Q+ Public

Today, many states have proposed so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bills that prohibit public school teachers from mentioning LGBTQ topics in the classroom. But a few states, like California, have taken decisive steps in the other direction. They mandate inclusive education that treats LGBTQ history as essential to the curriculum. At once a history of an evolving movement and an activist handbook, Contested Curriculum navigates the rocky path to LGBTQ-inclusive K–12 history education in the United States and recounts the fight for a curriculum that recognizes the value of queer and trans lives.

What began in fits and starts in activism and educational materials across the late twentieth century led to the passage of California’s landmark FAIR Education Act in 2011, ensuring that LGBTQ history has a place in the K–12 classroom. Historian Don Romesburg, the lead scholar who worked with advocacy organizations to pass the act, recounts the decades-long struggle to integrate LGBTQ content into history education policy, textbooks, and classrooms. Looking at California and states that followed its lead, he assesses the challenges and opportunities presented by this new way of teaching history. Romesburg’s powerful case for LGBTQ-inclusive education is all the more urgent in this era of anti-gay book bans, regressive legislation, and attempts to diminish the vital role that inclusive and honest history education should play in a democratic nation.

Genderqueer and nonbinary people of color often experience increased marginalization, belonging to an ethnic group that seldom recognizes their gender identity and a queer community that subscribes to white norms. Yet for this very reason, they have a lot to teach about how racial, sexual, and gender identities intersect. Their experiences of challenging social boundaries demonstrate how queer communities can become more inclusive and how the recognition of nonbinary genders can be an anti-racist practice.

My Race is My Gender is the first anthology by nonbinary writers of color to include photography and visual portraits, centering their everyday experiences of negotiating intersectional identities. While informed by queer theory and critical race theory, the authors share their personal stories in accessible language. Bringing together Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian perspectives, its six contributors present an intergenerational look at what it means to belong to marginalized queer communities in the U.S. and feel solidarity with a global majority at the same time. They also provide useful insights into how genderqueer and nonbinary activism can both energize and be fueled by such racial justice movements as Black Lives Matter.

Canada has been known as a hot spot for HIV criminalization where the act of not disclosing one’s HIV-positive status to sex partners has historically been regarded as a serious criminal offence. Criminalized Lives describes how this approach has disproportionately harmed the poor, Black and Indigenous people, gay men, and women in Canada. In this book, people who have been criminally accused of not disclosing their HIV-positive status, detail the many complexities of disclosure, and the violence that results from being criminalized.

Accompanied by portraits from artist Eric Kostiuk Williams, the profiles examine whether the criminal legal system is really prepared to handle the nuances and ethical dilemmas faced everyday by people living with HIV. By offering personal stories of people who have faced criminalization first-hand, Alexander McClelland questions common assumptions about HIV, the role of punishment, and the violence that results from the criminal legal system’s legacy of categorizing people as either victims or perpetrators.

Note: A regrettable error appears on page 22. The number 240 should be 206 when referring to the number of people prosecuted in relation to allegations of HIV nondisclosure. This will be fixed in future reprints.

Queer people may not have invented sex, but queers have long been pioneers in imagining new ways to have it. Yet their voices have been largely absent from the #MeToo conversation. What can queer people learn from the #MeToo conversation? And what can queer communities teach the rest of the world about ethical sex? This provocative book brings together academics, activists, artists, and sex workers to tackle challenging questions about sex, power, consent, and harm. While responding to the need for sex to be consensual and mutually pleasurable, these chapter authors resist the heteronormative assumptions, class norms, and racial privilege underlying much #MeToo discourse. The essays reveal the tools that queer communities themselves have developed to practice ethical sex—from the sex worker negotiating with her client to the gay man having anonymous sex in the back room. At the same time, they explore how queer communities might better prevent and respond to sexual violence without recourse to a police force that is frequently racist, homophobic, and transphobic.

Telling a queerer side of the #MeToo story, Unsafe Words dares to challenge dogmatic assumptions about sex and consent while developing tools and language to promote more ethical and more pleasurable sex for everyone.

Though today’s LGBTQ people owe a lot to the generations who came before them, their historical inheritances are not always obvious.

Working with the archives of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society, artist E.G. Crichton decided to do something to bridge this generation gap. She selected 19 innovative LGBTQ artists, writers, and musicians, then paired each of them with a deceased person whose personal artifacts are part of the archive.

Including 25 pages of vivid images, Matchmaking in the Archive documents this monumental creative project and adds essays by Jonathan D. Katz, Michelle Tea, and Chris Vargas, who describe their own unique encounters with the ghosts of LGBTQ history. Together, they make the archive come alive in remarkably intimate ways.

2024 Best Book of the Year Award by the GLBTQ Division of the National Communication Association

For a generation of gay men who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, becoming sexually active meant confronting the dangers of catching and transmitting HIV. In the 21st century, however, the development of viral suppression treatments and preventative pills such as PrEP and nPEP has massively reduced the risk of acquiring HIV. Yet some of the stigma around gay male promiscuity and bareback sex has remained, inhibiting open dialogues about sexual desire, risk, and pleasure.

A Pill for Promiscuity brings together academics, artists, and activists—from different generations, countries, ethnic backgrounds, and HIV statuses—to reflect on how gay sex has changed in a post-PrEP era. Some offer personal perspectives on the value of promiscuity and the sexual communities it fosters, while others critique unequal access to PrEP and the increased role Big Pharma now plays in gay life. With a diverse group of contributors that includes novelist Andrew Holleran, trans scholar Lore/tta LeMaster, cartoonist Steve MacIsaac, and pornographic film director Mister Pam, this book asks provocative questions about how we might reimagine queer sex and sexuality in the 21st century.