Books

By: MK Czerwiec (Author, Preface), 2021, Paperback, Graphic

A graphic memoir and adapted oral history of Unit 371, an inpatient AIDS care hospital unit in Chicago that was in existence from 1985 to 2000. Examines the human costs of caregiving and the role art can play in the grieving process.

In 1994, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, MK Czerwiec took her first nursing job, at Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago, as part of the caregiving staff of HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371. Taking Turns pulls back the curtain on life in the ward.

A shining example of excellence in the treatment and care of patients, Unit 371 was a community for thousands of patients and families affected by HIV and AIDS and the people who cared for them. This graphic novel combines Czerwiec’s memories with the oral histories of patients, family members, and staff. It depicts life and death in the ward, the ways the unit affected and informed those who passed through it, and how many look back on their time there today. Czerwiec joined Unit 371 at a pivotal time in the history of AIDS: deaths from the syndrome in the Midwest peaked in 1995 and then dropped drastically in the following years, with the release of antiretroviral protease inhibitors. This positive turn of events led to a decline in patient populations and, ultimately, to the closure of Unit 371. Czerwiec’s restrained, inviting drawing style and carefully considered narrative examine individual, institutional, and community responses to the AIDS epidemic―as well as the role that art can play in the grieving process.

Deeply personal yet made up of many voices, this history of daily life in a unique AIDS care unit is an open, honest look at suffering, grief, and hope among a community of medical professionals and patients at the heart of the epidemic.

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY. INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER.

New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Winner of the 2021 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction. One of The Washington Post's Top 50 Nonfiction Books of 2020.

From a young Harvard- and Cambridge-trained historian, and the Creator and Executive Producer of The Book of Queer (coming June 2022 to Discovery+), the secret history of the fight for gay rights that began a generation before Stonewall.

In 1957, Frank Kameny, a rising astronomer working for the U.S. Defense Department in Hawaii, received a summons to report immediately to Washington, D.C. The Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual, and after a series of humiliating interviews, Kameny, like countless gay men and women before him, was promptly dismissed from his government job. Unlike many others, though, Kameny fought back.

Based on firsthand accounts, recently declassified FBI records, and forty thousand personal documents, Eric Cervini's The Deviant's War unfolds over the course of the 1960s, as the Mattachine Society of Washington, the group Kameny founded, became the first organization to protest the systematic persecution of gay federal employees. It traces the forgotten ties that bound gay rights to the Black Freedom Movement, the New Left, lesbian activism, and trans resistance. Above all, it is a story of America (and Washington) at a cultural and sexual crossroads; of shocking, byzantine public battles with Congress; of FBI informants; murder; betrayal; sex; love; and ultimately victory.

By: Kami Ahrens (Editor), 2023, Paperback

In 1966 in Rabun County, Georgia, a group of high school English students created theFoxfire magazine, a literary journal that celebrated Appalachian stories, peoples, and culture. The publication was filled with poetry and prose from local students and authors and featured interviews with community members. These oral histories quickly became the focal point of the magazine and, eventually, the material that generated the multivolume Foxfire book series.

Now, pulled from the vast Foxfire archive comes the first volume in the series focused specifically on the lives of Appalachian women. These remarkable narratives illuminate a diverse regional culture held together by the threads that are woven between women and place, and through generations. Told sometimes with humor, sometimes with sadness, but always with a gripping rawness and honesty, the stories recount women's lived experiences from the 1960s to the present. The interviews cover work, family, and community, illuminating Cherokee, Black, and white women's experiences; changes in Appalachian culture; and the importance of relationships in daily life. Reading each interview in this book is almost like joining these women on their porches and in their homes as they take us on a journey through their lives. Taken together, the stories speak against regional stereotypes and offer instead a sampling of the many expressions of these women's strength.

By: Ashely Molesso (Author), Chessie Needham (Author), 2020, Hardcover - Illustrated

A joyful celebration of the LGBTQ+ community’s development, history, and culture, packed with facts, trivia, timelines, and charts, and featuring 100 full-color illustrations.

Compiled and designed by queer power couple and illustrators extraordinaire, Ashley Molesso and Chess Needham, founders of the popular stationery company Ash + Chess, The Gay Agenda is an inviting and entertaining guide that pays tribute to the LGBTQ+ community. Filled with engaging descriptions, interesting facts, helpful features—such as historical queer icons and events and LGBTQ+ acronym definitions—this fabulous compendium illuminates the transformation of the community, highlighting its struggles, achievements, landmarks, and contributions. It also salutes iconic members of the LGBTQ+ community—the celebrities, politicians, entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens who have made a notable impact on gay life and society itself.

