Pride Guide

"Part political thriller, part meditation on social change, part love story, The Children of Harvey Milk tells the epic stories of courageous men and women around the world who came forward to make their voices heard during the struggle for equal rights. Featuring LGBTQ icons from America to Ireland, Britain to New Zealand; Reynolds documents their successes and failures, heartwarming stories of acceptance and heartbreaking stories of ostracism, demonstrating the ways in which an individual can change the views and voting behaviors of those around them. The book also includes rare vignettes of LGBTQ leaders in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean who continue to fight for equality in spite of threats, violence, and homophobia. A touchstone narrative of the tumultuous journey towards LGBTQ rights, The Children of Harvey Milk is a must-read for anyone with an interest in social change." Amazon.com.

This volume presents a collection of the most recent knowledge on the relationship between gender and fashion in historical and contemporary contexts. Through fourteen essays divided into three segments—how dress creates, disrupts, and transcends gender—the essays investigate gender issues through the lens of fashion. Crossing Gender Boundaries first examines how clothing has been, and continues to be, used to create and maintain the binary gender division that has come to permeate Western and westernized cultures. Next, it explores how dress can be used to contest and subvert binary gender expectations, before a final section that considers the meaning of gender and how dress can transcend it, focusing on unisex and genderless clothing. The essays consider how fashion can both constrict and free gender expression, explore the ways dress and gender are products of one other, and illuminate the construction of gender through social norms. Readers will find that through analysis of the relationship between gender and fashion, they gain a better understanding of the world around them.

In Ethereal Queer, Amy Villarejo offers a historically engaged, theoretically sophisticated, and often personal account of how TV representations of queer life have changed as the medium has evolved since the 1950s. Challenging the widespread view that LGBT characters did not make a sustained appearance on television until the 1980s, she draws on innovative readings of TV shows and network archives to reveal queer television’s lengthy, rich, and varied history. Villarejo goes beyond concerns about representational accuracy. She tracks how changing depictions of queer life, in programs from Our Miss Brooks to The L Word, relate to transformations in business models and technologies, including modes of delivery and reception such as cable, digital video recording, and online streaming. In so doing, she provides a bold new way to understand the history of television.

Available as an e-book and in print.
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, its primary target was the outright exclusion of women from particular jobs. Over time, the Act’s scope of protection has expanded to prevent not only discrimination based on sex but also discrimination based on expression of gender identity. Kimberly Yuracko uses specific court decisions to identify the varied principles that underlie this expansion. Filling a significant gap in law literature, this timely book clarifies an issue of increasing concern to scholars interested in gender issues and the law.

At once a memoir, a call to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and an argument for queer solidarity across borders, this book tells the story of how novelist and activist Sarah Schulman's became aware of how issues of the Israeli occupation of Palestine were tied to her own gay and lesbian politics.

his open access book examines the significance of gay neighborhoods (or ‘gayborhoods’) from critical periods of formation during the gay liberation and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s, to proven durability through the HIV/AIDS pandemic during the 1980s and 1990s, to a mature plateau since 2000. The book provides a framework for contemplating the future form and function of gay neighborhoods. Social and cultural shifts within gay neighborhoods are used as a framework for understanding the decades-long struggle for LGBTQ+ rights and equality. Resulting from gentrification, weakening social stigma, and enhanced rights for LGBTQ+ people, gay neighborhoods have recently become “less gay,” following a 50-year period of resilience. Meanwhile, other neighborhoods are becoming “more gay,” due to changing preferences of LGBTQ+ individuals and a propensity for LGBTQ+ families to form community in areas away from established gayborhoods. The current ‘plateau’ in the evolution of gay neighborhoods is characterized by generational differences—between Baby Boom pioneers and Millennials who favour broad inclusivity—signaling various possible trajectories for the future ‘afterlife’ of these important LGBTQ+ urban spaces. The complicating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic provides a point of comparison for lessons learned from gay neighborhoods and the LGBTQ+ community that bravely endured the onset of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in various disciplines—including sociology, social work, anthropology, gender and sexuality, LGTBQ+ and queer studies, as well as urban geography, architecture, and city planning—and to policymakers and advocates concerned with LGBTQ+ rights and social justice.

