| Up from Invisibility | | Posted Saturday, September 09, 2006 3:42:09 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | A half century ago gay men and lesbians were all but invisible in the media and, in turn, popular culture. With the lesbian and gay liberation movement came a profoundly new sense of homosexual community and empowerment and the emergence of gay people onto the media's stage. And yet even as the mass media have been shifting the terms of our public conversation toward a greater acknowledgment of diversity, does the emerging "visibility" of gay men and women do justice to the complexity and variety of their experience? Or is gay identity manipulated and contrived by media that are unwilling -- and perhaps unable -- to fully comprehend and honor it? While positive representations of gays and lesbians are a cautious step in the right direction, media expert Larry Gross argues that the entertainment and news media betray a lingering inability to break free from proscribed limitations in order to embrace the complex reality of gay identity. While noting major advances, like the opening of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore -- the first gay bookstore in the country -- or the rise of The Advocate from small newsletter to influential national paper, Gross takes the measure of somewhat more ambiguous milestones, like the first lesbian kiss on television or the first gay character in a newspaper comic strip.... | |
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| | | Psychological Perspectives on Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Experiences | | Posted Sunday, September 03, 2006 7:41:40 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | Designed for both the undergraduate and graduate classroom, this selection of important articles provides a comprehensive overview of current thought about the psychological issues affecting lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. The editors have revised and updated the introduction and included a new set of articles for the second edition, most of which have been published since the release of the first edition of Psychological Perspectives. The book is divided into eight sections that deal with the meaning of sexual orientation; the psychological dimensions of prejudice, discrimination, and violence; identity development; diversity; relationships and families; adolescence, midlife, and aging; mental health; and the status of practice, research, and public policy bearing on homosexuality and bisexuality in American psychology.... | |
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| | | The G Quotient: Why Gay Executives are Excelling as Leaders... And What Every Manager Needs to Know | | Posted Wednesday, August 30, 2006 5:42:01 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | The G Quotient identifies a management phenomenon that will change the way people view their professional roles in the workplace. Based on a landmark five-year study, The G Quotient redefines successful leadership for all managers. Organizations and working units under the leadership of white-collar gay males are collectively experiencing 35 percent higher levels of employee engagement, job satisfaction, and workplace morale in addition to reporting greater employer loyalty and individual productivity. It is proof that today's employees are responding to a new type of organizational leader.... | |
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| | | Married Women Who Love Women | | Posted Sunday, August 27, 2006 3:41:37 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | During middle age, after 25 years of happy marriage to a man, Carren Strock fell in love with a woman. After a period of intense confusion and pain, Strock came to accept her sexuality and realize that there were other women who discovered lesbianism in the context of a heterosexual marriage. This book is based on interviews that Strock conducted with more than 100 women who had that experience--60 percent of whom were between the ages of 36 and 55--as well as their husbands, children, and lovers. Some women in this situation have remained in the closet, either repressing their desires or keeping their affairs secret. Others have come out to husbands and friends and been able to incorporate their lesbianism into their marriages. Others have ended their marriages. The very personal voices in this book remind us that most women who came of age before the relatively tolerant present did so in a culture in which lesbianism was not regarded as a healthy sexual possibility but as a shameful perversion.... | |
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| | | The Columbia Reader on Lesbians & Gay Men in Media, Society, and Politics | | Posted Wednesday, August 23, 2006 1:41:37 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | Here at last is a comprehensive and highly approachable introduction to lesbian and gay studies for students and general readers. More than one hundred articles, essays, and primary documents cover the formation of gay identity, religious, scientific, medical, and legal perspectives, the mainstream media, lesbian and gay media, and community prospects and tactics. From Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's essay, "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay," to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons," to a 1947 Newsweek article, "Homosexuals in Uniform," The Columbia Reader explores experiences and representations of lesbian and gay people in an engaging and accessible format.The Columbia Reader features:• concise introductions to each section, as well as a substantial general introduction• viewpoints -- ranging from radical to conservative -- of lesbian and gay scholars and community writers, as well as nongay intellectuals and public figures• essays, articles, and primary documents from both mainstream and lesbian/gay sources• detailed exploration of mainstream media representations of gays and lesbians in films, television, and print as well as the rise of lesbian/gay media outlets• broad coverage of history and identity, social, cultural, legal, medical, and religious regulation, AIDS, and lesbian and gay political agendas and strategies• current topics, such as the recent development of a cybercommunity, as well as questions of censorship and pornography, same-sex marriage, the ethics of "outing," gay and lesbian activism, and the conservative backlashGrounded in key social and political topics rather than wholly theoretical approaches, The Columbia Reader on Lesbians and Gay Men in Media, Society, and Politics will be a valuable resource for years to come.... | |
