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This compelling LBGTQ novel by LAMBDA award-winning author Watts explores the unlikely friendship between Libby, the oldest child in a rural Tennessee family of strict evangelical Christians, and Zo, her gender fluid new neighbor.
In rural Kentucky, a sixteen-year-old boy with a love of quilting, cooking and Dolly Parton helps his grandma care for his opioid-addicted mother, until the discovery of a family secret upends everything he has ever believed. While other sixteen-year-old boys in Morgan, Kentucky, love hunting and football, Kody prefers to spend his time quilting with his grandmother ("Nanny"), watching Golden Girls reruns, and listening to old Dolly Parton albums. Nanny is Kody's main caregiver, but it takes both Nanny and Kody to take care of Kody's mother, whose drug problem is spinning out of control. Between looking after Mommy and trying to survive in a place that doesn't look kindly on feminine boys, Kody already has a hard time making sense of his life. But then he uncovers a family secret that will change everything in his life.
1944. When sixteen-year-old Ruby Pickett and her family move to the new, government-built city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Ruby knows that her daddy’s new job will help the war effort, but she has no idea how. Ruby is not alone in her lack of knowledge, as the city’s true purpose is a carefully guarded secret. A thinker and a reader, Ruby has always been restless, and she finds Oak Ridge a much more stimulating environment than her old home in rural Southeastern Kentucky. Ruby finds a kindred spirit in twenty-three-year-old Iris, a wife and mother who has moved to Oak Ridge with her scientist husband and is frustrated by the intellectual limitations of being a full-time housewife. Ruby and Iris’s relationship starts as friendship but deepens in emotional intensity until it, like the purpose of Oak Ridge itself, is a dangerous secret.
The things a woman will do for love…and Lily had love, lots of it. But her partner Charlotte is dead. Their daughter Mimi keeps her sane—until Charlotte’s family claims they have all the rights to Mimi, who is their blood kin, and no “real” relation to Lily. With what’s left of her world balanced on a razor’s edge, any choice to find safer ground seems reasonable. Even getting married. Married to her Bugle Boy-wearing, trust fund-spending gay neighbor, Ben. Married and relocated to rural Georgia where Ben’s powerful family will make sure Lily gets custody of Mimi. Just one little trick involved: convincing Ben’s parents their marriage is the real thing. It doesn’t seem like keeping up appearances will be that hard. But the charade gets more difficult when a beautiful country veterinarian offers Lily a taste of what she’s pretending she no longer craves… The outrageous perks and pitfalls of compulsory heterosexuality are humorously explored by the talented pen of Lambda Literary award-winner Julia Watts, known for her wit and wry observations about the quirks of Southern life. First Published by Naiad Press 1999.
Abandoned by her mother and raised by her loving but religiously zealous grandmother, 16-year-old Heavenly Faith Simms (H.F. for short) has never felt like she belonged anywhere. When she finds her mother's address in a drawer, she and her best friend, Bo, an emotionally repressed gay boy, hit the road in Bo's scrap heap of a car and head south. Their journey through the heart of the American South awakens both teens to the realization that there is a life waiting for them that is very different from what they have known and that the concept of family is more far-reaching than they had ever imagined. Finding H.F. is the winner of the 2001 Lambda Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction. First Published by Alyson Books 2001.
Menstruation.
A transformative spiritual companion and deep dive into disability politics that reimagines disability in the Bible and contemporary culture A 2024 National Jewish Book Award winner and essential read on disability, spirituality, and social justice “What’s wrong with you?” Scholar, activist, and rabbi Julia Watts Belser is all too familiar with this question. What’s wrong isn’t her wheelchair, though—it’s exclusion, objectification, pity, and disdain. Our attitudes about disability have such deep cultural roots that we almost forget their sources. But open the Bible and disability is everywhere. Moses believes his stutter renders him unable to answer God’s call. Jacob’s enc...
"Rabbinic Tales of Destruction examines early Jewish accounts of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem from the perspective of the wounded body and the scarred land. Amidst stories saturated with sexual violence, enslavement, forced prostitution, disability, and bodily risk, the book argues that rabbinic narrative wrestles with the brutal body costs of Roman imperial domination. It brings disability studies, feminist theory, and new materialist ecological thought to accounts of rabbinic catastrophe, revealing how rabbinic discourses of gender, sexuality, and the body are shaped in the shadow of empire. Focusing on the Babylonian Talmud's longest account of the destruction of the Second Temple, the...
"Julia Watts breaks into the mainstream with a trip to planet parenthood in her latest novel, GIFTED AND TALENTED. Provocatively focusing her gimlet eye on the old Nature vs. Nurture question, Watts' comedic flair also hits pay dirt that as rich as the Appalachian soil." -Robin Lippincott
"Stop it Bev!" Huge tears were rolling down Andie's cheeks. "You're scaring me." "No. You're scaring me. When we moved in together seven years ago, I thought I was settling down with someone who had some personal integrity. I was obviously mistaken. Ever since we moved here, you've set up this big dividing line between your job and me. Your job's your public life, and I'm your dirty little secret!" When Bev's lover Andie receives an assistant professorship at a Christian-affiliated college, Bev does her best to be supportive. But she isn't too thrilled about the prospect of moving from Boston's lesbian ghetto to the small southern town of Morgan, Kentucky. Before she and Andie are even unpacked, a nosy neighbor is at the door with a welcoming cake and a basketful of personal questions. Bev is shocked when Andie tells the woman that the two of them are cousins—and mortified when the woman promises to set them up with all the eligible men in town, beginning with her grandson Cricket, the local mortician. Thus begins a hilarious and heartwarming tale of lesbian culture shock, the resiliency of true love, and the maddening gap between coming out and being out.