The Gay Agenda is a nostalgic look back for older generations, an archive for younger people, and a helpful introduction for those interested in learning more about the community and its contributions. From James Baldwin and Emma Goldman to Marsha P. Johnson and Jodie Foster; the Pink Triangle and the Rainbow Flag to Stonewall and the AIDS crisis; Matthew Shepard and Pulse Nightclub to Sodomy Laws and Obergefell; Drag and Transitioning to The L Word and The Kinsey Scale, Freddie Mercury and Ellen Degeneres to Laverne Cox and David Bowie, this magnificent digest is a keepsake honoring all LGBTQ+, and the ongoing fight to gain—and maintain—equality for all.

“This is the history of the gay and lesbian movement that we’ve been waiting for.” —The Washington Post

The sweeping story of the struggle for gay and lesbian rights—based on amazing interviews with politicians, military figures, and members of the entire LGBT community who face these challenges every day.

The fight for gay and lesbian civil rights—the years of outrageous injustice, the early battles, the heart-breaking defeats, and the victories beyond the dreams of the gay rights pioneers—is the most important civil rights issue of the present day. In “the most comprehensive history to date of America’s gay-rights movement” (The Economist), Lillian Faderman tells this unfinished story through the dramatic accounts of passionate struggles with sweep, depth, and feeling.

The Gay Revolution begins in the 1950s, when gays and lesbians were criminals, psychiatrists saw them as mentally ill, churches saw them as sinners, and society victimized them with hatred. Against this dark backdrop, a few brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and beyond. Faderman discusses the protests in the 1960s; the counter reaction of the 1970s and early eighties; the decimated but united community during the AIDS epidemic; and the current hurdles for the right to marriage equality.

“A compelling read of a little-known part of our nation’s history, and of individuals whose stories range from heart-wrenching to inspiring to enraging to motivational” (Chicago Tribune), The Gay Revolution paints a nuanced portrait of the LGBT civil rights movement. A defining account, this is the most complete and authoritative book of its kind.

By: Micheal Waters (Author), 2024, Hardcover

Named a Most Anticipated Book by Esquire, Town & Country, and Electric Literature

"Michael Waters performs an Olympian act of storytelling, using the stories of these extraordinary athletes to explore in brilliant detail the struggle for understanding and equality." ―Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

The story of the early trans athletes and Olympic bureaucrats who lit the flame for today’s culture wars.

In December 1935, Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes.

In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany’s atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC’s nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender.

Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.

Though Charleston has a reputation for holding onto the past longer than most other places, it could not avoid the shock of change. Much has been written of the city's history of civil rights, and its rich African American, women's, ethnic, and religious past. One of the minority groups long left out of the club has been Charleston's lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other sexual minorities community. It's not that they haven't been here all along, making history, contributing greatly to the creation of one of America's most distinctive cities. But, even now, with so many people out and acknowledged, marching in the streets, being elected to public office, and marrying, there are still discrepancies. There are no statues to LGBTQ people (while some discriminatory statutes linger), and very few official mentions anywhere. While other pasts blaze brightly, there is just a flickering of knowledge about local LGBTQ history.

Historian Harlan Greene digs deep and uncovers a wealth of knowledge about Charleston's LGBTQ past and present in this fascinating and informative book.

An accessible chronicle of how the Israel-Palestine conflict originated and developed over the past century. The Shortest History books deliver thousands of years of history in one riveting, fast-paced read.

The ongoing struggle between Israel and Palestine is one of the most bitter conflicts in history, with profound global consequences. In this book, Middle East expert Michael Scott-Baumann succinctly describes its origins and charts its evolution from civil war to the present day. Each chapter offers a lucid explanation of the politics and ends with personal testimony from Palestinians and Israelis whose lives have been impacted by the dispute.

While presenting competing interpretations, Scott-Baumann examines the key flash points, including the early role of the British, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the Trump administration’s peace plan, pitched as “the deal of the century,” in 2020. He delineates both the nature of Israeli control over the Palestinian territories and Palestinian resistance―going to the heart of the clashes in recent decades. The result is an indispensable history, including a time line, glossary, and analysis of why efforts to restore peace have continually failed and what it will take to succeed. 45 B&W maps and images

For the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, an anthology chronicling the tumultuous fight for LGBTQ rights in the 1960s and the activists who spearheaded it, with a foreword by Edmund White.

