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Aimee & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943
Par Erica Fischer. 1994
This powerful, poignant, and inspirational novel, a Lambda Literary Award winner, is the true story of two unlikely lovers set…
against World War II Berlin—a riveting chronicle of love, loyalty, and survival against all odds.“A memorable, vivid, and intimate portrait.” — Entertainment WeeklyBerlin 1942. Lilly Wust, 29, married, four children, led a life as did millions of German women. But then she met the 21-year-old Felice Schragenheim.It was love almost at first sight. Aimée and Jaguar started forging plans for the future. They composed poems and love letters to each other, and wrote their own marriage contract. When Jaguar-Felice admitted to her lover that she was Jewish, this dangerous secret drew the two women even closer to one another. But their luck didn’t last. On August 21, 1944, Felice was arrested and deported.At the age of 80, Lilly Wust told her story to Erica Fischer, who turned it into a poignant testimony. After the book appeared in 1994 she was contacted by additional contemporaries of Aimée and Jaguar, who offered new material that has been integrated into the present edition.The book, translated into twenty languages, and the film based on it—directed by Max Färberböck, with Juliane Köhler and Maria Schrader in the leading roles—have made Aimée and Jaguar’s story known around the world.Hiding in Hip Hop: On the Down Low in the Entertainment Industry—from Music to Hollywood
Par Terrance Dean. 2008
&“If you&’re a fan of the hit show Empire and its characters Cookie, Lucious, Hakeem, Jamal, and Andre, then you…
have to check out Terrance Dean&’s provocative memoir Hiding in Hip Hop. Dean writes a compelling story about black gay men in Hip Hop and Hollywood, and what it takes for them to make it the entertainment industry.&” – JL King, New York Times bestselling author of On The Down LowCelebrated blogger and former MTV insider Terrance Dean reveals a hidden side of Hollywood and hip hop in this explosive and illuminating memoir.Terrance Dean worked his way up for more than ten years in the entertainment industry from intern to executive and has lived the life of glitz and bling along with Hollywood and Hip Hop&’s most glamorous heavy hitters. As a gay man immersed within the world of the famous and the fabulous, Dean knows well the industry&’s secrets and the façade that is kept, that for men, promotes machismo and heteronormative behavior.Most of what Dean unveils in this book is fascinating and salacious, but all of it is true. He also shares his own secrets, and an account of the pain of his mother&’s addiction, and the poverty and molestation he experienced as a child.Hiding in Hip Hop is not a traditional tell-all. It&’s personal. It&’s poignant. It&’s a provocative and honest look at stardom and sexuality.The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood
Par Richard Blanco. 2014
“In this vibrant memoir, Obama-inaugural poet Richard Blanco tenderly, exhilaratingly chronicles his Miami childhood amid a colorful, if suffocating, family…
of Cuban exiles, as well as his quest to find his artistic voice and the courage to accept himself as a gay man.” — O, The Oprah MagazineA poignant, hilarious, and inspiring memoir from the first Latino and openly gay inaugural poet, which explores his coming-of-age as the child of Cuban immigrants and his attempts to understand his place in America while grappling with his burgeoning artistic and sexual identities.Richard Blanco’s childhood and adolescence were experienced between two imaginary worlds: his parents’ nostalgic world of 1950s Cuba and his imagined America, the country he saw on reruns of The Brady Bunch and Leave it to Beaver—an “exotic” life he yearned for as much as he yearned to see “la patria.”A prismatic and lyrical narrative rich with the colors, sounds, smells, and textures of Miami, Richard Blanco’s personal narrative is a resonant account of how he discovered his authentic self and ultimately, a deeper understanding of what it means to be American. His is a singular yet universal story that beautifully illuminates the experience of “becoming;” how we are shaped by experiences, memories, and our complex stories: the humor, love, yearning, and tenderness that define a life.Fire Shut Up in My Bones
Par Charles M. Blow. 2014
A New York Times Notable Book | Lambda Literary Award Winner | Long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award &“Charles Blow is…
