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'A Gay Century: Vol 1' is a canter through 60 years of gay history in ten serious or comic playlets.Wilde's deathbed encounter with Queen Victoria; the theft of the Irish crown jewels by a sadomasochistic cabal in Dublin Castle; Compton Mackenzie demanding of the Home Secretary that his own lesbian novel be prosecuted like 'The Well of Loneliness', because he needs the money; matinee idol Ivor Novello sharing a cell in Wandsworth with teenage psycho 'Mad' Frankie Fraser; the Jeremy Thorpe/Norman Scott affair seen through the eyes of the dogs involved, etc. etc. A sideways look at our queer past offers vivid vignettes which may or may not be true - and if they're not, they ought to be.
It can never be wrong to live with someone you are fond of. 5-year-old Jenny lives happily with her dad Martin and his partner Eric. From celebrating birthdays and eating breakfast in bed to playing board games and reading bedtime stories, their weekends are spent the same way as everyone else's. Well-received in Denmark, ́Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin ́ sparked a major debate when it was published in Britain two years later, resulting in a ban that prohibited teaching school children about homosexuality. Therefore, it is the ideal book for early readers as it serves as great educational material for those interested in learning about family structures that differ from their own. A beau...
The London Gay Teenage Group was a unique and ground-breaking youth group. It emerged in the heady days of the late 1970s and achieved registration as an official youth club catering mainly for gay and lesbian young people, at a time when gay male sex was still totally illegal for anyone aged under 21.
The 1980s heralded many challenges for LGBT people around the world and Colin Clews examines these in his new book. These included the rise of the New Right in the USA, Section 28 which prohibited the promotion of homosexuality; the trial of Gay’s the Word bookshop in the UK and the continuing criminalisation of homosexuality in the majority of Australian states. Underpinning all of this was the unfolding of the AIDS crisis: a time when LGBT people realised that they were no longer simply fighting for their rights but, quite literally, fighting for their lives. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom; by the end of the eighties there had been some very real progress. Major political parties had...
From government ministers and spies to activists, drag queens and celebrities, Odd men out charts the tumultuous history of gay men in 1950s and 60s Britain. It takes us from the earliest tentative steps towards decriminalisation to the liberation movement of the early 1970s. Along the way, it catalogues shocking repression, including laws against homosexual activity and the use of brutal medical ‘treatments’. Odd men out draws on medical data and opinion polls, broadcast recordings, theatrical productions, and extensive interviews with key players, as well as an in-depth analysis of the Wolfenden Report and the circumstances surrounding its creation. It brings to life pivotal moments in gay mens’ cultural representation, ranging across the West End and emerging writers like Joe Orton, the British film industry, the BBC, national newspapers, fashion catalogues and music magazines. Celebrating the joy of gay lives as well as the hardships, Odd men out preserves the voices of a disappearing generation who revolutionised what it meant to be a gay man in twentieth-century Britain.
A work of fierce originality and brilliance, Miriam Toews' novel explores the ties that bind families together and the forces that tear them apart. It is the world according to Nomi Nickel, a heartbreakingly bewildered and wry young woman trapped in a small Mennonite town that seeks to set her on the path to righteousness and smother her at the same time.'Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing,' Nomi tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her father Ray, her days are spent piecing together the reasons her mother Trudie and her sister Tash have gone missing, and trying to figure out what she can do to avoid a career at Happy Family Farms, a chick...
The fourth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga. ‘A consummate entertainer who has made a generation laugh.... It is Maupin's Dickensian gift to be able to render love convincingly’ Edmund White, Times Literary Supplement ____________________ When an ordinary househusband and his ambitious wife decide to start a family, they discover there’s more to making a baby than meets the eye. Help arrives in the form of a grieving gay neighbour, a visiting monarch, and the dashing young lieutenant who defects from her yacht. Bittersweet and profoundly affecting, Babycakes was the first piece of fiction to acknowledge the arrival of AIDS. Hurdling barriers both social and sexual, Maupin leads the eccentric tenants of Barbary Lane through heartbreak and triumph, through nail-biting terrors and gleeful coincidences in 1970s San Francisco. The result is a glittering and addictive comedy of manners that continues to beguile new generations of readers.
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Until the 1970s the history of sexuality was a marginalized practice. Today it is a flourishing field, increasingly integrated into the mainstream and producing innovative insights into the ways in which societies shape and are shaped by sexual values, norms, identities and desires. In this book, Jeffrey Weeks, one of the leading international scholars in the subject, sets out clearly and concisely how sexual history has developed, and its implications for our understanding of the ways we live today. The emergence of a new wave of feminism and lesbian and gay activism in the 1970s transformed the subject, heavily influenced by new trends in social and cultural history, radical sociological insights and the impact of Michel Foucault’s work. The result was an increasing emphasis on the historical shaping of sexuality, and on the existence of many different sexual meanings and cultures on a global scale. With chapters on, amongst others, lesbian, gay and queer history, feminist sexual history, the mainstreaming of sexual history, and the globalization of sexual history, What is Sexual History? is an indispensable guide to these developments.
A man's own story from the Rhondda. Jeffrey Weeks was born in the Rhondda in 1945, of mining stock. As he grew up he increasingly felt an outsider in the intensely community-minded valleys, a feeling intensified as he became aware of his gayness. Escape came through education. He left for London, to university, and to realise his sexuality. From the early 1970s he was actively involved in the new gay liberation movement and became its pioneering historian. This was the beginning of a long career as a researcher and writer on sexuality, with widespread national and international recognition. He has been described as the 'most significant British intellectual working on sexuality to emerge from the radical sexual movements of the 1970s'. His seminal book, Coming Out, a history of LGBT movements and identities since the 19th century, has been in print for forty years. He was awarded the OBE in the Queen's Jubilee Honours in 2012 for his contribution to the social science.