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In the 1970s, while communes bloomed like wildflowers across the land, most had no room for queer members. The so-called counterculture still clung to heterosexual norms, even as it preached freedom from traditional gender roles and the nuclear family. Juda Bennett’s engrossing memoir follows his escape from suburbia into the back-to-the-land movement—and chronicles the efforts it took for him to “drop back in” to mainstream society and the ways in which he and his compatriots continued to honor their communal vision.

After enduring the hollow promises of “progressive” communes, Bennett finally found what he didn’t know he was looking for at Lavender Hill, a rural queer commune of visionaries carving out a life beyond heteronormativity, beyond capitalism, beyond shame. They didn’t just survive; they built something messy, luminous, and defiantly alive. And when the commune began to unravel, they didn’t vanish. They evolved. Qtopia is a story of chosen family and radical transformation. It is a reminder that queer utopia isn’t behind us—it’s still out there on the horizon, singing its song of joy, defiance, and fabulousness.

The story of an unconventional, self-taught American herpetologist and handler of venomous reptiles.

Grace Olive Wiley, America’s homegrown snake charmer, believed that all snakes, venomous or not, could be tamed if treated with kindness. She made pets of everything—and not just kingsnakes and boas. Using only her bare hands, she draped king cobras over her shoulders, cuddled with rattlesnakes, and fed minnows to cottonmouths. Alligators, crocodiles, and monitor lizards came when she called them by name.

In 1923, a Minneapolis newspaper introduced Wiley to their readers as “the girl who hunts snakes for fun.” This enigmatic woman, who quickly gained a national reputation as a snake expert, was in fact a forty-year-old divorcée with no training in herpetology. She would go on to run a wildly successful live reptile exhibit at the Minneapolis Public Library Museum, be the first person to breed Western Diamond-backed Rattlesnakes in captivity, become Brookfield Zoo’s (and the nation’s) first female zoo curator, wrangle king cobras for Hollywood films, and spend the remainder of her life as a tireless advocate for all things reptilian.

Queen of the Snake Charmers brings Wiley’s remarkable life back into focus while exploring the enduring fascination with snakes and the people who handle them. Author Margie Crisp explores the myths and folklore surrounding snakes and examines new research into snake behavior and the medical uses of venom. Blending biography, science, and natural history, the book tells the story of a forgotten pioneer while offering a lively and unexpected look at our enduring relationship with one of nature’s most feared creatures.

Queenship and Sanctity brings together for the first time in English the anonymous Lives of Mathilda and Odilo of Cluny's Epitaph of Adelheid. Richly annotated, with an extensive introduction placing the texts and their subjects in historical and hagiographical context, it provides teachers and students with a crucial set of sources for the history of Europe (particularly Germany) in the tenth and eleventh centuries, for the development of sacred biography and medieval notions of sanctity, and for the life of aristocratic and royal women in the early Middle Ages.

The first book to chart Scott Burton’s performance art and sculpture of the 1970s.

Scott Burton (1939–89) created performance art and sculpture that drew on queer experience and the sexual cultures that flourished in New York City in the 1970s. David J. Getsy argues that Burton looked to body language and queer behavior in public space—most importantly, street cruising—as foundations for rethinking the audiences and possibilities of art. This first book on the artist examines Burton’s underacknowledged contributions to performance art and how he made queer life central in them. Extending his performances about cruising, sexual signaling, and power dynamics throughout the decade, Burton also came to create functional sculptures that covertly signaled queerness by hiding in plain sight as furniture waiting to be used.

With research drawing from multiple archives and numerous interviews, Getsy charts Burton’s deep engagements with postminimalism, performance, feminism, behavioral psychology, design history, and queer culture. A restless and expansive artist, Burton transformed his commitment to gay liberation into a unique practice of performance, sculpture, and public art that aspired to be antielitist, embracing of differences, and open to all. Filled with stories of Burton’s life in New York’s art communities, Queer Behavior makes a case for Burton as one of the most significant out queer artists to emerge in the wake of the Stonewall uprising and offers rich accounts of queer art and performance art in the 1970s.
 

Juanita Brooks became one of the best-known historians of Mormon and Utah history. Her autobiography is a valuable source of information on early southern Utah and Mormon history.