the James Baldwin of our age.&” — Washington Blade &“[An] exquisite memoir . . . Delicately wrought and arresting.&” — New York TimesUniversally praised on its publication, Fire Shut Up in My Bones is a pioneering journalist&’s indelible coming-of-age tale. Charles M. Blow&’s mother was a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, and a job plucking poultry at a factory near their segregated Louisiana town, where slavery's legacy felt close. When her philandering husband finally pushed her over the edge, she fired a pistol at his fleeing back, missing every shot, thanks to &“love that blurred her vision and bent the barrel.&” Charles was the baby of the family, fiercely attached to his &“do-right&” mother. Until one day that divided his life into Before and After—the day an older cousin took advantage of the young boy. The story of how Charles escaped that world to become one of America&’s most innovative and respected public figures is a stirring, redemptive journey that works its way into the deepest chambers of the heart. &“Stunning . . . Blow&’s words grab hold of you . . . [and] lead you to a place of healing.&” — Essence &“The memoir of the year.&” — A. V. ClubCity Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara
Par Brad Gooch. 2014
The definitive biography of Frank O’Hara, one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, the magnetic literary figure…
at the center of New York’s cultural life during the 1950s and 1960s.City Poet captures the excitement and promise of mid-twentieth-century New York in the years when it became the epicenter of the art world, and illuminates the poet and artist at its heart. Brad Gooch traces Frank O’Hara’s life from his parochial Catholic childhood to World War II, through his years at Harvard and New York. He brilliantly portrays O’Hara in in his element, surrounded by a circle of writers and artists who would transform America’s cultural landscape: Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, and John Ashbery.Gooch brings into focus the artistry and influence of a life “of guts and wit and style and passion” (Luc Sante) that was tragically abbreviated in 1966 when O’Hara, just forty and at the height of his creativity, was hit and killed by a jeep on the beach at Fire Island—a death that marked the end of an exceptional career and a remarkable era.City Poet is illustrated with 55 black and white photographs.In Search of Emma: How We Created Our Family, A Memoir
Par Armando Lucas Correa. 2021
Revised and updated with a new introduction by the author—and available in English for the first time—the moving story of…
a man who always wanted to be a father and the long emotional road to making his dream come true.Born in Cuba and raised in the USA, Armando Lucas Correa epitomized the American dream. He had everything he wanted: an incredible job as the editor of People magazine, meeting and interviewing glamorous celebrities; a steady partner; and a comfortable life filled with travel. But with the new millennium, he realized something vital was missing. A child. In the years before gay marriage was widespread and legal across the nation, the road to parenthood was difficult for gay couples. Though his family would not be traditional, Correa was undaunted. Every setback, each emotional challenge was fuel that drove him to fulfill his dream. Exhaustively researching the possibilities, Correa eventually chose surrogacy—a long, arduous, and expensive method involving seemingly endless tests, paperwork, and difficult decisions. But with the help of science, a lot of patience, an egg donor, a gestational mother, and the unconditional support of her partner and family, Correa’s dream finally came true with the birth of his beloved daughter, Emma. In Search of Emma is an inspiring and beautiful story of love, family, and fatherhood that reminds us of that, despite the odds, we must never stop fighting to achieve our dreams. Completely revised and updated to reflect his growing family.The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle
Par Anna Shechtman. 2012
"A surprising and ambitious investigation of language and the varied ways women resist the paradoxes of patriarchy both on and…
