"Both timely and well worth the time."-Thomas Keenan, Newsline. aia Award Winner & Oculus Bestseller.

A largely unexplored area, this is an innovative and original examination of bisexual spaces as places that are defined by both geographical boundaries and cultural significance. Hemmings applies the ideas of queer theory as well as social and cultural geography in her fascinating investigation into the spaces and places of bisexual life. Specifically focusing on Northhampton, MA and San Francisco, she draws on interviews with community members and the town histories showing how and why they have developed into safe places for the gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities. By mapping out a space of bisexuality, Bisexual Spaces provides a new and provocative understanding of the concept.

In Finding the Movement, Anne Enke reveals that diverse women’s engagement with public spaces gave rise to and profoundly shaped second-wave feminism. Focusing on women’s activism in Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis-St. Paul during the 1960s and 1970s, Enke describes how women across race and class created a massive groundswell of feminist activism by directly intervening in the urban landscape. They secured illicit meeting spaces and gained access to public athletic fields. They fought to open bars to women and abolish gendered dress codes and prohibitions against lesbian congregation. They created alternative spaces, such as coffeehouses, where women could socialize and organize. They opened women-oriented bookstores, restaurants, cafes, and clubs, and they took it upon themselves to establish women’s shelters, health clinics, and credit unions in order to support women’s bodily autonomy. By considering the development of feminism through an analysis of public space, Enke expands and revises the historiography of second-wave feminism. She suggests that the movement was so widespread because it was built by people who did not identify themselves as feminists as well as by those who did. Her focus on claims to public space helps to explain why sexuality, lesbianism, and gender expression were so central to feminist activism. Her spatial analysis also sheds light on hierarchies within the movement. As women turned commercial, civic, and institutional spaces into sites of activism, they produced, as well as resisted, exclusionary dynamics.

The topic of sexuality and gender within the South Asian context is timely and widely discussed across a variety of academic disciplines. Since the end of the last century, there have been debates in the cultural sphere in India on issues concerning Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender people’s rights, gender, sex workers’ rights and caste. There has also been an explicit visibility for sexuality in the form of discussion around intimate scenes in films, advertisements and moral concerns around pre-marital heterosexual relationships and same-sex relationships. This book brings out the modalities through which explicit visibility of sexuality gets constituted in the public space of India after the 1990s. The specificities through which relations of gender/ sexuality and caste get constituted and performed in regional media provide significant entry points to an understanding of larger structures and the ever-present fissures through which these larger structures emerge. Focussing on the southern state of Kerala, the book investigates women’s sexuality and caste through a number of case studies: the Suryanelli rape case, neology in the media and the debates around the life narratives of Nalini Jameela, a sex worker. The book does not stop at representational practices as it also looks at the negotiations between the subject and her represented figures which is a significant addition to the existing body of work in the field of media and gender studies. Sexuality and Public Space in India is a careful interrogation of the mass-mediatized space of contemporary public discourse around sexuality. It will be of interest to academics in South Asian Studies, Sociology, Anthropology and Gender Studies.

This book explores the interactions between queer identity, experience, and activism and a range of communal and public spaces.

Explores the intimate relationship of non-Native and Native sexual politics in the United States

Twelve essays provide a nuanced portrait of why public sexual activity is such an integral part of gay culture. Contributors explore issues such as visibility and secrecy, as well as economic status and social class, and interrogate the historical trajectories through which certain locations come to be favored sites for sexual encounters.

Love does not begin with condemnation. Can an evangelical theologian and his gay son overcome the differences in belief that threaten to destroy their relationship? For Brad and Drew Harper, that question wasn't theoretical and neither was the resounding yes they found after years of struggle. Writing to each other with compassion, grit, and humor, Brad and Drew take us on their journey as parent and child from the churches of Middle America to the penthouses of New York's party scenes, through a pastor's-kid childhood and painful conversion therapy to the hard-won victories of their adult relationship. But Space at the Table is more than just a memoir. It is a guide, showing us a way through the roadblocks that threaten to devastate both families and the broader evangelical and LBGTQ communities. Speaking from their own experience, Brad and Drew offer an invitation to join them at a place where love is stronger than the beliefs that divide us.

Winner, 2014 Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies Since the 1970s, a key goal of lesbian and gay activists has been protection against street violence, especially in gay neighborhoods. During the same time, policymakers and private developers declared the containment of urban violence to be a top priority. In this important book, Christina B. Hanhardt examines how LGBT calls for "safe space" have been shaped by broader public safety initiatives that have sought solutions in policing and privatization and have had devastating effects along race and class lines. Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research in New York City and San Francisco, Hanhardt traces the entwined histories of LGBT activism, urban development, and U.S. policy in relation to poverty and crime over the past fifty years. She highlights the formation of a mainstream LGBT movement, as well as the very different trajectories followed by radical LGBT and queer grassroots organizations. Placing LGBT activism in the context of shifting liberal and neoliberal policies, Safe Space is a groundbreaking exploration of the contradictory legacies of the LGBT struggle for safety in the city.

Drawn from extensive, new and rich empirical research across the UK, Canada and USA, Queer Spiritual Spaces investigates the contemporary socio-cultural practices of belief, by those who have historically been, and continue to be, excluded or derided by mainstream religions and alternative spiritualities. As the first monograph to be directly informed by 'queer' subjectivities whilst dealing with divergent spiritualities on an international scale, this book explores the recently emerging innovative spaces and integrative practices of queer spiritualities. Its breadth of coverage and keen critical engagement mean it will serve as a theoretically fertile, comprehensive entry point for any scholar wishing to explore the queer spiritual spaces of the twenty-first century.