LGBTQIA+ Pride Month

Events ranging from sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib to the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" hint that important issues surrounding gender and sexuality remain at the core of political and cultural problems. Nonetheless, intersectional analyses of militarism that account for questions of race, class, and gender remain exceedingly rare. Abuses of the Erotic fills this gap by offering a comprehensive picture of how military values have permeated the civilian cultural sphere and by investigating connections between sexuality and militarism in the United States since the late 1980s.  Josh Cerretti takes up the urgent task of applying an interdisciplinary, transnational framework to the role of sexuality in promoting, expanding, and sustaining the war on terror to understand the links between what Cerretti calls "domestic militarism" and later projects of state-backed violence and intervention. This work brings together scholarship on domestic and international militarization in relation to both homosexuality and heterosexuality to demonstrate how sexual and gender politics have been deployed to bolster U.S. military policies and, by tracking over a decade of militarized sexuality, how these instances have foundationally changed how we think of sexual and gender politics today.   

Within queer, transgender, and Latinx and Chicanx cultural politics, brown transgender narratives are frequently silenced and erased. Brown trans subjects are treated as deceptive, unnatural, nonexistent, or impossible, their bodies, lives, and material circumstances represented through tropes and used as metaphors. Restoring personhood and agency to these subjects, Francisco J. Galarte advances "brown trans figuration" as a theoretical framework to describe how transness and brownness coexist within the larger queer, trans, and Latinx historical experiences. Brown Trans Figurations presents a collection of representations that reveal the repression of brown trans narratives and make that repression visible and palpable. Galarte examines the violent deaths of two transgender Latinas and the corresponding narratives that emerged about their lives, analyzes the invisibility of brown transmasculinity in Chicana feminist works, and explores how issues such as transgender politics can be imagined as part of Chicanx and Latinx political movements. This book considers the contexts in which brown trans narratives appear, how they circulate, and how they are reproduced in politics, sexual cultures, and racialized economies.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth are disproportionately represented in the U.S. youth homelessness population. In Coming Out to the Streets, Brandon Andrew Robinson examines their lives.   Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in central Texas, Coming Out to the Streets looks into the LGBTQ youth's lives before they experience homelessness--within their families, schools, and other institutions--and later when they navigate the streets, deal with police, and access shelters and other services. Through this documentation, Brandon Andrew Robinson shows how poverty and racial inequality shape the ways that the LGBTQ youth negotiate their gender and sexuality before and while they are experiencing homelessness. To address LGBTQ youth homelessness, Robinson contends that solutions must move beyond blaming families for rejecting their child. In highlighting the voices of the LGBTQ youth, Robinson calls for queer and trans liberation through systemic change.

LGBTQ kids reveal what it's like to be young and queer today Growing Up Queer explores the changing ways that young people are now becoming LGBT-identified in the US. Through interviews and three years of ethnographic research at an LGBTQ youth drop-in center, Mary Robertson focuses on the voices and stories of youths themselves in order to show how young people understand their sexual and gender identities, their interest in queer media, and the role that family plays in their lives. The young people who participated in this research are among the first generation to embrace queer identities as children and adolescents. This groundbreaking and timely consideration of queer identity demonstrates how sexual and gender identities are formed through complicated, ambivalent processes as opposed to being natural characteristics that one is born with. In addition to showing how youth understand their identities, Growing Up Queer describes how young people navigate queerness within a culture where being gay is the "new normal." Using Sara Ahmed's concept of queer orientation, Robertson argues that being queer is not just about one's sexual and/or gender identity, but is understood through intersecting identities including race, class, ability, and more. By showing how society accepts some kinds of LGBTQ-identified people while rejecting others, Growing Up Queer provides evidence of queerness as a site of social inequality. The book moves beyond an oversimplified examination of teenage sexuality and shows, through the voices of young people themselves, the exciting yet complicated terrain of queer adolescence.

