The Lambda Literary Foundation has just announced the finalists for its annual Lambda Literary Awards—and we’re pleased note that two Chicago books are in the running for best book in LGBT studies.
One contender, Amin Ghaziani’s The Dividends of Dissent, chronicles the late twentieth century’s four major gay and lesbian marches on Washington—demonstrations, he argues, that helped define what it means to be gay in the United States.

The other, Regina Kunzel’s Criminal Intimacy, investigates a less public realm of American life. By exploring the sexual lives of prisoners and the sexual culture of prisons over the past two centuries—along with the impact of a range of issues, including race, class, and gender; sexual violence; prisoners’ rights activism; and the HIV epidemic—Kunzel discovers a world whose surprising plurality and mutability reveals the fissures and fault lines beneath modern sexuality itself.
Congratulations to both authors, who continue the nomination streak Mark Padilla’s Caribbean Pleasure Industry started last year.