Love Don’t Need a Reason focuses on Callen’s most important and lasting legacy: his music. A witness to the overlooked last years of Gay Liberation and a major figure in the early years of the AIDS crisis, Michael Callen chronicled these experiences in song. A community organizer, activist, author, and architect of the AIDS self-empowerment movement, he literally changed the way we have sex in an epidemic when he co-authored one of the first safe-sex guides in 1983. A gifted singer, songwriter, and performer, he also made gay music for gay people and used music to educate and empower people with AIDS. Listening again to his music allows us to hear the shifting dynamics of American families, changing notions of masculinity, gay migration to urban areas, the sexual politics of Gay Liberation, and HIV/AIDS activism. Using extensive archival materials and newly-conducted oral history interviews with Callen’s friends, family, and fellow musicians, Matthew J. Jones reintroduces Callen to the history of LGBTQIA+ music and places Callen’s music at the center of his important activist work.

In the world of My Gay Middle Ages, Chaucer and Boethius are the secret-sharers of A.W. Strouse’s “gay lifestyle.” Where many scholars of the Middle Ages would “get in from behind” on cultural history, Strouse instead does a “reach around.” He eschews academic “queer theory” as yet another tedious, normative framework, and writes in the long, fruity tradition of irresponsible, homo-medievalism (a lineage that includes luminaries like Oscar Wilde, who was sustained by his amateur readings of Dante and Abelard during the darks days of his incarceration for crimes of “gross indecency”). Strouse experiences medieval literature and philosophy as a part of his everyday life, and in these prose poems he makes the case for regarding the Middle Ages as a kind of technology of self-preservation, a posture through which to spiritualize the petty indignities of modern urban life. With a Warholian flair for insouciant name-dropping and a Steinian appetite for syntactic perversion, Strouse monumentalizes the medieval within the contemporary and the contemporary within the medieval.

Spaces are not exterior to bodies. They influence and affect the way bodies exist in the world. A quarry is an unnatural place within a natural territory. At any moment, it can be abandoned. A body is not separate from the spaces it inhabits. They exist together, in a mutual state of interrelation and instability. Quarry relays a year in the life of a body in transition as it changes with other bodies; human, animal, and mineral. It examines queer social spaces and contested natural spaces, asking how they affect each other. Using evocative metaphor and refreshing language, these poems make bodily experience new. Tanis Franco eschews traditional narratives of the queer and transgender body, bringing nuanced ideas to an ongoing literary and philosophical conversation. Their strong sense of location and landscape is interwoven with sensual language and impeccable craft, creating a unique and distinctive voice.

Queer Ancient Ways advocates a profound unlearning of colonial/modern categories as a pathway to the discovery of new forms and theories of queerness in the most ancient of sources (thereby also unlearning queer theory as it has been understood in contemporary, primarily Anglo-American and western European contexts). In this radically unconventional work, Zairong Xiang investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves. An exercise in decolonial learning-to-learn from non-Western and non-modern cosmologies, Xiang’s work uncovers a rich queer imaginary that has been all-but-lost to modern thought, in the process critically revealing the operations of modern/colonial systems of gender/sexuality and knowledge-formation that have functioned, from the Conquista de America in the sixteenth century to the present, to keep these systems in obscurity.

Queer People of Color in Higher Education (QPOC) is a comprehensive work discussing the lived experiences of queer people of color on college campuses. This book will create conversations and provide resources to best support students, faculty, and staff of color who are people of color and identify as LGBTQ. The edited volume covers emerging issues that are affecting higher education around the country. Leading researchers and practitioners have remarkable writing that concisely summarizes current literature while also adding new ways to address issues of injustice related to racism, sexism, homophobia, heterosexism, and transphobia.