Finalist for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, presented by The Publishing Triangle
Tor.com, Best Books of 2019 (So Far)
Harper’s Bazaar, The 20 Best LGBTQ Books of 2019
The Advocate, The Best Queer(ish) Non-Fiction Tomes We Read in 2019

June 28, 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which is considered the most significant event in the gay liberation movement, and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library's archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots. Most importantly the anthology spotlights both iconic activists who were pivotal in the movement, such as Sylvia Rivera, co-founder of Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR), as well as forgotten figures like Ernestine Eckstein, one of the few out, African American, lesbian activists in the 1960s. The anthology focuses on the events of 1969, the five years before, and the five years after. Jason Baumann, the NYPL coordinator of humanities and LGBTQ collections, has edited and introduced the volume to coincide with the NYPL exhibition he has curated on the Stonewall uprising and gay liberation movement of 1969.

By: Gayle E Pitman (Author), 2019, Hardcover

In The Stonewall Riots: Coming Out in the Streets, Gayle E. Pitman’s “fresh storytelling brings emotion and depth to the history of a movement and the establishment that served as an epicenter for social change” (Publishers Weekly).

A timely and necessary read, The Stonewall Riots helps readers understand the history and legacy of the LGBTQ+ movement. The book includes contemporary photos, newspaper clippings, and other period objects, as well as a timeline, a biography, and an index. Interviews with people involved as well as witnesses bring an immediacy to the story.

In clear prose and short chapters, the book takes readers through a history of American gay life leading up to the Riots, the Riots themselves, and the aftermath. In a starred review, Shelf Awareness noted: “With meaningful content delivered in an innovative format, The Stonewall Riotsdeserves to be required reading for people of all ages.”

The Stonewall Riots were a series of spontaneous, at times violent demonstrations by members of the gay (LGBTQ+) community in reaction to a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. The Riots are attributed as the spark that ignited the LGBTQ+ movement.

By:  George Takei (Author), Justin Eisinger (Author), Steven Scott (Author), Harmony Becker (Illustrator), 2019, Paperback

A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei's childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon -- and America itself -- in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.

George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father's -- and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future.

In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten "relocation centers," hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard.

They Called Us Enemy is Takei's firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother's hard choices, his father's faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.

What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.

By: Lisa Selin Davis (Author), 2020, Paperback

Based on the author’s viral New York Times op-ed, this heartfelt book is a celebration and exploration of the tomboy phenomenon and the future of girlhood.

We are in the middle of a cultural revolution, where the spectrum of gender and sexual identities is seemingly unlimited. So when author and journalist Lisa Selin Davis's six-year-old daughter first called herself a "tomboy," Davis was hesitant. Her child favored sweatpants and T-shirts over anything pink or princess-themed, just like the sporty, skinned-kneed girls Davis had played with as a kid. But "tomboy" seemed like an outdated word—why use a word with "boy" in it for such girls at all?

So was it outdated? In an era where some are throwing elaborate gender reveal parties and others are embracing they/them pronouns, Davis set out to answer that question, and to find out where tomboys fit into our changing understandings of gender.

In Tomboy, Davis explores the evolution of tomboyism from a Victorian ideal to a twentyfirst century fashion statement, honoring the girls and women—and those who identify otherwise—who stomp all over archaic gender norms. She highlights the forces that have shifted what we think of as masculine and feminine, delving into everything from clothing to psychology, history to neuroscience, and the connection between tomboyism, gender identity, and sexuality. Above all else, Davis's comprehensive deep-dive inspires us to better appreciate those who defy traditional gender boundaries, and the incredible people they become.

Whether you're a grown-up tomboy or raising a gender-rebel of your own, Tomboy is the perfect companion for navigating our cultural shift. It is a celebration of both diversity and those who dare to be different, ultimately revealing how gender nonconformity is a gift.

By: Susan Stryker (Author), 2017, Paperback

A timely second edition of the classic text on transgender history, with a new introduction and updated material throughout

Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender Historytakes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-'70s to 1990, the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the '90s and '00s.

Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture.

“The foundational text that gave me life-changing context, helping me to understand who I was and who came before me.”—Tourmaline, activist and filmmaker

Transgender Warriors is an essential read for trans people of all ages who want to learn about the towering figures who have come before them—and for everyone who is part of the fight for trans liberation

This groundbreaking book—far ahead of its time when first published in 1996 and still galvanizing today—interweaves history, memoir, and gender studies to show that transgender people, far from being a modern phenomenon, have always existed and have exerted their influence throughout history. Leslie Feinberg—hirself a lifelong transgender revolutionary—reveals the origin of the check-one-box-only gender system and shows how zie found empowerment in the lives of transgender warriors around the world, from the Two Spirits of the Americas to the many genders of India, from the trans shamans of East Asia to the gender-bending Queen Nzinga of Angola, from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and beyond.

This book was published with two different covers. Customers will be shipped the book with one of the available covers.