Butch is a Noun, the first book by activist, gender-jammer, and performer S. Bear Bergman,won wide acclaim when published by Suspect Thoughts in 2006: a funny, insightful, and purposely unsettling manifesto on what it meansto be butch (and not). In thirty-four deeply personal essays, Bear makes butchness accessibleto those who are new to the concept, and makesgender outlaws of all stripes feel as though theyhave come home. From girls' clothes to men'shaircuts, from walking with girls to hangingwith young men, Butch is a Nounchronicles the perplexities, dangers, and pleasures of living lifeoutside the gender binary.This new edition includes a new introduction by the author.
Lambda Literary Award finalist American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book In the summer of 2009, butch writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote and gender researcher and femme dynamo Zena Sharman wrote down a wish-list of their favourite queer authors; they wanted to continue and expand the butch-femme conversation. The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words "butch" or "femme." Contributors such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor (All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn (Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri (Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson (Code White), Anne Fleming (Anomaly), Michael V. Smith (Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today’s ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come. Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992. Ivan E. Coyote is the author of seven books (including the novel Bow Grip, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book) and a long-time muser on the trappings of the two-party gender system. Zena Sharman is the assistant director of Canada's national Institute of Gender and Health.
Butch is a Noun, published by the now-defunct Suspect Thoughts, was a critical and commercial success when first published in 2006: a funny, insightful manifesto on what it means to be butch. This edition includes a new introduction by the author.
As an author, educator, and public speaker, S. Bear Bergman has documented his experience as, among other things, a trans parent, with wit and aplomb. He also writes the advice column “Ask Bear,” in which he answers crucial questions about how best to make our collective way through the world. Featuring disarming illustrations by Saul Freedman-Lawson, Special Topics in Being a Human elaborates on “Ask Bear”’s premise: a gentle, witty, and insightful book of practical advice for the modern age. It offers Dad advice and Jewish bubbe wisdom, all filtered through a queer lens, to help you navigate some of the complexities of life—from how to make big decisions or make a good apology, to how to get someone’s new name and pronouns right as quickly as possible, to how to gracefully navigate a breakup. With warmth and candor, Special Topics in Being a Human calls out social inequities and injustices in traditional advice-giving, validates your feelings, asks a lot of questions, and tries to help you be your best possible self with kindness, compassion, and humor. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A book with many images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.
Alternately unsettling and affirming, devastating and delicious, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, is a new collection of essays on gender and identity by S. Bear Bergman that is irrevocably honest and endlessly illuminating. With humour and grace, these essays deal with issues from women's spaces to the old boys' network, from gay male bathhouses to lesbian potlucks, from being a child to preparing to have one; throughout, S. Bear Bergman shows us there are things you learn when you're visibly different from those around youaaC--/whether it's being transgressively gendered or readably queer. As a transmasculine person, Bergman keeps readers breathless and rapt in the freakshow tent long after the midway has gone dark, when the good hooch gets passed around and the best stories get told. Ze offers unique perspectives on issues that challenge, complicate, and confound the official stories about how gender and sexuality work.
S. Bear Bergman is an acclaimed writer and lecturer on trans issues. In hir third essay collection, Bear tackles the concept of the "modern family" as the trans parent of a young son; in Bear's extended family "orchard," drag sisters, sperm-donor parents, and other relations provide more branches of love and support than a mere family tree. Defiantly queer yet full of tenderness and hilarity, Bear's book redefines the notion of what family is and can be. S. Bear Bergman's previous books are The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, Butch is a Noun, and Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! A POPSUGAR "Best Young Adult Book of 2017" Pick An Autumn 2017 Indie Next Pick! Named by Bustle as one of the "16 Books The Internet Is Going To Be Obsessed With This Year" A Barnes & Noble Pick for “Most Anticipated LGBTQIAP YA Books of the Second Half of 2017” "Gaby Dunn and Allison Raskin have captured everything about the pain and excitement of that first terrifying, fabulous, confusing year on your own in college... In this epistolary novel, you live day by day with Ava and Gen, deep inside that friendship, so deep, it feels like it’s your own." —Francine Pascal, bestselling author of the Sweet Valley High series Perfect for fans of “Robin Talley’s What We Left Behind or Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl” (School Library Journal, Starred Review), Gaby Dunn and Allison Raskin’s I Hate Everyone But You is a hilarious and heartfelt debut novel about new beginnings, love and heartbreak, and ultimately the power of friendship. Dear Best Friend, I can already tell that I will hate everyone but you. Sincerely, Ava Helmer (that brunette who won’t leave you alone) We're still in the same room, you weirdo. Stop crying. G So begins a series of texts and emails sent between two best friends, Ava and Gen, as they head off to their first semesters of college on opposite sides of the country. From first loves to weird roommates, heartbreak, self-discovery, coming out and mental health, the two of them document every wild and awkward moment to each other. But as each changes and grows into her new life, will their friendship be able to survive the distance?
Drawing on personal experience and hundreds of interviews with straight chicks who've slept with lesbians, straight chicks who've slept with straight chicks, lesbians who have slept with straight chicks, and straight chicks who've done both or neither, Sincero covers A to Z of the experience.
From the founding editor of Cleis Press' bestselling Best Lesbian Erotica series (also available from Turnaround) comes a daring new project - a collection of erotica by and for transfolk, FTMs, MTFs, genderqueers, gender outlaws and two-spirited, intersex and gender-variant people. Many of the characters populating the pages of this sizzling collection consciously reinvent, re-imagine and play with gender during sex. The names they give themselves or each other during sex can taunt and tease - but they always signify the presence of gender.
Polari is a secret form of language mainly used by homosexual men in London and other cities during the twentieth century. Derived in part from the slang lexicons of numerous stigmatised and itinerant groups, Polari was also a means of socialising, acting out camp performances and reconstructing a shared gay identity and worldview among its speakers. This book examines the ways in which Polari was used in order to construct 'gay identities', linking its evolution to the changing status of gay men and lesbians in the UK over the past fifty years.
