In 1992, the voters of Colorado passed a ballot initiative amending the state constitution to prevent the state or any local government from adopting any law or policy that protected a person with a homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation from discrimination. This amendment was immediately challenged in the courts as a denial of equal protection of the laws under the United States Constitution. This litigation ultimately led to a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court invalidating the Colorado ballot initiative. Suzanne Goldberg, an attorney involved in the case from the beginning on behalf of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Lisa Keen, a journalist who covered the initiative campaign and litigation, tell the story of this case, providing an inside view of this complex and important litigation.
Starting with the background of the initiative, the authors tell us about the debates over strategy, the court proceedings, and the impact of each stage of the litigation on the parties involved. The authors explore the meaning of legal protection for gay people and the arguments for and against the Colorado initiative.
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of civil rights protections for gay people and the evolution of what it means to be gay in contemporary American society and politics. In addition, it is a rich story well told, and will be of interest to the general reader and scholars working on issues of civil rights, majority-minority relations, and the meaning of equal rights in a democratic society.
Suzanne Goldberg is an attorney with the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. Lisa Keen is Senior Editor at the Washington Blade newspaper.
From the bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed, an explanation of recent sexual culture and the loosening of marriage bonds in recent history.
"Finally someone is offering a new, utterly plausible explanation...of loosening marriage bonds. According to Barbara Ehrenreich...it is men who started walking off, in search of freedom from their stifling role of breadwinner/success-machine. The shock--and exhilaration--of this book comes from the recognition that here is a woman who has dared to look beyond the everyday assumptions about love and commitment to examine which bonds between men and women can endure and which may last forever."--Vogue
Beautiful stories of life in Australian Aboriginal society--where gender influences every aspect of existence--that show a new way to find happiness in our modern Western culture
- Follows an Australian Aboriginal boy and girl from childhood through adolescence, adulthood, old age, and death, contrasting their experiences with those of ours at the same life stages - Presents the experience of living in a society in which every action is governed by the gender laws of nature and myth, and offers us ideas for the conduct of our lives For thousands of years the Ngarinyin Aboriginal culture of Australia has existed with almost a total division of responsibility between genders. This division enables both men and women to respect the power, wisdom, and essentiality of the other because only when the two genders work in harmony does their culture function as it should. When Hannah Rachel Bell, a committed activist and feminist, first encountered this culture in the 1970s she resisted such blatant gender division. But over her 25-year collaboration with the well-known Aboriginal Lawman David Mowaljarlai she found her beliefs challenged and finally changed. In this book Bell presents the experience of living in a society in which every action is governed by the laws of nature and myth, rather than those of commerce and politics. She offers modern people ideas for the conduct of their lives by raising awareness of the cultural processes and institutions that affect men's and women's authority, sovereignty, and the fulfillment of their birthright. It is a journey that, if traveled collectively, could change the direction and experience of modern culture.
Representing some of the most exciting work in critical ethnic studies, the essays in this collection examine the production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference, and the possibilities for progressive coalitions, or the "strange affinities," afforded by nuanced comparative analyses of racial formations. The nationalist and identity-based concepts of race underlying the mid-twentieth-century movements for decolonization and social change are not adequate to the tasks of critiquing the racial configurations generated by neocolonialism and contesting its inequities. Contemporary regimes of power produce racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence and labor exploitation, and they render subjects redundant and disposable by creating new, nominally nonracialized categories of privilege and stigma. The editors of Strange Affinities contend that the greatest potential for developing much-needed alternative comparative methods lies in women of color feminism, and the related intellectual tradition that Roderick A. Ferguson has called queer of color critique. Exemplified by the work of Audre Lorde, Cherr e Moraga, Barbara Smith, and the Combahee River Collective, these critiques do not presume homogeneity across racial or national groups. Instead, they offer powerful relational analyses of the racialized, gendered, and sexualized valuation and devaluation of human life.
