Lesbianism Made Easy

The essential guide to enjoying modern lesbianism These days, lesbians are everywhere you turn, streaming for your entertainment or commenting on the important political movements and hairdos of the day. Yet as more doors open on this often-misunderstood world, who hasn’t found him- or herself wondering how he or she might uncover the secrets, experience the glamour, enjoy the special advantages of lesbianism? Helen Eisenbach’s hilariously irreverent guide provides a front-row seat to a largely female universe where love, lust, and forbidden laughter are just a fingertip away. Sharing hard-earned truths with sly insight and wit, Eisenbach reveals the fascinating inside story of a growing culture and shows how anyone can acquire the skills and state of mind to be a lesbian. From flirting to family values, from work to play, from enlightening friends, relatives, or strangers to figuring out how to have sex with women or choose a pet, Lesbianism Made Easy answers all your questions—and some you didn’t know you had.

Young New Yorkers negotiate challenging relationships in this “sharp, witty and touching” novel of friendship, sex, and love (Time Out). Manhattan offers the promise of escape for an aimless young man from Memphis. When Clay Lee comes to town hoping to take refuge from family ghosts, he has no idea that a fleeting encounter with an impossibly beautiful woman will upend his life. What begins as a brief obsession becomes the catalyst for exploring the meaning of love itself—in ways Clay could never have anticipated. As he attempts to get his hard-won lessons into focus—and print—he enters a world he didn’t know existed. Wry New York book editor Louisa Mercer has a puzzle she can’t solve: Her love affair with the dazzling, mercurial Mia D’Allesandro has imploded for reasons she can’t pinpoint, and she can’t seem to break its spell. When Louey discovers a manuscript with more than a few direct applications to her own life, her collaboration with its author transforms them both. With New York City as its glittering backdrop, Loonglow explores the exhilarating and heartbreaking turns that life delivers to both the victors and the victims of love.

Explore the broad range of healthy lesbian attitudes and behaviors in love, friendship, self-image, and society!This pioneering book makes a revolutionary assumption: that lesbian and bisexual women are normal, if not average. Instead of focusing on which family or genetic quirks might produce lesbians, these studies turn attention to describing the healthy ways lesbians interact with each other, with heterosexual women, and with society. The result is a significant exploration of uncharted territory.Lesbian Love and Relationships examines the lives of lesbian and bisexual women from adolescence to old age, addressing issues of class and race as well as sexual orientation. It encompasses theory, empirical research, and memoir on such diverse topics as physical appearance, cross-generational friendships, butch-femme issues, and lesbian sexuality. It also looks at such difficult and painful issues as lesbian domestic violence and the impact of homophobia on lesbian couples.Lesbian Love and Relationships asks personal, political, and psychological questions, including: how do young lesbians find each other? what makes successful lesbian relationships last? how does social class affect African-American lesbian relationships? what was it like growing up lesbian in the South during World War II? does “lesbian bed death” exist? This compendium offers exciting original research in a neglected field. Lesbian Love and Relationships is an essential resource for anyone interested in women’s lives and sexuality as well as scholars in the field.

What awaits lesbians at middle age? Midlife Lesbian Relationships explores the rich world of lesbian relationships at midlife, from dating through the loss of parents, and describes the central relationship between who we are as adults and our connections with friends, lovers, parents, and children. Midlife Lesbian Relationships will help lesbians and the professionals who counsel them navigate and understand the midlife transition. Offering both theoretical and descriptive material, this timely work discusses the difficulties of stigma and the strengths of female same-sex relationships, providing insight into the challenges lesbians find at middle age. Midlife Lesbian Relationships provides insight into the challenges and solutions of middle age for lesbians, discussing: friendships dating and courtship couple relationships and the key ingredients that strengthen and deepen them parenting young children and the influence of lesbian midlife maturation on confidence and satisfaction in mothering substance abuse and the road to recovery the evolution of the bonds between these women and their biological families what many lesbians in middle age go through when their parents pass away, including the easing of internalized homophobia Midlife Lesbian Relationships illustrates the commonalities and differences between lesbians and other women at midlife, and illuminates how the interplay between middle age and relationships can contribute to midlife development. Make this valuable volume part of your collection!

Part of the popular For Kids series, this book puts the historic struggle for LGBT equality into perspective Given today's news, it would be easy to get the impression that the campaign for LGBT equality is a recent development, but it is only the final act in a struggle that started more than a century ago. This timely resource helps put recent events into context for kids ages nine and up. After a brief history up to 1900, each chapter discusses an era in the struggle for LGBT civil rights from the 1920s to today. The history is told through personal stories and firsthand accounts of the movement's key events like the 1950s "Lavender Scare," the Stonewall Inn uprising, and the AIDS crisis. Readers will learn about civil rights mavericks, like Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of the first gay rights organization; Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, who turned the Daughters of Bilitis from a lesbian social club into a powerhouse for LGBT freedom; and Harvey Milk, the first out candidate to win a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Also chronicled are the historic contributions of famous LGBT individuals, and 21 activities enliven the history. Kids can write a free verse poem like Walt Whitman, learn the Madison line dance, design an AIDS quilt panel, and write a song parody to learn about the spirited ways in which the LGBT community has pushed for positive social change.

This early work by Radclyffe Hall was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Well of Loneliness' is a novel that follows an upper-class Englishwoman who falls in love with another woman while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I. Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born on 12th August 1880, in Bournemouth, England. Hall's first novel The Unlit Lamp (1924) was a lengthy and grim tale that proved hard to sell. It was only published following the success of the much lighter social comedy The Forge (1924), which made the best-seller list of John O'London's Weekly. Hall is a key figure in lesbian literature for her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). This is her only work with overt lesbian themes and tells the story of the life of a masculine lesbian named Stephen Gordon.

After World War II, Atlanta and Charlotte emerged as leading urban centers in the South, redefining the region through their competing metropolitan identities. Both cities also served as home to queer communities who defined themselves in accordance with their urban surroundings and profited to varying degrees from the emphasis on economic growth. Uniting southern women's history with urban history, La Shonda Mims considers an imaginatively constructed archive including feminist newsletters and queer bar guides alongside sources revealing corporate boosterism and political rhetoric to explore the complex nature of lesbian life in the South. Mims's work reveals significant differences between gay men's and lesbian women's lived experiences, with lesbians often missing out on the promises of prosperity that benefitted some members of gay communities. Money, class, and race were significant variables in shaping the divergent life experiences for the lesbian communities of Atlanta and Charlotte; whiteness especially bestowed certain privileges. In Atlanta, an inclusive corporate culture bolstered the city's queer community. In Charlotte, tenacious lesbian collectives persevered, as many queer Charlotteans leaned on Atlanta's enormous Pride celebrations for sanctuary when similar institutional community supports were lacking at home.