LGBTQ+ Perspectives

A multidisciplinary e-book collection of over 38,000 titles in full text and spanning all academic subject areas.

Ebsco provides access to a multidisciplinary eContent collection. eContent is the digital version of books, journals, and database content.

PsycBOOKS is a full-text database of books and chapters in the American Psychological Association's array of quality electronic databases.

In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson's All Boys Aren't Blue explores their childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia.

A singular, beautifully written coming-of-age memoir of a Filipino boy with albinism whose story travels from an immigrant childhood to Harvard to a gender transition and illuminates the illusions of race, disability, and gender. Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a "sun child" from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in America. Coping with the strain of parental neglect and the elusive promise of U.S. citizenship, Talusan found childhood comfort from her devoted grandmother, a grounding force as she was treated by others with special preference or public curiosity. As an immigrant to the United States, Talusan came to be perceived as white. An academic scholarship to Harvard provided access to elite circles of privilege but required Talusan to navigate through the complex spheres of race, class, sexuality, and her place within the gay community. She emerged as an artist and an activist questioning the boundaries of gender. Talusan realized she did not want to be confined to a prescribed role as a man, and transitioned to become a woman, despite the risk of losing a man she deeply loved.

Sarah McBride is on a mission to fight for transgender rights around the world. But before she was a prominent activist, and before she became the first transgender person to speak at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, she was a teenager struggling with her identity. With emotional depth and unparalleled honesty, Sarah shares her personal struggle with gender identity, coming out to her supportive but distraught parents, and finding her way as a woman. She inspires readers with her barrier-breaking political journey that took her, in just four years, from a frightened, closeted college student to one of the nation's most prominent transgender activists walking the halls of the White House, passing laws, and addressing the country in the midst of a heated presidential election. She also details the heartbreaking romance with her first love and future husband Andy, a trans man and activist, who passed away from cancer in 2014 just days after they were married.

The inspiring true story of transgender actor and activist Nicole Maines, whose identical twin brother, Jonas, and ordinary American family join her on an extraordinary journey to understand, nurture, and celebrate the uniqueness in us all. Nicole appears as TV's first transgender superhero on CW's Supergirl When Wayne and Kelly Maines adopted identical twin boys, they thought their lives were complete. But by the time Jonas and Wyatt were toddlers, confusion over Wyatt's insistence that he was female began to tear the family apart. In the years that followed, the Maineses came to question their long-held views on gender and identity, to accept Wyatt's transition to Nicole, and to undergo a wrenching transformation of their own, the effects of which would reverberate through their entire community.

When Kelly Cogswell plunged into New York's East Village in 1992, she had just come out. An ex-Southern Baptist born in Kentucky, she was camping in an Avenue B loft, scribbling poems, and playing in an underground band, trying to figure out her next move. A couple of months later she was consumed by the Lesbian Avengers, instigating direct action campaigns, battling cops on Fifth Avenue, mobilizing 20,000 dykes for a march on Washington, D.C., and eating fire--literally--in front of the White House. At once streetwise and wistful, Eating Fire is a witty and urgent coming-of-age memoir spanning two decades, from the Culture War of the early 1990s to the War on Terror. Cogswell's story is an engaging blend of picaresque adventure, how-to activist handbook, and rigorous inquiry into questions of identity, resistance, and citizenship. It is also a compelling, personal recollection of friendships and fallings-out and of finding true love--several times over.

Summary: In 1959, the year Terry Galloway turned nine, the voices of everyone she loved began to disappear. No one yet knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system, eventually causing her to go deaf. As a self-proclaimed "child freak," she acted out her fury with her boxy hearing aids and Coke-bottle glasses by faking her own drowning at a camp for crippled children. 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. What could have been a bitter litany of complaint is instead an unexpectedly hilarious and affecting take on life.

The metropolis has been the near exclusive focus of queer scholars and queer cultures in America. Asking us to look beyond the cities on the coasts, Scott Herring draws a new map, tracking how rural queers have responded to this myopic mindset. Interweaving a wide range of disciplines--art, media, literature, performance, and fashion studies--he develops an extended critique of how metronormativity saturates LGBTQ politics, artwork, and criticism. To counter this ideal, he offers a vibrant theory of queer anti-urbanism that refuses to dismiss the rural as a cultural backwater.

A provocative manifesto, Whipping Girl tells the powerful story of Julia Serano, a transsexual woman whose supremely intelligent writing reflects her diverse background as a lesbian transgender activist and professional biologist. Serano shares her experiences and observations -- both pre- and post-transition -- to reveal the ways in which fear, suspicion, and dismissiveness toward femininity shape our societal attitudes toward trans women, as well as gender and sexuality as a whole.

Bayard Rustin was a unique twentieth-century American radical voice. A homosexual, World War II draft resister, and ex-communist, he made enormous contributions to the civil rights, socialist, labor, peace, and gay rights movements in the United States, despite being viewed as an "outsider" even by fellow activists. Rustin was a humanist who championed the disadvantaged and oppressed, regardless of identity. In Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer, Jerald Podair examines the life and career of a man who shaped virtually every aspect of the modern civil rights movement as a theorist, strategist, and spokesman.

Annotation Written in poet Michael Klein's uniquely passionate voice, "The End of Being Known explores the lines that define yet also blur the boundaries of sex, friendship, and compatibility. This collection of autobiographical essays probes the manifestations of sexual desire in its mystical variety: incest, falling in love, being a twin, and inhabiting the world of anonymous sex--in practice and, in an essay about the Body Electric movement--as something recuperative and renewing. Each essay unfurls in a hybrid of poetry, narrative, and fragmentary literary devices.

