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Queer Cowboys
by Chris Packard
Was the American Cowboy gay? Judging from the earliest
representations of cowboys and other frontier figures in popular
literature—who typically preferred a "buddy" over a wife—the answer
seems to be yes. Evidence from books by nineteenth-century Western
writers (from legends such as James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and
Owen Wister, to more obscure novelists and diarists) shows how
same-sex intimacy and homoerotic admiration were key aspects of
Westerns well before the word "homosexual" and its synonyms were
invented. American writers celebrated erotic frontier friendships as
alternatives to the lawless violence that characterized stories
about the early settlers’ fabled lives. These males-only clubs of
journalists, cowboys, miners, Indians,and vaqueros defined
themselves by excluding femininity and the cloying ills of
domesticity, while embracing what Roosevelt called "strenuous
living" with other bachelors in the relative"purity" of wilderness
conditions. Queer Cowboys recovers this forgotten culture of
exclusively masculine, sometimes erotic, and often intimate
camaraderie in fiction, photographs, illustrations, song lyrics,
historicalephemera, and theatrical performances
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Gentlemen Callers
by Michael Paller
Gentlemen Callers provides a fascinating look at America's greatest
twentieth-century playwright and perhaps the most-performed, even
today. Michael Paller looks at Tennessee Williams's plays from the
1940s through the 1960s against the backdrop of the playwright's
life story, providing fresh details. Through this lens Paller
examines the evolution of mid-twentieth-century America's
acknowledgment and acceptance of homosexuality. From the early
one-act Auto-da-Fé and The Glass Menagerie through Camino Real, Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof, Garden District and the late Something Cloudy,
Something Clear, Paller's book investigates how Williams's earliest
critics marginalized or ignored his gay characters and why,
beginning in the 1970s, many gay liberationists reviled them.
Lively, blunt, and provocative, this book will appeal to anyone who
loves Williams, Broadway, and the theater. |
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Jean Genet
by Jeremy Reed
Jean Genet: poet-thief, novelist, revolutionary, gay icon. Genet's
early life was one of vagrancy and crime. He emerged in 1942 from
prison with the extraordinarily subversive novel Our Lady of the
Flowers. Championed by Cocteau and Sartre, Genet became a legend to
the underworld for his subsequent novels, dark fusions of crime, sex
and flowers. In later life he became involved with rebel groups such
as the Black Panthers and the PLO.
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Wrestling with God & Men
by Steven Greenberg
Wrestling with God and Men is the product of Rabbi Steven
Greenberg’s ten-year struggle to reconcile his homosexuality with
Orthodox Judaism. Employing traditional rabbinic resources,
Greenberg presents readers with surprising biblical interpretations
of the creation story, the love of David and Jonathan, the
destruction of Sodom, and the condemning verses of Leviticus. But
Greenberg goes beyond the question of whether homosexuality is
biblically acceptable to ask how such relationships can be sacred.
In so doing, he draws on a wide array of non scriptural texts to
introduce readers to occasions of same-sex love in Talmudic
narratives, medieval Jewish poetry and prose, and traditional Jewish
case law literature. Ultimately, Greenberg argues that Orthodox
communities must open up debate, dialogue, and discussion--precisely
the foundation upon which Jewish law rests--to truly deal with the
issue of homosexual love.
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