Lesbian

"Mom, I'm gay." With three little words, gay sons and daughters can change their parents' lives forever. Twenty years ago, during a walk on a Mississippi beach, Ellen DeGeneres spoke those simple, powerful words to her mother. That emotional moment eventually brought mother and daughter closer than ever, but it was not without a struggle. In Love, Ellen, Betty DeGeneres tells her story: the complicated path to acceptance and the deepening of her friendship with her daughter, the media's scrutiny of their family life, and the painful and often inspiring stories she's heard on the road as the first nongay spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign's National Coming Out Project.

Insightful, universally touching, and uncommonly wise, Love, Ellen is a story of friendship between mother and daughter and a lesson in understanding for all parents and their children.

"Mom, I'm gay." With three little words, gay children can change their parents' lives forever. Yet at the same times it's a chance for those parents to realize nothing, really, has changed at all; same kid, same life, same bond of enduring love.

Twenty years ago, during a walk on a Mississippi beach, Ellen DeGeneres spoke those simple, powerful words to her mother. That emotional moment eventually brought mother and daughter closer than ever, but not without a struggle. Coming from a republican family with conservative values, Betty needed time and education to understand her daughter's homosexuality -- but her ultimate acceptance would set the stage for a far more public coming out, one that would change history.

In Love, Ellen, Betty DeGeneres tells her story; the complicated path to acceptance and the deepening of her friendship with her daughter; the media's scrutiny of their family life; the painful and often inspiring stories she's heard on the road as the first non-gay spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaigns National Coming Out Project.

With a mother's love, clear minded common sense, and hard won wisdom, Betty DeGeneres offers up her own very personal memoir to help parents understand their gay children, and to help sons and daughters who have been rejected by their families feel less alone."Mom, I'm gay." With three little words, gay children can change their parents' lives forever. Yet at the same times it's a chance for those parents to realize nothing, really, has changed at all; same kid, same life, same bond of enduring love.

Twenty years ago, during a walk on a Mississippi beach, Ellen DeGeneres spoke those simple, powerful words to her mother. That emotional moment eventually brought mother and daughter closer than ever, but not without a struggle. Coming from a republican family with conservative values, Betty needed time and education to understand her daughter's homosexuality -- but her ultimate acceptance would set the stage for a far more public coming out, one that would change history.

In Love, Ellen, Betty DeGeneres tells her story; the complicated path to acceptance and the deepening of her friendship with her daughter; the media's scrutiny of their family life; the painful and often inspiring stories she's heard on the road as the first non-gay spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaigns National Coming Out Project.

With a mother's love, clear minded common sense, and hard won wisdom, Betty DeGeneres offers up her own very personal memoir to help parents understand their gay children, and to help sons and daughters who have been rejected by their families feel less alone.

“ZAMI is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page.”—Off Our Backs

No one knew Staceyann's mother was pregnant until a dangerously small baby was born on the floor of her grandmother's house in Lottery, Jamaica, on Christmas Day. Staceyann's mother did not want her, and her father was not present. No one, except her grandmother, thought Staceyann would survive.

It was her grandmother who nurtured and protected and provided for Staceyann and her older brother in the early years. But when the three were separated, Staceyann was thrust, alone, into an unfamiliar and dysfunctional home in Paradise, Jamaica. There, she faced far greater troubles than absent parents. So, armed with a fierce determination and uncommon intelligence, she discovered a way to break out of this harshly unforgiving world.

Staceyann Chin, acclaimed and iconic performance artist, now brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a brave, lyrical, and fiercely candid memoir about growing up in Jamaica. She plumbs tender and unsettling memories as she writes about drifting from one home to the next, coming out as a lesbian, and finding the man she believes to be her father and ultimately her voice. Hers is an unforgettable story told with grace, humor, and courage.

"How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?” Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master “whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness” and “thin, plain, tense, sour” Alice B. Toklas, the “worker bee” who ministered to Stein’s needs throughout their forty-year expatriate “marriage.” As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple’s charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. “The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,” she writes. 

The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas  lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat.

