Books: October 2007 Archives

Gay Perspective: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us About the Nature of God and the Universe
Toby Johnson

In this companion volume to his critically acclaimed, Lambda Literary Award - winning Gay Spirituality, Toby Johnson further explicates his visionary stance that gay people's nature as outsiders gives them a uniquely powerful perspective on the nature of God and religion. By living outside gender norms, gay people are more open to seeing across boundaries of gender and gain access to a less dualistic outlook on the nature of life. Once again, Johnson approaches this potentially controversial subject matter with -erudition, empathy and visionary speculation and gives meaning to gay consciousness beyond superficial issues of sexual behavior.

Toby Johnson is the editor of White Crane, a quarterly journal of gay men's spirituality, as well as the author of Gay Spirituality. He lives in Wimberley, Texas.

Trans-Gendered: Theology, Ministry, and Communities of Faith
Justin Edward Tanis

In the introduction to Trans-Gendered, Tanis says: "I intend to write about the ways in which religious communities have contributed to our oppression and occasionally, to our liberation. I want to speak, too, about the beauty and power of our lives. We need to think about how to fight back religiously and spiritually, as well as politically." Tanis largely accomplishes this goal.

The book began as a doctoral dissertation, while Tanis was at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, but it is not designed strictly for the academic world: As Tanis states in the books "I am not particularly interested in theories that do not have practical application for trans lives. Tanis writes in the first person, and weaves his own experience as a transgendered clergy person in with the experiences of other transgender individuals.

Man On!
Turner Kane

Greg Williams is an upcoming British soccer star whose professional life is going up, while his personal life seems adrift due to his searches for a boyfriend. Following a sexual encounter with his best friend Matt who's to be soon married, Greg can no longer hide his feelings for Matt, but Matt avoids Greg at all costs.

The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles
Eric C. Wat

In this unique oral history, gay Asian Americans talk frankly about their struggle for self-determination and independence. Despite its size, until recently the gay Asian American community in Los Angeles was fragmented and marginalized as gay Asian men separated into their own ethnic cliques and preferred whites as sexual partners. Using a cultural studies lens to interpret the rich oral narratives he collected, Eric C. Wat shows how a dominant sexual ideology can influence our desires and contradict our memories.

Gay Witchcraft: Empowering the Tribe
Christopher Penczak

When Christopher Penczak was introduced to Witchcraft, he found a spiritual path that hononred and embraced his homosexuality. Now he has written a book of clearheaded theory and practice that is bound to become a classic. With Gay Witchcraft, Penczak joins the ranks of his forebearers in spirit, gay writers who have taken a tradition and made it home.

Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition
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.

Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America
Will Roscoe

Gender diversity - in the form of third and fourth gender roles - is one of the most common and least understood features of native North America. Such roles have been documented in over 150 tribes throughout the continent. Widely accepted, often considered holy, berdaches, as they have been termed, combine the work and social roles of men and women along with traits unique to their status. In Changing Ones, Will Roscoe carefully reconstructs the place of these roles in traditional tribal cultures and traces their history up to the present. The result is a strikingly different view of native North America.

Scrub Match
Bill Eisele

To a mixed-race gay man still smarting from a failed relationship during his final year of college, San Francisco seemed like the best destination for Paul Carter after graduation. A city of ethnic diversity, where his red Afro would be less likely to elicit stares, and where a significant portion of the population was also gay, and far enough away from his father whom Paul felt was disappointed in him. If he could just make it through the sky-high rents, having to rent a room from a woman who constantly suspected him of stealing from her, and if he could only find a great boyfriend, like Twitch, the fellow he met on the basketball courts one night shortly after his arrival, and whom he has been "courting" ever since.

Pins
Jim Provenzano

Acclaimed sports columnist and fiction writer Jim Provenzano's novel PINS tells the story of bigotry in athletics, and one very short boy who stands up to it.

Set in Little Falls, New Jersey in 1993, PINS weaves the classic story of a Catholic saint into a compelling modern life -and near-death- account of Joey Nicci, a fifteen-year-old Italian-American wrestler.

Huddle
Dan Boyle

The game starts with a whistle and ends with triumph-or defeat. Forty minutes of man against man-blocking the rusher, beating the defense downfield, finding the open receiver, reading the offense, picking off the pass, working as a team, racing against the clock, racing against themselves. For the nine gay men of the L.A. Quake, the season of sweat is about to end with a chance to win the West Los Angeles Flag Football Championship. For some, it's a last hurrah; for others, a taste of gridiron glory they've only dreamed about. The Quake has struggled to compete on the field in a "straight" league and struggled off the field with relationships, success (and its pitfalls), aging, and their own concepts of masculinity. And now, it's first down-and-forever, with time running out-and no way to stop it.

Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces
Juana Maria Rodriguez

According to the 2000 census, Latinos/as have become the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. Images of Latinos and Latinas in mainstream news and in popular culture suggest a Latin Explosion at center stage, yet the topic of queer identity in relation to Latino/a America remains under examined.

Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture
Editors: Susana Chavez-Silverman & Librada Hernandez

In this dynamic collection of essays, many leading literary scholars trace gay and lesbian themes in Latin American, Hispanic, and U.S. Latino literary and cultural texts. Reading and Writing the Ambiente is consciously ambitious and far-ranging, historically as well as geographically. It includes discussions of texts from as early as the seventeenth century to writings of the late twentieth century.

One More River to Cross: Black and Gay in America
Keith Boykin

Proclaiming their mission as "a simple matter of justice," the organizers of the 1993 March on Washington for lesbian and gay rights consciously paralleled Martin Luther King's historic 1963 March on Washington. In response, black leaders and ministers across the country challenged any comparison between blacks and gays as offensive and irrational. In One More River to Cross, Keith Boykin takes us on a journey into this controversy by offering a window onto what it means to be both black and gay in America.

Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology
Will Roscoe

Joining a reclaimed past to a vibrant present, this work provides a broad view of male and female homosexuality in Native American cultural history through anthropological reports, biography, mission records, photographs, oral literature, diaries, interviews, essays, autobiographical excerpts, poems, and selections from novels.

Rainbow Boys
Alex Sanchez

Jason, Kyle and Nelson hang out in three very different cliques at their high school. Jason is a top football player with a serious girlfriend, Kyle is a quiet, serious student and Nelson is a flamboyant loner. All three are gay. Each one of these teenagers faces different coming-out issues: Jason does not want to admit that he is gay-especially to himself, even though he fantasizes about making love to a boy. Kyle feels comfortable with being gay, but does not want to tell his parents. And Nelson is physically bullied for being openly out to his family and peers.

Annie on My Mind
Nancy Garden

Annie On My Mind tells the story of two young women, each with loving families but outsiders at their respective schools, who meet at a museum in New York, quickly becoming friends and, later, lovers. The book is told from the perspective of Liza, a student at a private high school governed by an authoritarian principal. When Liza and Annie get caught making love in the house of two lesbian teachers, not just their lives but others' are irrevocably changed.