Download or read book The Freezer Door written by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity. When you turn the music off, and suddenly you feel an unbearable sadness, that means turn the music back on, right? When you still feel the sadness, even with the music, that means there's something wrong with this music. Sometimes I feel like sex without context isn't sex at all. And sometimes I feel like sex without context is what sex should always be.--The Freezer Door The Freezer Door records the ebb and flow of desire in daily life. Crossing through loneliness in search of communal pleasure in Seattle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore exposes the failure and persistence of queer dreams, the hypocritical allure of gay male sexual culture, and the stranglehold of the suburban imagination over city life. Ferocious and tender, The Freezer Door offers a complex meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that relentlessly enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity while claiming to celebrate diversity.
Download or read book That s Revolting written by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2008-04-22 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the gay mainstream prioritizes the attainment of straight privilege over all else, it drains queer identity of any meaning, relevance, or cultural value, writes Matt Bernstein Sycamore, aka Mattilda, editor of That's Revolting! . This timely collection shows what the new queer resistance looks like. Intended as a fistful of rocks to throw at the glass house of Gaylandia, the book challenges the commercialized, commodified, and hyperobjectified view of gay/queer identity projected by the mainstream (straight and gay) media by exploring queer struggles to transform gender, revolutionize sexuality, and build community/family outside of traditional models. Essays include “Dr. Laura, Sit on My Face,” “Gay Art Guerrillas,” “Legalized Sodomy Is Political Foreplay,” and “Queer Parents: An Oxymoron or Just Plain Moronic?”
Download or read book Between Certain Death and a Possible Future written by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and published by arsenal pulp press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every queer person lives with the trauma of AIDS, and this plays out intergenerationally. Usually we hear about two generations—the first, coming of age in the era of gay liberation, and then watching entire circles of friends die of a mysterious illness as the government did nothing to intervene. And now we hear about younger people growing up with effective treatment and prevention available, unable to comprehend the magnitude of the loss. But there is another generation between these two, one that came of age in the midst of the epidemic with the belief that desire intrinsically led to death, and internalized this trauma as part of becoming queer. Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing up with the AIDS Crisis offers crucial stories from this missing generation in AIDS literature and cultural politics. This wide-ranging collection includes 36 personal essays on the ongoing and persistent impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis in queer lives. Here you will find an expansive range of perspectives on a specific generational story—essays that explore and explode conventional wisdom, while also providing a necessary bridge between experiences. These essays respond, with eloquence and incisiveness, to the question: How do we reckon with the trauma that continues to this day, and imagine a way out?
Download or read book Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots written by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gay culture has become a nightmare of consumerism, whether it's an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into “straight-acting dudes hangin’ out,” what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle? Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? challenges not just the violence of straight homophobia but the hypocrisy of mainstream gay norms that say the only way to stay safe is to act straight: get married, join the military, adopt kids! Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reinvokes the anger, flamboyance, and subversion once thriving in gay subcultures in order to create something dangerous and lovely: an exploration of the perils of assimilation; a call for accountability; a vision for change. A sassy and splintering emergency intervention! Called "startlingly bold and provocative" by Howard Zinn, and described as "a cross between Tinkerbell and a honky Malcolm X with a queer agenda" by The Austin Chronicle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is undoubtedly one of America's most outspoken queer critics. She is the author of two novels, including, most recently, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, and is the editor of four nonfiction anthologies, including Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation.
Download or read book Nobody Passes written by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2006-11-27 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nobody Passes" is a collection of essays that confronts and challenges the very notion of belonging. By examining the perilous intersections of identity, categorization, and community, contributors challenge societal mores and countercultural norms. "Nobody Passes" explores and critiques the various systems of power seen (or not seen) in the act of "passing." In a pass-fail situation, standards for acceptance may vary, but somebody always gets trampled on. This anthology seeks to eliminate the pressure to pass and thereby unearth the delicious and devastating opportunities for transformation that might create. Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore, has a history of editing anthologies based on brazen nonconformity and gender defiance. Mattilda sets out to ask the question, "What lies are people forced to tell in order to gain acceptance as 'real'." The answers are as varied as the life experiences of the writers who tackle this urgent and essential topic.
