Böcker i Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Au-serien

Plain tells the story of Mary Alice Hostetter's journey to define an authentic self amid a rigid religious upbringing in a Mennonite farm family. Although endowed with a personality "prone toward questioning and challenging," the young Mary Alice at first wants nothing more than to be a good girl, to do her share, and-alongside her eleven siblings-to work her family's Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, farm. She feels fortunate to have been born into a religion where, as the familiar hymn states, she is "safe in the arms of Jesus." As an adolescent, that keen desire for belonging becomes focused on her worldly peers, even though she knows that Mennonites consider themselves a people apart. Eventually she leaves behind the fields and fences of her youth, thinking she will finally be able to grow beyond the prohibitions of her church. Discovering and accepting her sexuality, she once again finds herself apart, on the outside of family, community, and societal norms. This quietly powerful memoir of longing and acceptance casts a humanizing eye on a little-understood American religious tradition and a woman's striving to grow within and beyond it.

One of the leading Latino writers working today offers a provocative autobiography interweaving his own story with the lives of three other gay Hispanic authors: Manuel Puig, Reinaldo Arenas, and Federico Garcia Lorca.

THE TV-PERFECT FAMILY OF WALTER DE MILLY III was like many others in the American South of the 1950s -- seemingly close-knit, solidly respectable, and active in the community.Tragically, Walter's deeply troubled father would launch his family on a perilous journey into darkness. To the outside world, this man is a prominent businessman, a dignified Presbyterian, and a faithful husband; to Walter, he is an overwhelming, handsome monster. Whenever the two are together, young Walter becomes a sexual plaything for his father; father and son outings are turned into soul-obliterating nightmares.Walter eventually becomes a successful businessman only to be stricken by another catastrophe: his father, at the age of seventy, is caught molesting a young boy. Walter is asked to confront his father. He convenes the family, and in a private conference with a psychiatrist, his father agrees to be surgically castrated.De Milly's portraits of his relationships with his father and mother, and the confrontation that leads to his father's bizarre and irreversible voluntary "cure", are certain to be remembered long after the reader has set aside this powerful contribution to the literature of incest survival.

"Growing up queer, closeted, and afraid, Richard Scott Larson found expression for his interior life in horror films, especially John Carpenter's 1978 classic, Halloween. He developed an intense childhood identification with Michael Myers, Carpenter's inscrutable masked villain, as well as Michael's potential victims. In The Long Hallway, Larson scrutinizes this identification, meditating on horror as a metaphor for the torments of the closet."--