Contributors
Victor Bascara
Lisa Marie Cacho
M. Bianet Castellanos
Martha Chew S nchez
Roderick A. Ferguson
Grace Kyungwon Hong
Helen H. Jun
Kara Keeling
Sanda Mayzaw Lwin
Jodi Melamed
Chandan Reddy
Ruby C. Tapia
Cynthia Tolentino
This rich blend of prayers, poems, and sayings by women writers and sages from around the world and throughout history offers daily inspiration and delight. Included in this collection are diverse voices ranging from the early Sufi mystic Rabia and the trailblazing Mechtild of Magdeburg, to contemporary poets Denise Levertov, Kathleen Norris, Maya Angelou, Jane Hirshfield, and Mary Oliver. These and many other treasures of women's wisdom are gathered here from such wide-ranging sources as Celtic blessings, Native American petitions, and Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Hindu, and Chinese prayers.
An expert on spirituality with a remark-able eye for the best inspirational literature, Ford-Grabowsky includes in this collection prayers of praise, thanks, petition, mystical ecstasy, and insight. Her book explores self-discovery, mothering, inner strength, needs, work, gratefulness, spiritual darkness, mysti-cal experience, and love.
This debut collection by Cave Canem fellow Geffrey Davis burrows under the surface of gender, addiction, recovery, clumsy love, bitterness, and faith. The tones explored--tender, comic, wry, tragic--interrogate male subjectivity and privilege, as they examine their "embarrassed desires" for familial connection, sexual love, compassion, and repair. Revising the Storm also speaks to the sons and daughters affected by the drug/crack epidemic of the '80s and addresses issues of masculinity and its importance in family.
Some nights I hear my father's long romancewith drugs echoed in the skeletal choir
of crickets. Geffrey Davis holds an MFA and a PhD from Penn State University. A Cave Canem fellow, Davis is the recipient of the 2013 Dogwood First Prize in Poetry, the 2012 Wabash Prize for Poetry, the 2012 Leonard Steinberg Memorial/Academy of American Poets Prize, and the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. He currently teaches at the University of Arkansas.
The Twin Cities is home to one of the largest and most vital GLBT populations in the nation-and one of the highest percentages of gay residents in the country. Drawn from the pioneering work of the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project-a collective organization of students, scholars, and activists devoted to documenting and interpreting the lives of GLBT people in Minneapolis and St. Paul-Queer Twin Cities is a uniquely critical collection of essays on Minnesota's vibrant queer communities, past and present.
A rich blend of oral history, archival research, and ethnography, Queer Twin Cities uses sexuality to chart connections between people's lives in Minnesota. Topics range from turn-of-the-century Minneapolis amid moral reform-including the highly publicized William Williams murder trial and efforts to police Bridge Square, aka "skid row"-to northern Minnesota and the importance of male companionship among lumber workers, and to postwar life, when the increased visibility of queer life went hand in hand with increased regulation, repression, and violence. Other essays present a portrait of early queer spaces in the Twin Cities, such as Kirmser's Bar, the Viking Room, and the Persian Palms, and the proliferation of establishments like the Dugout and the 19 Bar. Exploring the activism of GLBT/Two-Spirit indigenous people, the antipornography movements of the 1980s, and the role of gay men in the gentrification of Minneapolis neighborhoods, this volume brings the history of queer life and politics in the Twin Cities into fascinating focus.
Engaging and revelatory, Queer Twin Cities offers a critical analysis of local history and community and fills a glaring omission in the culture and history of Minnesota, looking not only to a remarkable past, but to our collective future.
"Lindsay King-Miller is the cool, queer aunt you never had but always wanted--she is unrelentingly kind, totally funny, and no subject is off limits. Ask a Queer Chick is essential reading."--Jolie Kerr, author of My Boyfriend Barfed In My Handbag...And Other Things You Can't Ask Martha
In 1967, after a twin baby boy suffered a botched circumcision, his family agreed to a radical treatment that would alter his gender. The case would become one of the most famous in modern medicine--and a total failure. As Nature Made Him tells the extraordinary story of David Reimer, who, when finally informed of his medical history, made the decision to live as a male. A macabre tale of medical arrogance, it is first and foremost a human drama of one man's--and one family's--amazing survival in the face of terrible odds.