off the page."—New York TimesCombining the soul-baring confessional of Brain on Fire and the addictive storytelling of The Queen’s Gambit, a renowned puzzle creator’s compulsively readable memoir and history of the crossword puzzle as an unexpected site of women’s work and feminist protest.The indisputable “queen of crosswords,” Anna Shechtman published her first New York Times puzzle at age nineteen, and later, helped to spearhead the The New Yorker’s popular crossword section. Working with a medium often criticized as exclusionary, elitist, and out-of-touch, Anna is one of very few women in the field of puzzle making, where she strives to make the everyday diversion more diverse.In this fascinating work—part memoir, part cultural analysis—she excavates the hidden history of the crossword and the overlooked women who have been central to its creation and evolution, from the “Crossword Craze” of the 1920s to the role of digital technology today. As she tells the story of her own experience in the CrossWorld, she analyzes the roles assigned to women in American culture, the boxes they’ve been allowed to fill, and the ways that they’ve used puzzles to negotiate the constraints and play of desire under patriarchy.The result is an unforgettable and engrossing work of art, a loving and revealing homage to one of our most treasured, entertaining, and ultimately political pastimes.Stone Motel: Memoirs of a Cajun Boy (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)
Par Morris Ardoin. 2020
In the summers of the early 1970s, Morris Ardoin and his siblings helped run their family's roadside motel in a…
hot, buggy, bayou town in Cajun Louisiana. The stifling, sticky heat inspired them to find creative ways to stay cool and out of trouble. When they were not doing their chores—handling a colorful cast of customers, scrubbing motel-room toilets, plucking chicken bones and used condoms from under the beds—they played canasta, an old ladies’ game that provided them with a refuge from the sun and helped them avoid their violent, troubled father. Morris was successful at occupying his time with his siblings and the children of families staying in the motel’s kitchenette apartments but was not so successful at keeping clear of his father, a man unable to shake the horrors he had experienced as a child and, later, as a soldier. The preteen would learn as he matured that his father had reserved his most ferocious attacks for him because of an inability to accept a gay or, to his mind, broken, son. It became his dad’s mission to “fix” his son, and Morris’s mission to resist—and survive intact. He was aided in his struggle immeasurably by the love and encouragement of a selfless and generous grandmother, who provides his story with much of its warmth, wisdom, and humor. There’s also suspense, awkward romance, naughty French lessons, and an insider’s take on a truly remarkable, not-yet-homogenized pocket of American culture."James Nolan looks back unsparingly on a time few writers have faced with such clarity and compassion. There's suspense and…
beauty on every page . . ."--Andrei CodrescuFlight Risk takes off as a page-turning narrative with deep roots and a wide wingspan. James Nolan, a fifth-generation New Orleans native, offers up an intimate portrait both of his insular hometown and his generation's counterculture. Flight runs as a theme throughout the book, which begins with Nolan's escape from the gothic mental hospital to which his parents committed the teenaged poet during the tumult of 1968. This breakout is followed by the self-styled revolutionary's hair-raising flight from a Guatemalan jail, and years later, by the author's bolt from China, where he ditched his teaching position and collectivist ideals. These Houdini-like feats foreshadow a more recent one, how he dodged biblical floods in a stolen school bus three days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.Nolan traces these flight patterns to those of his French ancestors who fled to New Orleans in the mid-nineteenth century, established a tobacco business in the French Quarter, and kept the old country alive in their Creole demimonde. The writer describes the eccentric Seventh Ward menagerie of the extended family in which he grew up, his early flirtation with extremist politics, and a strong bond with his freewheeling grandfather, a gentleman from the Gilded Age. Nolan's quest for his own freedom takes him to the flower-powered, gender-bending San Francisco of the sixties and seventies, as well as to an expatriate life in Spain during the heady years of that nation's transition to democracy. Like the prodigal son, he eventually returns home to live in the French Quarter, around the corner from where his grandmother grew up, only to struggle through the aftermath of Katrina and the city's resurrection.Many of these stories are entwined with the commentaries of a wry flaneur, addressing such subjects as the nuances of race in New Orleans, the Disneyfication of the French Quarter, the numbing anomie of digital technology and globalization, the challenges of caring for aging parents, Creole funeral traditions, how to make a soul-searing gumbo, and what it really means to belong.Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated
Par Carl Rollyson, Lisa Paddock. 2016
This first biography of Susan Sontag (1933–2004) is now fully revised and updated, providing an even more intimate portrayal of…
the influential writer's life and career. The authors base this revision on Sontag's newly released private correspondence—including emails—and the letters and memoirs of those who knew her best. The authors reveal as never before her early years in Tucson and Los Angeles, her conflicted relationship with her mother, her longing for her absent father, and her precocious achievements at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Papers, diaries, and lecture notes, many accessible for the first time, spark a passionate fire in this biography. The authors follow Sontag as she abruptly ends an early first marriage, establishes herself in Paris, and embraces the open lifestyle she began as a teenager in Berkeley. As a single mother she struggled with teaching at Columbia University and other colleges while aiming for a career as a novelist and essayist. Eventually she made her own way in New York City after acquiring her one and only publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In her later years Sontag became a world figure, a tastemaker, dramatist, and political activist who risked her life in besieged Sarajevo. Love affairs with men and women troubled her. Diagnosed with cancer, she responded with determination, and her experience with illness inspired some of her best writing. This biography shows Sontag always craving “more life” at whatever cost and depicts her harrowing final decline even as she resisted terminal cancer. Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated presents in candid and stark relief a new assessment of a heroic and controversial figure.Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much
Par Jen Winston. 2021
Lambda Award Finalist: “[A]cackle-loudly-and-send-quotes-to-your-friends chronicle of bisexuality [and] a story of awkwardness and identity crisis.” —GlamourNamed One of the Best…
Books of 2021 by Oprah Daily, Glamour, Shondaland, and BuzzFeedIf Jen Winston knows one thing for sure, it’s that she’s bisexual. Or wait—maybe she isn’t? Actually, she definitely is. Unless . . . she’s not?Jen’s provocative, laugh-out-loud debut takes us inside her journey of self-discovery, through stories of a childhood “girl crush,” an onerous quest to have a threesome, and an enduring fear of being bad at sex. Greedy follows Jen’s attempts to make sense of herself as she explores the role of the male gaze, what it means to be “queer enough,” and how to overcome bi stereotypes when you’re the poster child for all of them: greedy, slutty, and constantly confused.With her clever voice, clear-eyed insight, and whip-smart humor, Jen draws on personal experiences with sexism and biphobia to understand how we all can and must do better. She sheds light on the reasons women, queer people, and other marginalized groups tend to make ourselves smaller, provoking the question: What would happen if we suddenly stopped???Greedy shows us that being bisexual is about much more than who you’re sleeping with—it’s about finding stability in a state of flux and defining yourself on your own terms. It inspires us to rethink the world as we know it, reminding us that “greedy” was a superpower all along.“Wholly original, and entirely delightful.” —Publishers WeeklySu Friedrich: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series)
Par Sonia Misra and Rox Samer. 2022
Su Friedrich (b. 1954) has been described as an autobiographical filmmaker, an experimental filmmaker, a documentary filmmaker, an independent filmmaker,…
a feminist filmmaker, and a lesbian filmmaker—labels that she sprucely dodges, insisting time and again she is, quite simply, a filmmaker. Nevertheless, the influences of the experimental film culture and of the feminist and lesbian political ethos out of which she emerged resonate across her films to the present day. Su Friedrich: Interviews is the first volume dedicated exclusively to Friedrich and her work. The interviews collected here highlight the historical, theoretical, political, and economic dimensions through which Friedrich’s films gain their unique and defiantly ambiguous identity. The collection seeks to give a comprehensive view of Friedrich’s diverse body of work, the conditions in which her films were made, and how they have circulated and become understood within different contexts. The volume contains fifteen interviews—two previously unpublished—along with three