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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.

When one looks out on the quiet waters and forested hills of Quabbin Reservoir in west central Massachusetts, it is hard to imagine that the area was once dotted with buildings and farmlands or that it echoed with the activity of several villages and towns. Today, the daytime silence may be broken only by the cry of a hawk overhead or the slap of a plunging fish, and the evening calm, by the lonesome howl of a coyote. But in the nineteenth century, things were quite different.

In 1895, engineers for the Metropolitan Water Board began to search the state of Massachusetts for a site on which to construct a reservoir to supply water for the growing city of Boston. Sixty-five miles west of the city, in a region of high hills and running streams known as the Swift River Valley, they found what they were looking for. When Quabbin Reservoir was finally completed and filled in 1946, the engineers had created the third largest body of fresh water in New England and hand accomplished one of the larger public works projects of its time. They had also uprooted and displaced the valley's inhabitants, leveled and flooded four towns and six villages—and formed a magnificent wilderness on some 85,000 acres. 

The valley that was once known for its picturesque villages and mill ponds is now, over forty years later, home to a wide array of wildlife. Coyote, bobcat, and deer flourish, and Quabbin's eagle restoration project, begun in 1982, produced the first nesting pair of bald eagles in Massachusetts in almost a century. Today, the bald eagle population at Quabbin is estimated at forty-one birds.

But this accidental wilderness is being increasingly threatened. As early as the 1950s, the sounds of power boats occasionally intruded on the peaceful silence of the waters. In more recent years, acid rain, ozone and other pollutants, the ravages of a herd of hungry deer, and demands for increased recreational use are all jeopardizing Quabbin's waters and forests.

This book tells the story of Quabbin, tracing Quabbin's history, describing its natural resources, and discussing the environmental challenges it currently faces. The original edition, issued by the Massachusetts Audubon Society in 1981, has now been expanded and updated.

As educators and legislators across the country debate how to improve public schools, the most vital factor often disappears from the equation—the relationship between the teacher and the student. According to veteran educators Rita and Marco Portales, this relationship is the central issue in the education of students, especially Latino/a students who often face serious barriers to school success because of the legacy of racism, insufficient English-language skills, and cultural differences with the educational establishment.

To break down these barriers and help Latino/a students acquire a quality education, the Portaleses focus attention on the teacher-student relationship and offer a proven method that teachers can use to strengthen the print and oral skills of their students. They begin by analyzing the reasons why schools too often fail to educate Latino/a students, using eloquent comments from young Latinos/as and their parents to confirm how important the teacher-student relationship is to the student's success. Then they show how all educational stakeholders—teachers, administrators, state education agencies, legislators, and parents—can work together to facilitate the teacher-student relationship and improve student education. By demonstrating how teachers can improve students' reading, critical thinking, writing, and oral communication skills across the curriculum, they argue that learning can be made more relevant for students, keeping their interest levels high while preparing them for academically competitive colleges.

“ONE OF THE SHARPEST, FUNNIEST, AND BEST BOOKS EVER ABOUT ANY ROCK ARTIST”—Rolling Stone

“WEIRD AND WONDROUS”—New York Times

“I ADORED IT”—Michael Chabon

A literary and visual exploration of the songs of Steely Dan.

Steely Dan’s songs are exercises in fictional world-building. No one else in the classic-rock canon has conjured a more vivid cast of rogues and heroes, creeps and schmucks, lovers and dreamers and cold-blooded operators—or imbued their characters with so much humanity.

Pulling from history, lived experience, pulp fiction, the lore of the counterculture, and their own darkly comic imaginations, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker summoned protagonists who seemed like fully formed people with complicated pasts, scars they don’t talk about, delusions and desires and memories they can’t shake. From Rikki to Dr. Wu, Hoops McCann to Kid Charlemagne, Franny from NYU to the Woolly Man without a Face, every name is a locked-room mystery, beguiling listeners and earning the band an exceptionally passionate and ever-growing cult fandom.

Quantum Criminals presents the world of Steely Dan as it has never been seen, much less heard. Artist Joan LeMay has crafted lively, color-saturated images of her favorite characters from the Daniverse to accompany writer Alex Pappademas’s explorations of the famous and obscure songs that inspired each painting, in short essays full of cultural context, wild speculation, inspired dot-connecting, and the occasional conspiracy theory. All of it is refracted through the perspectives of the characters themselves, making for a musical companion unlike any other. Funny, discerning, and visually stunning, Quantum Criminals is a singular celebration of Steely Dan’s musical cosmos.

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, LGBT Latinas/os faced several forms of discrimination. The greater Latino community did not often accept sexual minorities, and the mainstream LGBT movement expected everyone, regardless of their ethnic and racial background, to adhere to a specific set of priorities so as to accommodate a “unified” agenda. To disrupt the cycle of sexism, racism, and homophobia that they experienced, LGBT Latinas/os organized themselves on local, state, and national levels, forming communities in which they could fight for equal rights while simultaneously staying true to both their ethnic and sexual identities. Yet histories of LGBT activism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s often reduce the role that Latinas/os played, resulting in misinformation, or ignore their work entirely, erasing them from history.

