"Harvey Milk--eloquent, charismatic, and a smart-aleck--was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, but he had not even served a full year in office when he was shot by a homophobic fellow supervisor. Milk's assassination at the age of forty-eight made him the most famous gay man in modern history; twenty years later Time magazine included him on its list of the hundred most influential individuals of the twentieth century. Before finding his calling as a politician, however, Harvey variously tried being a schoolteacher, a securities analyst on Wall Street, a supporter of Barry Goldwater, a Broadway theater assistant, a bead-wearing hippie, the operator of a camera store and organizer of the local business community in San Francisco. He rejected Judaism as a religion, but he was deeply influenced by the cultural values of his Jewish upbringing and his understanding of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. His early influences and his many personal and professional experiences finally came together when he decided to run for elective office as the forceful champion of gays, racial minorities, women, working people, the disabled, and senior citizens. In his last five years, he focused all of his tremendous energy on becoming a successful public figure with a distinct political voice."--Dust jacket.

On the night of October 6, 1998, in Laramie, Wyoming, Matthew Wayne Shepard (1976-1998) was brutally killed solely because he was gay. It was a shocking murder that was nationally covered in the media, and it became a rallying cry for the LGBTQ+ rights movement. In 2009, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was signed by President Barack Obama, expanding the federal hate crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. With a foreword by Jason Collins--the first openly gay active player in the NBA--and written by Lesléa Newman--author of the Stonewall Honor-winning novel-in-verse October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard and a friend of the Shepard family--Always Matt is an emotional yet ultimately hopeful look at the progress that's been made, as well as the work that still continues, in advocating for the dignity and equality of all people.

Before there was a Woodstock Concert, there was Elliot Tiber working to make a go of his parents' hotel, the El Monaco. It wasn't easy. The Jewish clientele who had returned to the Catskills year after year had discovered Florida, and the hotel business was dying. To save his family's livelihood, Elliot put on plays, musicals and local festivals. In the process, Elliot became the area's official i[Bokinfo]

Finalist, 2008 Pulitzer Prize Lincoln Kirstein was a tireless champion of the arts in America. Working behind the scenes to provide artists with money, space, audiences, and, at times, emotional support, he helped found such landmark cultural institutions as the New York City Ballet, the School of American Ballet, New York’s Lincoln Center and Stratford's American Shakespeare Festival. Duberman's biography sheds light on this lamentably neglected cultural figure. Though best known as a benefactor of the arts, Kirstein was also an adept critic, poet and novelist who published some fifteen books in his lifetime. From his undergraduate years at Harvard, where he established the influential literary magazine Hound and Horn , as well as the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art (precursor to the Modern Museum of Art), to his complex and historically significant relationship with George Balanchine, Kirstein's contributions were indespensible to the development of the arts in America. Authoritative and elegant, Duberman's biography utilizes previously unavailable documents, including Kirstein's diaries, to reveal the keen eye, incessant self-doubt, and enormous ambition that drove Kirstein's relentless advocacy. The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein brings attention to an important, but until-now unappreciated figure whose individual contribution to the arts was one of the greatest of the twentieth century.

In the swamps of Asmat in West New Guinea, Tobias Schneebaum--traveler, writer, painter, explorer--finds the way of life that suits him best. Secret Places reels readers into a world of storytellers and sorcerers, cannibals and carvers, a place where Schneebaum discovers his soulmates and his own soul. Looking back at a life of wild adventure, Schneebaum seeks in Secret Places to intertwine the varied strands of his experience, pondering the parallel universes of his experience as a gay Jewish New Yorker and his years among the Asmat. The result illuminates both worlds--as when he juxtaposes the Asmat celebration of the spirits of the dead with a New York City plagued by AIDS and its own sad spirits.

Excerpts from journals written during 1989 and 1990 share the author's thoughts on AIDS, the experimental drug AZT, gay civil rights, and the alternative films he was making

A disabled foreigner in Japan--a society historically hostile to difference--Kenny Fries spins a tale of exciting, bewildering adventure. As he visits Japanese gardens, experiences Noh and butoh, and meets artists and scholars, he also discovers disabled gods, one-eyed samurai, blind chanting priests, and A-bomb survivors. When he is diagnosed as HIV-positive, all his assumptions about Japan, the body, and mortality are shaken, and he must find a way to re-enter life on new terms.