autobiographical writings by Friedrich. Included are canonical early interviews, but a special focus is given to interviews that address her less-studied film production in the twenty-first century. Echoing across these various pieces is Friedrich’s charmingly sardonic and defiant personality, familiar from her films. Her occasional resistance to an interviewer’s line of questioning opens up other, unexpected lines of inquiry as it also provides insight into her distinct philosophy. The volume closes with a new interview conducted by the editors, which illuminates areas that remain latent or underdiscussed in other interviews, including Friedrich’s work as a film professor and projects that supplement Friedrich’s filmmaking, such as Edited By, an online historical resource dedicated to collecting information about and honoring the contributions of women film editors.During Mardi Gras 1973, Stewart Butler (1930–2020) fell in love with Alfred Doolittle—a wealthy socialite and schizophrenic from San Francisco.…
Their relationship was an improbable love story that changed the course of LGBTQ+ history. With Doolittle’s money, Butler was able to retire and devote his life to political activism in the cause of queer liberation. A survivor of the horrific Up Stairs Lounge arson, Butler was a founding member of the first statewide lesbian and gay rights organization in Louisiana and an early champion for transgender rights, playing a key role in the eight-year struggle to persuade PFLAG to become the first national LGBTQ+ organization to include trans people in its mission statement. In Political Animal: The Life and Times of Stewart Butler, author Frank Perez traces Butler’s amazing life from his early childhood in Depression-era New Orleans, his adolescence at Carville where his father worked, his first unsuccessful attempt at college, his time in the army as a closeted gay man, his adventures in Alaska, his transformation into a hippie in the 1960s, his love affair with Doolittle, his decades as a gay rights advocate, and ultimately, his twilight years as an elder statesman. Based on Butler's own personal papers, including hundreds of letters, and dozens of interviews, Political Animal paints an intimate portrait of a legendary figure in gay politics and the times in which he lived.With Hawks and Angels: Episodes from a Southern Life (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)
Par Joel Lafayette Fletcher III. 2023
With Hawks and Angels: Episodes from a Southern Life chronicles the fortunate life of a man born in the Cajun…
country of Louisiana and his interaction with the three distinct parts of his home state: the swampy, laissez-faire South where he was born, the red clay hills and piney woods of northern Louisiana where his relatives lived, and exotic New Orleans, where he was educated. Author Joel Lafayette Fletcher III examines his childhood on the campus of what is now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where his father, Joel Lafayette Fletcher Jr., was president for twenty-five years, to his time as a student at Tulane. The book follows Fletcher through his service as a naval officer—when he began to admit to himself, accept, and explore who he really was—to his life in Europe and, eventually, Virginia where he now resides. With Hawks and Angels intimately explores the life of a young man growing up in the racially segregated Deep South while coming to terms with being gay at a time when being out was not socially acceptable. Based on his personal journals and recollections and filled with the unique characters he met along the way, With Hawks and Angels is the culmination of writing that, for Fletcher, was a way of holding onto an important part of his true self that for many years he felt compelled to hide.But Everyone Feels This Way: How an Autism Diagnosis Saved My Life
Par Paige Layle. 2024
Autism acceptance activist and TikTok influencer Paige Layle shares her deeply personal journey to diagnosis and living life autistically. &“For far…
