Random House New Releases - Social Science - Gay Studies - Between May 24, 2012 and June 23, 2013.

God Believes in Love by Gene Robinson

2013-06-04T00:30:00-05:00

God Believes in Love Straight Talk About Gay Marriage
Written by Gene Robinson

From the IX Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire in the Episcopal Church, the first openly gay person elected to the episcopate and the world’s leading religious spokesperson for gay rights and gay marriage—a groundbreaking book that persuasively makes the case for same-sex marriage using a commonsense, reasoned, religious argument.

Robinson holds the religious text of the Bible to be holy and sacred and the ensuing two millennia of church history to be relevant to the discussion. He is equally familiar with the secular and political debate about gay marriage going on in America today, and is someone for whom same-sex marriage is a personal issue; Robinson was married to a woman for fourteen years and is a father of two children and has been married to a man for the last four years of a twenty-five-year relationship.

Robinson has a knack for taking complex and controversial issues and addressing them in plain direct language, without using polemics or ideology, putting forth his argument for gay marriage, and bringing together sacred and secular points of view.

Family Pride by Elizabeth Castellana, Colage

2013-01-15T00:30:00-05:00

Family Pride What LGBT Families Should Know about Navigating Home, School, and Safety in Their Neighborhoods
Written by Michael Shelton
Foreword by Elizabeth Castellana, Colage

An invaluable portrait and roadmap on how to thrive as an LGBT family

The overwhelming success of Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” YouTube project aimed at queer youth highlighted that despite the progress made in gay rights, LGBT people are still at high risk of being victimized. While the national focus remains on the mistreatment of gay people in schools, the reality is that LGBT families also face hostility in various settings—professional, recreational, and social. This is especially evident in rural communities, where the majority of LGBT families live, isolated from support networks more commonly found in urban spaces.

Family Pride is the first book for queer parents, families, and allies that emphasizes community safety. Drawing on his years as a dedicated community activist and on the experiences of LGBT parents, Michael Shelton offers concrete strategies that LGBT families can use to intervene in and resolve difficult community issues, teach their children resiliency skills, and find safe and respectful programs for their children.

Family Pride by Elizabeth Castellana, Colage

2013-01-15T00:30:00-05:00

Family Pride What LGBT Families Should Know about Navigating Home, School, and Safety in Their Neighborhoods
Written by Michael Shelton
Foreword by Elizabeth Castellana, Colage

A Queer Geography by Frank Browning

2013-01-02T00:30:00-05:00

A Queer Geography Journeys Toward a Sexual Self
Written by Frank Browning

What is the gay identity? Do gay people even exist? The bestselling author of The Culture of Desire journeys into the minds of gay men in America and elsewhere to discover how their lives are shaped by time, nation, and desire. In a brilliant argument, Browning shows how and why the gay movement could have only arisen in America.

Born This Way by Paul Vitagliano

2012-10-09T00:30:00-05:00

Born This Way Real Stories of Growing Up Gay
Written by Paul Vitagliano

Based on the hugely popular blog of the same name, Born This Way shares 100 different memories of growing up LGBTQ. Childhood photographs are accompanied by sweet, funny, and at times heartbreaking personal stories. Collected from around the world and dating from the 1940s to today, these memories speak to the hardships of an unaccepting world and the triumph of pride, self-love, and self-acceptance. This intimate little book is a wonderful gift for all members of the LGBTQ community as well as their friends and families. Like Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, Born This Way gives young people everywhere the courage to say, “Yes, I’m gay. And I was born this way. I’ve known it since I was very young, and this is my story.”

Born This Way by Paul Vitagliano

2012-10-09T00:30:00-05:00

Born This Way Real Stories of Growing Up Gay
Written by Paul Vitagliano

God Believes in Love by Gene Robinson

2012-09-18T00:30:00-05:00

God Believes in Love Straight Talk About Gay Marriage
Written by Gene Robinson

From the Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire in the Episcopal Church, the first openly gay person elected (in 2003) to the historic episcopate and the world's leading religious spokesperson for gay rights and gay marriage—a groundbreaking book that lovingly and persuasively makes the case for same-sex marriage using a commonsense, reasoned, religious argument, made by someone who holds the religious text of the Bible to be holy and sacred and the ensuing two millennia of church history to be relevant to the discussion, equally familiar with the secular and political debate going on in America today, and for whom same-sex marriage is a personal issue; Robinson was married to a woman for two decades and is a father of two children and has been married to a man for the last four years of a twenty-three-year relationship.

