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Jason Cianciotto and Sean Cahill, experts on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender public policy advocacy, combine an accessible review of social science research with analyses of school practices and local, state, and federal laws that affect LGBT students. In addition, portraits of LGBT youth and their experiences with discrimination at school bring human faces to the issues the authors discuss.

This is an essential guide for teachers, school administrators, guidance counselors, and social workers interacting with students on a daily basis; school board members and officials determining school policy; nonprofit advocates and providers of social services to youth; and academic scholars, graduate students, and researchers training the next generation of school administrators and informing future policy and practice.

Jason Cianciotto and Sean Cahill, experts on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender public policy advocacy, combine an accessible review of social science research with analyses of school practices and local, state, and federal laws that affect LGBT students. In addition, portraits of LGBT youth and their experiences with discrimination at school bring human faces to the issues the authors discuss.

This is an essential guide for teachers, school administrators, guidance counselors, and social workers interacting with students on a daily basis; school board members and officials determining school policy; nonprofit advocates and providers of social services to youth; and academic scholars, graduate students, and researchers training the next generation of school administrators and informing future policy and practice.

"A rich and detailed picture of a particular historical moment that has now passed . . . I found myself immersed in the world of the East Village theatre scene and its connections to the larger world of feminism, theatre, and politics. Davy's long-standing association with this world pays off handsomely---it is impossible to imagine that anyone could write a more informative portrait."
---Charlotte Canning, University of Texas at Austin

 "After hosting two annual international women's performance festivals in 1980 and '81, Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and comrades put on such extravaganzas as the Freudian Slip party and the Debutante Ball (a coming-out party if ever there was one) to raise the first several months' rent for a narrow vestibule on East 11th Street, where they could keep the creativity going year-round. There, on a stage no bigger than a queen-sized mattress, . . . artists honed their craft, giving birth to a celebratory feminist-and-tinsel-tinged queer aesthetic. By the mid '80s . . . the rent quadrupled, and WOW moved to a city-owned building on East 4th Street, where it has flourished ever since, presenting hundreds---if not thousands---of plays, solo shows, concerts, dance pieces, cabarets, and sundry performances that defy classification."
---Alisa Solomon, Village Voice

Out of a small, hand-to-mouth, women's theater collective called the WOW Café located on the lower east side of Manhattan, there emerged some of the most important theater troupes and performance artists of the 1980s and 1990s, including the Split Britches Company, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Carmelita Tropicana, Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Deb Margolin, Reno, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver. The WOW (Women's One World) Café Theatre appeared on the cultural scene at a critical turning point in both the women's movement and feminist theory, putting a witty, hilarious, gender-bending and erotically charged aesthetic on the stage for women in general and lesbians in particular.

The storefront that became the WOW Café Theatre saw dozens of excitingly original and enormously funny performances created, performed, and turned over at lightning speed---a kind of "hit and run" theater. As the demands on the space increased, the women behind WOW organized as a collective and moved their theater to an abandoned doll factory where it continues to operate today. For three decades the WOW Café has nurtured fledgling women writers, designers, and performers who continue to create important performance work.

Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers provides a critical history of this avant-garde venture whose ongoing "system of anarchy" has been largely responsible for its thirty-year staying power, after dozens of other women's theaters have collapsed. WOW artists were creating a wholly original cultural landscape across which women could represent themselves on their own terms. Parody, cross-dressing, zany comedy, and an unbridled eroticism are hallmarks of WOW's aesthetic, combined---importantly and powerfully---with a presumptive address to the audience as if everyone onstage, in the audience, and in the world is lesbian. Author Kate Davy's extensive research included in-depth interviews with WOW veterans; newspaper reviews of the earliest productions; and rare, unpublished photographs. The book also includes a chronology of productions that have highlighted WOW's performance schedule since the early '80s. 

Kate Davy is currently Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Her previous books include Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos and Richard Foreman and the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.

Stacey Copeland’s Lavender Sounds explores lesbian radio history and its evolution into queer feminist podcasting today, exploring the politics, aesthetics, and cultural activism embedded in queer feminist soundwork. Through deeply personal and archival explorations, Stacey Copeland traces the emergence of queer feminist soundwork—a unique blend of community-led storytelling, political resistance, and creative expression rooted in feminist and LGBTQ+ activism. At the heart of the book lies a powerful idea: sound is not just heard but felt, connecting generations through shared voices and struggles. In conversation with award-winning and cutting-edge queer and feminist podcast producers from across Canada and the U.S., Lavender Sounds invites us to turn a feminist-embodied ear to the past to uncover the ways gender, race, and sexual orientations are embedded in our everyday media listening practices. From pioneering Canadian radio shows like Vancouver's The Lesbian Show and Montreal's Dykes on Mykes to today’s queer chumcasts and audio documentary, Lavender Sounds is a journey through auditory landscapes where joy, protest, intimacy, and identity intersect. This book opens a vibrant conversation about how radio and podcasting are vital tools for marginalized communities to connect, create, and claim space in the media world. 

