10 books to honor Women’s History Month
Recommended reading offering insight into the lives of women for Women’s History Month.
Lucy J Madison – Personal Foul
Kat Schaefer’s career is on autopilot. She’s an elite basketball official in the WNBA after surviving an extremely rocky childhood but still finds herself adrift in her personal life almost two years after her longtime girlfriend dumped her.
Kat’s well-ordered world turns upside down again when she meets a hotshot rookie named Julie Stevens who knocks her world off balance with her stellar play and captivating eyes. Despite Kat’s best defense, she falls hard for the young player but she’s unable to open herself up to love again. Her solution is to retreat alone to the magnificent beaches of Provincetown, Massachusetts to heal old wounds and to figure out what the future holds.
Jewelle Gomez – The Gilda Stories
Gilda, the vampyr everyone loves to love is still alive (or more than alive) and well, traveling the world looking for others like herself to be part of her family.
Since she first broke through into the almost all male, all white world of darkness (now isn’t that a contradiction!) in the novel The Gilda Stories her legion has continued to grow.
Kimberly Dark – The Daddies
A love letter to masculinity, and an indictment of patriarchy.
How do you invest in a relationship built on deception, then break up without destroying everything? Is it possible to leave love intact but transformed?
The Daddies is a story about love and grief–how it hurts to change, even when change is needed. Using hybrid narrative, magical realism and pop-culture analysis, The Daddies offers a dark love letter to masculinity told as a lesbian leather-Daddy love story. The story follows a break-up between adults, lovers, but the metanarrative is about our cultural need to break-up with patriarchy, while still holding onto love for masculinity. The Daddies is about the pain of change, an unflinching tour through the pleasures and horrors of domination.
www.kimberlydark.com/the-daddies
Rachel Gold – Being Emily
They say that whoever you are it’s okay, you were born that way. Those words don’t comfort Emily, because she was born Christopher and her insides know that her outsides are all wrong.
They say that it gets better, be who are you and it’ll be fine. For Emily, telling her parents who she really is means a therapist who insists Christopher is normal and Emily is sick. Telling her girlfriend means lectures about how God doesn’t make that kind of mistake.
Emily desperately wants high school in her small Minnesota town to get better. She wants to be the woman she knows is inside, but it’s not until a substitute therapist and a girl named Natalie come into her life that she believes she has a chance of actually Being Emily.
A story for anyone who has ever felt that the inside and outside don’t match and no one else will understand…
Kitty Tsui – Breathless
How to describe writing about sex? “Pornography” seems old fashioned, male-oriented; and “erotica,” while kinder and gentler, feels like a marketing term. Kitty Tsui’s Breathless carries the label “erotic” on its cover, but it’s explicit, no-holds-barred, depictions of lesbian sex–including S-M, bondage, and rough play–feels closer to the hard edge of porn, not the gracefulness of “erotica.”
Tsui has been writing for more than a decade and is just now finding a wider audience, and it is about time. Breathless is beautifully written, and Tsui knows exactly what she is doing. The grace of the prose is countered, line by line, with sexual and emotional excitement that startles us, even as we are seduced by it. Breathless is a nonstop roller coaster that leaves us feeling just that.
www.documentaries.org/kitty-tsui-nice-chinese-girls-dont
Dolores Maggiore – Love, Lechery at Albert Academy
In September 1959 Pina’s got only one thing on her mind at the elite Albert Academy: four years of blissful rooming with her heartthrob Katie, pursuing their taboo relationship of the previous summer—only one thing until Pina stumbles over the lecherous Head Mistress Craney, lurking in the hall. Pina and Katie become obsessed with the blood-curdling game of cat and mouse Craney is craftily staging in every nook and cranny, from the fire escape to the bedclothes. Aided by quirky roommates, Pina struggles to elude Craney’s clutches and her sinister machinations when Craney calls Pina’s bluff in a salacious duel of wills. Must Pina submit?
Will the scorned and unrequited Head Mistress expose Pina to her parents, and the eventuality of shock therapy? Who will banish whom?
Achy Obejas – We came all the way from Cuba so you could dress like this?
Achy Obejas writes stories about uprooted people. Some, like herself, are Latino immigrants and lesbians; others are men (gay and straight), people with AIDS, addicts, people living marginally, just surviving.
As omniscient narrator to her characters’ lives, Obejas generously delves into her own memories of exile and alienation to tell stories about women and men who struggle for wholeness and love.
Amber Dawn – Sodom Road Exit
It’s the summer of 1990, and Crystal Beach in Ontario has lost its beloved, long-running amusement park, leaving the lakeside village a virtual ghost town. It is back to this fallen community Starla Mia Martin must return to live with her overbearing mother after dropping out of university and racking up significant debt. But an economic downturn, mother-daughter drama, and Generation X disillusionment soon prove to be the least of Starla’s troubles: a mysterious and salacious force begins to dog Starla; inexplicable sounds in the night and unimaginable sights spotted on the periphery. Soon enough, Starla must confront the unresolved traumas that haunt Crystal Beach.
Sodom Road Exit might read like a conventional paranormal thriller, except that Starla is far from a conventional protagonist. Where others might feel fear, Starla feels lust and queer desire. When others might run, Starla draws the horror nearer. And in turn, she draws a host of capricious characters toward her–all of them challenged to seek answers beyond their own temporal realities. Sodom Road Exit, the second novel by Amber Dawn, is a book that’s alive with both desire and dread.
Judith Katz – Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound
25th Anniversary Edition includes an all new introduction by the author
Nadine Pagan’s dyke sister Jane wants to find her. Her lover Rose wants to marry her. And her mother Fay wants to forget her. All Nadine wants is to stop the buzzing in her head.
Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound follows Nadine’s (née Morningstar) adventures as she escapes from her incendiary Jewish family into the lesbian town of New Chelm—and far beyond. This is the novel Isaac Bashevis Singer might have written if he’d been a lesbian with a keen eye for contemporary middle-class assimilation. It’s Jewish magical lesbian realism, a good story, and a dynamic piece of writing
Christie Hardwick – The Progressive Wedding Book
A free, online guide for same gender, transgender, and progressive couples written by Christie Hardwick. Please consider donating to Christie’s non-profit organization, Inspiration Gatherings, an annual event in Provincetown, MA designed to provide an opportunity to relax, renew, and reflect.
www.theprogressiveweddingbook.com
