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Chicago Whispers by St Sukie De la Croix; John D'Emilio (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9780299286941

Publication Date: 2012-07-11

Chicago Whispers illuminates a colorful and vibrant record of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people who lived and loved in Chicago from the city's beginnings in the 1670s as a fur-trading post to the end of the 1960s. Journalist St. Sukie de la Croix, drawing on years of archival research and personal interviews, reclaims Chicago's LGBT past that had been forgotten, suppressed, or overlooked. Here are accounts of vice dens during the Civil War and classy gentlemen's clubs; the wild and gaudy First Ward Ball that was held annually from 1896 to 1908; gender-crossing performers in cabarets and at carnival sideshows; rights activists like Henry Gerber in the 1920s; authors of lesbian pulp novels and publishers of "physique magazines"; and evidence of thousands of nameless queer Chicagoans who worked as artists and musicians, in the factories, offices, and shops, at theaters and in hotels.
Queer Brown Voices by Uriel Quesada (Editor); Letitia Gomez (Editor); Salvador Vidal-Ortiz (Editor)
ISBN: 9781477302323

Publication Date: 2015-09-01

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, LGBT Latinas/os faced several forms of discrimination. To disrupt the cycle of sexism, racism, and homophobia that they experienced, LGBT Latinas/os organized themselves on local, state, and national levels, forming communities in which they could fight for equal rights while simultaneously staying true to both their ethnic and sexual identities. Yet histories of LGBT activism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s often reduce the role that Latinas/os played, resulting in misinformation, or ignore their work entirely, erasing them from history. Queer Brown Voices is the first book published to counter this trend, documenting the efforts of some of these LGBT Latina/o activists. Comprising essays and oral history interviews that present the experiences of fourteen activists across the United States and in Puerto Rico, the book offers a new perspective on the history of LGBT mobilization and activism. The activists discuss subjects that shed light not only on the organizations they helped to create and operate, but also on their broad-ranging experiences of being racialized and discriminated against, fighting for access to health care during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and struggling for awareness.
Becoming a Visible Man by Jamison Green
ISBN: 9780826514561

Publication Date: 2004-06-04

Written by a leading activist in the transgender movement, Becoming a Visible Man is an artful and compelling inquiry into the politics of gender. Jamison Green combines candid autobiography with informed analysis to offer unique insight into the multiple challenges of the female-to-male transsexual experience, ranging from encounters with prejudice and strained relationships with family to the development of an FTM community and the realities of surgical sex reassignment. Greene's comprehensive knowledge of the processes and problems encountered by transgender and transsexual people--as well as his legal advocacy work to help ensure that gender-variant people have access to the same rights and opportunities as others--enable him to explain the issues as no transsexual author has previously done. Brimming with frank and often poignant recollections of Green's own experiences--including his childhood struggles with identity and his years as a lesbian parent prior to his sex-reassignment surgery--the book examines transsexualism as a human condition, and sex reassignment as one of the choices that some people feel compelled to make in order to manage their gender variance. Relating the FTM psyche and experience to the social and political forces at work in American society, Becoming a Visible Man also speaks consciously of universal principles that concern us all, particularly the need to live one's life honestly, openly, and passionately.
Beijing by Philip Gambone
ISBN: 9780299184902

Publication Date: 2003-03-28

Escaping his ghosts, AIDS widower David Masiello accepts a one-year position at a Western medical clinic in Beijing. Lonely but excited, he sets out to explore the city--both its bustling street life and its clandestine gay subculture. David chronicles his adventures in China as he wrestles with cultural dislocation, loneliness, and sexual and spiritual longing. After a series of both comic and poignant encounters with gay Chinese men, he meets Bosheng, a handsome young artist. Though the attraction is strong, a difficult courtship ensues, during which Bosheng returns to his ancestral village to marry the girl his parents have chosen for him. Eventually, and quite unexpectedly, David and Bosheng reconnect and share an idyllic spring together. As the year ends, David must decide whether to say goodbye or face the uncertainties of a long-distance relationship.
Sugarless by James Magruder
ISBN: 9780299233808

Publication Date: 2009-10-22

Things look bad for Rick Lahrem, a high school sophomore in a cookie-cutter Chicago suburb in 1976. His mother's second husband is a licensed psychologist who eats like an ape, his stepsister is a stoner slut, and his father is engaged to a Southern belle. Rick's only solace is his growing collection of original Broadway-cast LPs, bought on the sly at Wax Trax. After he brings two girls in speech class to tears by reading a story aloud, Rick is coaxed onto the interscholastic forensics team to perform a dramatic interpretation of The Boys in the Band, the controversial sixties play about homosexuality. Rick also discovers the joys of sex--with a speech coach from a rival school--just as his mother, reacting to a deteriorating home environment, makes an unnerving commitment to Christ. The newly confident Rick assumes this too shall pass--until the combined forces of family, sex, and faith threaten to undo him at the state meet in Peoria. James Magruder's Sugarless offers a ruefully entertaining take on the simultaneous struggles of coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming-to-Jesus.
Outbound by William Storandt
ISBN: 9780299174606

