Barbara is a cynical schoolteacher who is close to retirement. Her only means of taking the edge off her desperate loneliness is writing in her journal. Sheba is a younger, attractive woman, who joins the faculty as an art teacher. Barbara watches her from afar and has nothing but caustic things to say in her diary. Barbara finds herself reaching out to Sheba. Sheba responds by inviting her to dinner at her house to meet Sheba's lecturer husband and their two children. Later, when Barbara discovers that Sheba is having a sexual relationship with a 15-year old student, Barbara realizes that knowledge of this secret gives her power over Sheba which she can use for her own purposes. Sheba becomes uneasy with Barbara's friendship. The tenuous relationship between the two women reaches a crisis point when Barbara's cat is dying and she asks Sheba to go with her to the vet. Sheba chooses to go with her family to see their son in a play instead. In revenge, Barbara sets in motion the scandal that will rock both their lives in ways they never imagined.

In Love Stories, Jonathan Ned Katz presents stories of men's intimacies with men during the nineteenth century--including those of Abraham Lincoln--drawing flesh-and-blood portraits of intimate friendships and the ways in which men struggled to name, define, and defend their sexual feelings for one another. In a world before "gay" and "straight" referred to sexuality, men like Walt Whitman and John Addington Symonds created new ways to name and conceive of their erotic relationships with other men. Katz, diving into history through diaries, letters, newspapers, and poems, offers us a clearer picture than ever before of how men navigated the uncharted territory of male-male desire.

In the wake of a drama teacher's decision to direct "Lysistrata" for the high school play, the women in the town begin to sexually reject their husbands and boyfriends in ways that force both men and women to reevaluate their views on relationships and sexuality.

" A Courtship After Marriage places sex and marriage at the heart of modernity's making. Hirsch's innovative study of marriage-making in transnational Mexican families offers a fascinating look at the opportunities cross-border migration provides for reconstructing gender and rediscovering pleasure. This ambitious, well-crafted book speaks to anthropologists, demographers, and public health specialists, while transcending the divides between them."—Susan Greenhalgh, author of Under the Medical Gaze: Facts and Fictions of Chronic Pain "Jennifer Hirsch is one of the new wave in demographic scholars that takes culture seriously. Her book is a model of engaged, policy-relevant scholarship that achieves its warrant through deep contextualization in the everyday experience of its subjects. Beautifully written, rigorously analyzed, and almost novelistic in its nuance and detail, this study of marriage, migration, and fertility puts the people back into demography and makes one of the most powerful contributions to policy-relevant social science that I have seen in a long time. A work of beauty, sensitivity, and scholarship that sets a new standard for all that follows."—Tom Fricke, author of Himalayan Households: Tamang Demography and Domestic Processes "In this engagingly written and keenly observed ethnography of Mexican marriages in Atlanta and in small Mexican towns, Jennifer Hirsch brings love, sex and romance to Mexican immigration scholarship, and presents a compelling case for the rise of companionate marriages and ideals of spousal intimacy. This book will appeal to anyone interested in gender studies, immigrant families and the social and cultural contexts of fertility."—Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of Domestica: Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence "A groundbreaking study. Gracefully written, yet at the same time rigorously argued, this book reminds us of the poetry and dignity that can be found in ordinary lives and of the dreams and aspirations that sustain human agency even in the face of severe social and economic constraints. This is a major contribution to our understanding of migration, gender, sexuality, and social change in contemporary life and a model for engaged social research at its very best."—Richard Parker, author of Bodies, Pleasures and Passions "Hirsch has written a superb, insightful, and original study of Mexican migrants and the challenges of marital devotion and separation they face across time and space. Exemplary in its detail and rigor, Courtship brings us into the lives of men and women in Georgia and Jalisco, shows us the risks they take to create modern forms of intimacy, and reconceptualizes how we should view sexualized companionship, procreation, and engendered pleasures. This book will become a gold standard ethnography in medical anthropology, public health, and transnational migration studies."—Matthew C. Gutmann, author of The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico "Hirsch’s engaging analysis of gender relations among immigrant Mexicans in Atlanta and in the Mexican community from which they come, shows how migration affects women's and men's roles, the place of sexuality in building marital intimacy, struggles over contraceptive use, and power relations in the couple. Using detailed ethnographic examples, she examines the trend toward companionate couplehood, and demonstrates both struggles and triumphs as young Mexicans and Mexican-Americans strive to create marriages that combine the strengths of traditional respect-based bonds with the advantages of new relationships built on trust."—L.A. Rebhun, author of The Heart Is Unknown Country: Love in the Changing Economy of Northeast Brazil

What happens when married men face their gay/bisexual needs?This astonishing volume offers an intimate look into the lives and thoughts of bisexual men. Already married to women, these men are undeniably attracted to other men. Their struggle with conflicting needs, desires, and loyalties is not filtered through theories or evoked in brief interviews. It comes straight from their own keyboards. The stories told in Bisexual and Gay Husbands are taken from an Internet mailing list, which allows people to speak freely and in anonymity, yet also encourages the development of a tightly knit community. Men at all stages of the coming-out process share their experiences, their secrets, their pain, shame, anger, and hope.One man writes, “I have found the answer to my bisexual needs and am afraid to embrace it. I need help and advice to know what to do. What you people have done in your lives may hold the key to helping me decide on a course of action. I am either going to create a dream come true or hell on earth as I destroy my marriage. I can’t tell which, and of course you can’t either. But you CAN tell me how you are handling the problems I am facing.”Bisexual and Gay Husbands includes advice and information on the issues that touch these men most deeply, including: how do I tell my wife and kids? what does it mean to self-identify as bisexual or gay? what kinds of relationships do I want with men? can triads work? how do I deal with my children’s reaction? do I have to leave my wife?The insight, intelligence, and honesty revealed in Bisexual and Gay Husbands make it a riveting read, but it also has great clinical and historic value for therapists, sex theorists, and bisexual men and their families.

'At 29 I got married to live the life of the perfect wife with the gorgeous children. I did that for ten years, the last four of which I was completely celibate. Then I went online and everything changed...' After a love affair with a man three thousand miles away, met online, Suzanne Portnoy - mother of two and a top executive in the entertainment industry - begins her sexual reawakening. Embarking on a sensational and prolific series of liaisons, Suzanne beds a top London chef, who cooks her a five star meal on the day her husband moves out. An affair with a famous men's magazine editor quickly ensues, followed by a top cameraman who takes pictures of Suzanne naked. But this is just the beginning. Insatiable, Suzanne dives into the swinging scene and works her way through an entire spectrum of sexual experience, including exhibitionism, group sex, fetish clubs, and a predilection for picking up men in her lunch hour. Suzanne's journey of self-discovery is anything but typical; her attitude towards sex and relationships is even more unusual. The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker is a story that is shocking and heart-warming in equal measure. Freed from the restraints of marriage and monogamy, Suzanne takes pleasure without commitment and tells her story without a trace of shame. She's not looking for Prince Charming anymore, but fun. And she finds it. 'Taking the vogue for erotic memoirs to the extreme ... as mind boggling as it is shocking' The Mirror 'Intelligently written [and] brutally honest' Metro 'Eye-poppingly unambiguous prose' Esquire 'Book of the Month' Scarlet