Judah Leblang's journey of discovery blends comedy and drama. In this episodic memoir, the author sketches the world he comes from--a world of poppyseed kuchen, Indians baseball, and the great industrial city of Cleveland, Ohio, which seemed to be imploding in the 1960's and '70's--and the world he inhabits today, as a hard of hearing man with a funny name, navigating middle age.

Loving Mountains, Loving Men is the first book-length treatment of a topic rarely discussed or examined: gay life in Appalachia. Appalachians are known for their love of place, yet many gays and lesbians from the mountains flee to urban areas. Jeff Mann tells the story of one who left and then returned, who insists on claiming and celebrating both regional and erotic identities.

The provocative bestseller She’s Not There is the winning, utterly surprising story of a person changing genders. By turns hilarious and deeply moving, Jennifer Finney Boylan explores the territory that lies between men and women, examines changing friendships, and rejoices in the redeeming power of family. Told in Boylan’s fresh voice, She’s Not There is about a person bearing and finally revealing a complex secret. Through her clear eyes, She’s Not There provides a new window on the confounding process of accepting our true selves. “Probably no book I’ve read in recent years has made me so question my basic assumptions about both the centrality and the permeability of gender, and made me recognize myself in a situation I’ve never known and have never faced.

A child of the 1950s from a small New England town, "perfect Paul" earns straight A's and shines in social and literary pursuits, all the while keeping a secret -- from himself and the rest of the world. Struggling to be, or at least to imitate, a straight man, through Ivy League halls of privilege and bohemian travels abroad, loveless intimacy and unrequited passion, Paul Monette was haunted, and finally saved, by a dream of "the thing I'd never even seen: two men in love and laughing."

As a writer, Glenway Wescott (1901-1987) left behind several novels, including The Grandmothers and The Pilgrim Hawk, noted for their remarkable lyricism. As a literary figure, Wescott also became a symbol of his times. Born on a Wisconsin farm in 1901, he associated as a young writer with Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald in 1920s Paris and subsequently was a central figure in New York's artistic and gay communities. Though he couldn't finish a novel after the age of forty-five, he was just as famous as an arts impresario, as a diarist, and for the company he kept: W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Marianne Moore, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Joseph Campbell, and scores of other luminaries.      In Glenway Wescott Personally, Jerry Rosco chronicles Wescott's long and colorful life, his early fame and later struggles to write, the uniquely privileged and sometimes tortured world of artistic creation.

This frank memoir chronicles the long journey mother and son took from shame and concealment to acceptance and love. In alternating voices, this poignant book describes the parallel lives of a mother and son during the painful years that they kept silent, even though they both suspected that Chris was gay. Chris tells of his ongoing struggle to change his sexual orientation, and Marlene's attempt to control her son's sexual future.

Author and photographer Susan Kuklin met and interviewed six transgender or gender-neutral young adults and used her considerable skills to represent them thoughtfully and respectfully before, during, and after their personal acknowledgment of gender preference.

Teens are more aware of sexuality and identity than ever, and they’re looking for answers and insights, as well as a community of others. In order to help create that community, YA authors David Levithan and Billy Merrell have collected original poems, essays, and stories by young adults in their teens and early 20s.The Full Spectrumincludes a variety of writers—gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight, transitioning, and questioning—on a variety of subjects: coming out, family, friendship, religion/faith, first kisses, break-ups, and many others.

A unique introduction to sexual and gender identity and queer studies Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people are becoming more and more visible in all aspects of American culture, from party politics to MTV videos. Despite the recent queer publishing explosion, few texts cover a broad range of topics around sexual and gender identities. Most existing works are high-level theory books, texts focused upon specific disciplines or topics, or practical guides aimed primarily at a heterosexual audience or people just beginning to come out. There has been to date no general, accessible, and inclusive work suitable for use as an introduction to Queer Studies.

"A significant contribution to the literature of gender, lesbian, and literary studies."-Library Journal.

Compañeras is a collection of oral histories, essays, poems, short stories and art work by and about Latina lesbians. In these pieces, some in Spanish, most in English, 47 women born in 10 different countries address issues such as coming out, relationships with families and friends, political organizing and community building. This groundbreaking collection allows women to speak about what it means to be Latina and lesbian in their communities. Throughout, the voices in this book explore the process of self-commitment to a political struggle to end all forms of Oppression.

Growing up Gay, Growing up Lesbian is the first literary anthology geared specifically to gay and lesbian youth. It includes more than fifty coming-of-age stories by established writers and teenagers and has been hailed by writers, educators, activists, booksellers, and the press as an essential resource for young people--and not-so-young people--seeking to understand the gay and lesbian experience.

"CHICANA LESBIANS is a love poem, a bible, a dictionary, nothing so simple as a manifesto--this book is yet another reason to believe--to believe in the girls our mothers warned us about, brown girls, lesbians, making their own love poems, bibles, dictionaries, manifestoes, reasons to believe."--Dorothy Allison "When I was selling books at a Chicana conference, I noticed book buyers were literally afraid to touch this anthology. I say now what I said then, 'Don't be scared. Sexuality is not contagious, but ignorance is.' If you've ever been curious, been there, been voyeur, been tourist, or just plain under-informed, misinformed, or unaffirmed, here is a book to listen to and learn from".--Sandra Cisneros