Queer Brown Voices is the first book published to counter this trend, documenting the efforts of some of these LGBT Latina/o activists. Comprising essays and oral history interviews that present the experiences of fourteen activists across the United States and in Puerto Rico, the book offers a new perspective on the history of LGBT mobilization and activism. The activists discuss subjects that shed light not only on the organizations they helped to create and operate, but also on their broad-ranging experiences of being racialized and discriminated against, fighting for access to health care during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and struggling for awareness.

Blending archival work, ethnography, and cultural analysis with memoir, graphic arts, and science fiction, Queer Chimerica unpacks the ways in which the transnational circulation of queer culture, politics, and institutions are structured through the antagonist interdependence of China and the United States. By examining the intersecting timelines of the rise of queer theory and the rise of China in the late Cold War era, Shana Ye explores the relationship between the discourse of queer fluidity and capital’s demands for labor flexibility. 

Drawing on rare archival material and oral historical accounts of queer life from the 1950s to the late 2010s, the author shows how these accounts make sense of the variegated landscapes of desires, transformations, and conundrums in postsocialist China. The author illustrates party cadres in the Cultural Revolution, tongzhi activism mediated by the explosive politics of Tiananmen upheaval, HIV/AIDS community outreach workers, feminist artists and digital activists, leftist queer theorists, and fictional bio-engineers, layering these vivid depictions to reveal the poetic messiness of queer world-making. Queer Chimerica offers insight into the governmentality of LGBT rights, the rules of legibility and recognition, the geo- and bio-politics of identity, and the class-ridden appropriation of queer history and community. Thus understanding the production of queerness unveils the uneven distributions of capital, knowledge, affect, and opportunity that reproduce queer precarity and agency.  
 

A new paradigm for queer theory

Michael Snediker offers a much-needed counterpoint to queer theoretical discourse, which has long privileged melancholy, self-shattering, incoherence, shame, and the death drive. Recovering the forms of positive affect that queer theory has jettisoned, Snediker insists that optimism must itself be taken beyond conventional tropes of hope and futurity and reimagined as necessary for critical engagement.

A pioneering look at the queer history, politics, and spaces of the Twin Cities

The Twin Cities is home to one of the largest and most vital GLBT populations in the nation—and one of the highest percentages of gay residents in the country. Drawn from the pioneering work of the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project—a collective organization of students, scholars, and activists devoted to documenting and interpreting the lives of GLBT people in Minneapolis and St. Paul—Queer Twin Cities is a uniquely critical collection of essays on Minnesota’s vibrant queer communities, past and present.

Contrasting works by queer Chicano writers against the legal landscape of sexuality and migration to interrogate the “lawful fiction” that denies queer migrants citizenship and community.

Activists for immigrants and queer people under assault by US authorities focus overwhelmingly on protections presumed to be afforded by citizenship through narratives that have rarely had a place for queer immigrants, who have consistently faced special obstacles to legal entry and citizenship that only recently are being applied more widely. Queer in a Legal Sense studies literary works by gay Chicanx writers alongside instruments of law, showing through this juxtaposition how racialized queer people have been imagined as nonviable from the standpoint of citizenship. In stories by John Rechy, Arturo Islas, Rigoberto González, Michael Nava, and Jaime Cortez, José de la Garza Valenzuela finds what has gone missing in the migrant movement’s pursuit of gendered avenues to civic participation. Further, these works illuminate the production of fictions in canons of law, like those announced by the Florida legislature’s “Purple Pamphlet” and by the US Supreme Court in Boutilier v. INS and Bowers v. Hardwick. Queer in a Legal Sense argues that, through selective ommissions and inclusions, legal fictions place queerness outside the boundaries of citizenship and powerfully undermine queer representation in pro-migrant advocacy.

A fascinating exploration of hidden Indígena histories and silences, Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas blends scholarship with spirit practices to reimagine the root work, dis/connection to land, and the political decolonization of Xicana/x peoples.

Winner of the Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women's Studies, Popular Culture Association
Co-winner of the Elli Kongas Maranda Prize, Women's Section of the American Folklore Society (AFS)

A dynamic study of social negotiation and consumerism in the coming-of-age quinceañera celebration and the impact of normalizing spectacles of luxury.

Quinceañera celebrations, which recognize a girl’s transition to young womanhood at age fifteen, are practiced in Latinx communities throughout the Americas. But in the consumer-driven United States, the ritual has evolved from a largely religious ceremony to an elaborate party where social status takes center stage. Examining the many facets of this contemporary debut experience, Quinceañera Style reports on ethnographic fieldwork in California, Texas, the Midwest, and Mexico City to reveal a complex, compelling story. Along the way, we meet a self-identified transwoman who uses the quinceañera as an intellectual space in her activist performance art. We explore the economic empowerment of women who own barrio boutiques specializing in the quinceañera’s many accessories and made-in-China gowns. And, of course, we meet teens themselves, including a vlogger whose quince-planning tips have made her an online sensation.

Disrupting assumptions, such as the belief that Latino communities in the United States can’t desire upward mobility without abandoning ethnoracial cultural legacies, Quinceañera Style also underscores the performative nature of class and the process of constructing a self in the public, digital sphere.