Rigoberto González: Butterfly Boy

USA 2006, 207 pp., brochure, € 19.95
Kostenloser Versand ab 20 Euro Bestellwert.
University of Wisconsin Press
Growing up among poor migrant Mexican farmworkers, Rigoberto González faces the pressure of coming-of-age as a gay man in a culture that prizes machismo. Losing his mother when he is twelve, González must then confront his father's abandonment and an abiding sense of cultural estrangement, both from his adopted home in the United States and from a Mexican birthright. His only sense of connection gets forged in a violent relationship with an older man. By finding his calling as a writer, and by revisiting the relationship with his father during a trip to Mexico, González finally claims his identity at the intersection of race, class, and sexuality. The result is a leap of faith that every reader who ever felt like an outsider will immediately recognize. Heartbreaking, poetic, and intensely personal.

Joy Landin: Through the Door of Life

A Jewish Journey Between Genders. USA 2012, 255 pp., hardbound, € 23.99
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Europas.
University of Wisconsin Press - Living Out
Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned after a year of »involuntary research leave« to the orthodox Jewish campus as a woman - Joy Ladin. In this book, Joy Ladin takes readers inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self. With unsparing honesty and surprising humor, Ladin wrestles with both the practical problems of gender transition and its larger moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions. Ladin recounts her struggle to reconcile the pain she experienced living as the »wrong« gender with the pain of her children in losing the father they love. We eavesdrop on her lifelong conversations with the god whom she sees both as a source of her agony and as her hope for transcending it.

St. Sukie de la Croix: Chicago Whispers

A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall. USA 2012, 326 pp. with numerous b/w photographs, brochure, € 27.59
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Europas.
University of Wisconsin Press
This book illuminates a colorful and vibrant record of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people who lived and loved in Chicago from the city's beginnings in the 1670s as a fur-trading post to the end of the 1960s. The author reclaims Chicago's LGBT past that had been forgotten, suppressed, or overlooked. Included here are Jane Adams, the pioneer of American social work, Blues legend Ma Rainey, who recorded »Sissy Blues« in Chicago in 1926, commercial artist J.C. Leyendecker, who used his lover as the model for »The Arrow Collar Man« advertisements, and celebrated playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of »A Raisin in the Sun«. Here, too, are accounts of vice dens during the Civil War and classy gentlemen's clubs, gender-crossing performers in cabarets, and evidence of thousands of nameless queer Chicagoans.

Moe Meyer: An Archaeology of Posing

Essays on Camp, Drag, and Sexuality. USA 2010, 221pp., brochure, € 28.69
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Europas.
University of Wisconsin Press
This book compiles two decades of new and previously published writing on gay culture by one of the field's most provocative and outspoken critics. Diverging from the text-based premise of most queer theory, Meyer utilizes performance studies and interpretive anthropology to examine camp and drag performances in the spaces in which they appear. He explores a variety of topics - from transsexual striptease and Harlem drag balls to the death of camp - within the genre of queer drag and sexuality performance. This collection of essays, with Meyer's rejection of gender parity and his celebration of the effeminate gay male body, presents a fresh interpretation of established art forms. From the pre-Stonewall era to the present day, Meyer's cultural critique redefines how we understand the phenomena of camp and drag.