Publication Date: 2001-07-03

"Outbound" is the story of two voyages: an Atlantic crossing in the 33-foot cutter "Clarity," bound for Scotland; and the hard voyage of self-discovery that finally brought Bill Storandt to his life partner. Storandt's account of the adventure he had carefully planned with longtime partner Brian Forsyth and their friend Bob soon turns into a white-knuckled sailing tale, as they encounter a fierce storm four hundred miles from the Irish coast that tests their courage and all their sailing skills. The sea story, vividly evoking life in a small boat on a big ocean, is interwoven with Storandt's flashbacks to his earlier life. Outbound delivers its share of excitement, but it s also a moving reflection on how circuitous our paths can be, even when the destination is clear and beckoning.

These books from archive.org are available through the practice of Controlled Digital Lending. Learn more about CDL and its recent role in the online library here.

Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
ISBN: 9781101965122

Bawdy and moving, the ultimate word-of-mouth bestseller, Rubyfruit Jungle is about growing up a lesbian in America - and living happily ever after. Critically acclaimed, Rubyfruit Jungle launched Rita Mae Brown's career as one of this country's most distinctive writers and continues to be a powerful seminal work more than 40 years after its original publication.
Zami: a New Spelling of My Name by Geraldine Audre Lorde
ISBN: 0895941228

Publication Date: 1982-01-01

"ZAMI is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author's vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde's work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page."--Off Our Backs
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
ISBN: 1555838537

Published in 1993, this brave, original novel is considered to be the finest account ever written of the complexities of a transgender existence. Woman or man? That's the question that rages like a storm around Jess Goldberg, clouding her life and her identity. Growing up differently gendered in a blue--collar town in the 1950's, coming out as a butch in the bars and factories of the pre-feminist '60s, deciding to pass as a man in order to survive when she is left without work or a community in the early '70s. This powerful, provocative and deeply moving novel sees Jess coming full circle, she learns to accept the complexities of being a transgender person in a world demanding simple explanations.
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
ISBN: 9780385334587

Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
ISBN: 9780486800295

A chance encounter between two lonely women leads to a passionate romance in this lesbian cult classic. Therese, a struggling young sales clerk, and Carol, a homemaker in the midst of a bitter divorce, abandon their oppressive daily routines for the freedom of the open road, where their love can blossom. But their newly discovered bliss is shattered when Carol is forced to choose between her child and her lover. Highsmith's sensitive treatment of fully realized characters who defy stereotypes about homosexuality marks a departure from previous lesbian pulp fiction. Erotic, eloquent, and suspenseful, this story offers an honest look at the necessity of being true to one's nature. The book is also the basis of the acclaimed 2015 film Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.
Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta
ISBN: 9780544003446

Publication Date: 2015-09-22

Inspired by Nigeria's folktales and its war, Under the Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly. Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, star-crossed, fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls. When their love is discovered, Ijeoma learns that she will have to hide this part of herself. But there is a cost to living inside a lie. As Edwidge Danticat has made personal the legacy of Haiti's political coming of age, Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees uses one woman's lifetime to examine the ways in which Nigerians continue to struggle toward selfhood. Even as their nation contends with and recovers from the effects of war and division, Nigerian lives are also wrecked and lost from taboo and prejudice. This story offers a glimmer of hope -- a future where a woman might just be able to shape her life around truth and love.
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
ISBN: 9781844085156

Publication Date: 2008-09-01

A powerful novel of love between women, THE WELL OF LONELINESS brought about the most famous legal trial for obscenity in the history of British law. Banned on publication in 1928, it then went on to become a classic bestseller. Stephen Gordon (named by a father desperate for a son) is not like other girls: she hunts, she fences, she reads books, wears trousers and longs to cut her hair. As she grows up amidst the stifling grandeur of Morton Hall, the locals begin to draw away from her, aware of some indefinable thing that sets her apart. And when Stephen Gordon reaches maturity, she falls passionately in love with another woman.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (Illustrator)
ISBN: 9780618477944

Publication Date: 2006-06-08

A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
ISBN: 9780312427733

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license...records my first name simply as Cal." So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of 1967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
ISBN: 0816638624

When A Single Man was originally published, it shocked many by its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in midlife. George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his partner, and determines to persist in the routines of his daily life; the course of A Single Man spans twenty-four hours in an ordinary day. An Englishman and a professor living in suburban Southern California, he is an outsider in every way, and his internal reflections and interactions with others reveal a man who loves being alive despite everyday injustices and loneliness. Wry, suddenly manic, constantly funny, surprisingly sad, this novel catches the texture of life itself.

