In Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity author Joshua Gamson digs deep into the complex sexual politics of one of the most influential forces in modern American media—daytime TV talkshows. Using extensive interviews, hundreds of transcripts, focus-group discussions with viewers, and his own experiences as an audience member, Gamson argues that talk shows give much-needed, high-impact public visibility to sexual nonconformists while also exacerbating all sorts of political tensions among those becoming visible. With wit and passion, Freaks Talk Back illuminates the joys, dilemmas, and practicalities of media visibility—and for the month of June only, you can download it free from the University of Chicago Press website.

Also, read an interview with the author and an excerpt from the book.

Check back each month for more free e-books from the University of Chicago Press or for all our currently available e-books, see our complete list of e-books by subject.

E-books from the University of Chicago Press are offered in Adobe Digital Editions format for Mac, PC, and a number of mobile devices such as the Sony Reader, IREX, BeBook, and more. Check out these links to find out more about Adobe Digital Editions or more about e-books from the University of Chicago Press.

Archived in Film and Media | Gay and Lesbian | Press Releases
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The finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards, which celebrate the best lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans books available in the United States, were announced yesterday, and the University of Chicago Press has three titles among the nominees. The "Lammy" is the most prestigious award given to books of interest to the LGBT community, and we're honored to have our books recognized. And the nominees are…:

For the category of LGBT Studies, we have two contenders:

Deborah B. Gould
Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS

In the late 1980s, after a decade spent engaged in more routine interest-group politics, thousands of lesbians and gay men responded to the AIDS crisis by defiantly and dramatically taking to the streets. But by the early 1990s, the organization they founded, ACT UP, was no more—even as the AIDS epidemic raged on. Weaving together interviews with activists, extensive research, and reflections on the author's time as a member of the organization, Moving Politics is the first book to chronicle the rise and fall of ACT UP, highlighting a key factor in its trajectory: emotion.

Surprisingly overlooked by many scholars of social movements, emotion, Gould argues, plays a fundamental role in political activism. From anger to hope, pride to shame, and solidarity to despair, feelings played a significant part in ACT UP's provocative style of protest, which included raucous demonstrations, die-ins, and other kinds of street theater. Detailing the movement's public triumphs and private setbacks, Moving Politics is the definitive account of ACT UP's origin, development, and decline as well as a searching look at the role of emotion in contentious politics.

Armando Maggi
The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Saint Paul to Sade

Italian novelist, poet, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was brutally killed in Rome in 1975, a macabre end to a career that often explored humanity's capacity for violence and cruelty. Along with the mystery of his murderer's identity, Pasolini left behind a controversial but acclaimed oeuvre as well as a final quartet of beguiling projects that signaled a radical change in his aesthetics and view of reality.

The Resurrection of the Body is an original and compelling interpretation of these final works: the screenplay Saint Paul, the scenario for Porn-Theo-Colossal, the immense and unfinished novel Petrolio, and his notorious final film, Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, a disturbing adaptation of the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Together these works, Armando Maggi contends, reveal Pasolini's obsession with sodomy and its role within his apocalyptic view of Western society. One of the first studies to explore the ramifications of Pasolini's homosexuality, The Resurrection of the Body also breaks new ground by putting his work into fruitful conversation with an array of other thinkers such as Freud, Strindberg, Swift, Henri Michaux, and Norman O. Brown.

And we had one finalist in the category of Gay Poetry:

Randall Mann
Breakfast with Thom Gunn

A work both direct and unsettling, Randall Mann's poems are haunted by the afterlife of Thom Gunn (1929—2004), one of the most beloved gay literary icons of the twentieth century, and are moored in Florida and California, but the backdrop is "pitiless," the trees "thin and bloodless," the words "like the icy water" of the San Francisco Bay. Mann, fiercely intelligent, open yet elusive, draws on the "graceful erosion" of both landscape and the body, on the beauty that lies in unbeauty. With audacity, anxiety, and unbridled desire, this gifted lyric poet grapples with dilemmas of the gay self embroiled in—and aroused by—a glittering, unforgiving subculture. Breakfast with Thom Gunn is at once formal and free, forging a sublime integrity in the fire of wit, intensity, and betrayal.