For decades queer women in the Sinophone world have followed a strict dating custom: a lesbian relationship usually consists of a masculine partner, known as a tomboy, and a feminine counterpart. In the 2010s, however, many queer women have come to reject this custom and abandon their own former identities as tomboys. Leaving The Tomboy Behind follows their journey moving beyond lesbian masculinity and turning towards global LGBTQ+ media from Japan, Thailand, and the United States to explore new forms of gender expressions. Carman K. M. Fung offers a rich ethnography of the impacts media has had on queer Sinophone women’s lives, focusing on transnational interpretations and misinterpretations, and how media globalization shapes viewers’ perceptions of unfamiliar places. Through a combination of personal interviews and analysis of the global media these communities consume, Fung traces the genealogy of the tomboy identity in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in relation to global queer and trans cultures.

Despite St. Louis’s mid-twentieth-century reputation as a conservative and sleepy midwestern metropolis, the city and its surrounding region have long played host to dynamic forms of social-movement organizing. This was especially the case during the 1960s and 1970s, when a new generation of local activists lent their energies to the ongoing struggles for Black freedom, lesbian and gay liberation, feminist social transformations, environmental protection, an end to the Vietnam War, and more. This volume, the first of its kind, offers fifteen scholarly contributions that together bring into focus the exceptional range of progressive activist projects that took shape in a single midwestern city during these tumultuous decades.

In contrast to scholarship that seeks to interpret the era’s social-movement initiatives in a primarily national context, the works presented in this expansive collection emphasize the importance of locality, neighborhood, community institutions, and rooted social networks. Documenting wrenching forces of metropolitan change as well as grassroots resilience, Left in the Midwest shows us how place powerfully shaped agendas, worldviews, and opportunities for the disparate groups that dedicated themselves to progressive visions for their city. By revising our sense of the region’s past, this volume also expands our sense of the possibilities that the future may hold for activist movements seeking change in St. Louis and beyond.
 

Engaging with fears of lesbian death to explore the value of lesbian beyond identity
 

The loss of lesbian spaces, as well as ideas of the lesbian as anachronistic has called into question the place of lesbian identity within our current culture. In Lesbian Death, Mairead Sullivan probes the perception that lesbian status is in retreat, exploring the political promises—and especially the failures—of lesbian feminism and its usefulness today. 

Lesbian Death reads how lesbian is conceptualized in relation to death from the 1970s onward to argue that lesbian offers disruptive potential. Lesbian Death examines the rise of lesbian breast cancer activism in San Francisco in conversation with ACT UP, the lesbian separatist manifestos “The C.L.I.T. Papers,” the enduring specter of lesbian bed death, and the weaponization of lesbian identity against trans lives. 

By situating the lesbian as a border figure between feminist and queer, Lesbian Death offers a fresh perspective on the value of lesbian for both feminist and queer projects, even if her value is her death. 

A look at the emergence of queer women characters in popular storytelling and the wide-ranging effects of this mainstream representation.

The twenty-first century has seen LGBTQ+ rights emerge at the forefront of public discourse and national politics in ways that would once have been hard to imagine. In Lesbians on Television, Kate McNicholas Smith maps concurrent contemporary shifts in lesbian visibility within popular media, focusing on the small screens of Europe and North America. Central to these shifts has been a re-imagining of queer lives—or a “new queer visibility”—as LGBTQ+ characters have become increasingly visible within popular culture. Kate McNicholas Smith explores this increased visibility through the lens of television, and in doing so, she identifies a “new lesbian normal”—a normalization of lesbian subjects that both helps and hinders those it represents. 

Structured around five central case studies of popular British and American television shows featuring lesbian, bisexual, and queer women characters—The L Word, Skins, Glee, Coronation Street, and The Fosters—the book develops a detailed analysis of the shaping of a new “lesbian normal” through representations of LGBTQ+ figures and examines their televisual representation and reception. Presenting critical queer and feminist theory alongside empirical research that includes interviews and multi-platform media analyses, McNicholas Smith works to untangle the social, political, and cultural implications of new visibility in a period of significant social change in the LGBTQ+ experience.

This handsome volume combines interviews and photographs to document the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered parents and their children. It allows all of the family members to speak candidly about their lives, their relationships, and the ways in which they have dealt with the pressures of homophobia. Included in the book are people from a diverse array of racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds, representing a wide range of family structures. Together, they provide clear evidence that family roles and responsibilities need not be based on gender, and that children thrive in an atmosphere in which understanding, respect, and love transcend the prejudices of the day.