ready to fight the powers that be.
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Queer, There, and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World
A New York Public Library Best Book of 2017 * A Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Book for Teens 2017
This first-ever LGBTQ history book of its kind for young adults will appeal to fans of fun, empowering pop-culture books like Rad American Women A-Z and Notorious RBG. Three starred reviews!
World history has been made by countless lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals--and you've never heard of many of them.
Queer author and activist Sarah Prager delves deep into the lives of 23 people who fought, created, and loved on their own terms. From high-profile figures like Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt to the trailblazing gender-ambiguous Queen of Sweden and a bisexual blues singer who didn't make it into your history books, these astonishing true stories uncover a rich queer heritage that encompasses every culture, in every era.
By turns hilarious and inspiring, the beautifully illustrated Queer, There, and Everywhere is for anyone who wants the real story of the queer rights movement.
A Junior Library Guild Selection
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Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us
"I know I'm not a man ... and I've come to the conclusion that I'm probably not a woman, either.... The trouble is, we're living in a world that insists we be one or the other." With these words, Kate Bornstein ushers readers on a funny, fearless, and wonderfully scenic journey across the terrains of gender and identity. With a new introduction by the author
On one level, Gender Outlaw details Bornstein's transformation from heterosexual male to lesbian woman, from a one-time IBM salesperson to a playwright and performance artist. But this particular coming-of-age story is also a provocative investigation into our notions of male and female, from a self-described nonbinary transfeminine diesel femme dyke who never stops questioning our cultural assumptions. Gender Outlaw was decades ahead of its time when it was first published in 1994. Now, some twenty-odd years later, this book stands as both a classic and a still-revolutionary work--one that continues to push us gently but profoundly to the furthest borders of the gender frontier. -
Sold outCovenant
Discover Lysandra Vuong's hit supernatural action Webtoon Covenant in print for the first time ever. "If you need a comic that blends action fantasy with mythology, comedy, and punk gothic fashion, Covenant is wildly enjoyable." -Women Write About Comics In a world where priests are decked out in holy tattoos and brandish machine guns in the face of demons, a powerful exorcist and a mysterious boy cross paths . . . in a college classroom. Erza's faith is waning when God intervenes and sends him on a mission to protect Sunny, an outwardly normal human, from demonic forces. Looks can be deceiving, however, as Sunny proves to have hidden secrets and a bloody past nipping at his heels. Between Erza's sunny sarcasm, and Sunny's closed-off distant demeanor, the two struggle to find any common ground to bridge the gap. Yet, as much as the two bicker and retain distance, neither can help but be drawn to the other. With his church under scrutiny and the threat of war on the horizon, will Ezra find his conviction in time to keep Sunny safe? Will Sunny even accept his help? Or will they both suffer the consequences From debut creator LySandra Vuong comes the first volume of the supernatural action webcomic that explores religious faith, a slow burn queer romance, the weight of destiny, and what it means to be good in a world plagued by demons. This volume collects episodes 1-18 of the hit WEBTOON comic Covenant.Sold out