"If you've ever questioned the logic of basing an entire identity around what you have between your legs, it's time to embark on a daring escape outside of the binary box... Open your eyes to what it means to be a boy or a girl -- and above and beyond! Within these pages, you get to choose which path to forge. Explore over one hundred different scenarios that embrace nearly every definition across the world, over history, and in the ever-widening...

With the advent of recording technology, LGBT messages were for the first time brought to the forefront of popular music. Bullock covers the history of recorded music by and for the LGBT community, and shows how those records influenced the evolution of the music we listen to today. He discusses how gay, lesbian, and bisexual performers influenced jazz and blues; examines the almost forgotten Pansy Craze in the years between the two World Wars; chronicles...

In NICE CHINESE GIRLS DON'T, Kitty Tsui recounts her emergence as a poet, artist, activist, writer, and bodybuilder in the early days of the Women’s Liberation Movement in San Francisco. She narrates her experience of arriving to the States as an immigrant from Hong Kong by way of her own original poetry and stories. Tsui wrote the groundbreaking Words of a Woman Who Breathes Fire, the first book written by an Asian American lesbian. She is considered...

A family saga based on private archival footage, MADAME takes us onto an intimate journey where Caroline, a flamboyant 90-year-old grandmother and her filmmaker grandson Stéphane explore the development and transmission of gender identity in a patriarchal environment. Promised to a domestic life in the 1920s, Caroline manages to free herself from the clutches of a forced marriage and becomes a successful businesswoman, defying the social rules of...

Maria Irene Fornes was one of America's greatest playwrights and most influential teachers, but many know her only as the ex-lover of writer and social critic Susan Sontag. The visionary Cuban-American dramatist constructed astonishing worlds on-stage, writing over 40 plays and winning nine Obie Awards. At the vanguard of the nascent Off-Off Broadway experimental theater movement in NYC, Fornes is often referred to as American theater's "Mother Avant-Garde."...

Through Stonewall, the feminist movement, and the experimental cinema of the 1970s, lesbian filmmakers built visibility and transformed the social imagination. Filmmakers Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Rose Troche, Cheryl Dunye, Yoruba Richen, Desiree Akhavan, Vicky Du, film critic B. Ruby Rich, Jenni Olson, and others share moving and often hilarious stories from their lives and discuss how they've expressed queer identity through film.  

During the early 1990s, San Francisco was the epicenter of body modification and gender nonconformity, with transgender pioneers like Patrick Califia and Tala Brandeis fighting for visibility, alongside the voice of a bold S/M community. From pushy bottoms to macho femmes, BLOODSISTERS immerses the viewer in the San Francisco leather dyke scene, shattering assumptions about gender and lesbian sexuality, while broadening the discussion about personal...

This documentary chronicles the US tour of a group of Black lesbian poets and musicians, who become present-day stewards of a historical movement to build community among queer women of color. Their journey to strengthen their community is enriched by insightful interviews with leading Black feminist thinkers and historians. As the group tours the country, the film reveals their aspirations and triumphs, as well as the unique identity challenges they...

This powerful documentary is a moving tribute to legendary black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde (1934-1992). One of the most celebrated icons of feminism's second wave, Lorde inspired several generations of activists with her riveting poetry, serving as a catalyst for change and uniting the communities of which she was a part: black arts and black liberation, women's liberation and lesbian and gay liberation. Nowhere was this more apparent than...

Any minority craves images of itself, and this compilation of clips from Britain’s post-war cinema archives is a testament to the closeted appearances of gay characters and sentiments from filmmaking’s earliest days. Following gay characters as they go from being the butt of jokes to full-blown leading characters, Weiss has captured a playful, occasionally melodramatic, insight into on-screen homosexual characterizations. With Ian McKellen as...