Male and female

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Mark Thompson

**From Amazon.com:** Arguably the book that started the Gay Spirituality Movement. Publishers Weekly wrote: Cultural editor of the Advocate, Thompson here collects previously published articles and book excerpts from the magazine, each an attempt to define the status of gay men. In an introduction he distinguishes between homosexual (a form of sexuality) and gay: "A social identity and consciousness actively chosen." The text discusses the gay's role in politics, religion, culture, identity. Among the contributors are Judy Grahn, author of lesbian/feminist works; Malcolm Boyd, activist Episcopal priest; Harry Hay, a founder of the Mattachine Society; writer William S. Burroughs; and Geoff Mains's presenting an approving, detailed description of sadomasochism. Gay Spirit is so terrific at making the reader feel there might be something more wondrous, more miraculous to life... the book's exciting challenge to conventional thinking is that it's not merely time for society to tolerate but time to cherish its intermediate sexual types. --Los Angeles Times Gay Spirit calls gay people back to the Circle of Life as full participants in the dance of survival and joy...this anthology is like the rains of spring hastening our unique growth, flowering and fruition. --Gay Community News

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Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon

Lesbian/Woman is a work by the feminist and gay rights activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, in which the authors discuss what it means to be a lesbian. The book was influential and is considered a foundational text of lesbian feminism.

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Leo Bersani

Hardly a day goes by without the media focusing an often sympathetic beam on gay life - and, with AIDS, on gay death. Gay plays on Broadway, big book awards to authors writing on gay subjects, Hollywood movies with gay themes, gay and lesbian studies at dozens of universities, openly gay columnists and even editors at national mainstream publications, political leaders speaking in favor of gay rights: it seems that straight American has finally begun to listen to homosexual America. Still, Bersani notes, not only has homophobia grown more virulent, but many gay men and lesbians themselves are reluctant to be identified as homosexuals. In Homos, he studies the historical, political, and philosophical grounds for the current distrust, within the gay community, of self-identifying moves, for the paradoxical desire to be invisibly visible. While acknowledging the dangers of any kind of group identification (if you can be singled out, you can be disciplined), Bersani argues for a bolder presentation what it means to be gay. In their justifiable suspicion of labels, gay men and lesbians have nearly disappeared into their own sophisticated awareness of how they have been socially constructed. By downplaying their sexuality, gays risk self-immolation - they will melt into the stifling culture they had wanted to contest. . In his chapters on contemporary queer theory, on Foucault and psychoanalysis, on the politics of sadomasochism, and on the image of "the gay outlaw" in works by Gide, Proust, and Genet, Bersani raises the exciting possibility that same-sex desire by its very nature can disrupt oppressive social orders. His spectacular theory of "homo-ness" will be of interest to straights as well as gays, for it designates a mode of connecting to the world embodied in, but not reducible to, a sexual preference. The gay identity bersani advocates is more of a force - as such, rather cool to the modest goal of social tolerance for diverse lifestyles - which can lead to a massive redefining of sociality itself, and of what we might expect from human communities.

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Catherine Kaputa

""Whether you need a total career makeover or just a little refining around the edges, [Kaputa] will show you how to get ahead while staying true to yourself. Empowering, insightful, and fun to read."-Clinton Kelly, co-host, TLC's What Not to WearBy the author of the bestsellers You Are a Brand and Breakthrough Branding, an up-to-date guide for women who want to get ahead in the business world. Just as individual strengths are based on who we are as people, gender-based strengths for women are essential assets of the female brand. Out of this provocative and challenging assertion, Women Who Brand delivers the very latest in gender research into the female brain to debunk the notion that women have to play the male game to win.Catherine Kaputa is founder and president of SelfBrand, a brand strategy and business coaching company. A bestselling author and twenty-year veteran of branding and advertising on Madison Avenue, Wall Street, and in academia, Kaputa has been a marketing and advertising executive at well-known New York ad agencies, where she worked on the iconic I?NY campaign, as well as taught at the Stern School of Business, New York University. She has been featured on CNN, ABC, NBC, and MSNBC, in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, and Fortune, and was a "Cool Friend" on TomPeters.com"-- "Just as individual strengths are based on who we are as people, gender-based strengths for women are essential assets of the female brand. Out of this provocative and challenging assertion, Women Who Brand delivers the very latest in gender research into the female brain to debunk the notion that women have to play the male game to win"--