Recommendations based on "Flashbang"

ONE OF BILLBOARD'S "100 GREATEST MUSIC BOOKS OF ALL TIME": The provocative transgender advocate and lead singer of the punk rock band Against Me! provides a searing account of her search for identity and her true self.It began in a bedroom in Naples, Florida, when a misbehaving punk teenager named Tom Gabel, armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a headful of anarchist politics, landed on a riff. Gabel formed Against Me! and rocketed the band from its scrappy beginnings-banging on a drum kit made of pickle buckets-to a major-label powerhouse that critics have called this generation's The Clash. Since its inception in 1997, Against Me! has been one of punk's most influential modern bands, but also one of its most divisive. With every notch the four-piece climbed in their career, they gained new fans while infuriating their old ones. They suffered legal woes, a revolving door of drummers, and a horde of angry, militant punks who called them "sellouts" and tried to sabotage their shows at every turn.But underneath the public turmoil, something much greater occupied Gabel-a secret kept for 30 years, only acknowledged in the scrawled-out pages of personal journals and hidden in lyrics. Through a troubled childhood, delinquency, and struggles with drugs, Gabel was on a punishing search for identity. Not until May of 2012 did a Rolling Stone profile finally reveal it: Gabel is a transsexual, and would from then on be living as a woman under the name Laura Jane Grace.Tranny is the intimate story of Against Me!'s enigmatic founder, weaving the narrative of the band's history, as well as Grace's, with dozens of never-before-seen entries from the piles of journals Grace kept. More than a typical music memoir about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll-although it certainly has plenty of that-Tranny is an inside look at one of the most remarkable stories in the history of rock.

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST A transgender reporter's "powerful, profoundly moving" narrative tour through the surprisingly vibrant queer communities sprouting up in red states (New York Times Book Review), offering a vision of a stronger, more humane America. Ten years ago, Samantha Allen was a suit-and-tie-wearing Mormon missionary. Now she's a GLAAD Award-winning journalist happily married to another woman. A lot in her life has changed, but what hasn't changed is her deep love of Red State America, and of queer people who stay in so-called "flyover country" rather than moving to the liberal coasts. In Real Queer America, Allen takes us on a cross-country road-trip stretching all the way from Provo, Utah to the Rio Grande Valley to the Bible Belt to the Deep South. Her motto for the trip: "Something gay every day." Making pit stops at drag shows, political rallies, and hubs of queer life across the heartland, she introduces us to scores of extraordinary LGBT people working for change, from the first openly transgender mayor in Texas history to the manager of the only queer night club in Bloomington, Indiana, and many more. Capturing profound cultural shifts underway in unexpected places and revealing a national network of chosen family fighting for a better world, Real Queer America is a treasure trove of uplifting stories and a much-needed source of hope and inspiration in these divided times.

In a lecture delivered before the University of Oxford's Anglo-French Society in 1936, Gertrude Stein described romance as "the outside thing, that . . . is always a thing to be felt inside." Hannah Roche takes Stein's definition as a principle for the reinterpretation of three major modernist lesbian writers, showing how literary and affective romance played a crucial yet overlooked role in the works of Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes. The Outside Thing offers original readings of both canonical and peripheral texts, including Stein's first novel Q.E.D. (Things As They Are), Hall's Adam's Breed and The Well of Loneliness, and Barnes's early writing alongside Nightwood. Is there an inside space for lesbian writing, or must it always seek refuge elsewhere? Crossing established lines of demarcation between the in and the out, the real and the romantic, and the Victorian and the modernist, The Outside Thing presents romance as a heterosexual plot upon which lesbian writers willfully set up camp. These writers boldly adopted and adapted the romance genre, Roche argues, as a means of staking a queer claim on a heteronormative institution. Refusing to submit or surrender to the "straight" traditions of the romance plot, they turned the rules to their advantage. Drawing upon extensive archival research, The Outside Thing is a significant rethinking of the interconnections between queer writing, lesbian living, and literary modernism.