Congratulations to all the nominees! And for more books, check out our complete list of titles in gay and lesbian studies.

Archived in Books for the News | Gay and Lesbian
Posted by at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Greenwich Village. Harlem. Bronzeville. Even in this freewheeling, globalized age, the names of these iconic neighborhoods still conjure up an atmosphere of glamour, excitement, and illicit thrills. But long before today’s teens or even yesterday’s beatniks wandered their streets, these neighborhoods exercised a powerful attraction for upright members of the middle class looking for dissipation and disreputable fun.

With Slumming, Chad Heap brings these early havens of hip to life, recreating the long-lost nightlife of early twentieth-century New York and Chicago. From jazz clubs and speakeasies to black-and-tan parties and cabarets, Heap packs Slumming with vivid scenes, fascinating characters, and wild anecdotes of a late-night life on the borders of the forbidden. And while he doesn’t ignore the role of exploitation and voyeurism in slumming—or the resistance it often provoked—he argues that the relatively uninhibited mingling it promoted across bounds of race and class helped to dramatically recast the racial and sexual landscape of burgeoning U.S. cities.

The unforgettable tale of an urban past that continues to resonate in our day, Slumming is a late-night treat for all urbanites and fans of the demi-monde.

Read the press release or read the introduction.

Archived in Black Studies | Gay and Lesbian | History | Press Releases | Sociology
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The California Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments today on Proposition 8, the successful ballot measure that amended the state's constitution to ban gay marriage. The Los Angeles Times reports that supporters of gay marriage "seek to overturn Proposition 8 by saying it isn't a constitutional amendment at all, but a constitutional revision that should have been required to go through a much more rigorous process to become law."

Whatever the court decides, it seems safe to predict that this is only one of many battles to come between two sides of an issue that—as the authors of The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage point out—has waxed and waned in the public sphere since the passing of the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act. In fact, same-sex couples filed suit Tuesday against the federal government over portions of the act. The suit is expected to take several years to make its way through the federal court system—which leaves a lot of time for reading up on the issue in the meantime.

The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage, a great place to start, brings together an esteemed list of scholars to explore all facets of this heated issue, including the ideologies and strategies on both sides of the argument, the public's response, the use of the issue in political campaigns, and how same-sex marriage fits into the broad context of policy cycles and windows of political opportunity.

And Same Sex, Different Politics brings an illuminating comparative approach to gay rights issues. It's the first book to compare results across struggles over laws governing military service, homosexual conduct, adoption, marriage and partner recognition, hate crimes, and civil rights. In each area, Gary Mucciaroni found, the gay rights movement's achievements depended both on Americans' perceptions of its demands and on the political venue in which the conflict plays out. Adoption policy, for example, generally takes shape in a decentralized system of courts that enables couples to target sympathetic judges, while fights for gay marriage generally culminate in legislation or ballot referenda—Proposition 8 comes to mind—against which it is easier to mount opposition.

Archived in Books for the News | Gay and Lesbian | Law | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by at 09:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple of months ago, we noted that Chicago's Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame planned to induct Jane Addams, whose life story Louise Knight vividly recounts in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy.

In commemoration of that honor, the new Lambda Literary Salon features an essay by Louise Knight, which eloquently explores the role of love in Addams's life.

"I believe that love was Jane Addams's most absorbing passion," Knight writes. "She was one of those rare people who was thinking about the importance of love all the time—not always succeeding in being loving, of course, but steadily trying." Focusing in particular on Addams's experiences with romantic, intimate love, Knight concludes that "it has been a revelation and a joy to learn about the remarkable contributions gay men and lesbian women have made to the United States. We all want to see ourselves reflected in the great accomplishments of history; now, finally, the gay and lesbian communities are beginning to be able to have that deeply human satisfaction. Jane Addams, too, belongs to lesbian history."