Two Lives is also a work of literary criticism. “Even the most hermetic of [Stein’s] writings are works of submerged autobiography,” Malcolm writes. “The key of  'I' will not unlock the door to their meaning—you need a crowbar for that—but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion.” Whether unpacking the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein “solves the koan of autobiography,” or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a masterwork of “magisterial disorder,” Malcolm is stunningly perceptive.

Praise for the author:

“[Janet Malcolm] is among the most intellectually provocative of authors . . .able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight.”—David Lehman, Boston Globe

“Not since Virginia Woolf has anyone thought so trenchantly about the strange art of biography.”—Christopher Benfey

 

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Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was the author of The Cancer Journals, and an icon of American womanhood, poetry, African American arts and survival. She created a mythic identity for herself that retains its vitality to this day. Alexis De Veaux demystifies Lorde's iconic status, charting her childhood; her marriage to a white, gay man with whom she had two children; her emergence as an outspoken black feminist lesbian poet; and her canonisation as a seminal poet of American literature. Lorde's restless search for a spiritual home finally brought her to the island of St Croix in 1986. This long-awaited first biography draws on the private archives of the poet's estate, personal journals, and interviews with members of Lorde's family, friends and lovers. Assessing the cultural legacy of a woman who personified the civil rights struggles of the twentieth century, De Veaux pays homage to one of the most courageous, singular voices of American letters.

Natalie and Romaine met in London during World War I and their partnership lasted until Natalie died 52 years later. They were both American expatriates: unconventional, energetic, flamboyant and rich. Natalie was known as 'the wild girl of Cincinnatti'. She had numerous affairs with other women: Renee Vivien who nailed shut the windows of her apartment, wrote about the loveliness of death, drank eau de cologne and died of anorexia aged 30; and Dolly Wilde niece of Oscar, who ran up terrible phone bills and died of a drugs overdose. She wrote books of aphorism, memoirs and poems and her Friday afternoon salons in the cobbled garden of her Parisian house were for 'introductions and culture'. They were frequented by Gertrude Stein, Colette, Radclyffe Hall and Edith Sitwell. Romaine achieved fame in her own lifetime and after as an artist. She painted her lovers including Gabriele d'Annunzio with whom she had a terrible and tortured relationship, and the ballerina Ida Rubinstein. However her relationship with Natalie was constant and in their eventful years together they threw up a liberating spirit of culture, style and candour. Diana Souhami has written a moving portrait of these two enigmatic figures, as well as a fascinating recreation of a forgotten time.

'A wrenching and intimate autobiography, "Sita" is an unsparing, moment-by-moment record of the fading of love, with all of its agony and false-dawn respites. For the first time, the original text of "Sita" is accompanied by the first of Millett's moving prose elegies, written after Sita committed suicide. This lament lends new resonance to the original text and gives the reader a fuller understanding of the mercurial devotion that bound the two women to each other. This reissue also features a new preface by the author."Sita" follows the disintegration of Millett's love affair with a woman who is ten years her senior, a veteran of several marriages, and the mother of grown children. Fiery, seductive, elegant, and exotic, "Sita" captivates Millett in every sense, offering unimagined pleasure and much-needed emotional security. One day, however, all this changes. Arriving from New York to spend half the year in Berkeley, as they had arranged, Millett is appalled to find the house - their house - overrun with Sita's troubled children and their hangers-on.Amid this unexpected chaos, she struggles with searing jealousy and self-doubt to salvage her relationship with Sita, who is often preoccupied, impatient, and cold, and who frequently disappears for assignations with male lovers. With remarkable candor, Millett charts her months with Sita and the inexorable shift from passionate abandon to abandonment. As each fragile thread of their love dissolves, Millett dwells on what drew them together, recounting all the hopes, tricks, and evasions that made up their erotic dance. Obsessive and impassioned, "Sita" speaks with a sharp immediacy to everyone who has ever experienced the exhilaration and despair of love'.

In 1981, at the age of 15, Daphne Scholinski was put in a mental hospital for what her psychiatrist called "failure to identify as a sexual female." Though the facts are truly frightening, The Last Time I Wore a Dress is an expose of a shameful medical sham that destroyed countless childhoods.