Adult Nonfiction

By: Zane McNeill (Editor), Rebecca Scott (Editor), Paperback, 2024

Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future uses the lens of queer ecologies to explore environmental destruction in Appalachia while mapping out alternative futures that follow from critical queer perspectives on the United States' exploitation of the land. With essays by Lis Regula, Jessica Cory, Chet Pancake, Tijah Bumgarner, MJ Eckhouse, and other essential thinkers, this collection brings to light both emergent and long-standing marginalized perspectives that give renewed energy to the struggle for a sustainable future. A new and valuable contribution to the field of Appalachian studies, rural queer studies, Indigenous studies, and ethnographic studies of the United States, Deviant Hollers presents a much-needed objection to the status quo of academic work, as well as to the American exceptionalism and white supremacy pervading US politics and the broader geopolitical climate. By focusing on queer critiques and acknowledging the status of Appalachia as a settler colony, Deviant Hollers offers new possibilities for a reimagined way of life.

By: Alba De Zanet (Author), Roberto Garcia (Author), 2021, Hardcover, Illustrated

"No tea no shade, Judy, but your mug looks pretty badly beaten!"

With RuPaul's Drag Race catapulting drag into the mainstream, queens are well and truly owning the spotlight, and introducing us to their quirky and hilarious slang. But are you struggling to keep up with the lingo? Desperate to "throw shade" and "spill the tea" but not quite sure how to work it into a sentence? Well never fear: The Drag Dictionary is here to save you!

Featuring bright, fun illustrations of your best-loved girls, as well as all those classic phrases explained – from "death drop" to "squirrel friends", "tuck" and more – this explains 45 of the best phrases you've been gagging over since the dawn of Lady Bunny. This is a tribute to all things drag, and the amazing artists and superheroes who add sparkle and glitz to our lives.

By:  Frank Decaro (Author) & Bruce Vilanch (Foreword), 2022, Hardcover

Drag celebrates the fabulous current and historical influence of drag, and its talented and inspiring performers.

Since man first walked the Earth...in heels, no other art form has wielded as unique an influence on pop culture as Drag. Drag artists have now sashayed their way to snatch the crowns as the Queens of mainstream entertainment.
Through informative and witty essays chronicling over 100 years of drag, readers will embark on a Priscilla-like journey through pop culture, from television shows like The Milton Berle Show, Bosom Buddies, and RuPaul's Drag Race, films like Some Like It Hot, To Wong Foo..., and Tootsie, and Broadway shows like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, La Cage aux Folles, and Kinky Boots.
With stops in cities around the globe, and packed with interviews and commentaries on the dramas, joys, and love that "make-up" a life in wigs and heels, Drag features contributions from today's most groundbreaking and popular artists, including Bianca del Rio, Miss Coco Peru, Hedda Lettuce, Lypsinka, and Varla Jean Merman, as well as notable performers as Harvey Fierstein and Charles Busch. It includes more than 100 photos--many from performers' personal collections, and a comprehensive timeline of drag "herstory."

By:  Dolly Parton, 2013, Paperback

Expanding on the popular commencement speech Dolly Parton gave at the University of Tennessee, Dream More is a deeper and richer exploration of the personal philosophy she has forged over the course of her astonishing career as a singer, songwriter, performer, and philanthropist.

Dolly elaborates on the four great hopes she wants us all to embrace: Dream more, Learn more, Care more, and Be more. She offers examples from her own life, from her childhood in the hills of eastern Tennessee to her life as the iconic performer she is today.

From one of the legends of our time, Dream More is an honest, funny, and uplifting anthem for all who want to take charge of their lives and forge a future on their own terms.

By: Heather Brook Adams (Author), 2022, Paperback

A study of the rhetorical power of shame and its effect on reproductive politics

Not long ago, unmarried pregnant women in the United States hid in maternity homes and relinquished their "illegitimate" children to more "deserving" two-parent families―all to conceal "shameful" pregnancies. Although times have changed, reproductive politics remain fraught. In Enduring Shame Heather Brook Adams recasts the 1960s and '70s―an era of presumed progress―as a time when expanding reproductive rights were paralleled by communicative practices of shame that cultivated increasingly public interventions into unwed and teen pregnancy and new forms of injustice.

