In honor of Pride Month this June, we’re sharing the love with a special offer on a few of our favorite books in LGBT studies. From the lasting significance of the Stonewall Riots to the cultural effects of gay marriage, learn about the history of the LGBT movement and explore the LGBT experience with the eBooks below—each $1.99 through the end of June!
Click on any of the covers to find the eBook for your device available for order online for $1.99!*
*offer good through 6/30/2019
The Stonewall Riots
A Documentary History
Edited by Marc Stein
June 28, 1969, Greenwich Village: The New York City Police Department, fueled by bigoted liquor licensing practices and an omnipresent backdrop of homophobia and transphobia, raided the Stonewall Inn, a neighborhood gay bar, in the middle of the night. The raid was met with a series of responses that would go down in history as the most galvanizing period in this country’s fight for sexual and gender liberation: a riotous reaction from the bar’s patrons and surrounding community, followed by six days of protests. Across 200 documents, Marc Stein presents a unique record of the lessons and legacies of Stonewall. Drawing from sources that include mainstream, alternative, and LGBTQ media, gay-bar guide listings, state court decisions, political fliers, first-person accounts, song lyrics, and photographs, Stein paints an indelible portrait of this pivotal moment in the LGBT movement. In The Stonewall Riots, Stein does not construct a neatly quilted, streamlined narrative of Greenwich Village, its people, and its protests; instead, he allows multiple truths to find their voices and speak to one another, much like the conversations you’d expect to overhear in your neighborhood bar.
“The Stonewall Riots is an invaluable addition to LGBTQ+ history, gathering for the first time a wealth of primary documents that will deepen understanding of a pivotal, culture-changing event.” —Foreword Reviews
“[A] mosaic of the cultural and political realities before, during, and after the riots. The book reflects both the brilliance and contradictions of a multifaceted history…Stein’s reflective curation is an important contribution to understanding what Stonewall was and what it represents…illuminating.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A generous survey of LGBTQ lives before and after the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village in June 1969, Stein’s research fills in gaps in the American history of the fight for free expression of sexuality…Stein’s work offers reasons for pride and hope.” —Booklist
The Trans Generation
How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) are Creating a Gender Revolution
By Ann Travers
Winner, 2019 PROSE Award for Anthropology, Criminology and Anthropology, presented by the Association of American Publishers
Based on interviews with transgender kids, ranging in age from 4 to 20, and their parents, and over five years of research in the US and Canada, The Trans Generation offers a rare look into what it is like to grow up as a trans child. From daycare to birthday parties and from the playground to the school bathroom, Travers takes the reader inside the day-to-day realities of trans kids who regularly experience crisis as a result of the restrictive ways in which sex categories regulate their lives and put pressure on them to deny their internal sense of who they are in gendered terms.
“Given that trans children are subjected to harassment, bullying, and systemic lack of support, there’s no better time than now to have this book as a resource.” —Bitch Magazine
“Ann Travers’s The Trans Generation is an astounding and essential qualitative study that collects heartfelt, honest anecdotes from a variety of transgender children and their parents.” —Foreword Reviews
The Gay Marriage Generation
How the LGBTQ Movement Transformed American Culture
By Peter Hart-Brinson
Through revealing interviews, Hart-Brinson explores how different age groups embrace, resist, and create society’s changing ideas about gay marriage. Religion, race, contact with gay people, and the power of love are all topics that weave in and out of these fascinating accounts, sometimes influencing opinions in surprising ways. The book captures a wide range of voices from diverse social backgrounds at a critical moment in the culture wars, right before the turn of the tide. The story of gay marriage’s rapid ascent offers profound insights about how the continuous remaking of the population through birth and death, mixed with our personal, biographical experiences of our shared history and culture, produces a society that is continually in flux and constantly reinventing itself anew.
“At the very moment attitudes toward gay marriage began to change rapidly, Peter Hart-Brinson interviewed people from multiple generations to assess the shifting meanings surrounding gay marriage. While quantitative studies allow us to track these changing attitudes in a simplistic way, most barely scratch the surface of what remains a complex issue for many. With his insightful analysis of his qualitative data, Hart-Brinson breaks through this surface and does a deep dive into the metaphors people use to think about gay marriage. In doing so, he helps us to understand why resistance to gay marriage remains steadfast, even in the face of growing consensus.” —Thomas J. Linneman, Author of Weathering Change: Gays and Lesbians, Christian Conservatives, and Everyday Hostilities
The Path to Gay Rights
How Activism and Coming Out Changed Public Opinion
By Jeremiah J. Garretson
The Path to Gay Rights is the first social science analysis of how and why the LGBTQ movement achieved its most unexpected victory—transforming gay people from a despised group of social deviants into a minority worthy of rights and protections in the eyes of most Americans. The book weaves together a narrative of LGBTQ history with new findings from the field of political psychology to provide an understanding of how social movements affect mass attitudes in the United States and globally.
“The book’s narrative is hopeful—it’s a story of how countless personal interactions and individual changes of heart, not elite opinion or legal mandates, drove one of the most remarkable attitudinal shifts in modern history.” —Reason
“This fine study examines how the change in public opinion took place over the years while looking at the ultimate causes of social change generally… An important addition to the LGBTQ bookshelf.” —Booklist
Pride Parades
How a Parade Changed the World
By Katherine McFarland Bruce
With vivid imagery, and showcasing the voices of these participants, Pride Parades tells the story of Pride from its beginning in 1970 to 2010. Though often dismissed as frivolous spectacles, the author builds a convincing case for the importance of Pride parades as cultural protests at the heart of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Weaving together interviews, archival reports, quantitative data, and ethnographic observations at six diverse contemporary parades in New York City, Salt Lake City, San Diego, Burlington, Fargo, and Atlanta, Bruce describes how Pride parades are a venue for participants to challenge the everyday cultural stigma of being queer in America, all with a flair and sense of fun absent from typical protests. Unlike these political protests that aim to change government laws and policies, Pride parades are coordinated, concerted attempts to improve the standing of LGBT people in American culture.
“Bruce not only provides an entertaining and informative history of gay pride parades which have become standard fare worldwide, but in doing so has employed a new and effective prism through which to view and explain the subtle and complicated aspects of the history of the lesbian and gay rights movement in the US.” —Choice
“LGBT pride parades are many things at once—cultural protests, solidarity parties, visibility tools, commercial opportunities—and Pride Parades offers a useful tour through their complexities, impact, and pleasures.” —Joshua Gamson, author of Modern Families: Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship
Click on any of the covers to find the eBook for your device available for order online for $1.99!*
*offer good through 6/30/2019
Featured Photo by Ylanite Koppens from Pexels
