In the spring of 2010, Toronto lost one of its most important queer civic heroes. Weaving together interviews and stories, Army of Lovers is a biography of Will Munro and a document of a galvanizing period when various subcultures — the queer community, the art scene, the independent music universe, the grassroots activist enclaves — came together.

In the age of Occupy, An Army of Lovers reasks the question, what is the relationship between poetry and politics?

In California, a month before the Stonewall Riots in 1969, Maxine Feldman penned a song, “Angry Atthis,” about the shame surrounding lesbians. She didn’t know where she was going to sing her new song until comedy duo Harrison and Tyler asked her to open their shows. On the other side of the country and three years later, Alix Dobkin released Lavender Jane Loves Women, the first record produced, engineered and played by women. Maxine and Alix had no business plan. They didn’t fit the mold set by mainstream music but they saw great potential to create a powerful soundtrack for women claiming their place as lesbians and feminists. A myriad of musicians joined them, from a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, to singer-songwriter Cris Williamson, to activist/singer Holly Near, to jazz/classical/gospel performer Mary Watkins and many more; collectively they have sold millions of albums. Venues, radio shows, record distributors, and sound technicians sprung up to host and work with these musicians. Grateful fans traveled hundreds of miles to attend performances. These women (and a few men) created artist-run independent record labels—perhaps the first in history—and organized music festivals that drew thousands and still exist today. Before Lilith Fair and riot grrrls, there was women’s music! “I stood in those crowds, sang along with Meg Christian and Casse Culver and women who played rock & roll and bluegrass and all the music that echoed in my bloodstream. Jamie Anderson has caught the lightning and put it on the page.” – Dorothy Allison

This book contains a selection of interviews from the film "Armee der Liebenden oder Aufstand der Perversen" by the German gay film-maker Rosa von Praunheim. His documentary shows the extreme diversity of the American gay movement and centres on interviews with individuals who are either politically or culturally prominent in it, including Christopher Isherwood, Rohn Rechy, Fred Halstead, Vito Russo, Bruce Coeller, Tom Reeves, the editors of "Fag Rag", Kim Kepner, David Thorstad and others. -- Cover, page [4]

“Brave, honest, and necessary.”—Nancy Pearl, NPR Seattle Kayla Williams is one of the 15 percent of the U.S. Army that is female, and she is a great storyteller. With a voice that is “funny, frank and full of gritty details” (New York Daily News), she tells of enlisting under Clinton; of learning Arabic; of the sense of duty that fractured her relationships; of being surrounded by bravery and bigotry, sexism and fear; of seeing 9/11 on Al-Jazeera; and of knowing she would be going to war. With a passion that makes her memoir “nearly impossible to put down” (Buffalo News) Williams shares the powerful gamut of her experiences in Iraq, from caring for a wounded civilian to aiming a rifle at a child. Angry at the bureaucracy and the conflicting messages of today’s military, Williams offers us “a raw, unadulterated look at war” (San Antonio Express News) and at the U.S. Army. And she gives us a woman’s story of empowerment and self-discovery.

The thrilling look into the last decades of ancient Greek freedom leading up to Alexander the Great's destruction of Thebes--and the saga of the greatest military corps of the age, the Theban Sacred Band.

Between 1966 and 1975 North American youth activists established over 35 school- and community-based gay liberation youth groups whose members sought control over their own bodies, education, and sexual and social relations. This book focuses on three groundbreaking New York City groups -- Gay Youth (GY), Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.), and the Gay International Youth Society of George Washington High School (GWHS) -- from the advent of gay liberation in NYC in 1969 to just after its dissolution and the rise of identity politics by 1975. Cohen examines how gay liberation -- with its rejection of stultifying sex roles, attack on institutional oppression, connection between personal and political liberation, celebration of innate androgyny, and resolute anti-war and anti-capitalist stance -- shaped understandings of sexual identity, membership criteria, organization, decision-making, the roles of youth and adults, and efforts to effect social change.

A “New & Noteworthy” selection of The New York Times Book Review “Alexis Clark illuminates a whole corner of unknown World War II history.” —Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci “[A]n irresistible human story. . . . Clark's voice is engaging, and her tale universal.” —Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power and American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House A true and deeply moving narrative of forbidden love during World War II and a shocking, hidden history of race on the home front This is a love story like no other: Elinor Powell was an African American nurse in the U.S. military during World War II; Frederick Albert was a soldier in Hitler's army, captured by the Allies and shipped to a prisoner-of-war camp in the Arizona desert. Like most other black nurses, Elinor pulled a second-class assignment, in a dusty, sun-baked—and segregated—Western town. The army figured that the risk of fraternization between black nurses and white German POWs was almost nil. Brought together by unlikely circumstances in a racist world, Elinor and Frederick should have been bitter enemies; but instead, at the height of World War II, they fell in love. Their dramatic story was unearthed by journalist Alexis Clark, who through years of interviews and historical research has pieced together an astounding narrative of race and true love in the cauldron of war. Based on a New York Times story by Clark that drew national attention, Enemies in Love paints a tableau of dreams deferred and of love struggling to survive, twenty-five years before the Supreme Court's Loving decision legalizing mixed-race marriage—revealing the surprising possibilities for human connection during one of history's most violent conflicts.

The Roman army was the greatest fighting machine the ancient world produced. The Roman Empire depended on soldiers not just to win its wars, defend its frontiers and control the seas but also to act as the engine of the state. Roman legionaries and auxiliaries came from across the Roman world and beyond. They served as tax collectors, policemen, surveyors, civil engineers and, if they survived, in retirement as civic worthies, craftsmen and politicians. Some even rose to become emperors. Gladius takes the reader right into the heart of what it meant to be a part of the Roman army through the words of Roman historians, and those of the men themselves through their religious dedications, tombstones, and even private letters and graffiti. Guy de la Bedoyere throws open a window on how the men, their wives and their children lived, from bleak frontier garrisons to guarding the emperor in Rome, enjoying a ringside seat to history fighting the emperors' wars, mutinying over pay, marching in triumphs, throwing their weight around in city streets, and enjoying esteem in honorable retirement.

Wearing thick glasses, speaking in her thick Icelandic accent, and, well, seeming a touch thick, Bjork stormed the public consciousness in 2000 as an unlikely heroine in the experimental musical film Dancer In the Dark. Army of She is an in-depth look at the woman who first took the public stage twenty-three years ago, analyzing her rise from child prodigy to punk anarchist to New Wave novelty (as member of the Sugarcubes) to hit soloist to film star.