Drawing from personal interviews, archival documents, legal decisions, public policy, journalism, memoirs, and advocacy writing, Adams articulates how the rhetorical power of shame persuaded the American public to think about reproduction, sexual righteousness, and unwed pregnancy. Despite the aspirational goals of reproductive liberation, public sentiment frequently reflected supremacist beliefs regarding racial, economic, and moral fitness―notions that informed new public policy. Enduring Shame maps a range of experiences across these decades from women's experiences in homes for unwed mothers to policy and legal changes that are typically understood as proof of shame's dissipation, including Title IX legislation and Roe v. Wade. Rhetorical historiography and questions of reproductive justice guide the analysis, and women's testimonies provide essential perspectives and context. Through these histories, Adams articulates a network of language, affect, and embodiment through which shame moves; expands rhetorical understandings of the discursive power of the identities of woman and mother; and considers how the gendered, raced, and classed aspects of shame can help us understand and support reproductive dignity.

Enduring Shame recovers a misunderstood part of women's recent history by considering why reproductive politics continue to be so volatile despite previous gains and why shame still figures centrally in discourse about women's reproductive and sexual freedoms.

By: Alex Alberto (Author), 2024, Paperback

In a series of genre-blending essays, Entwined tells the story of Alex Alberto’s decade-long polyamorous journey towards a new kind of family.

In these essays, Alex attempts to build two committed relationships at once when no one involved has done it before; develops a powerful bond with the woman their partner loves; sits through a tense Thanksgiving Dinner with religious in-laws; questions the need for rules and hierarchy in their relationships; experiences the intensity of a triad; wrestles with the fragility baked into the nuclear family after their father’s stroke; and explores their queerness and gender identity in English, in New York, while struggling to reconcile their newfound self in their native French-Canadian language and culture.

By Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton, 2009, Paperback

For anyone who has ever dreamed of love, sex, and companionship beyond the limits of traditional monogamy, this groundbreaking guide navigates the infinite possibilities that open relationships can offer. Experienced ethical sluts Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy dispel myths and cover all the skills necessary to maintain a successful and responsible polyamorous lifestyle--from self-reflection and honest communication to practicing safe sex and raising a family. Individuals and their partners will learn how to discuss and honor boundaries, resolve conflicts, and to define relationships on their own terms.

In this one of a kind memoir, author Monique Jenkinson tells the story of her time as a drag queen, and what it meant for her to win a major drag queen pageant as a cis woman. Naming her drag persona Fauxnique, Jenkinson consciously pays tribute to the queer men and trans woman for whom drag has held so much meaning even as she recognizes how unusual it is for a cis woman to dress in drag. A Valentine to a queer culture that Jenkinson nonetheless finds herself on the outside of, Faux Queen is a fascinating glimpse into the politics of gender and sex that permeate the world of drag and inflect the ways that people of various identities and orientations can participate in it. 

By: Sabrina Strings (Author), 2019, Paperback

Winner, 2020 Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award, given by the American Sociological Association

Honorable Mention, 2020 Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association

How the female body has been racialized for over two hundred years

There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor Black women are particularly stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat Black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago.

Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals―where fat bodies were once praised―showing that fat phobia, as it relates to Black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority.

The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

By: Casey Tanner LCPC, CST (Author), 2024, Hardcover

A groundbreaking guide to sexuality that dispels the stale cultural attitudes about sex that leave too many feeling inadequate, and offers an expansive, attachment-based framework to free us and develop bolder, more satisfying relationships with our sexual selves.

When it comes to sex, most people feel insecure. But it’s not because we’re deficient; it’s because we’ve been under-resourced and miseducated.      

Certified sex therapist Casey Tanner argues that our sex lives are a microcosm of every untruth we’ve internalized about gender, sex, relationships, our bodies, and ourselves. Most of us were taught that healthy sexuality is only for a certain kind of person, in a certain kind of relationship, with a certain kind of body. As a result, the way we’ve learned how to define “good sex” is reflective of how good, worthy, and loveable we see ourselves.

Feel It All is a comprehensive guide to help everyone uncover their personal misconceptions about sexuality and relationships. Tanner helps you recognize and assess your core beliefs surrounding relationships, sexuality, gender, and more; identify past trauma; find pathways to healing that work for you; and redefine sex based on knowledge and possibilities, rather than potential consequences.

Comprehensive yet accessible, informative, warm, and nonjudgmental, Feel It All provides a pathway for personal healing, creating stronger relationships, and achieving deeper intimacy.