With a focus on historic sites, this volume explores the recent history of non- heteronormative Americans from the early twentieth century onward and the places associated with these communities. Authors explore how queer identities are connected with specific places: places where people gather, socialize, protest, mourn, and celebrate. The focus is deeper look at how sexually variant and gender non-conforming Americans constructed identity, created communities, and fought to have rights recognized by the government. Each chapter is accompanied by prompts and activities that invite readers to think critically and immerse themselves in the subject matter while working collaboratively with others.

If you are transgendered, the feeling of wanting your body to match the sex you feel you are never goes away. For some, though, especially those who grew up before trans people were widely out and advocating for equality, these feelings were often compartmentalized and rarely acted upon. Now that gender reassignment has become much more commonplace, many of these people may feel increasing pressure to finally undergo the procedures they have always secretly wanted.   Ken Koch was one of those people. Married twice, a veteran, and a world traveler, a health scare when he was sixty-three prompted him to acknowledge the feelings that had plagued him since he was a small child. By undergoing a host of procedures, he radically changed his appearance and became Anne Koch. In the process though, Anne lost everything that Ken had accomplished. She had to remake herself from the ground up. Hoping to help other people in her age bracket who may be considering transitioning, Anne describes the step by step procedures that she underwent, and shares the cost to her personal life, in order to show seniors that although it is never too late to become the person you always knew you were, it is better to go into that new life prepared for some serious challenges.  Both a fascinating memoir of a well-educated man growing up trans yet repressed in the mid-twentieth century, and a guidebook to navigating the tricky waters of gender reassignment as a senior, It Never Goes Away shows how what we see in the television world of Transparent translates in real life.   

A transgender reporter's "powerful, profoundly moving" narrative tour through the surprisingly vibrant queer communities sprouting up in red states (New York Times Book Review), offering a vision of a stronger, more humane America. Ten years ago, Samantha Allen was a suit-and-tie-wearing Mormon missionary. Now she's a GLAAD Award-winning journalist happily married to another woman. A lot in her life has changed, but what hasn't changed is her deep love of Red State America, and of queer people who stay in so-called "flyover country" rather than moving to the liberal coasts. In Real Queer America, Allen takes us on a cross-country road-trip stretching all the way from Provo, Utah to the Rio Grande Valley to the Bible Belt to the Deep South. Her motto for the trip: "Something gay every day." Making pit stops at drag shows, political rallies, and hubs of queer life across the heartland, she introduces us to scores of extraordinary LGBT people working for change, from the first openly transgender mayor in Texas history to the manager of the only queer night club in Bloomington, Indiana, and many more. Capturing profound cultural shifts underway in unexpected places and revealing a national network of chosen family fighting for a better world, Real Queer America is a treasure trove of uplifting stories and a much-needed source of hope and inspiration in these divided times.

The first book to examine the complexity of sexual identity, philosophy, and behavior in Amish culture. The Amish offer a startling contrast to the postmodern view of sexuality and gender roles. After the sexual revolution of the 1960s, mainstream American culture never looked back. Meanwhile, the Amish never looked forward. In twenty-first-century Amish communities, heteronormative sexuality is still based on a unifying principle: an understanding of sexuality as emerging from a divine plan. In the eyes of the Amish, sex is squandered by those who embrace it as hedonistic or who carve out a sexual identity that moves them away from that singular, God-given purpose. But this communal emphasis on sex for procreation does not mean that the Amish do not possess a complex range of sexual identities and opinions. In Serpent in the Garden, clinical psychologist James A. Cates breaks new ground in the study of Amish sexuality by examining this shrouded, rarely discussed subject. The first book to bring Amish sexuality into primary focus, this volume argues that, because the Amish are a sexual minority, queer theory is the ideal framework from which to observe their views on sex, sexuality, and gender. The book offers a broad view of sexuality in Amish culture that includes the challenges that gays and lesbians face in the community, as well as an exploration of Amish gender roles, their views toward intimacy, their responses to cases of child sexual abuse, and the role of fetishes among the Amish. Cates draws from multiple perspectives and years of research on the Amish themselves. He also looks at pushback against alternative behaviors or identities, as well as Amish success in keeping mainstream values at bay. With this book, Cates establishes Amish sexuality as a topic worthy of professional attention. Offering readers a more sophisticated understanding of the Amish and of sexual expression among cultures, Serpent in the Gardenwill appeal to scholars working on gender and sexuality, the Amish, and social service professionals who serve the Amish community.