For more reading, we also have an excerpt from Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Gay and Lesbian
Posted by at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Sunday marked what would have been the 103rd birthday of the eldest daughter of novelist Thomas Mann. Erika Mann, born November 9, 1905, was a writer in her own right, though her father's fame overshadowed her own accomplishments in her lifetime. More recently, however, Andrea Weiss has restored Erika, and her brother Klaus, to their rightful places in the spotlight.

In the Shadow of Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story is an intimate portrait of Mann's two eldest children, who were unconventional, rebellious, and fiercely devoted to each other. Empowered by their close bond, they espoused vehemently anti-Nazi views in a Europe swept up in fascism and were openly, even defiantly, gay in an age of secrecy and repression. They were serious authors, performance artists before the medium existed, and political visionaries whose searing essays and lectures are still relevant today. And, as Andrea Weiss reveals in this dual biography, their story offers a fascinating view of the literary and intellectual life, political turmoil, and shifting sexual mores of their times.

In the Shadow of Magic Mountain was the lead review in the November 6 London Review of Books and has been praised by the late John Leonard in Harper's and in the Times (UK): "A fascinating tale. Outside the pages of the Manns' own memoirs and essays, or of Klaus's deeply personal fiction, it's hard to imagine it more sympathetically told." To celebrate Erika's birthday, dress in your finest androgynous fashions and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Gay and Lesbian | Literature
Posted by at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Jane Addams, whose fascinating life Louise Knight chronicles in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy, will be inducted this fall into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. Chicago's' Advisory Council on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Issues recently announced the nomination as part of its list of individuals and organizations up for inclusion in the only known government-sponsored hall of fame that honors members of the LGBT communities.

Read up on Addam's accomplishments before the November induction by checking out this excerpt from Citizen. Or track her legacy by reading recent invocations of these achievements by political commentators tracing the genealogies of Barack Obama's community organizing and Sarah Palin's feminism.

Archived in Biography | Books for the News | Gay and Lesbian
Posted by at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The August 21 edition of the Times Higher Education includes a review of Regina Kunzel's new book, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality. The THE's Lynne Segal writes:

Being a product of "situational" aberrations, same-sex activity in prisons is of little interest to historians of sexuality, the psychiatrist and historian Vernon Rosario believes. He is quite wrong, according to feminist historian Regina Kunzel. In her latest book, Criminal Intimacy, Kunzel argues persuasively that the increasingly open secrets of prison life, although usually officially buried, expose the perennial fault-lines of many of our understandings of modern sexuality. As she illustrates, the hallmark of modern discourses of sexuality is the move from sexual acts, seen as decent or indecent, to sexual identities, seen as normal or perverse, generated from within. Sex behind bars, however, has always provided evidence that fails to mirror this account, leaving its occurrence apparently cut off in some anachronistic space all its own.

Read the review on the THE website.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The May 8 edition of the Times Higher Education ran several noteworthy reviews of Chicago books including Scott Herring's Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg's The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860-1920.

Both books focus on the subject of social identification in the early twentieth century, the former delivering an insightful critique of American "slumming literature" and the gender stereotypes that the author claims the genre simultaneously acknowledged, yet undermined, while the latter gives an equally penetrating analysis of the re-making of Italian cultural identity in the wake of WWI.

Read Denis Flanery's review of Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History.

You can find Steven Gundle's review of The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860-1920 in the same issue.

