Recommendations based on "Real Queer America LGBT Stories from Red States"

'Funny, kind, generous and smart - I could have done with the wisdom of Flo Perry far sooner' Dolly AldertonWhen it comes to our sex lives, few of us are free of niggling fears and body image insecurities. Rather than enjoying and exploring our bodies uninhibited, we worry about our bikini lines, bulging tummies and whether we're doing it 'right'.Flo broaches everything from faking it to consent, stress to kink, and how losing your virginity isn't so different to eating your first chocolate croissant. Her mission is to get more people talking openly about what they do and don't want from every romantic encounter.

Liv Strömquists nya seriealbum Kunskapens frukt handlar om det som brukar kallas för det kvinnliga könsorganet. Vad är det för något? Och varför har mänskligheten ett så extremt osoft, bordelineartat love-or-hate-relationship med just denna mänskliga kroppsdel?I en brokig mosaik bestående av gamla greker, stenålderskvinnor, Sigmund Freud, Magnus Uggla, prinsessan Törnrosa, hinduistiska gudinnor, Dogge Doggelito, biologiböcker och Stig Larsson försöker Liv Strömquist knåpa ihop en bild av det organ som Gustave Coubert kallade Världens ursprung.

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

Eve Babitz captured the voluptuous quality of L.A. in the1960s in a wildly original, totally unique voice. These stories are time capsule gems, as poignant and startling today as they were when published in the early 1970s. Eve Babitz is not well known today, but she should be. Her first hand experiences in the L.A. cultural scene, translated into haunting fiction, are an unforgettable glimpse at a lost world and a magical time.

A novel of loss and love. The author has also written Sexing the Cherry and Oranges are Not the Only Fruit which won the 1985 Whitbread Prize and was later adapted as an award-winning BBC dramatization. Her book The Passion won the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.

These thirty-nine stories chronicle the gay experience over the course of the last century, beginning with the unarticulated longing of two boys swimming in D.H. Lawrence's "A Poem of Friendship" and ending with the explicit sexual interaction of two boys in a bathtub in A.M. Homes's "The Whiz Kids."In between there is every imaginable kind of gay story written by every imaginable kind of writer—gay and straight, male and female—all illuminating the common ground of the gay male experience and its astonishing diversity.“The book is like a long enjoyable party, at which the celebrated rub elbows with the neglected.”—Times Literary Supplement

Loba is a visionary epic quest for the reintegration of the femimine, hailed by many as the great female counterpart to Allen Ginsberg's Howl when the first half appeared in 1978. Now published for the first time in its completed form with new material, Loba, "she-wolf" in Spanish explores the wilderness at the heart of experience, through the archetype of the wolf goddess, elemental symbol of complete self-acceptance.

Where did the word love come from? Has there ever been a gay pope? How did Valentine's Day originate? From the lascivious to the romantic, from the hard-core to the scientific and the scholarly, this engaging and eye-opening compendium of little known facts about sex is both informative and endlessly entertaining.

The men of Renaissance Florence were so renowned for sodomy that "Florenzer" in German meant "sodomite." Indeed, in the late fifteenth century, as many as one in two Florentine men had come to the attention of the authorities for sodomy by the time they were thirty. In the seventy years from 1432 to 1502, some 17,000 men--in a city of only 40,000--were investigated for sodomy; 3,000 were convicted and thousands more confessed to gain amnesty. Michael Rocke vividly depicts this vibrant sexual culture in a world where these same-sex acts were not the deviant transgressions of a small minority, but an integral part of a normal masculine identity. In 1432 The Office of the Night was created specifically to police sodomy in Florence. Seventy years of denunciations, interrogations, and sentencings left an extraordinarily detailed record, which Rocke uses to its fullest in this richly documented portrait. He describes a wide range of sexual experiences between males, ranging from boys such as fourteen-year-old Morello di Taddeo, who prostituted himself to fifty-seven men, to the notorious Jacopo di Andrea, a young bachelor implicated with forty adolescents over a seventeen-year period and convicted thirteen times; same-sex "marriages" like that of Michele di Bruno and Carlo di Berardo, who were involved for several years and swore a binding oath to each other over an altar; and Bernardo Lorini, a former Night Officer himself with a wife and seven children, accused of sodomy at the age of sixty-five. (Mortified, he sent his son Taddeo to confess for him and plead for a discreet resolution of his case.) Indeed, nearly all Florentine males probably had some kind of same-sex experience as a part of their "normal" sexual life. Rocke uncovers a culture in which sexual roles were strictly defined by age, with boys under eighteen the "passive" participants in sodomy, youths in their twenties and older men the "active" participants, and most men at the age of thirty marrying women, their days of sexual frivolity with boys largely over. Such same sex activities were a normal phase in the transition to adulthood, and only a few pursued them much further. Rather than precluding heterosexual experiences, they were considered an extension of youthful and masculine lust and desire. As Niccolo Machiavelli quipped about a handsome man, "When young he lured husbands away from their wives, and now he lures wives away from their husbands." Florentines generally accepted sodomy as a common misdemeanor, to be punished with a fine, rather than as a deadly sin and a transgression against nature. There was no word, in the otherwise rich Florentine sexual lexicon, for "homosexual," nor was there a distinctive and well-developed homosexual "subculture." Rather, sexual acts between men and boys were an integral feature of the dominant culture. Rocke roots this sexual activity in the broader context of Renaissance Florence, with its social networks of families, juvenile gangs, neighbors, patronage, workshops, and confraternities, and its busy political life from the early years of the Republic through the period of Lorenzo de' Medici, Savonarola, and the beginning of Medici princely rule. His richly detailed book paints a fascinating picture of a vibrant time and place and calls into question our modern conceptions of gender and sexual identity.

This landmark work is the most complete compilation of its kind, offering an enlightened view of a diverse and long-neglected genre. Arranged in thematic sections are a generous and wide range of selections--fiction, poetry, and essays from writers past and present, including Emily Dickinson, Carson McCullers, Christina Rossetti, and Rita Mae Brown.