As LGBTQ movements in Western Europe, North America, and other regions of the world are becoming increasingly successful at awarding LGBTQ people rights, especially institutional recognition for same-sex couples and their families, what becomes of the deeper social transformation that these movements initially aimed to achieve? The United States is in many ways a paradigmatic model for LGBTQ movements in other countries. Sexuality, Subjectivity, and LGBTQ Militancy in the United Statesfocuses on the transformations of the US LGBTQ movement since the 1980s, highlighting the relationship between its institutionalization and the disappearance of sexuality from its most visible claims, so that its growing visibility and legitimation since the 1990s have paradoxically led to a decrease in grassroots militancy. The book examines the issue from the bottom up, identifying the links between the varying importance of sexuality as a movement theme and actors' mobilization, and enhances the import of subjectivity in militancy. It draws attention to cultural, sometimes infrapolitical, forms of militancy that perpetuate the role of sexuality in LGBTQ militancy.

The increased visibility of transgender people in mainstream media, exemplified by Time magazine's declaration that 2014 marked a "transgender tipping point," was widely believed to signal a civil rights breakthrough for trans communities in the United States. In Terrorizing Gender Mia Fischer challenges this narrative of progress, bringing together transgender, queer, critical race, legal, surveillance, and media studies to analyze the cases of Chelsea Manning, CeCe McDonald, and Monica Jones. Tracing how media and state actors collude in the violent disciplining of these trans women, Fischer exposes the traps of visibility by illustrating that dominant representations of trans people as deceptive, deviant, and threatening are integral to justifying, normalizing, and reinforcing the state-sanctioned violence enacted against them. The heightened visibility of transgender people, Fischer argues, has actually occasioned a conservative backlash characterized by the increased surveillance of trans people by the security state, evident in debates over bathroom access laws, the trans military ban, and the rescission of federal protections for transgender students and workers. Terrorizing Gender concludes that the current moment of trans visibility constitutes a contingent cultural and national belonging, given the gendered and racialized violence that the state continues to enact against trans communities, particularly those of color.  

The vast majority of anti-violence activism in the United States occurs within the framework of identity politics. Identity-based movements, such as those to stop violence against people of color, women, and LGBT people, have become so commonplace as to seem to be a natural way to reduce violence. Unlivable Lives examines how identity politics and anti-violence activities shape group identity and practices of activism in ways that can be unintentionally damaging to the very groups they aim to protect. Analyzing thirteen national organizations working to reduce the violence experienced by transgender people, sociologist Laurel Westbrook reveals that activists use a number of techniques with consequences that run counter to the goal of making trans lives more livable. Rather than reducing fear, these tactics may actually increase it, leaving group members convinced that a violent fate is inevitable. Provocative and galvanizing, this book envisions new strategies for anti-violence and social justice movements and will revolutionize the way we think about this form of activism.

The never-before-told story of Brooklyn's vibrant and forgotten queer history, from the mid-1850s up to the present day. Hugh Ryan's When Brooklyn Was Queer is a groundbreaking exploration of the LGBT history of Brooklyn, from the early days of Walt Whitman in the 1850s up through the queer women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and beyond. No other book, movie, or exhibition has ever told this sweeping story. Not only has Brooklyn always lived in the shadow of queer Manhattan neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Harlem, but there has also been a systematic erasure of its queer history--a great forgetting. Ryan is here to unearth that history for the first time. In intimate, evocative, moving prose he discusses in new light the fundamental questions of what history is, who tells it, and how we can only make sense of ourselves through its retelling; and shows how the formation of the Brooklyn we know today is inextricably linked to the stories of the incredible people who created its diverse neighborhoods and cultures. Through them, When Brooklyn Was Queer brings Brooklyn's queer past to life, and claims its place as a modern classic.