God Believes in Love by Gene Robinson

2012-09-18T00:30:00-05:00

God Believes in Love Straight Talk About Gay Marriage
Written by Gene Robinson

Straight by Hanne Blank

2012-08-28T00:30:00-05:00

Straight The Surprisingly Short History of Hetrosexuality
Written by Hanne Blank

Like the typewriter and the light bulb, the heterosexual was invented in the 1860s and swiftly transformed Western culture. The idea of “the heterosexual” was unprecedented. After all, men and women had been having sex, marrying, building families, and sometimes even falling in love for millennia without having any special name for their emotions or acts. Yet, within half a century, “heterosexual” had become a byword for “normal,” enshrined in law, medicine, psychiatry, and the media as a new gold standard for human experience. With an eclectic scope and fascinating detail, Straight tells the eye-opening story of a complex and often contradictory man-made creation that turns out to be anything but straight or narrow.

From the Hardcover edition.

Outing Yourself by Michelangelo Signorile

2012-07-11T00:30:00-05:00

Outing Yourself How to Come Out to Your Family, Your Friends, and Your Coworkers
Written by Michelangelo Signorile

From the author of Queer in America comes a complete, step-by-step guide to coming out of the closet--the first coming-out guide to the '90s. Signorile's pull-no-punches style gives this book a Susan Powter-ish Stop the Insanity! approach to a difficult and often mishandled experience.

The Fan Who Knew Too Much by Anthony Heilbut

2012-06-19T00:30:00-05:00

The Fan Who Knew Too Much Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations
Written by Anthony Heilbut

A dazzling exploration of American culture—from high pop to highbrow—by acclaimed music authority, cultural historian, and biographer Anthony Heilbut, author of the now classic The Gospel Sound (“Definitive” —Rolling Stone), Exiled in Paradise, and Thomas Mann (“Electric”—Harold Brodkey).

In The Fan Who Knew Too Much, Heilbut writes about art and obsession, from country blues singers and male sopranos to European intellectuals and the originators of radio soap opera—figures transfixed and transformed who helped to change the American cultural landscape.

Heilbut writes about Aretha Franklin, the longest-lasting female star of our time, who changed performing for women of all races. He writes about Aretha’s evolution as a singer and performer (she came out of the tradition of Mahalia Jackson); before Aretha, there were only two blues-singing gospel women—Dinah Washington, who told it like it was, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who specialized, like Aretha, in ambivalence, erotic gospel, and holy blues.

We see the influence of Aretha’s father, C. L. Franklin, famous pastor of Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist Church. Franklin’s albums preached a theology of liberation and racial pride that sold millions and helped prepare the way for Martin Luther King Jr. Reverend Franklin was considered royalty and, Heilbut writes, it was inevitable that his daughter would become the Queen of Soul.

In “The Children and Their Secret Closet,” Heilbut writes about gays in the Pentecostal church, the black church’s rock and shield for more than a hundred years, its true heroes, and among its most faithful members and vivid celebrants. And he explores, as well, the influential role of gays in the white Pentecostal church.
In “Somebody Else’s Paradise,” Heilbut writes about the German exiles who fled Hitler—Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Marlene Dietrich, and others—and their long reach into the world of American science, art, politics, and literature. He contemplates the continued relevance of the émigré Joseph Roth, a Galician Jew, who died an impoverished alcoholic and is now considered the peer of Kafka and Thomas Mann.

And in “Brave Tomorrows for Bachelor’s Children,” Heilbut explores the evolution of the soap opera. He writes about the form itself and how it catered to social outcasts and have-nots; the writers insisting its values were traditional, conservative; their critics seeing soap operas as the secret saboteurs of traditional marriage—the women as castrating wives; their husbands as emasculated men. Heilbut writes that soaps went beyond melodrama, deep into the perverse and the surreal, domesticating Freud and making sibling rivalry, transference, and Oedipal and Electra complexes the stuff of daily life.