'Feverish, devouring and provocative' LUCY ROSE, author of The Lamb 'Dark, sexy, addictive and beautifully written' KATE DAVIES, author of In at the Deep End ‘Hot, hungry and aching with desire, this book will bite down into you and it won't let go’ TOBI COVENTRY, author of He’s the Devil Love can really eat you up Avni is done with the meaningless carousel of tame sex. Tender women repel her. Clumsy men disgust her. She wants to make her flesh electric; to fill the chasm inside her created by her mundane job, her ex who died in a bizarre tragedy, and her sick aunt, whose diseased brain is swallowing memories. Then there’s the sour fruit, the bad meat that she craves. She longs for something to make her feel full. Something beyond all the pointless sex and depravity. When she is sucked into the orbit of a couple who seem as unstitched as she is, Avni thinks she may have found what she is looking for. But each time she fulfils her darkest needs her appetite grows, and she begins to spiral into obsession. There's that bone-deep ache again. Is it love? Or a different kind of hunger? Uncompromising, unique and compulsively readable, SOUR FRUIT is the fearless debut of a major new talent.

Sappho of Lesbos lived and wrote poetry some twenty-six centuries ago, but hers remains a persistent and effective voice for the expression of a woman's desire for a woman. Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho is the first book to examine Sappho's poetry through the lens of lesbian desire, focusing on the active female gaze in the texts and the narrative voice - one that describes female experience and desires as primary, not secondary to the dominant (male) culture. Snyder reads Sappho's songs against a woman-centered framework in which emotional and/or erotic bonds between and among women take center stage. Her close readings demonstrate the ways in which Sappho's lyrics focus on women's emotional lives with one another and on female erotic desire for other females. In Sappho's poetic world, male figures, when they do appear, stand on the periphery. In order to make Sappho accessible to everyone, Snyder presents detailed readings of the one complete existing song and of each of the major fragments of her poetry. She provides a clear English translation and a transliteration into our alphabet; the original Greek text is included in an appendix. Rather than making claims about the specific social contexts out of which the poems may have arisen, Snyder offers a close analysis of the words themselves, with comparative material drawn from other archaic Greek poets where there appear to be appropriate parallels. The book concludes with a chapter addressing Sappho's influence on a number of modern American woman poets, particularly Amy Lowell, H.D., and Olga Broumas. Snyder sees in these three poets qualities similar to Sappho's: a strong sense of self-definition; a display of independencewithin a poetic tradition; a relishing of the erotic and the sensual; and an emphasis on the mutuality of desire; and a blurring of the gaze that disrupts the hierarchy of subject versus object.

In an uncensored journal, named her "ultimate confidante," the author of Henry and June and Incest reveals her private self, her doubts and weaknesses, and the intimate details of her physical relationships.

From a #1 Apple podcast host, Lambda Literary fellow, and dominatrix comes a sex-positive, judgment-free cultural deep-dive into the world of kink.   When celebrated BDSM educator Tina Horn first launched Why Are People Into That?!, publications from Vice to Buzzfeed heralded it as one of the best sex podcasts around. Each episode centered around a different fetish or fantasy, thoughtfully examining why, exactly, different strokes work for different folks. From sex workers and scientists to artists and activists, Tina’s wide range of guests helped educate fascinated listeners across the world on the wide spectrum of humanity’s appetites. With her listeners growing more and more insatiable, she soon realized that the only way to address the titular question with all the depth and nuance it deserved was to turn that idea into a book. From spanking, strap-ons, and sluts, to taboos involving cake, chains, and cannibalism, WHY ARE PEOPLE INTO THAT? explores the universal drives that shape even the most specific erotic tastes, and the cultural context that molds and is molded by the way we conceptualize pleasure, gender, fantasy, and power. With buoyant prose, Tina invites us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about sexuality. How, for example, should we think about "consensual nonconsent" in a post-#MeToo era? How does cross-dressing fit in with our evolving cultural understanding of gender performance and identity? And what do foot fetishists, fisters, and FinDoms have in common? Blending insightful cultural criticism, investigative journalism, and spicy anecdotes from Tina’s 15+ years of hard-earned expertise in the sex industry and beyond, WHY ARE PEOPLE INTO THAT? is a philosophical-but-fun exploration of the prismatic spectrum of human desire and the expansive possibilities of pleasure. For fans of adrienne maree brown and Emily Nagoski, this raunchy and rousing book is perfect for anyone who is interested not only in the intricacies of what we desire, but in how desire itself really works.  