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| | | Slammerkin | | Posted Saturday, August 19, 2006 9:41:40 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | Born to rough cloth in working-class London in 1748, Mary Saunders hungers for linen and lace. Her lust for a shiny red ribbon leads her to a life of prostitution at a young age, where she encounters a freedom unknown to virtuous young women. But a dangerous misstep sends her fleeing to Monmouth and the refuge of the middle-class household of Mrs. Jones, to become the seamstress her mother always expected her to be and to live the ordinary life of an ordinary girl. Although Mary becomes a close confidante of Mrs. Jones, her desire for a better life leads her back to prostitution. She remains true only to the three rules she learned on the streets of London: Never give up your liberty; Clothes make the woman; Clothes are the greatest lie ever told. In the end, it is clothes, their splendor and their deception, that lead Mary to disaster. Emma Donoghue's daring, sensually charged prose casts a new sheen on the squalor and glamour of eighteenth-century England. Accurate, masterfully written, and infused with themes that still bedevil us today, Slammerkin is historical fiction for all readers.... | |
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| | | The Homosexuality of Men and Women | | Posted Wednesday, August 16, 2006 3:41:34 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | One of the founders of the scientific study of sex, Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) led the field with his pioneering objective examinations of homosexuality, tranvestism, and gender identity. THE HOMOSEXUALITY OF MEN AND WOMEN was designed to provide a unified, comprehensive description of homosexuality while ridding heterosexuals of gay prejudice and allowing homosexuals to confront their isolation and accept themselves. Opening with a definition and a detailed biological discussion of sexual orientation, including the childhood and adolescent phases, Hirschfeld addresses the physical, mental, and emotional life of homosexuals while explaining the inborn nature of homosexuality and bisexuality. In the second half of the book, Hirschfeld looks at sociology, community life, bonding, roles in society, history, persecution, victimization, and the law. His documentation of gays in the miliary and the "new technology" of his day--such as the telephone and airplanes and their affect on the lives of homosexuals--offers farsighted observations that strongly parallel today's national debates and new developments. ... | |
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| | | Social Perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Studies | | Posted Saturday, August 12, 2006 1:41:39 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | This comprehensive reader brings a social science perspective to an area previously dominated by the humanities. Through it, students will be able to follow the story of how sociology has come to engage with gay and lesbian issues from the 1950s to the present, from the earliest research on the underground worlds of gay men to the emergence of queer theory in the 1990s. Bringing together classic readings and the best work of younger scholars from throughout the English-speaking world, the reader will be an invaluable resource for courses at undergraduate and graduate level in all areas of the sociology of sexuality and gender. Separate sections cover the theoretical foundations, identity and community making, institutions and social change, and challenges for the future. Each section begins with a brief introduction which gives readers a brief guide to the readings in that section, contextualises them and relates them to one another and the book ends with an afterword by Ken Plummer summing up the present state of the field and looking forward to the future.... | |
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| | | The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was: Myths of Self-Imitation | | Posted Tuesday, August 08, 2006 11:41:40 PM by BlogJeeves Team | | Many cultures have myths about self-imitation, stories about people who pretend to be someone else pretending to be them, in effect masquerading as themselves. This great theme, in literature and in life, tells us that people put on masks to discover who they really are under the masks theyusually wear, so that the mask reveals rather than conceals the self beneath the self.In this book, noted scholar of Hinduism and mythology Wendy Doniger offers a cross-cultural exploration of the theme of self-impersonation, whose widespread occurrence argues for both its literary power and its human value. The stories she considers range from ancient Indian literature throughmedieval European courtly literature and Shakespeare to Hollywood and Bollywood. They illuminate a basic human way of negotiating reality, illusion, identity, and authenticity, not to mention memory, amnesia, and the process of aging. Many of them involve marriage and adultery, for tales of sexualbetrayal cut to the heart of the crisis of identity.These stories are extreme examples of what we common folk do, unconsciously, every day. Few of us actually put on masks that replicate our faces, but it is not uncommon for us to become travesties of ourselves, particularly as we age and change. We often slip carelessly across the permeable boundarybetween the un-self-conscious self-indulgence of our most idiosyncratic mannerisms and the conscious attempt to give the people who know us, personally or publicly, the version of ourselves that they expect. Myths of self-imitation open up for us the possibility of multiple selves and the infiniteregress of self-discovery.Drawing on a dizzying array of tales-some fact, some fiction-The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was is a fascinating and learned trip through centuries of culture, guided by a scholar of incomparable wit and erudition. ... | |
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| | | Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement | | Posted Saturday, August 05, 2006 9:41:40 AM by BlogJeeves Team | | Every year, hundreds of gay men and lesbians join ex-gay ministries in an attempt to convert to non-homosexual Christian lives. In this fascinating study of the transnational ex-gay movement, Tanya Erzen focuses on the everyday lives of men and women at New Hope Ministry, a residential ex-gay program, over the course of several years. Straight to Jesus traces the stories of people who have renounced long-term relationships and moved from other countries out of a conviction that the conservative Christian beliefs of their upbringing and their own same-sex desires are irreconcilable. Rather than definitively changing from homosexual to heterosexual, the participants experience a conversion that is both sexual and religious as born-again evangelical Christians. At New Hope, they maintain a personal relationship with Jesus and build new forms of kinship and belonging. By becoming what they call "new creations," these men and women testify to religious transformation rather than changes in sexual desire or behavior. Straight to Jesus exposes how the Christian Right attempts to repudiate gay identity and political rights by using the ex-gay movement as evidence that "change is possible." Instead, Erzen reveals, the realities of the lives she examines actually undermine this anti-gay strategy.... | |
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