A landmark reference guide to the LGBTQIA+ community’s contributions to the English language—an intersectional, inclusive, playfully illustrated glossary featuring more than 800 terms and fabulous phrases created by and for queer culture. Do you know where “yaaaas queen!” comes from? Do you know the difference between a bear and a wolf? Do you know what all the letters in LGBTQIA+ stand for? The Queens’ English is a comprehensive guide to modern gay slang, queer theory terms, and playful colloquialisms that define and celebrate LGBTQIA+ culture. This modern dictionary provides an in-depth look at queer language, from terms influenced by celebrated lesbian poet Sappho and from New York’s underground queer ball culture in the 1980s to today's celebration of RuPaul’s Drag Race. The glossary of terms is supported by full-color illustrations and photography throughout, as well as real-life usage examples for those who don't quite know how to use “kiki,” “polysexual,” or “transmasculine” in a sentence. A series of educational lessons highlight key people and events that shaped queer language; readers will learn the linguistic importance of pronouns, gender identity, Stonewall, the Harlem Renaissance, and more. For every queen in your life—the men, women, gender non-conforming femmes, butches, daddies, and zaddies—The Queens’ English is at once an education and a celebration of queer history, identity, and the limitless imagination of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Society and the Healthy Homosexual by George Weinberg, Ph.D., was hailed as a landmark when first published. It is the book that pioneered the concept of widespread prejudice against homosexuals--homophobia. It explores the psychological factors underlying that prejudice and offers advice to help individuals overcome the prejudice and accept their sexuality.
The rise of heterosexual culture and the resistance it met from feudal lords, church fathers, and the medical profession. Heterosexuality is celebrated—in film and television, in pop songs and opera, in literature and on greeting cards—and at the same time taken for granted. It is the cultural and sexual norm by default. And yet, as Louis-Georges Tin shows in The Invention of Heterosexual Culture, in premodern Europe heterosexuality was perceived as an alternative culture. The practice of heterosexuality may have been standard, but the symbolic primacy of the heterosexual couple was not. Tin maps the emergence of heterosexual culture in Western Europe and the significant resistance to it from feudal lords, church fathers, and the medical profession. Tin writes that before the phenomenon of "courtly love" in the early twelfth century, the man-woman pairing had not been deemed a subject worthy of more than passing interest. As heterosexuality became a recurrent theme in art and literature, the nobility came to view it as a disruption of the feudal chivalric ethos of virility and male bonding. If feudal lords objected to the "hetero" in heterosexuality and what they saw as the associated dangers of weakness and effeminacy, the church took issue with the “sexuality,” which threatened the Christian ethos of renunciation and divine love. Finally, the medical profession cast heterosexuality as pathology, warning of an epidemic of “lovesickness.” Noting that the discourse of heterosexuality does not belong to heterosexuals alone, Tin offers a groundbreaking history that reasserts the cultural identity of heterosexuality.
From New York Times bestselling author Naomi Wolf, Outrages explores the history of state-sponsored censorship and violations of personal freedoms through the inspiring, forgotten history of one writer’s refusal to stay silenced. Newly updated, first North American edition--a paperback original In 1857, Britain codified a new civil divorce law and passed a severe new obscenity law. An 1861 Act of Parliament streamlined the harsh criminalization of sodomy. These and other laws enshrined modern notions of state censorship and validated state intrusion into people’s private lives. In 1861, John Addington Symonds, a twenty-one-year-old student at Oxford who already knew he loved and was attracted to men, hastily wrote out a seeming renunciation of the long love poem he’d written to another young man. Outrages chronicles the struggle and eventual triumph of Symonds—who would become a poet, biographer, and critic—at a time in British history when even private letters that could be interpreted as homoerotic could be used as evidence in trials leading to harsh sentences under British law. Drawing on the work of a range of scholars of censorship and of LGBTQ+ legal history, Wolf depicts how state censorship, and state prosecution of same-sex sexuality, played out—decades before the infamous trial of Oscar Wilde—shadowing the lives of people who risked in new ways scrutiny by the criminal justice system. She shows how legal persecutions of writers, and of men who loved men affected Symonds and his contemporaries, including Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and the painter Simeon Solomon. All the while, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was illicitly crossing the Atlantic and finding its way into the hands of readers who reveled in the American poet’s celebration of freedom, democracy, and unfettered love. Inspired by Whitman, and despite terrible dangers he faced in doing so, Symonds kept trying, stubbornly, to find a way to express his message—that love and sex between men were not “morbid” and deviant, but natural and even ennobling. He persisted in various genres his entire life. He wrote a strikingly honest secret memoir—which he embargoed for a generation after his death—enclosing keys to a code that the author had used to embed hidden messages in his published work. He wrote the essay A Problem in Modern Ethics that was secretly shared in his lifetime and would become foundational to our modern understanding of human sexual orientation and of LGBTQ+ legal rights. This essay is now rightfully understood as one of the first gay rights manifestos in the English language. Naomi Wolf’s Outrages is a critically important book, not just for its role in helping to bring to new audiences the story of an oft-forgotten pioneer of LGBTQ+ rights who could not legally fully tell his own story in his lifetime. It is also critically important for what the book has to say about the vital and often courageous roles of publishers, booksellers, and freedom of speech in an era of growing calls for censorship and ever-escalating state violations of privacy. With Outrages, Wolf brings us the inspiring story of one man’s refusal to be silenced, and his belief in a future in which everyone would have the freedom to love and to speak without fear.