By: Renee Lane (Author), 0formant0 (Illustrator), 2022, Paperback

Dominatrix Renee Lane and her submissive husband live in Memphis, Tennessee, disguised as an average married couple. In private life, they are mistress and slave. For the last ten years, Ms. Renee has employed erotic S&M, mind control, and brainwashing techniques to forge an intimate and loving bond with her submissive partner. They consider themselves explorers of the boundaries of consensual female domination. Ms. Renee's intense and radical approach to their relationship will challenge the reader who merely dabbles in BDSM.

The book is a collection of e-mails between Renee and a close friend, as well as Butler's journal detailing his ever deepening submission to his true love. We follow the story as Renee continually challenges him to give up control and abandon his own agency. All the while she urged on by her lover and confidant, Heather, who acts as both observer and accomplice to his total enslavement.

Make no mistake, this is a love story. A story of unrelenting faith, trust, and devotion, and a couple's willingness to cross boundaries and take things to the limit together in their own special world. Mind-bendingly erotic, and heart-wrenchingly romantic. An answer to the misconceptions of BDSM and Total Power Exchange portrayed in popular media.

By: Rhea Ewing, 2022, Paperback

By: Jack Parlett (Author), 2023, Paperback

"[A] concise, meticulously researched, century-spanning chronicle of queer life on Fire Island captures, with a plain-spoken yet lyric touch, the locale’s power to stun and shame, to give pleasure and symbolize evanescence." —Wayne Koestenbaum, New York Times Book Review

Fire Island, a thin strip of beach off the Long Island coast, has long been a vital space in the queer history of America. Both utopian and exclusionary, healing and destructive, the island is a locus of contradictions, all of which coalesce against a stunning ocean backdrop.

Now poet and scholar Jack Parlett tells the story of this iconic destination—its history, its meaning and its cultural significance—through the lens of the artists and creators who sought refuge on its shores. Together, figures as divergent as Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, Frank O'Hara, Patricia Highsmith and Jeremy O. Harris tell the story of a queer space in constant evolution. Transporting, impeccably researched and gorgeously written, Fire Island is a fond and fierce portrait of an iconic American destination and an essential contribution to queer history.

"Supremely engaging and highly informative." —BuzzFeed

"A fascinating, throbbing history." —Olivia Laing

By: Dale Carpenter (Author), 2013, Paperback

“A highly informative, detailed, even thrilling account of how the Supreme Court arguments reshaped American law.”―Michael Bronkski, San Francisco Chronicle

No one could have predicted that the night of September 17, 1998, would be anything but routine in Houston, Texas. Even the call to police that a black man was "going crazy with a gun" was hardly unusual in this urban setting. Nobody could have imagined that the arrest of two men for a minor criminal offense would reverberate in American constitutional law, exposing a deep malignity in our judicial system and challenging the traditional conception of what makes a family. Indeed, when Harris County sheriff’s deputies entered the second-floor apartment, there was no gun. Instead, they reported that they had walked in on John Lawrence and Tyron Garner having sex in Lawrence’s bedroom.

So begins Dale Carpenter’s "gripping and brilliantly researched" Flagrant Conduct, a work nine years in the making that transforms our understanding of what we thought we knew about Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark Supreme Court decision of 2003 that invalidated America’s sodomy laws. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Carpenter has taken on the "gargantuan" task of extracting the truth about the case, analyzing the claims of virtually every person involved.

Carpenter first introduces us to the interracial defendants themselves, who were hardly prepared "for the strike of lightning" that would upend their lives, and then to the Harris County arresting officers, including a sheriff’s deputy who claimed he had "looked eye to eye" in the faces of the men as they allegedly fornicated. Carpenter skillfully navigates Houston’s complex gay world of the late 1990s, where a group of activists and court officers, some of them closeted themselves, refused to bury what initially seemed to be a minor arrest.

The author charts not only the careful legal strategy that Lambda Legal attorneys adopted to make the case compatible to a conservative Supreme Court but also the miscalculations of the Houston prosecutors who assumed that the nation’s extant sodomy laws would be upheld. Masterfully reenacting the arguments that riveted spectators and Justices alike in 2003, Flagrant Conduct then reaches a point where legal history becomes literature, animating a Supreme Court decision as few writers have done.

In situating Lawrence v. Texas within the larger framework of America’s four-century persecution of gay men and lesbians, Flagrant Conduct compellingly demonstrates that gay history is an integral part of our national civil rights story. 8 pages of illustrations