April Ashley was a trailblazing figure in the history of transgender rights and advocacy. Born in 1935 in Liverpool, Ashley was assigned male at birth, but knew from a young age that she identified as a woman. At the age of sixteen, April left...

A man masquerading as a lesbian in Spain's Golden Age fiction. A hermaphrodite's encounters with the Spanish Inquisition. Debates about virility in the national literature of postrevolutionary Mexico. The work of contemporary artists Reinaldo Arenas, Severo Sarduy, and Maria Luisa Bemberg. The public persona...

This book discusses the significance of late twentieth century and early twenty first century American fiction written in response to the AIDS crisis and interrogates how sexual identity is depicted and constructed textually. Pearl develops Freudian psychoanalytic theory in a complex account of the...

The Public Lives of Gay Men from Stonewall to the Queer Generation The civil rights of LGBTQ people have slowly yet steadily strengthened since the Stonewall Riots of June, 1969. Despite enormous opposition from some political segments and the catastrophic effects of the AIDS crisis,...

Sexuality and Work in Modern America A masterful history of the LGBT workforce in AmericaWorkplaces have traditionally been viewed as "straight spaces" in which queer people passed. As a result, historians have directed limited attention to the experiences of queer people on the job....

In his 16th book, eyewitness gay activist Jack Fritscher, the lover and biographer of Robert Mapplethorpe, breaks the trance of received gay history in this fact-rich memoir of how "The Boys in the Band Played On" from the Titanic 1970s to 1999. Built on...

Imagined Histories of Sexual TechnologiesInvestigating and reimagining the origin story of the sex doll through the tale of the sailor's dames de voyage. The sex doll and its high-tech counterpart the sex robot have gone mainstream, as both the object of consumer desire and the...

New Queer Visibility & The Lesbian Normal The twenty-first century has seen LGBTQ+ rights emerge at the forefront of public discourse and national politics in ways that would once have been hard to imagine. This book offers a unique and layered account of the...

Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s-1990s explores the history of gay, lesbian and non-heterosexual people in the Communist Party in the United States. The Communist Party banned LGBT people from membership beginning in 1938 when it cast them off as degenerates. It persisted in...

The first monograph on Darrel Ellis' expressive transformations of photographic memory. Known for his experimental approach to painting and photography, New York–based mixed-media artist Darrel Ellis (1958–92) explored the psychic terrain between surface, memory and lyric self-representation. Working in part from his late father’s...

Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition Ten years on, Jasbir K. Puar's pathbreaking Terrorist Assemblages remains one of the most influential queer theory texts and continues to reverberate across multiple political landscapes, activist projects, and scholarly pursuits. Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation,...

A wide-ranging study on the reasons why queer individuals migrate to Europe and the socio-political frameworks they navigate.  Europe is a popular destination for LGBTQ people seeking to escape discrimination and persecution. Yet, while European institutions have done much to promote the legal equality...

Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling  Many of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who immigrated to the US beginning in the 1870s worked as peddlers. Men were able to transgress Syrian norms related to marriage practices while they were traveling, while Syrian...

Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago In Feels Right Kemi Adeyemi presents an ethnography of how black queer women in Chicago use dance to assert their physical and affective rights to the city. Adeyemi stages the book in queer dance...

Over the course of the last half century, queer history has developed as a collaborative project involving academic researchers, community scholars, and the public. Initially rejected by most colleges and universities, queer history was sustained for many years by community-based contributors and audiences. Academic...

Words of Change: QUEER offers a curated collection of thought-provoking quotes and passages from the writings and speeches of activists and allies in the LGBTQIA+ community, with a focus on diverse and previously unheard voices. Compiled by activist and journalist Coco Romack, this highly...

The First Decade of RuPaul's Drag Race and the First Century of Queer Life A definitive deep-dive into queer history and culture with hit reality show RuPaul's Drag Race as a touchstone, by the creators of the pop culture blog Tom and Lorenzo. From the singular voices...

Leonard "Len" Keith and Joseph "Cub" Coates grew up in the rural New Brunswick village of Havelock in the early 20th century. The two were neighbours, and they clearly developed an inseparable relationship. Len was an amateur photographer and automobile enthusiast who went on...

Sexuality, Photography, and Cultural Difference : Selected essays by Sunil Gupta We Were Here: Sexuality, Photography, and Cultural Difference offers an unparalleled first hand account of the influential photographer and curator Sunil Gupta's writing and critical inquiry since the 1970s. Newspaper articles, speeches, and...

Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin In Kids on the Street Joseph Plaster explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States. Tracing the history of the downtown lodging house districts...

The Anne Lister Diaries, 1833-36: Land, Gender and Authority A unique and thrilling insight into the brilliant mind of Anne Lister' Sally Wainwright, creator of Gentleman JackFemale Fortune is the book which inspired Sally Wainwright to write Gentleman Jack, now a major drama series for...

A Story of Glitter, Glam Rock, and Loving Lou Reed In this funny and poignant memoir and cultural history, the television personality, columnist, and author of Drag pays homage to Lou Reed's ground-breaking album Transformer on its fiftieth anniversary and recalls its influence on his...

A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York "This true-crime gem - Green's first full-length work, sensitively and incisively narrated by Pittu - is an illuminating and deeply humanizing testament to victims overlooked by the media and forgotten in cultural...

Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages A fascinating history of marginalized identities in the medieval world While the term "intersectionality" was coined in 1989, the existence of marginalized identities extends back over millennia. Byzantine Intersectionality reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval...

Kind Like Marsha celebrates 14 amazing and inspirational LGBTQ+ people throughout history. Fan favourites like Harvey Milk, Sylvia Rivera, and Audre Lorde are joined by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Frida Kahlo, and more in this striking collection. With a focus on a...

A Social Revolution Begins Ireland is the first country in the world to extend civil marriage to same sex couples through a public vote. The marriage equality referendum saw record numbers turn out to register their votes including Irish emigrants who returned from around...

A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a...

50 Influential Cross-Dressers, Impersonators, Name-Changers, and Game-Changers Meet the unsung sheroes of history: the diverse, defiant and daring (wo)men who changed the rules, and their identities, to get sh*t done. You'll encounter Kit Cavanagh, the swaggering Irish dragoon who was the first woman to...

2022 Lambda Literary Award Finalist  The previously untold stories of the life of the leading subject in David France's How To Survive A Plague, Peter Staley, including his continuing activism In 1987, somebody shoved a flyer into the hand of Peter Staley: massive AIDS demonstration,...

Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis An enthralling and incisive anthology of personal essays on the persistent impact of the AIDS crisis on queer lives.Every queer person lives with the trauma of AIDS, and this plays out intergenerationally. Usually we hear...