In these selections from twenty years of her best short fiction, Edna O'Brien's A Fanatic Heart pulls the reader into a woman's experience. Her stories portray a young Irish girl's view of obsessive love and its often wrenching pain, while tales of contemporary life show women who open themselves to sexuality, to disappointment, to madness. Throughout, there is always O'Brien's voice—wondrous, despairing, moving—examining passionate subjects that lay bare the desire and needs that can be hidden in a woman's heart.

From a writer of astonishing versatility and erudition, the much-admired literary critic, novelist, short-story writer, and scholar (“Dazzling”—The Washington Post; “One of those rare writers who seems to be able to work on any register, any time, any atmosphere, and make it her own” —The Observer), a book that explores the little-known literary tradition of love between women in Western literature, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Agatha Christie, and many more. Emma Donoghue brings to bear all her knowledge and grasp to examine how desire between women in English literature has been portrayed, from schoolgirls and vampires to runaway wives, from cross-dressing knights to contemporary murder stories. Donoghue looks at the work of those writers who have addressed the “unspeakable subject,” examining whether such desire between women is freakish or omnipresent, holy or evil, heartwarming or ridiculous as she excavates a long-obscured tradition of (inseparable) friendship between women, one that is surprisingly central to our cultural history. Donoghue writes about the half-dozen contrasting girl-girl plots that have been told and retold over the centuries, metamorphosing from generation to generation. What interests the author are the twists and turns of the plots themselves and how these stories have changed—or haven’t—over the centuries, rather than how they reflect their time and society. Donoghue explores the writing of Sade, Diderot, Balzac, Thomas Hardy, H. Rider Haggard, Elizabeth Bowen, and others and the ways in which the woman who desires women has been cast as not quite human, as ghost or vampire. She writes about the ever-present triangle, found in novels and plays from the last three centuries, in which a woman and man compete for the heroine’s love . . . about how—and why—same-sex attraction is surprisingly ubiquitous in crime fiction, from the work of Wilkie Collins and Dorothy L. Sayers to P. D. James. Finally, Donoghue looks at the plotline that has dominated writings about desire between women since the late nineteenth century: how a woman’s life is turned upside down by the realization that she desires another woman, whether she comes to terms with this discovery privately, “comes out of the closet,” or is publicly “outed.” She shows how this narrative pattern has remained popular and how it has taken many forms, in the works of George Moore, Radclyffe Hall, Patricia Highsmith, and Rita Mae Brown, from case-history-style stories and dramas, in and out of the courtroom, to schoolgirl love stories and rebellious picaresques. A revelation of a centuries-old literary tradition—brilliant, amusing, and until now, deliberately overlooked.

"Honest, informative, and stylish, this book made me grateful for the activism of the past and gave me courage for the fights to come!” —Maia Kobabe, author of Gender Queer: A Memoir "This book belongs in every bookstore, library, and educational establishment, and in the hands of every queer kid." —Mo B. Dick, Drag King legend and executive director of Drag King History More than a historical narrative, this story of queer identity interweaves the author's personal history, showing queerness as both a community endeavor and deeply personal journey. When Hazel was twelve years old, they came out as bisexual to their parents. At the time, they couldn’t have imagined who they are today: a nonbinary, transmasculine person in a loving queer relationship. In seeking to understand their own history, Hazel takes readers on a parallel journey through queer history—from the origins of Western concepts of sexual orientation, to the synthesis of hormones, to the evolution of trans health care. They unpack the economic underpinnings of gender roles. They dive into the origins behind our concept of “coming out,” the history of "female husbands," neopronouns, and the emergence of drag kings. As Hazel grows and changes, so does their understanding of those who came before them, and the interweaving of both narratives gives the reader a powerful entryway into not just Hazel's journey of self-actualization, but the queer community at large.