too long, I was told I was just like everyone else. But knew it couldn&’t be true. Living just seemed so much harder for me. This wasn&’t okay. This wasn&’t normal. This wasn&’t functioning. And it certainly wasn&’t fine.&” Paige Layle was normal. She lived in the countryside with her mom, dad, and brother Graham. She went to school, hung out with friends, and all the while everything seemed so much harder than it needed to be. A break in routine threw off the whole day. If her teacher couldn't answer &“why&” in class, she dissolved into tears, unable to articulate her own confusion or explain her lack of control. But Paige was normal. She smiled in photos, picked her feet up when her mom needed to vacuum instead of fleeing the room, and earned high grades. She had friends and loved to perform in local theater productions. It wasn&’t until a psychiatrist said she wasn&’t doing okay, that anyone believed her. In But Everyone Feels This Way, Paige Layle shares her story as an autistic woman diagnosed late. Armed with the phrase &“Autism Spectrum Disorder&” (ASD), Paige challenges stigmas, taboos, and stereotypes while learning how to live her authentic, autistic life.2010 National Book Award Finalist for NonfictionDrawn from the secret, never-before-seen diaries, journals, and sexual records of the novelist, poet,…
and university professor Samuel M. Steward, Secret Historian is a sensational reconstruction of one of the more extraordinary hidden lives of the twentieth century. An intimate friend of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Steward maintained a secret sex life from childhood on, and documented these experiences in brilliantly vivid (and often very funny) detail.After leaving the world of academe to become Phil Sparrow, a tattoo artist on Chicago's notorious South State Street, Steward worked closely with Alfred Kinsey on his landmark sex research. During the early 1960s, Steward changed his name and identity once again, this time to write exceptionally literate, upbeat pro-homosexual pornography under the name of Phil Andros.Until today he has been known only as Phil Sparrow—but an extraordinary archive of his papers, lost since his death in 1993, has provided Justin Spring with the material for an exceptionally compassionate and brilliantly illuminating life-and-times biography. More than merely the story of one remarkable man, Justin Spring's Secret Historian is a moving portrait of homosexual life long before Stonewall and gay liberation.Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring
Par Brad Gooch. 1981
“It’s all here: the grade school Walt Disney and Dr. Seuss; the adolescent acid trips; the fondness for Post-it notes and…
flying saucers; the long tails of Dubuffet and Burroughs; the encounters with Madonna, Warhol, and one game-changer of a subway Johnny Walker Red poster. Brad Gooch takes us deep into Keith Haring’s imagination while somehow managing to fix the aura and energy of the 1980s New York art scene to the page. A keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come.”—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Revolutionary: Sam AdamsA stunning life of the iconic American artist, Keith Haring, by the acclaimed biographer Brad Gooch.In the 1980s, the subways of New York City were covered with art. In the stations, black matte sheets were pasted over outdated ads, and unsigned chalk drawings often popped up on these blank spaces. These temporary chalk drawings numbered in the thousands and became synonymous with a city as diverse as it was at war with itself, beset with poverty and crime but alive with art and creative energy. And every single one of these drawings was done by Keith Haring.Keith Haring was one of the most emblematic artists of the 1980s, a figure described by his contemporaries as “a prophet in his life, his person, and his work.” Part of an iconic cultural crowd that included Andy Warhol, Madonna, and Basquiat, Haring broke down the barriers between high art and popular culture, creating work that was accessible for all and using it as a means to provoke and inspire radical social change. Haring died of AIDS in 1990. To this day, his influence on our culture remains incontrovertible, and his glamorous, tragically short life has a unique aura of mystery and power.Brad Gooch, noted biographer of Flannery O’Connor and Frank O’Hara, was granted access to Haring’s extensive archive. He has written a biography that will become the authoritative work on the artist. Based on interviews with those who knew Haring best and drawing from the rich archival history, Brad Gooch sets out to capture the magic of Keith Haring: a visionary and timeless icon.Diary of a Drag Queen
Par Crystal Rasmussen, Tom Rasmussen. 2020
“This book changed my life. Tom Rasmussen’s honesty, vulnerability, and fearlessness jump out of every page and every word. It…
