In this age of Will & Grace and gentrification, the dream market and gay investment advisors, you don't hear much about working-class queers. In fact, some would even consider the idea a contradiction in terms. But the contributors to Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men About More-or-Less Gay Life would beg to differ. The first collection of short stories by working-class queer, gay, and bisexual men, Everything I Have Is Blue is a rich and long-overdue contribution both to the burgeoning field of working-class studies and to LGBTIQ fiction.
Even as substantial legal and social victories are being celebrated within the gay rights movement, much of working-class America still exists outside the current narratives of gay liberation. In Steel Closets, Anne Balay draws on oral history interviews with forty gay, lesbian, and transgender steelworkers, mostly living in northwestern Indiana, to give voice to this previously silent and invisible population. She presents powerful stories of the intersections of work, class, gender, and sexual identity in the dangerous industrial setting of the steel mill. The voices and stories captured by Balay--by turns alarming, heroic, funny, and devastating--challenge contemporary understandings of what it means to be queer and shed light on the incredible homophobia and violence faced by many: nearly all of Balay's narrators remain closeted at work, and many have experienced harassment, violence, or rape. Through the powerful voices of queer steelworkers themselves, Steel Closets provides rich insight into an understudied part of the LGBT population, contributing to a growing body of scholarship that aims to reveal and analyze a broader range of gay life in America.
How well does social policy serve this understudied population? Although public policy and social programs responding to the AIDS and hate crime epidemics of the past decades are supposed to be designed for the working-class gay man, in actuality they have been based more on socioeconomic bias, stereotype, and anecdote than on social science. What do these men actually want and need? How well do programs work for them? The answers are found in Working-Class Gay and Bisexual Men, the landmark international study that is among the first to empirically examine the lives, attitudes, needs, and concerns of this hidden population. Working-Class Gay and Bisexual Men reports on research conducted throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand using a broad-based sample of working-class men. Using ethnographic techniques, researchers systematically captured and analyzed the social themes of their lives. The impressively detailed and consistent results should compel policymakers to rethink their assumptions about working-class gay men. This carefully conducted scientific research project also provides a forum where the men's own voices can be heard. Topics include: What gives them the strength to cope with violence, homophobia, AIDS, and discrimination? How can they come out to their families, friends, and coworkers? How do rural gay and bisexual men handle their isolation? What kinds of social support networks do they have? How do Latino gay men handle the double discrimination of gay and minority status? What kinds of social services would reach these men? What are the risk factors and protective factors in their lives? How do socioeconomic factors affect them? Working-Class Gay and Bisexual Men is a powerfully persuasive work of scholarship with broad-ranging implications. Social workers, policymakers, AIDS activists, and anyone else concerned with the lives of gay and bisexual men will find this informative study an essential tool for designing effective programs.
No one raises an eyebrow if you suggest that a guy who arranges his furniture just so, rolls his eyes in exaggerated disbelief, likes techno music or show tunes, and knows all of Bette Davis's best lines by heart might, just possibly, be gay. But if you assert that male homosexuality is a cultural practice, expressive of a unique subjectivity and a distinctive relation to mainstream society, people will immediately protest. Such an idea, they will say, is just a stereotype-ridiculously simplistic, politically irresponsible, and morally suspect. The world acknowledges gay male culture as a fact but denies it as a truth. David Halperin, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies, dares to suggest that gayness is a specific way of being that gay men must learn from one another in order to become who they are. Inspired by the notorious undergraduate course of the same title that Halperin taught at the University of Michigan, provoking cries of outrage from both the right-wing media and the gay press, How To Be Gay traces gay men's cultural difference to the social meaning of style. Far from being deterred by stereotypes, Halperin concludes that the genius of gay culture resides in some of its most despised features: its aestheticism, snobbery, melodrama, adoration of glamour, caricatures of women, and obsession with mothers. The insights, impertinence, and unfazed critical intelligence displayed by gay culture, Halperin argues, have much to offer the heterosexual mainstream.
Young Working Class Men in Transition uses a unique blend of concepts from the sociologies of youth and masculinity combined with Bourdieusian social theory to investigate British young working-class men’s transition to adulthood. Indeed, utilising data from biographical interviews as well as an ethnographic observation of social media activity, this volume provides novel insights by following young men across a seven-year time period. Against the grain of prominent popular discourses that position young working-class men as in ‘crisis’ or as adhering to negative forms of traditional masculinity, this book consequently documents subtle yet positive shifts in the performance of masculinity among this generation. Underpinned by a commitment to a much more expansive array of emotionality than has previously been revealed in such studies, young men are shown to be engaged in school, open to so called ‘women’s work’ in the service sector, and committed to relatively egalitarian divisions of labour in the family home. Despite this, class inequalities inflect their transition to adulthood with the ‘toxicity’ of neoliberalism - rather than toxic masculinity - being core to this reality. Problematising how working-class masculinity is often represented, Young Working Class Men in Transition both demonstrates and challenges the portrayal of working class masculinity as a repository of homophobia, sexism and anti-feminine acting. It will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as youth studies, masculinity studies, gender studies, sociology of education and sociology of work.