From pornography to autobiography, from the Cold War to the sexual revolution, from rural roots and mythologies to the queer meccas of Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, The Romance of Transgression in Canada is a history of sexual representation on the large and small screen in English Canada and Quebec. Thomas Waugh identifies the queerness that has emerged at the centre of our national sex-obsessed cinema, filling a gap in the scholarly literature. In Part One he explores the explosive canon of artists such as Norman McLaren, Claude Jutra, Colin Campbell, Paul Wong, John Greyson, Patricia Rozema, Lea Pool, Bruce Labruce, Esther Valiquette, Marc Paradis, and Mirha-Soleil Ross. Part Two is an encyclopaedia of short essays covering 340 filmmakers, video artists, and institutions. The Romance of Transgression in Canada is both a scholarly account and a celebration of Canadian LGBTQ films - moving images that have scandalized conservative politicans, but are the envy of queer cultural festivals around the world.

Available as an e-book and as a physical resource. In the past three years, Canada has witnessed landmark court rulings in Ontario, B.C. and Quebec making it legal for gay men and lesbian women to marry. Legislation in the Netherlands and Belgium have also extended marriage to same-sex couples. Legal challenges before the U.S. courts in Hawaii, Vermont, Massachusetts, Oregon and California have had the same goal in mind. The same-sex marriage phenomenon is characterized on the one hand by intense personal joys and on the other by long-standing activism and historic legal reasoning. Same-Sex Marriage tells both stories: the experiences of couples who have been able to marry, and the stories behind the scenes that explain how the legal battle has finally been won. Using legal history and interviews, lawyer and professor Kathleen A. Lahey and counselling psychologist Kevin Alderson investigate the two sides of this process, creating a narrative that provides a remarkable case study of progressive social change.

If feminist studies and transgender studies are so intimately connected, why are they not more deeply integrated? Offering multidisciplinary models for this assimilation, the vibrant essays in Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies suggest timely and necessary changes for institutions of higher learning. Responding to the more visible presence of transgender persons as well as gender theories, the contributing essayists focus on how gender is practiced in academia, health care, social services, and even national border patrols. Working from the premise that transgender is both material and cultural, the contributors address such aspects of the university as administration, sports, curriculum, pedagogy, and the appropriate location for transgender studies. Combining feminist theory, transgender studies, and activism centered on social diversity and justice, these essays examine how institutions as lived contexts shape everyday life.

"A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby's extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby's story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism. As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual abuse by different adults, and in her teen years became alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby moved to Thunder Bay with her children to escape an abusive marriage. Abuse, compounded by racism, continued, but Chacaby found supports to help herself and others. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety; trained and worked as an alcoholism counsellor; raised her children and fostered many others; learned to live with visual impairment; and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in Thunder Bay. Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, humour, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people."-- Provided by publisher.

Pepin-Neff coins the term 'Tolerable Inequality' to examine the ways in which politicians and political actors use the policy process as a tool to make inequality acceptable as a way of keeping power and avoiding penalties. Power is built on the illusion of differences. The public policy process is used to reinforce the illusions of inferiority and superiority that help to keep power in the hands of the powerful. Tolerable Inequality reinforces these differences by diverting attention away from issues that would give marginalized people power, reducing differences between public expectations and reality, and policy reactions that fortify existing social status. The three tactics of Tolerable Inequality include: focused inattention and inaction, deviation harmonization of differences between expectations and perceived reality, and equality governance, where equality is distributed in the policy process relative to conditional compliance and comparative identity. The book explores this concept within the context of LGBTQ+ policy and presents frameworks that allow the public to engage in the policy process in ways that highlight the role of expected political penalties in order to reclaim policymaking in the public interest. A comprehensive text for researchers and students in LGBTQ studies, American Studies, Policy Studies, and Legislative Studies.