Download or read book Juliet the Maniac written by Juliet Escoria and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, Juliet the Maniac is a worthy new entry in that pantheon of deconstruction... Dazzling."—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW This portrait of a young teenager's fight toward understanding and recovering from mental illness is shockingly honest, funny, and heartfelt. Ambitious, talented fourteen-year-old honors student Juliet is poised for success at her Southern California high school. However, she soon finds herself in an increasingly frightening spiral of drug use, self-harm, and mental illness that lands her in a remote therapeutic boarding school, where she must ultimately find the inner strength to survive. A highly anticipated debut—from a writer hailed as "a combination of Denis Johnson and Joan Didion" (Dazed)—that brilliantly captures the intimate triumph of a girl's struggle to become the woman she knows she can be.
Download or read book Sketchtasy written by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and published by . This book was released on 2018-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet Alexa: a resilient twenty-one-year-old queen who lives without rules or apologies.
Download or read book So Many Ways to Sleep Badly written by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Sycamore kicks mainstream literature in the teeth.”—The San Francisco Bay Guardian Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's exhilarating novel is about struggling to find hope in the ruins of everyday San Francisco—battling roaches, Bikram Yoga, chronically bad sex, NPR, internet cruising, tweakers, the cops, $100 bills, chronic pain, the gay vote, vegan restaurants and incest, with the help of air-raid sirens, herbal medicine, late-night epiphanies, sea lions and sleeping pills. So Many Ways to Sleep Badly unveils a gender-bending queer world where nothing flows smoothly, except for those sudden moments when everything becomes lighter or brighter or easier to imagine. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the gender-bending author of the highly praised novel Pulling Taffy and the editor of the anthology Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity. Sycamore writes regularly for a variety of publications, including Bitch, Utne Reader, AlterNet, Make/Shift and MaximumRocknRoll.
Download or read book The End of San Francisco written by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2013-03-08 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The End of San Francisco breaks apart the conventions of memoir to reveal the passions and perils of a life that refuses to conform to the rules of straight or gay normalcy. A budding queer activist escapes to San Francisco, in search of a world more politically charged, sexually saturated, and ethically consistent—this is the person who evolves into Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, infamous radical queer troublemaker, organizer and agitator, community builder and anti-assimilationist commentator. Here is the tender, provocative and exuberant story of the formation of one of the contemporary queer movement's most savvy and outrageous writers and spokespersons. Using an unrestrained associative style to move kaleidoscopically between past, present and future, Sycamore conjures the untidy push and pull of memory, exposing the tensions between idealism and critical engagement, trauma and self-actualization, inspiration and loss. Part memoir, part social history and part elegy, The End of San Francisco explores and explodes the dream of a radical queer community and the mythical city that was supposed to nurture it. "Mattilda is a dazzling writer of uncommon truths, a challenging writer who refuses to conform to conventionality. Her agitation is an inspiration."—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals “Author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the artistic love child of John Genet and David Wojnarowicz, deconstructing language swathed in unbridled sensuality, while flinging readers into a disrupted, chaotic life of queer anarchy.”—Gay and Lesbian Review "Bring on The End of San Francisco! And Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, whose new book has reinvented memoir without the predictable gloss of passive resolution. This book is undeniably brave and new, and the internal energy churning at its core is like nothing you've seen, heard or read before. I swear."—T. Cooper, author of Real Man Adventures "We hear so much about coming-of-age narratives that we seldom think about going-of-age—the shutting down and closure, the making sense of where we've been. Written with grace, reserve and the honest tremblings that come when things matter, Mattilda shows us that The End of San Francisco is really the beginning of joy."—Daphne Gottlieb, author of 15 Ways to Stay Alive "It would be easy to describe The End of San Francisco as a Joycean 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Queer' (although the book's intense stream of consciousness is reminiscent of the later, more experimental, Joyce) . . . but this is misleading. This journey of a life that begins in the professional upper-middle class (both parents are therapists) and the Ivy League and moves to hustling, drugs, activism—Sycamore was active in ACT UP and Queer Nation—and queer bohemian grunge, is profoundly American. At heart, Sycamore is writing about the need to escape control through flight or obliteration."—Michael Bronski, San Francisco Chronicle
Download or read book Pulling Taffy written by Matt Bernstein Sycamore and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book We Had No Rules written by Corinne Manning and published by arsenal pulp press. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young teenager stays a step ahead of her parents’ sexuality-based restrictions by running away and learns a very different set of rules. A woman grieves the loss of a sister, a “gay divorce,” and the pain of unacknowledged abuse with the help of a lone wallaby on a farm in Washington State. A professor of women’s and gender studies revels in academic and sexual power but risks losing custody of the family dog. In Corinne Manning’s stunning debut story collection, a cast of queer characters explore the choice of assimilation over rebellion. In this historical moment that’s hyperaware of and desperate to define even the slowest of continental shifts, when commitment succumbs to the logic of capitalism and nobody knows what to call each other or themselves—Gay? Lesbian? Queer? Partners? Dad?—who are we? And if we don’t know who we are, what exactly can we offer each other? Spanning the years 1992 to 2019, and moving from New York to North Carolina to Seattle, the eleven first-person stories in We Had No Rules feature characters who feel the promise of a radically reimagined world but face complicity instead.