Each entry includes a brief definition of the term, a description of the principal ideas behind it, and analysis of its history, development and contemporary relevance, followed by a detailed bibliography giving the major sources in the field.
One of the Boys: Masculinity, Homophobia, and Modern Manhood takes a fresh look at the formation of modern male sexual identities. You will find that homophobia is not only widespread, but that it takes diverse forms and has far-reaching behavioral and social consequences. The new concept of “homophobic passage,” which is part of the development of all young men, will enlighten you as to the proposed “causes” of homosexuality and heterosexuality. One of the Boys will help you discover how the passage of young males from childhood to adulthood plays an important role in formation of the modern adult male self in gay and straight men. As a result, this knowledge will allow you to offer relevant services to clients who are struggling with societal stereotypes and identity issues. From this informative book, you will discover how homophobia plays a role in the increase in violence experienced by gay men and lesbians in our culture today. To help you offer improved services, One of the Boys discusses why homophobia is widespread, takes diverse forms, and has far-reaching behavioral and social consequences by: examining the school playground and its many effects on children’s peer groups to discover how profoundly names like “crybaby” and “poofter” can impact a child’s development learning that children often cannot escape harmful labels and stereotypes at home and realizing how it impacts a child’s developing sense of self discovering the media’s influence on role models and realizing the important role television and magazines play in providing information about homosexuality and homophobia realizing the heavy pressure homophobia exerts on men and how it shapes their relationships with women and other men, how emotionally close they allow themselves to get to people, how affectionate they are, and with whom they have sexual relations Through One of the Boys, you will gain valuable insight into the masculinity of the men interviewed and how it was shaped in order for you to develop a greater understanding of men and the many influences of society as a whole. This unique study investigates the development of homophobia and the meanings and significances people associate with it to help you understand how and where homophobia originates in our society.
“Heterosexuality,” assumed to denote a universal sexual and cultural norm, has been largely exempt from critical scrutiny. In this boldly original work, Jonathan Ned Katz challenges the common notion that the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality has been a timeless one. Building on the history of medical terminology, he reveals that as late as 1923, the term “heterosexuality” referred to a "morbid sexual passion," and that its current usage emerged to legitimate men and women having sex for pleasure. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud, James Baldwin, Betty Friedan, and Michel Foucault, The Invention of Heterosexuality considers the effects of heterosexuality’s recently forged primacy on both scientific literature and popular culture. “Lively and provocative.”—Carol Tavris, New York Times Book Review “A valuable primer . . . misses no significant twists in sexual politics.”—Gary Indiana, Village Voice Literary Supplement “One of the most important—if not outright subversive—works to emerge from gay and lesbian studies in years.”—Mark Thompson, The Advocate
English evangelicals give the appearance of being a community at war, with each other and with the world around them. The issue of homosexuality is one of the key battlegrounds. How has this issue become so significant to evangelicals? Why is it provoking such violent responses? How is it changing evangelicals, and what might this mean for the future? This book examines the history of evangelical responses to the issue of homosexuality, setting them in a wider historical and cultural context and drawing on the work of Rene Girard to argue that the issue of homosexuality has come to symbolise deeply-held convictions within evangelicalism. The conflict over the issue that is now becoming apparent within evangelicalism reveals deep divisions within the evangelical community that will have great significance for the future. The Scandal of Evangelicals and Homosexuality offers an alternative perspective, seeking not to present an answer to the ethical question, but rather to examine the way the debate has become scandalised and consider the cost. It offers a window into contemporary English evangelicalism and provides an important contribution to international and ecumenical debate.