is the queer bible I’ve always needed.” —Sam Smith, singer and songwriter"Tom covers the nuance, doubt, and uncertainty of being a drag queen. Crystal covers the transcendence . . . Charisma and quick intelligence—two qualities that have long been prerequisites for drag . . . Diary puts on technicolor display." —Katy Waldman, The New YorkerIn these pages, find glamour and gaffes on and off the stage, clarifying snippets of queer theory, terrifyingly selfish bosses, sex, quick sex, KFC binges, group sex, the kind of honesty that banishes shame, glimmers of hope, blazes of ambition, tender sex, mad dashes in last night's heels plus a full face of make-up, and a rom-com love story for the ages. This is where the unspeakable becomes the celebrated. This is the diary of a drag queen—one dazzling, hilarious, true performance of a real, flawed, extraordinary life. "I hope people like me will read this and feel seen and loved by it. I hope people who aren't like me will enjoy it, laugh with it, learn from it. And I hope people who don't like me will file lawsuits just so I can wear my brand-new leopard-print skirt suit and bust their asses in court."—Crystal Rasmussen, in Refinery29A Wild and Precious Life: A Memoir
Par Edie Windsor, Joshua Lyon. 2019
A lively, intimate memoir from a marriage equality icon of the gay rights movement, describing gay life in the 1950s…
and 60s New York City and her longtime activism."Brash, funny and brave." —NPR“A captivating and inspiring story of a queer woman who believed in her right to take up space and be seen.”—BuzzFeed"Windsor’s story fighting for what she believed in is one that will leave readers inspired." —NBC OUTEdie Windsor became internationally famous when she sued the US government, seeking federal recognition for her marriage to Thea Spyer, her partner of more than four decades. The Supreme Court ruled in Edie’s favor, a landmark victory that set the stage for full marriage equality in the US. Beloved by the LGBTQ community, Edie embraced her new role as an icon; she had already been living an extraordinary and groundbreaking life for decades. In this memoir, which she began before passing away in 2017 and completed by her co-writer, Edie recounts her childhood in Philadelphia, her realization that she was a lesbian, and her active social life in Greenwich Village's electrifying underground gay scene during the 1950s. Edie was also one of a select group of trailblazing women in computing, working her way up the ladder at IBM and achieving their highest technical ranking while developing software. In the early 1960s Edie met Thea, an expat from a Dutch Jewish family that fled the Nazis, and a widely respected clinical psychologist. Their partnership lasted forty-four years, until Thea died in 2009. Edie found love again, marrying Judith Kasen-Windsor in 2016. A Wild and Precious Life is remarkable portrait of an iconic woman, gay life in New York in the second half of the twentieth century, and the rise of LGBT activism.The City Is Up for Grabs: How Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Led and Lost a City in Crisis
Par Gregory Royal Pratt. 2024
"Gregory Pratt had a rare front-row seat to the passions, problems, peculiarities, hopes, disappointments, shenanigans, and pettiness in the drama…
and farce that was Lori Lightfoot's uneasy tenure on the fifth floor at City Hall. What he delivers on these pages takes us backstage to give us a powerful, incisive portrait of the woman, the details of her mayoralty, and the many players who shared the stage." —Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune reporter and author of A Chicago Tavern Chicago is a world-class city, but it is also a city in crisis. Crime is up, schools have repeatedly shut down due to conflict between City Hall and the powerful teachers' union, and COVID-19 only deepened the entrenched poverty, institutional racism, and endless tug of war between the city's haves and have nots. For four years, the person at the center of this storm was Lori Lightfoot. A groundbreaking figure—the first Black, gay woman to be elected mayor of a major city and only the second female mayor of Chicago—she knew the city was at a critical turning point when she took office in 2019. But the once-in-a-lifetime challenges she ended up facing were beyond anything she or anyone else saw coming. Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Royal Pratt offers the first comprehensive behind-the-scenes look at the tumultuous single term of Mayor Lightfoot and the chaos that roiled the city and City Hall as she fought to live up to her promises to change the city's culture of corruption and villainy, reform its long-troubled police department, and make Chicago the safest big city in America. Some of Chicago's problems can be explained by forces greater than the mayor: national polarization, long-standing cultural and racial tensions, our plague years. But some are the result of Lightfoot's poor leadership at City Hall, a story that hasn't been told in full—until now.