Recommendations based on "L.A. Woman"

Teeming with life and crackling with energy - a love song to modern Britain, to black womanhood, to the ever-changing heart of LondonGirl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.'A daring evocation of black British history... Sexy, punchy [and] fresh' Independent on Sunday on The Emperor's Babe

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.

In This New Feminist, Queer Fairy Tale Collection, The Princesses, Mermaids, Barmaids, Children, And Wise Old Women Who Have Been Forced To Sit On The Sidelines In Classic Stories Take Center Stage To Fulfill Their Own Dreams And Find The Love, Power, And Happiness They Deserve.

"Girls Girls Girls floored me. . . . It's completely extraordinary." —Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of SandwichA vibrant queer Jewish debut "teeming with heart, angst, love, and self discovery" (Emily Austin) about a young woman who, caught between the expectations of others and her own evolving desires, is forced to make a series of fraught life-altering decisions.It’s the summer of ’96 and best friends (and secret girlfriends) Hannah and Sam are driving across the country from Long Beach, New York, to the fabled queer paradise of San Francisco, free from the harsh gazes of their neighbors and the stifling demands of Hannah’s devout Orthodox Jewish mother. In San Francisco, they will finally be together as a real couple, out in the open, around other queer people. Even if the move means leaving behind Hannah’s beloved Bubbe.When the financial strains of West Coast living push the girls to start stripping at The Chez Paree—yet another secret Hannah must keep from her family—Hannah feels trapped. Sam wants her at the club, but Hannah hates stripping nearly as much as she hates disappointing Sam. Then Hannah meets Chris, an older butch lesbian, who is immediately taken with her. Desperate to stay in San Francisco, but away from the leering men at the club, Hannah proposes an escort arrangement.But as Hannah falls deeper into Chris’ world and Sam starts to meet new queer friends, a rift forms between them. Without Sam, who is Hannah? And what becomes of San Francisco to Hannah alone—a space rich with queer possibility, or an intimidating, unfamiliar place, just as lonely as the one she’d left behind? An achingly tender and resonant story of survival, first love, and growing up queer in the ’90s, Girls Girls Girls is a piercing exploration of the choices we make in the thrilling and often confounding search for ourselves and home.

From one of the UK’s most followed journalists comes a mythbusting call-to-arms that exposes sex misinformation and champions inclusive and equitable sex.Clueless about everything from her own anatomy to relationships, Sophia Smith Galer’s sex education classes left her with more questions than answers. But what she didn’t know was that this lack of knowledge was about to turn her life upside down – as it does to countless people in the UK every year.Thanks to inadequate sex education, many of us are finishing school knowing more about STDs and condoms than the bigger sexual picture – our own physicality, pleasure and consent. And the effects can last a lifetime.In Losing It, Smith Galer shares the eye-opening stories of ordinary people affected by sex misinformation and finds that many of us are unable to access the world of sexual freedom that we’ve been promised. She draws on her own experiences – and the expertise of a new generation of sex educators – to uncover a world that subscribes to a wide catalogue of sex myths. This book Virginity Does having sex for the first time alter us biologically?The Sexlessness Who is abstaining and why?The Virility Why do men feel so much pressure to have sex?The Consent Is there more to it than just saying no?Losing It challenges the status quo and empowers people from all backgrounds and any age to rewrite the story of their sex lives.

'Queer London' explores the underground gay culture of London during four decades when homosexual acts between consenting adults remained illegal. The author discovers how queer men made sense of their sexuality and how their lifestyles were affected by and in turn influenced the life of the metropolis.

The much-anticipated follow up to the groundbreaking anthology Disability Visibility: another revolutionary collection of first-person writing on the joys and challenges of the modern disability experience, and intimacy in all its myriad forms. What is intimacy? More than sex, more than romantic love, the pieces in this stunning and illuminating new anthology offer broader and more inclusive definitions of what it can mean to be intimate with another person. Explorations of caregiving, community, access, and friendship offer us alternative ways of thinking about the connections we form with others—a vital reimagining in an era when forced physical distance is at times a necessary norm.  But don't worry: there's still sex to consider—and the numerous ways sexual liberation intersects with disability justice. Plunge between these pages and you'll also find disabled sexual discovery, disabled love stories, and disabled joy. These twenty-five stunning original pieces—plus other modern classics on the subject, all carefully curated by acclaimed activist Alice Wong—include essays, photo essays, poetry, drama, and erotica: a full spectrum of the dreams, fantasies, and deeply personal realities of a wide range of beautiful bodies and minds. Disability Intimacy will free your thinking, invigorate your spirit, and delight your desires.

1972. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, Australia, two teenage girls must each make a choice: to act upon their desires or suppress them? To live an openly queer life or to try desperately not to? Over the following three decades, these girls grow into women and live out their decisions, always almost crossing paths at pivotal moments. In an era that spans Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, there is joy and grief and loss and desire for each of them - but will their lives ever collide? A Language of Limbs is about love and how it's policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak. A celebration of queer life in all its vibrancy and colour, this story finds the humanity in all of us and demands we claim our futures for ourselves.

From the national bestselling author of Girlhood, an examination of the solitude, freedoms, and feminist heroes Melissa Febos discovered during a year of celibacy. A wise and transformative look at relationships and self-knowledge.In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break—for three months she would abstain from dating, from relationships, and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship after another. As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances” from her adolescence to her mid-thirties. Finally, she would carve out time to focus on herself and examine the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster. Over those first few months, she gleaned insights into her past and awoke to the joys of being single. She decided to extend her celibacy, not knowing it would become the most fulfilling and sensual year of her life. No longer defined by her romantic pursuits, she learned to relish the delights of solitude, the thrill of living on her own terms, the sensual pleasures unmediated by lovers, and the freedom to pursue her ideals without distraction or guilt. Bringing her own experiences into conversation with those of women throughout history—from Hildegard von Bingen, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia Butler to the Shakers and Sappho—Febos situates her story within a newfound lineage of role models who unapologetically pursued their ambitions and ideals.By abstaining from all forms of romantic entanglement, Febos began to see her life and her self-worth in a radical new way. Her year of divestment transformed her relationships with friends and peers, her spirituality, her creative practice, and most of all her relationship to herself. Blending intimate personal narrative and incisive cultural criticism, The Dry Season tells a story that's as much about celibacy as its inverse: pleasure, desire, fulfillment. Infused with fearless honesty and keen intellect, it's the memoir of a woman learning to live at the center of her own story, and a much-needed catalyst for a new conversation around sex and love.

In Break Any Woman Down, Dana Johnson explores race, identity, and alienation with unflinching honesty and vibrant language. Hip and seductive, her stories often feature women discovering their identities through sexual and emotional intimacy with the men in their lives. In the title story, La Donna is a black stripper whose white boyfriend, an actor in adult movies, insists that she stop stripping. In "Melvin in the Sixth Grade," eleven-year-old Avery has a crush on a white boy from Oklahoma who, like Avery, is an outsider in their suburban Los Angeles school. "Markers" is as much about a woman's relationship with her mother as it is about the dissolution of her relationship with an older Italian man.Dana Johnson has an intuitive sense of character and a gift for creating authentic voices. She effortlessly captures the rhythmic vernaculars of Los Angeles, the American South, and various immigrant communities as she brings to life the sometimes heavyhearted, but always persevering, souls who live there.