The Gothic Wanderer Rises Eternal in Popular Literature From the horrors of sixteenth century Italian castles to twenty-first century plagues, from the French Revolution to the liberation of Libya, Tyler R. Tichelaar takes readers on far more than a journey through literary history. The Gothic Wanderer is an exploration of man's deepest fears, his eff orts to rise above them for the last two centuries, and how he may be on the brink finally of succeeding. Tichelaar examines the figure of the Gothic wanderer in such well-known Gothic novels as "The Mysteries of Udolpho," "Frankenstein," and "Dracula," as well as lesser known works like Fanny Burney's "The Wanderer," Mary Shelley's "The Last Man," and Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "Zanoni." He also finds surprising Gothic elements in classics like Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" and Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Tarzan of the Apes." From Matthew Lewis' "The Monk" to Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight," Tichelaar explores a literary tradition whose characters refl ect our greatest fears and deepest hopes. Readers will find here the revelation that not only are we all Gothic wanderers--but we are so only by our own choosing. Acclaim for "The Gothic Wanderer" ""The Gothic Wanderer" shows us the importance of its title figure in helping us to see our own imperfections and our own sometimes contradictory yearnings to be both unique and yet a part of a society. The reader is in for an insightful treat." --Diana DeLuca, Ph.D. and author of Extraordinary Things "Make no mistake about it, The Gothic Wanderer is an important, well researched and comprehensive treatise on some of the world's finest literature." --Michael Willey, author of Ojisan Zanoni Foreword by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Ph.D. Learn more at www.GothicWanderer.com From Modern History Press www.ModernHistoryPress.com Literary Criticism: Gothing & Romance Literary Criticism: European - General
"There was a question that had come to trouble me a bit earlier, once I had taken the first steps on this return journey to Reims... Why, when I have had such an intense experience of forms of shame related to class, shame in relation to the milieu in which I grew up, why, when once I had arrived in Paris and started meeting people from such different class backgrounds, I would often find myself lying about my class origins... why had it never occurred to me to take up this problem in a book?" Returning to Reims is a breathtaking account of one man's return to the town where he grew up after an absence of thirty years. It is a frank, fearlessly personal story of family, memory, identity and time lost. But it is also a sociologist's view of what it means to grow up working class and then leave that class; of inequality and shifting political allegiances in an increasingly divided nation. A phenomenon in France and a huge bestseller in Germany, Didier Eribon has written the defining memoir of our times.
In this astonishing new history of wartime Britain, historian Stephen Bourne unearths the fascinating stories of the gay men who served in the armed forces and at home, and brings to light the great unheralded contribution they made to the war effort. Fighting Proud weaves together the remarkable lives of these men, from RAF hero Ian Gleed – a Flying Ace twice honoured for bravery by King George VI – to the infantry officers serving in the trenches on the Western Front in WWI - many of whom led the charges into machine-gun fire only to find themselves court-martialled after the war for indecent behaviour. Behind the lines, Alan Turing's work on breaking the 'enigma machine' and subsequent persecution contrasts with the many stories of love and courage in Blitzed-out London, with new wartime diaries and letters unearthed for the first time. Bourne tells the bitterly sad story of Ivor Novello, who wrote the WWI anthem 'Keep the Home Fires Burning', and the crucial work of Noel Coward - who was hated by Hitler for his work entertaining the troops. Fighting Proud also includes a wealth of long-suppressed wartime photography subsequently ignored by mainstream historians. This book is a monument to the bravery, sacrifice and honour shown by a persecuted minority, who contributed during Britain's hour of need.
Love and Money argues that we can’t understand contemporary queer cultures without looking through the lens of social class. Resisting old divisions between culture and economy, identity and privilege, left and queer, recognition and redistribution, Love and Money offers supple approaches to capturing class experience and class form in and around queerness. Contrary to familiar dismissals, not every queer television or movie character is like Will Truman on Will and Grace—rich, white, healthy, professional, detached from politics, community, and sex. Through ethnographic encounters with readers and cultural producers and such texts as Boys Don’t Cry, Brokeback Mountain, By Hook or By Crook, and wedding announcements in the New York Times, Love and Money sees both queerness and class across a range of idioms and practices in everyday life. How, it asks, do readers of Dorothy Allison’s novels use her work to find a queer class voice? How do gender and race broker queer class fantasy? How do independent filmmakers cross back and forth between industry and queer sectors, changing both places as they go and challenging queer ideas about bad commerce and bad taste? With an eye to the nuances and harms of class difference in queerness and a wish to use culture to forge queer and class affinities, Love and Money returns class and its politics to the study of queer life.
Blue, Too contains writing by twenty writers who speak meaningfully about queers in and from the working class and provide a touchstone for working-class LGBTQ writers eager to know more about their traditions and their history. Blue, Too is meant to entertain and challenge, but most of all it is meant to illuminate our realities, our struggles, and our resistance to assimilation and mental gentrification. As a sourcebook for working-class studies and queer studies, Blue, Too: More Writing by (for or about) Working-Class Queers includes two special features: "A Blue Study: The Reader's, Writer's, and Scholar's Guide" to using Blue, Too to examine the interlocking issues of queerness and social class, including discussion questions and prompts for writing and mini-research projects that connect the reader with working-class and LBGT scholarship; and "Reading Blue," an extensive annotated bibliography that represents the first-ever attempt to create an exhaustive listing of materials related to queers and class.
