by Lionel Cantú, Jr (2009)
The Sexuality of Migration provides an innovative study of the experiences of Mexican men who have same sex with men and who have migrated to the United States. Until recently, immigration scholars have left out the experiences of gays and lesbians. In fact, the topic of sexuality has only recently been addressed in the literature on immigration. The Sexuality of Migration makes significant connections among sexuality, state institutions, and global economic relations. Cantú; situates his analysis within the history of Mexican immigration and offers a broad understanding of diverse migratory experiences ranging from recent gay asylum seekers to an assessment of gay tourism in Mexico. Cantú uses a variety of methods including archival research, interviews, and ethnographic research to explore the range of experiences of Mexican men who have sex with men and the political economy of sexuality and immigration. His primary research site is the greater Los Angeles area, where he interviewed many immigrant men and participated in organizations and community activities alongside his informants. Sure to fill gaps in the field, The Sexuality of Migration simultaneously complicates a fixed notion of sexual identity and explores the complex factors that influence immigration and migration experiences.
Joseph Hansen
Book #1 in the Nathan Reed series. Joseph Hansen has been praised by The New York Times as "one of the best we have" and by the Boston Globe as among "our finest writers". Known for his bestselling Dave Brandstetter series, Hansen here tells a richly atmospheric story of a young homosexual man's coming of age.
John Howard
To date, lesbian and gay history has focused largely on the East and West coasts and on urban settings such as New York and San Francisco. The American South, on the other hand, identified as it is with religion, traditional gender roles, and cultural conservatism, has escaped attention. Southerners wrestle with their past, lesbians and gays wrestle for visibility, historians wrestle over the South - yet rarely have the three crossed paths. John Howard's ground-breaking anthology casts its net broadly, examining lesbian and gay experiences in Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, New Orleans, Atlanta, Charleston, Memphis, and Louisville. Rigorous in its approach, the book does not shy away from thorny, self-critical questions: What allows us to label a historical figure with the relatively recent category of "lesbian" or "gay"? Further, exactly who is a Southerner? And what is Southern? Moving chronologically through America's past, from the antebellum and postbellum periods, through the Jim Crow era and the Cold War, to the present, this volume introduces an important new framework to the field of lesbian and gay history - that of the region.
Sheila M. Rothman
For more than 150 years, until well into the twentieth century, tuberculosis was the dreaded scourge that AIDS is for us today. Based on the diaries and letters of hundreds of individuals over five generations, Living in the Shadow of Death is the first book to present an intimate and evocative portrait of what it was like for patients as well as families and communities to struggle against this dreaded disease. "Consumption," as it used to be called, is one of the oldest known diseases. But it wasn't until the beginning of the nineteenth century that it became pervasive and feared in the United States, the cause of one out of every five deaths. Consumption crossed all boundaries of geography and social class. How did people afflicted with the disease deal with their fate? How did their families? What did it mean for the community when consumption affected almost every family and every town? Sheila M. Rothman documents a fascinating story. Each generation had its own special view of the origins, transmission, and therapy for the disease, definitions that reflected not only medical knowledge but views on gender obligations, religious beliefs, and community responsibilities. In general, Rothman points out, tenacity and resolve, not passivity or resignation, marked people's response to illness and to their physicians. Convinced that the outdoor life was better for their health, young men with tuberculosis in the nineteenth century interrupted their college studies and careers to go to sea or to settle in the West, in the process shaping communities in Colorado, Arizona, and California. Women, anticipating the worst, raised their children to be welcomed as orphans in other people's homes. In the twentieth century, both men and women entered sanatoriums, sacrificing autonomy for the prospect of a cure. Poignant as biography, illuminating as social history, this book reminds us that ours is not the first generation to cope with the death of the young or with the stigma of disease and the proper limits of medical authority. In an era when a deadly contagious disease once again casts its shadow over individual lives and communities, Living in the Shadow of Death gives us a new sense of our own past as it equips us to comprehend the present.
Derek Mahon
Derek Mahon, best known as a poet, worked as a freelance journalist for many years, and his first prose book brings together a selection of his feature articles, lectures and book reviews. Some of these, like the essays on MacNeice and Beckett, Brian Moore and J.G. Farrell, are seriously 'literary' in nature; while others, like the reports from Coleraine, Rome and Los Angeles, are more discursive and relaxed, if not downright mischievous.