A book published by Liverpool University Press, one of our distributed clients, was also reviewed in the May 8 THE. Read Martin Conreen's review of SK-INTERFACES: Exploding Borders in Art, Science and Technology.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Reviews | Sociology
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Germany’s leading literary family during the 20th century was headed by Thomas Mann and composed of six talented children, the most accomplished of which were Erika and Klaus. Long obscured by the fame of their domineering father, Erika and Klaus were prominent writers and artists in their own right who led fascinating, unconventional lives that mirrored the tumult and chaos of their times. In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain is their story. Andrea Weiss’s remarkable biography chronicles Erika and Klaus’s equally remarkable lives. Openly gay during an era of secrecy and repression; defiantly anti-fascist during the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich; intimate friends with such luminaries as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau; performance artists before the phrase had even been coined, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain is rich in anecdote and eye-opening details, sending the reader spinning and tumbling into the minds of these two extraordinary but neglected literary figures.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

German intellectual Thomas Mann left behind not only the legacy of his extraordinary literary career, but six children who—though often overshadowed by their father's fame—became literary and artistic figures in their own right. In her new book In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story Andrea Weiss delivers a dual biography of Mann's two eldest, Erika and Clause, whose literary, political, and artistic exploits she recounts in vivid detail. In a review running in the April edition of Harper's, John Leonard notes that in delivering its candid portrait of the Mann children's dramatic lives, the book also provides a revealing look inside the elite literary and artistic circles which the Mann children traversed. Leonard writes:

The years of exile, war, and America are an extravagance of highbrow gossip, with such raisins in the cake as André Gide, Bertolt Brecht, Sybille Bedford, Jean Cocteau, Stefan Zweig, Muriel Rukeyser, Christopher Isherwood, Janet Flanner, James Baldwin, and Carson McCullers. Erika wrote magazine articles and children's books; Klaus wrote novels, plays, and film scripts; and the two of them collaborated on travel books, all while the FBI and the INS were hot on their trail for "premature anti-Fascism."

Pick up the current issue of Harper's to find out more, or read an excerpt.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our books are not often reviewed in Jordanian newspapers. In fact, we can't remember the last time. So it was a treat to see Joseph A. Massad's new book Desiring Arabs receiving some positive press in Monday's Jordan Times. Writer Sally Bland praises Massad's book for its detailed analysis of the influence of Western culture on Middle Eastern sexual mores through a comprehensive survey of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present. Bland writes:

The material reviewed by Massad is amazingly comprehensive, covering a time span of over a century and all major schools of thought from Arab nationalist to Marxist to Islamic. Their writings come in many forms and genres—academic, literary, journalistic and theological—and touch on many subjects related to sexuality, such as heritage, women's status, health issues and how state policy has dealt with "deviance."

Like Massad's two previous books, Desiring Arabs is meticulously researched and documented, using a broad spectrum of Arabic, English and French sources. Touching on so many disciplines as it does, the book inspires—or provokes—a radically new way of looking at human identity, culture and social behaviour, in part based on a more objective assessment of the past.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

With topics like same-sex marriage, adoption rights, and other queer issues taking center stage in much of the current political, religious, and social debate, Matt Houlbrook's Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis 1918-57 delivers a timely and significant back-story to the role of queer sexualities in modern culture. A recent review in the London Review of Books applauds Houlbrook's work in its attempt to deconstruct some of the modern preconceptions of the historical role of homosexuality in one of its modern urban meccas:

Matt Houlbrook's impressive study of queer life in London between 1918 and 1957 does much to revise our understanding of homosexuality in that period. Coverage of recent changes in the law has tended to portray the 20th century as a time of darkness, in which gay men struggled to escape the shadow of Oscar Wilde's imprisonment; Queer London complicates that account. Houlbrook's story is lucid, subtle and at times very funny.

A history remarkable in its complexity yet intimate in its portraiture, Queer London is a landmark work that redefines queer urban life in England and beyond.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From 1950 to 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy and his infamous list of "Reds" were at the center of every major congressional debate. These days, most Americans know that hundreds of government employees faced professional and personal devastation as a result of his rampant accusations. But few of us know of the lavender scare that McCarthy's charges also engendered—a witch hunt against "sex perverts" who had apparently infiltrated government agencies. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government traces the origins of contemporary sexual politics to this Cold War hysteria.… Read the press release.