Download or read book Dangerous Families written by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains writing by queer survivors of childhood abuse.
Download or read book Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through written by T Fleischmann and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. G. Sebald meets Maggie Nelson in an autobiographical narrative of embodiment, visual art, history, and loss. How do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? T Fleischmann uses Felix Gonzáles-Torres’s artworks—piles of candy, stacks of paper, puzzles—as a path through questions of love and loss, violence and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality. From the back porches of Buffalo, to the galleries of New York and L.A., to farmhouses of rural Tennessee, the artworks act as still points, sites for reflection situated in lived experience. Fleischmann combines serious engagement with warmth and clarity of prose, reveling in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity and community.
Download or read book The Not Wives written by Carley Moore and published by The Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Occupy-era New York City novel following three women. “A provocative and well-told story about chosen community, friendship, and human frailty.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) The Not Wives traces the lives of three women as they navigate the Occupy Wall Street movement and each other. Stevie is a nontenured professor and recently divorced single mom; her best friend Mel is a bartender, torn between her long-term girlfriend and her desire to explore polyamory; and Johanna is a homeless teenager trying to find her way in the world, who bears shared witness to a tragedy that interlaces her life with Stevie’s. In the midst of economic collapse and class conflict, late-night hookups and long-suffering exes, the three characters piece together a new American identity founded on resistance—against the looming shadow of financial precarity, the gentrification of New York, and the traditional role of wife. “Audacious and exhilarating in its candor, The Not Wives captures the heady mix of pleasures and agonies necessary to turn one’s life in a new, truer direction. Carley Moore attends to the complexities of urban living and activism with riveting clarity.” —Idra Novey, award-winning author of Those Who Knew “The Not Wives is gritty, sexy, very queer, literary social realism that’s up-all-night compelling—just what I want from a novel set in NYC in the time of Occupy, with its sprawling cast of adjuncts, bartenders, poets, single parents, little kids, homeless teenagers, and serious organizers embroiled in various romantic and economic complications. When we say report back, this is what we mean!” —Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
Download or read book Hustling Verse written by Amber Dawn and published by arsenal pulp press. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this trailblazing anthology, more than fifty self-identified sex workers from all walks of the industry (survival and trade, past and present) explore their lived experience through the expressive nuance and beauty of poetry. In a variety of forms ranging from lyrics to list poems to found poetry to hybrid works, these authors express themselves with the complexity, agency, and honesty that sex workers are rarely afforded. Contributors from Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia include Gregory Scofield, Tracy Quan, Summer Wright, and Akira the Hustler. As an antidote to the invasive and often biased media depictions of sex workers, Hustling Verse is a fiercely groundbreaking exploration of intimacy, transactional sex, identity, healing, and resilience. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.
Download or read book Don t be So Gay written by Donn Short and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on interviews with queer youth and their allies in the Toronto area, the author considers the effectiveness of safe school legislation and concludes that the current legislation is often more responsive than proactive.
Download or read book South of Broad written by Pat Conroy and published by Dial Press. This book was released on 2009-08-11 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A big sweeping novel of friendship and marriage” (The Washington Post) by the celebrated author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini Leopold Bloom King has been raised in a family shattered—and shadowed—by tragedy. Lonely and adrift, he searches for something to sustain him and finds it among a tightly knit group of outsiders. Surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, as well as Charleston, South Carolina’s dark legacy of racism and class divisions, these friends will endure until a final test forces them to face something none of them are prepared for. Spanning two turbulent decades, South of Broad is Pat Conroy at his finest: a masterpiece from a great American writer whose passion for life and language knows no bounds. Praise for South of Broad “Vintage Pat Conroy . . . a big sweeping novel of friendship and marriage.”—The Washington Post “Conroy remains a magician of the page.”—The New York Times Book Review “Richly imagined . . . These characters are gallant in the grand old-fashioned sense, devoted to one another and to home. That siren song of place has never sounded so sweet.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune “A lavish, no-holds-barred performance.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “A lovely, often thrilling story.”—The Dallas Morning News “A pleasure to read . . . a must for Conroy’s fans.”—Associated Press