When Joel Derfner's boyfriend proposed to him, there was nowhere in America the two could legally marry. That changed quickly, however, and before long the two were on what they expected to be a rollicking journey to married bliss. What they didn't realize was that, along the way, they would confront not just the dilemmas every couple faces on the way to the altar—what kind of ceremony would they have? what would they wear? did they have to invite Great Aunt Sophie?—but also questions about what a relationship can and can't do, the definition of marriage, and, ultimately, what makes a family. Add to the mix a reality show whose director forces them to keep signing and notarizing applications for a wedding license until the cameraman gets a shot she likes; a family marriage history that includes adulterers, arms smugglers, and poisoners; and discussions of civil rights, Sophocles, racism, grammar, and homemade Ouija boards—coupled with Derfner's gift for getting in his own way—and what results is a story not just of gay marriage and the American family but of what it means to be human.

Dull and self-important.--Jim Kepner.

In this beautifully written and almost compulsively readable book - in turn vindictive and joyful, painful and amusing - Mark Matousek writes of his struggle to live an enlightened life in a desacralised and brutal age ‘where God is dead and Madonna rules in crotchless leather panties'.

Before Elliot found financial success by bringing Woodstock Ventures to his motel, he was one of Manhattan’s leading interior designers. Then Elliot’s career came to a halt due to a floating society party, Judy Garland and the Mob.In April 1968, Elliot was hired to throw an elegant dinner party aboard a luxury yacht on the Hudson River. Included on the guest list were New York’s rich and famous--p[Bokinfo]

One of England’s foremost filmmakers, Derek Jarman (1942–1994) wrote and directed several feature films, including Sebastiane, Jubilee, Caravaggio, and Blue, as well as numerous short films and music videos. He was a stage designer, artist, writer, gardener, and an outspoken AIDS and queer rights activist in the UK and the United States. He is the author of several books, among them Modern Nature, available from the University of Minnesota Press.

Writing a Jewish Life chronicles novelist Lev Raphael's struggle to claim both his religious and sexual identities, and the happiness he subsequently found. Until he reached his mid-20s, the author felt alienated from other Jews, ambivalent about his homosexuality; or as he puts it, "twice strange ... in each [community], different, lesser, ashamed." A son of Holocaust survivors, Raphael grew up in an unmistakably Jewish but nonreligious home. However, as an adult he initiated his own affiliations with Judaism: He had a bar mitzvah at age 30, went to Israel twice, and fell in love with a Jewish man. It was "coming out as a Jew,' he writes, that "ultimately made it possible for me to come out as a gay man and then work at uniting the two identities." Attesting to his journey is the contrast between his confused childhood and the joyful domestic life he now shares with his lover, Gersh, and their two sons.

Dennis Altman first travelled from Australia to the United States when Lyndon Johnson was President, beginning a long obsession with the US. In the early 1970s he was involved in New York Gay Liberation; his 1971 study Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, is widely regarded as a classic work in its field. In the 1980s Altman lived in San Francisco during the onset of the AIDS epidemic. Later he sat on the Australian National Council on AIDS and international organisations including, as president, the AIDS Society of Asia and the Pacific. The election of Donald Trump took place while Altman was back in California on one of his frequent visits. In this diarised memoir, moving between Australia, the United States, Europe and parts of Asia, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Christopher Isherwood and many others people a story of a half century of activism, intellectualism, friendship and conflict.

"German, Jew, Muslim, Gay offers an astonishing perspective on the history of modern Germany through the vantage point of a man with multiple identities who devoted his life to religious utopias, fought for homosexual rights, wrote gay fiction, converted from Judaism to Islam (one of the few of any faith to do so), and considered himself part of a spiritual elite that held the key to Germany's salvation. Born in Posen in 1880, the son of a Jewish industrialist, Hugo Marcus converted to Islam and chose the name Hamid; he became the most important convert in Germany while retaining his membership in the Jewish community. He was renamed Israel by the Nazis and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938, where he was in the unique position of Muslim witness to the Holocaust. The imam of his mosque gained his release and he escaped to Switzerland, where he wrote gay fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus. He died in Basel in 1966. The book challenges deeply ingrained perceptions of Muslim-Jewish relations during World War II and illuminates their interconnected histories in modern Europe. It also tells the unknown story of Marcus' orientalized Islam that, in echoing Goethe's, revitalized an essential strand of Germany's spiritual heritage"--

In Journeys & Arrivals prize-winning author Lev Raphael explores for the first time in non-fiction the gay and Jewish identities that have dominated his highly acclaimed fiction for many years. Journeys & Arrivals reveals in a collection of autobiographical and critical essays the influence these often conflicting identities of being gay and Jewish have had in his life and his writing.