Read an interview with the author.

Archived in Gay and Lesbian | History | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

History Today's March 2006 issue features a review of Matt Houlbrook's Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957, winner of its Longman-History Today Book of the Year 2006 award. Julian Jackson praised the book: "Superb…. This is scholarly history, but it is also the best kind of engaged history. Houlbrook clearly feels something was lost with the 'respectable' homosexuality of the 1950s although he is too good a historian to tell any black-and-white story. He sees the evolution he describes as 'simultaneously liberating and exclusionary.' If for some men the emergence of more private spaces after 1945 was 'unequivocally affirmative, offering them opportunities to socialize in a safe, respectable and semi-private place,' this process made things harder for those who wished—or were forced—to remain more visible. This is a book, finally, as much about London as about sexuality, demonstrating with empathy and subtlety both how sexuality was played out in the city and how it was shaped by it."

History Today editor Peter Furtado calls the book "[An] example of modern 'queer history' is an account of how gay people lived in London, which everyone, gay or straight, can relate to. Not written (as it might have been) as a tale of suffering, it is a lucid, sane and jargon-free account of how gay people negotiated space for themselves, physically, socially and emotionally, and draws on police records, memoirs, letters and newspaper exposés, as well as the first queer guidebook ever written. It deals with issues of policing, housing, geography, identity and politics faced by gay men in this period. It is also a book that will make anyone who reads it look at London and its public spaces through new eyes."

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Awards | Gay and Lesbian | History | Reviews
Posted by at 07:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An essay by John Ibson, author of Picturing Men.

History's fundamental lesson warns those who are comfortable with contemporary social arrangements, as it reassures those who are oppressed by current practices: It hasn't always been like this, and isn't likely to stay this way forever. This lesson is certainly true when it comes to the way that American men today are inclined and allowed to express their affection for each other—whether that affection involves romance, sexual longing, or just profound fondness.

Ang Lee's magnificent film Brokeback Mountain is the sad story of two Wyoming ranch hands whose society severely inhibits their twenty-year-long affectionate and sexual relationship. They express their mutual attraction only when utterly alone in the wilderness, at huge expense to their emotional lives and also their relationships with women. Yet Brokeback Mountain may also be instructively seen as a movie that raises disturbing issues about the ways that all American men feel about the appropriate ways to express their fondness for each other, whether or not that fondness is accompanied by sexual desire. Our culture still so scorns sexual desire between two men that there is a common fear that such desire just might accompany any fondness, as well as a fear that other people might jump to conclusions about the implications of two men's attraction to each other.

Continue reading "Seeing Males Together: Brokeback Mountain and Picturing Men" »

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Gay and Lesbian | History
Posted by DB at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Matt Houlbrook's Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 has received the Longman-History Today Book of the Year 2006 award. History Today Editor Peter Furtado described it as "not a story of persecution, but a lucid, sane and fascinating account of how gay people negotiated space for themselves within a hostile cultural environment, dealing with policing, housing, geography, identity and politics."

The current edition of the Times Higher Education Supplement features a review of Queer London by Matt Cook: "A ground-breaking work. While middle-class lives and writing have tended to compel the attention of most historians of homosexuality, Matt Houlbrook has looked more widely and found a rich seam of new evidence. It has allowed him to construct a complex, compelling account of interwar sexualities and to map a new, intimate geography of London.… There is a nostalgia here for a world lost. This brings a rare warmth to the book: Houlbrook has a genuine affection for the men and places he describes. Occasionally his spectacles feel just a little too rose (or lilac) tinted. He is right to suggest that some of our understandings of queer life have narrowed since the war, but I find it difficult to regret the passing of certain other interwar constraints. A small qualm, though, about a great book and a worthy winner."

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Awards | Gay and Lesbian | History | Reviews
Posted by at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)