Prideland on PBS

Follow queer actor Dyllón Burnside on a journey to discover how LGBTQ Americans are finding ways to live authentically and with pride in the modern South. This short-form digital series has three minisodes followed by an hour-long special. View the first episode below:

Pride Month Video Collection

This collection put together by Films on Demand explores the many sides of LGBT living to provide informative and moving content. Some selections are featured below:

Supreme Court rules existing civil rights law protects LGBTQ workers

"The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday, June 15 that existing federal law forbids job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and transgender status, a major victory for advocates of gay rights — and a surprising one from an increasingly conservative court."

Transgender health protections reversed by Trump administration

"The Trump administration on Friday, June 12 finalized a rule that would remove nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people when it comes to health care and health insurance."

Local Organizations

Open Up at Salem Academy and College

"Open Up is an LGBTQIA+ organization alliance at Salem College. Its purpose is to educate members of the Salem community on the topic of sexuality and its effects on people in our everyday society. Open Up is a forum for the exchange of ideas, views, perceptions, and opinions. It provides a safe space for students to share these feelings and experiences without fear of harassment or ridicule. All faculty, staff, and students are invited to be a part of Open Up."

North Star LGBTQ Community Center

"North Star is Winston-Salem’s LGBTQ Community Center. North Star seeks to empower and enrich the lives of LGBTQ people in the Triad area. We offer various social, support, and educational opportunities for adults & youth." Located on 930 Burke St, Winston-Salem, it provides opportunities for group activities, community involvement, and volunteering.

Pride Winston-Salem

Pride Winston-Salem hosts the annual Pride Festival Parade and Food Truck Rodeo every October. Even though the 2020 festival has been canceled in consideration of the health and well-being of community members, Pride Winston-Salem continues to provide educational and community building programs virtually. They are most active on their Facebook page.

PFLAG Winston-Salem

"Since 1988, PFLAG Winston-Salem has been providing support to the Winston-Salem and Forsyth County area by helping LGBTQ+ individuals, their families, and friends through support - to cope with an adverse society, education - to enlighten an ill-informed public, and advocacy - to end discrimination and secure equal rights for everyone."

National Organization and Websites

GLAAD (previously Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) works to promote positive and accurate media depictions of the LGBTQ community. You can find publications, reports, and more meant to help educate yourself and others.

Human Rights Campaign is a civil rights organization focused on achieving equality for LGBTQ people. Their resources include national and local reviews of policies affecting the LGBTQ community, guidance and education, opportunities for involvement, and more.

National Center for Transgender Equality is dedicated to changing policies to "replace disrespect, discrimination, and violence with empathy, opportunity, and justice." There is a wealth of information on the issues that affect trans people; help with document changes, health coverage, and trans rights; and opportunities for community involvement.

The Point Foundation grants scholarships to LGBTQ students, helps find internship and leadership development opportunities, and offers other resources to help prepare the next generation of leaders.

The Gender & Sexuality Action Committee of the American Medical Student Association combats sexism and heterosexism by ensuring equal access to medical care and education. It provides programs on inclusive sexual health practices and networking opportunities for LGBTQ pre-medical and medical students.

Virtual Cinema Release ($10)

For They Know Not What They Do

OUT at the Movies of Winston-Salem is offering a virtual cinema opportunity to watch the new documentary by Dan Karslake. Tickets are $10 and 50% of the proceeds go directly to supporting the OUT at the Movies Film Festival. View the trailer below:

For They Know Not What They Do - Trailer from First Run Features on Vimeo.

The arrival of marriage equality was seen by many as the pinnacle achievement of the march toward full equality for LGBTQ people. But for many on the Right, it was the last straw, and their public backlash has been swift, severe and successful. In collaboration with religious conservatives, politicians are invoking both the Bible and the U.S. Constitution in their campaigns for the 'religious freedom' to legally discriminate. By telling the stories of four families struggling with these issues, the film offers healing and understanding to those caught in the crosshairs of scripture, sexuality, and identity.

Digital Book Display

Featured Reading

The Color Purple

You're Not from Around Here, Are You?

The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

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