Akron Public Library

In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood and adolescence growing up as a gay black man.

"The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality. When Garrard was a nineteen-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to "cure" him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and...

Growing Up Queer explores the changing ways that young people are now becoming LGBT-identified in the US. Through interviews and three years of ethnographic research at an LGBTQ youth drop-in center, Mary Robertson focuses on the voices and stories of youths themselves in order to show how young people understand their sexual and gender identities, their interest in queer media, and the role that family plays in their lives. The book moves beyond...

"History has often ignored men who loved men, women who loved women, and people who lived outside gender boundaries. Lee Wind examines primary source letters, poems, and more to rethink the lives and loves of historical figures"--

"When Richie Jackson's son born through surrogacy comes out to him at the age of 18, Richie - now in his 50s, a successful producer and happily married - feels compelled to write him a letter. Gay Like Me is both a celebration of gay identity and a sorrowful warning. Jackson talks of his own progress and growth as a gay man coming of age through decades of political and cultural change. We've come a long way, he argues: discrimination is now outlawed...

"One of nineteen children in a blended family, Hari Ziyad was raised by a Hindu Hare Krsna mother and a Muslim father. Through reframing their own coming-of-age story, Ziyad takes readers on a powerful journey of growing up queer and Black in Cleveland, Ohio, and of navigating the equally complex path toward finding their true self in New York City. Exploring childhood, gender, race, and the trust that is built, broken, and repaired through generations,...

A broad range of culture-related topics specific to the lesbian and gay community are explored in this volume. Along with empirical, clinical and theoretical discussions, personal narrative offers poignant insight into additional complexities, pressures and losses that lesbians and gay men must cope with in a world that often handles diversity with bigotry.