Leatherfolk


Book Description

Since its publication a decade ago, this Lambda Literary Award-nominated book has become a classic, must-read book on human sexuality and identity. Widely cited as being among the most useful books of its kind, this co-gender anthology is both historical witness to and provocative treatise on this unique and often misunderstood subculture. The diverse contributors look at the history of the gay and lesbian underground, how radical sex practice relates to their spirituality, and what S/M means to them personally.




Folsom Street Blues


Book Description

Stewart has written a wonderful memoir revealing how South of Market became hip SoMa in San Francisco. Leading a lusty life surfing the first wave of gay liberation up to HIV, he is an uninhibited writer spilling personal tales of sex, art, and friendship during that first decade of Gay Liberation after Stonewall.







Subcultures


Book Description

This book presents a cultural history of subcultures, covering a remarkable range of subcultural forms and practices. It begins with London’s ‘Elizabethan underworld’, taking the rogue and vagabond as subcultural prototypes: the basis for Marx’s later view of subcultures as the lumpenproletariat, and Henry Mayhew’s view of subcultures as ‘those that will not work’. Subcultures are always in some way non-conforming or dissenting. They are social - with their own shared conventions, values, rituals, and so on – but they can also seem ‘immersed’ or self-absorbed. This book identifies six key ways in which subcultures have generally been understood: through their often negative relation to work: idle, parasitical, hedonistic, criminal their negative or ambivalent relation to class their association with territory - the ‘street’, the ‘hood’, the club - rather than property their movement away from home into non-domestic forms of ‘belonging’ their ties to excess and exaggeration (as opposed to restraint and moderation) their refusal of the banalities of ordinary life and in particular, of massification. Subcultures looks at the way these features find expression across many different subcultural groups: from the Ranters to the riot grrrls, from taxi dancers to drag queens and kings, from bebop to hip hop, from dandies to punk, from hobos to leatherfolk, and from hippies and bohemians to digital pirates and virtual communities. It argues that subcultural identity is primarily a matter of narrative and narration, which means that its focus is literary as well as sociological. It also argues for the idea of a subcultural geography: that subcultures inhabit places in particular ways, their investment in them being as much imaginary as real and, in some cases, strikingly utopian.




Coming to Power


Book Description

Writings surrounding the issue of S/M in the lesbian and feminist movement.




Macho Sluts


Book Description

When it was first published in 1988, Pat Califia's Macho Sluts, a collection of S/M stories set in San Francisco's dyke bathhouses, sex parties, and S/M gay bars, shocked the lesbian community and caused an upheaval in the field of queer publishin...




The Leatherman's Handbook


Book Description

Larry Townsend's first handbook was an immediate cult classic upon its release in 1972. Its publication was the first step to bringing gay 'leathersex' out into the open. Presented here in a completely revised and updated edition, this is still the most authoritative work in the field and is sought after by beginner and advanced practitioners alike.




A Special Illumination


Book Description

Gay spirituality represents a hidden strand in Western thought that was only publically declared from the Gay Liberation of the 1970s. Since "coming out", expressions of gay spirituality have proliferated in both number and diversity. Beginning with gay theology within Christianity, the phenomenon has now reached as far as Buddhism and neo-paganism. But, so far, critical analysis of the movement has been very limited largely because gay spirituality has been treated as a political and social movement arguing for rights and acceptance within religious circles. 'A Special Illumination' offers an indepth analysis and argues that gay spirituality should be placed at the heart of religion.




The Leather and BDSM Handbook


Book Description

In celebration of the more than a decade of success of The Complete leatherboy Handbook, Vince Andrews has focused his experience and insight on a new handbook. Now he takes on the challenge of introducing the reader to the greater world of Leather sexuality: gay and straight, male and female, D/s and S/M and Kink. Andrews explores the differences that make the greater Leather community so diverse and colorful, as well as the commonalities that have brought these groups together.With the same experience-based clarity and objective perspective he has brought to his previous work, Andrews explores the histories of the various groups that form Leather culture, and how those groups have intersected throughout the 20th century - and how they are growing into the 21st century. This book gives the reader historical background and a clear understanding of what makes up modern Leather culture: thought, art, ritual, fashion, public figures, legislation, and literature.The Leather & BDSM Handbook is designed to provide a foundational understanding of the Leather culture to help not only newcomers to the scene, but also experienced Leatherfolk who are adjusting to the Leather community's growth and development in new directions. Andrews's work gives you the depth of understanding of the Leather world and its history to enable you to be comfortable communicating your own thoughts and views to others within the culture. Essentially, it provides the tools, insight, and understanding you will need to succeed in the world of Leather.




Sexual Myths of Modernity


Book Description

The notion of sexual sadism emerged from nineteenth-century alienist attempts to imagine the pleasure of the torturer or mass killer. This was a time in which sexuality was mapped to social progress, so that perversions were always related either to degeneration or decadence. These ideas were internalized in later Freudian views of the drives within the self, and of their repression under the demands of modern European civilization. Sadism was always presented as the barbarous past that lurked within each of us, ready to burst forth into murderous violence, crime, anti-Semitism, and finally genocide. This idea maintained its currency in European thought after the Second World War as Freudian-influenced accounts of the history of philosophy configured the Marquis de Sade as a kind of Kantian “superego” in a framework that viewed the Western Enlightenment as unraveled by its own inner demons. In this way, a straight line was imagined from the late eighteenth century to the Holocaust. These ideas have had an ongoing legacy in debates about sexual perversion, feminism, genocide representation, and historical memory of Nazism. However, recent genocide research has massively debunked assumptions that perpetrators of mass violence are especially sexually motivated in their cruelty. This book considers how the late twentieth-century imagination eroticized Nazism for its own ends, but also how it has been informed by nineteenth-century formulations of the idea of mass violence as a sexual problem.