2018 Pride Issue - The Book Review

Seriously...What Am I Doing Here? The Adventures of a Wondering and Wandering Gay Jew
Never having been on an adventure, Ken Schneck finds himself stumbling twice into rural Uganda; signing up for a 425-mile bike ride; stirring up drama at a Californian hippie, healing retreat; and somehow standing up straight with a colossal backpack strapped to his shoulders deep in the backwoods of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. This occasionally heartbreaking, often insightful, and reliably witty travelogue has at its core our never-ending search for meaning, our desperate need to grasp that elusive sense of place and community, and how we often fail to succeed (sometimes hilariously so!) but keep right on trying.
Paperback: 230 pages
Publisher: 1984 Publishing (May 23, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0997813822
ISBN-13: 978-0997813821

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TRANS/gressive: How Transgender Activists Took on Gay Rights, Feminism, the Media & Congress...and Won!
In the early 1990s, no one talked about transgender people, and no one knew one. We were not on TV or in movies. What formed the visible part of the trans community – overwhelmingly white, urban, and middle class – was also overwhelmingly focused on conferences, surgery or hormones and cisgender acceptance. This was still a determinedly non-political population, often in defensive crouch because it was also constantly under attack by the media, police, local legislatures, feminists and even LGB-but-never-T advocates. We were a group that still thought of ourselves as a collection of separate individuals, not a movement. Without realizing or intending it, the community was reaching critical mass. Even in those pre-Internet, pre-cellphone days, enough trans people were running into one another often enough to begin realizing we could be a force, that we didn’t really need cisgender acceptance. What we needed was our civil rights. This is the inside story of how in just a few years, a handful of trans activists would come together in the face of enormous difficulties and opposition to launch from the very margins of society what would grow into the modern political movement for gender rights.
Paperback: 218 pages
Publisher: Riverdale Avenue Books
Language: English ISBN-10: 1626013683
ISBN-13: 978-1626013681

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The Life and Death of ACT UP/LA: Anti-AIDS Activism in Los Angeles from the 1980s to the 2000s
​The Life and Death of ACT UP/LA explores the history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, Los Angeles, part of the militant anti-AIDS movement of the 1980s and 1990s. ACT UP/LA battled government, medical, and institutional neglect of the AIDS epidemic, engaging in multi-targeted protest in Los Angeles and nationally. The book shows how appealing the direct action anti-AIDS activism was for people across the United States; as well as arguing the need to understand how the politics of place affect organizing, and how the particular features of the Los Angeles cityscape shaped possibilities for activists. A feminist lens is used, seeing social inequalities as mutually reinforcing and interdependent, to examine the interaction of activists and the outcomes of their actions. Their struggle against AIDS and homophobia, and to have a voice in their healthcare, presaged the progressive, multi-issue, anti-corporate, confrontational organizing of the late twentieth century, and deserves to be part of that history.
Paperback: 260 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (May 18, 2017)
Language: English ISBN-10: 1107514177
ISBN-13: 978-1107514171

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