From the earliest marches in 1970 to this month’s events around the Bay Area and the world, Pride has celebrated and commemorated the LGBTQ community’s culture and heritage for over 40 years. While COVID-19 has changed the nature of celebrations this year, UC Press is honored to publish titles that shed light on the unique experiences of LGBTQ individuals and ongoing struggles of the LGBTQ community.
This list features titles that speak to the lives of LGBTQ people of color, the issues they face, and how they form and find family and community.
Invisible Families
Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood among Black Women
by Mignon Moore
“Mignon R. Moore has given Black and African-American lesbians a voice in her book. . . . Not only will this book give visibility and light to African-American lesbian families, but social sciences researchers will cite the construction, development, and conclusions from Moore’s study for years to come.”—Rachel Wexelbaum Lambda Literary
Mignon R. Moore brings to light the family life of a group that has been largely invisible—gay women of color—in a book that challenges long-standing ideas about racial identity, family formation, and motherhood. Drawing from interviews and surveys of one hundred black gay women in New York City, Invisible Families explores the ways that race and class have influenced how these women understand their sexual orientation, find partners, and form families.
Coming Out to the Streets
LGBTQ Youth Experiencing Homelessness
by Brandon Andrew Robinson
“The voices of unhoused queer youth come alive on these pages, documenting how the “queer control complex” increases their vulnerability to issues of racism, homophobia and transphobia. But, this is not just a story of heartbreak. It is also a story of hope led by the voices of the youth themselves as they provide solutions to many of the social problems which shape their lives.”—C.J. Pascoe author of Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School
Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in central Texas, Coming Out to the Streets looks into the lives of the LGBTQ youth before they experience homelessness—within their families, schools, and other institutions—and how they later live on the streets, deal with police, and navigate shelters and other services. Through this documentation, Robinson shows how poverty and racial inequality shape how the LGBTQ youth negotiate their gender and sexuality before and while they are experiencing homelessness.
A Dirty South Manifesto
Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South
by L.H. Stallings
“Always at the vanguard of critical work in sexuality studies, Stallings has produced one of the most important manifestos about queerness and southern-ness, about family and empire. For those familiar with and unsettled by the parameters set forth in Patsy Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire (2000), this manifesto is a necessary intervention.”—Sharon P. Holland, author of The Erotic Life of Racism
From the shutdown of Planned Parenthood clinics and rising rates of HIV to opposition to marriage equality and bathroom bills, the New South is the epicenter of the new sex wars. Antagonism toward reproductive freedom, partner rights, and transgender rights has revealed a new and unacknowledged era of southern reconstruction centered on gender and sexuality.
In A Dirty South Manifesto, L. H. Stallings celebrates the roots of radical sexual resistance in the New South—a movement that is antiracist, decolonial, and transnational. With her focus on contemporary Black southern life, Stallings offers an invitation to anyone who has ever imagined a way of living beyond white supremacist heteropatriarchy.