And he writes of the “daytime serial’s unwed mother,” Irna Phillips, a Chicago wannabe actress (a Margaret Hamilton of the shtetl) who created radio’s most seminal soap operas—Today’s Children, The Road of Life among them—and for television, As the World Turns, Guiding Light, etc., and who became known as the “queen of the soaps.” Hers, Heilbut writes, was the proud perspective of someone who didn’t fit anywhere, the stray no one loved.

The Fan Who Knew Too Much is a revelatory look at some of our American icons and iconic institutions, high, low, and exalted.

From the Hardcover edition.

The Fan Who Knew Too Much by Anthony Heilbut

2012-06-19T00:30:00-05:00

The Fan Who Knew Too Much Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations
Written by Anthony Heilbut

Random House New Releases - Social Science - Gay Studies - Between May 24, 2012 and June 23, 2013.

God Believes in Love by Gene Robinson

God Believes in Love Straight Talk About Gay MarriageWritten by Gene Robinson

Family Pride by Elizabeth Castellana, Colage

Family Pride What LGBT Families Should Know about Navigating Home, School, and Safety in Their NeighborhoodsWritten by Michael Shelton Foreword by Elizabeth Castellana, Colage

Family Pride by Elizabeth Castellana, Colage

Family Pride What LGBT Families Should Know about Navigating Home, School, and Safety in Their NeighborhoodsWritten by Michael Shelton Foreword by Elizabeth Castellana, Colage

A Queer Geography by Frank Browning

A Queer Geography Journeys Toward a Sexual SelfWritten by Frank Browning

Born This Way by Paul Vitagliano

Born This Way Real Stories of Growing Up GayWritten by Paul Vitagliano

Born This Way by Paul Vitagliano

Born This Way Real Stories of Growing Up GayWritten by Paul Vitagliano

God Believes in Love by Gene Robinson

God Believes in Love Straight Talk About Gay MarriageWritten by Gene Robinson

God Believes in Love by Gene Robinson

God Believes in Love Straight Talk About Gay MarriageWritten by Gene Robinson

Straight by Hanne Blank

Straight The Surprisingly Short History of HetrosexualityWritten by Hanne Blank

Outing Yourself by Michelangelo Signorile

Outing Yourself How to Come Out to Your Family, Your Friends, and Your CoworkersWritten by Michelangelo Signorile

The Fan Who Knew Too Much by Anthony Heilbut

The Fan Who Knew Too Much Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other MeditationsWritten by Anthony Heilbut

The Fan Who Knew Too Much by Anthony Heilbut

The Fan Who Knew Too Much Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other MeditationsWritten by Anthony Heilbut

God Believes in Love Straight Talk About Gay Marriage
Written by Gene Robinson

Family Pride What LGBT Families Should Know about Navigating Home, School, and Safety in Their Neighborhoods
Written by Michael Shelton
Foreword by Elizabeth Castellana, Colage

Family Pride What LGBT Families Should Know about Navigating Home, School, and Safety in Their Neighborhoods
Written by Michael Shelton
Foreword by Elizabeth Castellana, Colage

A Queer Geography Journeys Toward a Sexual Self
Written by Frank Browning

Born This Way Real Stories of Growing Up Gay
Written by Paul Vitagliano

Born This Way Real Stories of Growing Up Gay
Written by Paul Vitagliano

God Believes in Love Straight Talk About Gay Marriage
Written by Gene Robinson

God Believes in Love Straight Talk About Gay Marriage
Written by Gene Robinson

Straight The Surprisingly Short History of Hetrosexuality
Written by Hanne Blank

Outing Yourself How to Come Out to Your Family, Your Friends, and Your Coworkers
Written by Michelangelo Signorile

The Fan Who Knew Too Much Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations
Written by Anthony Heilbut

The Fan Who Knew Too Much Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations
Written by Anthony Heilbut