Robert Giard's Portraits of LGBTQ+ Writers and Their Works

by Lillian Faderman

In this groundbreaking book, Faderman reclaims the history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks to more recent diverse lifestyles. She draws from journals, unpublished manuscripts, songs, media accounts, novels, medical literature, pop culture artifacts, and oral histories by lesbians of all ages and backgrounds, uncovering a narrative of uncommon depth and originality.

What does it mean to be a “woman” in America? Award-winning gender and sexuality scholar Lillian Faderman traces the evolution of the meaning from Puritan ideas of God’s plan for women to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its reversals to the impact of such recent events as #metoo, the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the election of Kamala Harris as vice president, and the transgender movement.

Los Angeles, 1986. A group of right-wing Christians has put an initiative on the November ballot to allow health officials to force people with HIV into quarantine camps. It looks like it’s going to pass. Henry Rios, now living in LA, agrees to be counsel for a group of young activists who call themselves QUEER [Queers United to End Erasure and Repression]. QUEER claims to be committed to peaceful civil disobedience. But when one of its members is implicated in the bombing of an evangelical church that kills its pastor, who publicly supported the quarantine initiative, Rios finds himself with a client suddenly facing the death penalty

A sweeping novel of Mexico set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, The City of Palaces is a story of faith and reason, cathedrals and hovels, barefoot street vendors and frock-coated businessmen, grand opera and silent film, presidents and peasants, the living and the dead.

This remarkable novel begins in 1850s Louisiana, where Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who "shares the blood" by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home. An instant lesbian classic when it was first published in 1991, The Gilda Stories has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of blackness, radical ecology, re-definitions of family, and yes, the erotic potential of the vampire story.

In a series of journal entries—some original passages, others revisited and expanded in retrospect—Cherrié Moraga details her experiences with pregnancy, birth, and the early years of lesbian parenting. With the premature birth of her son—when HIV-related mortality rates were at their highest—Moraga, a new mother at 40-years-old, was forced to confront the fragile volatility of life and death; in these recorded dreams and reflections, her terror and resilience are made palpable. The particular challenges of queer parenting prove transformative as Moraga navigates her intersecting roles as mother, child, lover, friend, artist, activist, and more.

Native Country of the Heart is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child, along with her siblings, by their own father to pick cotton in California’s Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherríe Moraga, is a brilliant, pioneering, queer Latina feminist. The story of these two women, and of their people, is woven together in an intimate memoir of critical reflection and deep personal revelation.

Babel-17, winner of the Nebula Award, is a fascinating tale of a famous poet bent on deciphering a secret language that is the key to the enemy's deadly force, a task that requires she travel with a splendidly improbable crew to the site of the next attack.

With a burst of radiation to the brain, an angry young man is transformed into a dim-witted slave—suitable only for the most brutal work. But the tragedy of Rat Korga is the prologue to the story of Marq Dyeth, an “industrial diplomat,” who travels from world to world in this exciting, sprawling future, solving problems that come with the spread of “General Information.” The greatest fear in this future is Cultural Fugue, a critical mass of shared knowledge that can destroy life over the surface of an entire world in hours.

Lucy Marsden looks back on her long life and her experiences as the wife of a Civil War veteran, recounting the combat and the historical figures of the war years, as well as the hidden conflicts of domesticity.

In 1980, a young Southern aristocrat arrives in New York to pursue his artistic ambitions, falling in love with both a gifted male composer and a failed debutante turned painter, until their brilliant circle of gifted and artistic friends falls prey to the ravages of AIDS.

In this collection of personal essays and poetry, acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed details her coming of age in New York City during the late 1980s. Funeral Diva captures the impact of AIDS on Black Queer life, and highlights the enduring bonds between the living, the dying, and the dead. 

Poems address both personal and contemporary issues, including codependency, sexuality, abuse, and emotional trauma
 

Gathered from Rafael Campo’s over twenty-year career as a poet-physician, these eighty-eight poems—thirty of which have never been previously published in a collection—pull back the curtain in the ER, laying bare our pain and joining us all in spellbinding moments of pathos.

Using the empathetic medium of poetry grounded in the sentient physical body we all share, Campo writes of a country endlessly at war—not only against the presumed enemy abroad but also with its own troubled conscience. Yet whether he is addressing the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the battle against the AIDS pandemic, or the culture wars surrounding the issues of feminism and gay marriage, Campo's compelling poems affirm the notion that hope arises from even the most bitter of conflicts.

In vivid poems, Woodson shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the civil rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world. 

As Melody celebrates a coming of age ceremony at her grandparents’ house in 2001 Brooklyn, her family remembers 1985, when Melody’s own mother prepared for a similar party that never took place in this novel about different social classes.

Francisco X. Alarcón deftly places Spanish and English side-by-side in this bilingual collection that is a modern meditation on love, self, loss, and universal truths. Each page lifts the heart and stirs the soul by delving deep into the struggle for self and sexual identity.

In the lush rainforest of the Iguazú National Park, toucans and butterflies flit through the trees while sleek jaguars prowl the jungle floor. Dazzling waterfalls provide a thunderous backdrop while great dusky swifts keep watch overhead. In this magical journey through one of the wonders of the natural world, renowned poet Francisco X. Alarcón follows the Amerindian oral tradition, allowing the animals to speak for themselves in their own roaring, soaring, fluttering voices. Maya Christina Gonzalez’s glorious mixed media illustrations bring the vibrant colors and textures of the rainforest to life.

The Hours tells the story of three women: Virginia Woolf, beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway as she recuperates in a London suburb with her husband in 1923; Clarissa Vaughan, beloved friend of an acclaimed poet dying from AIDS, who in modern-day New York is planning a party in his honor; and Laura Brown, in a 1949 Los Angeles suburb, who slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home. By the end of the novel, these three stories intertwine in remarkable ways, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace.

Prophetic poet Walt Whitman presides over each interlinked episode in a visionary novel set in the city of New York, featuring the same group of characters—a young boy, an older man, and a young woman—that range from "In the Machine," which takes place at the height of the Industrial Revolution, through the 21t-century "Children's Crusade," to "Like Beauty," set in a city of the future.

A Sturdy Yes of a People gathers Nestles most influential writing into a single volume presenting her persistent involvement in liberation movements, LGBTQ histories, erotic writing, and archives that document gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer lives. Embedded in tales of lesbian desire are Nestle's concerns with the power of class and race in America to exile bodies.

A collection of intimate essays and narratives about lesbian sexuality, butch-femme relationships, sex writing, the importance of preserving lesbian and gay history, the love between lesbians and gay men, and the "often-shaky camaraderie among lesbians that as a community continues to flex its diversity."