Inspiring portraits of gay men and their families from all across America. An evolution has quietly been occurring in the world of parenting. Recent surveys reveal that millions of children have found loving homes either by being born to, or adopted by, gay men. This book is a celebration of these remarkable new families. Gay Dads includes twenty-five personal accounts from men describing their unique journeys to fatherhood and the struggles and successes they have experienced as they raise their children. This is the first book to provide such an expansive exploration of this extraordinary new family unit. With beautiful black-and-white photographs of each of the families, Gay Dads is a moving tribute to familial love.
. . . fresh and bold . . . a charter of hope"In these fresh and bold essays, Gary David Comstock finds God's liberating connection in scripture-from-the-underside, in nontraditional traditions, and in body experience. Candidly self-revelatory, he shows how only in taking our own lives seriously can we be lovers of the world. Gay Theology without Apology is both judgment on churchly oppression and a charter of hope for gay/lesbian/bisexual Christians on the edges of the church. It is also truly an apologia, a persuasive case for the richer, more erotic, more just and loving humanness of everyone of us."--James B. Nelson, Professor of Christian Ethics, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities . . . an important contribution . . . a creative search for meaning "Gary Comstock has taken the initiative to reconstruct Christian tradition out of his experience of mutuality and relationship as a gay man and has made an important contribution to the growing field of gay liberation theology. His critique of heterosexism in the Bible leads to a creative search for meaning in the lives of those struggling for wholeness and new life in community."--Letty M. Russell, Professor of Theology, Yale Divinity School . . . a gripping testimonial . . . all of us are enriched "Starting from the ground of his own unfolding experience as a gay man, Gary Comstock critically assesses Christian Scripture, tradition, and church practice as fragile but valued resources--rather than monolithic authorities--for nurturing a more inclusive human community. This book is a gripping testimonial to the integrity of the gay way of being in the world. At the same time, it is a convincing demonstration of how all of us are enriched by fully honoring gayness as a valid way of being human and Christian."--Norman K. Gottwald, Professor of Biblical Studies, New York Theological Seminary. . . the real deviants are the homophobes "Gay people generally will draw hope and support from this book, and a lot of Christians will find in the author's thoughtfulness and humanity a real asset in battling their own Victorian resistance and rigidity. Comstock reconfirmed my conviction that the real deviants are the homophobes."--William Sloane Coffin, Former Senior Minister. Riverside Church. New York
From my fear of coming out to coming on strong in the struggle for human rights, this is my American journey, the story of an outsider on the inside, a gay man proudly committed to a life of standing up for freedom. "President Clinton and I were born three days apart. We had both dreamed of serving our country. There was one difference: He could pursue his dream, while I felt I could not. The President was born straight and I was born gay." In this stirring personal history, one of America's most influential gay rights advocates recounts his extraordinary career as a policy maker and adviser to the major political leaders of our time, and his own often anguishing, ultimately triumphant life as a gay man. A longtime personal friend of Bill Clinton, in Stranger Among Friends David Mixner offers an insider's look at the power struggles that occur every day in our nation's capital and candid insights on the Clinton administration's successes and failures. Spanning three decades of human rights activism--from the behind-the-scenes negotiations to the painful betrayals to the hard-won victories--his forthright story unflinchingly explores what it means to be an outsider on the inside, and sends a message of hope to all who have ever stood up for what they believe.
A collection of David Holly's gay stories. Most of these tales are intensely homoerotic, while others involve gay romance in all its wondrous splendor. Caveat: All of these stories have been previously published. For this volume they have been slightly revised for greater readability.
Prayer divided seventeenth-century England. Anglican Conformists such as Lancelot Andrewes and Jeremy Taylor upheld set forms of prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, a book designed to unite the nation in worship. Puritan Reformers and Dissenters such as John Milton and John Bunyan rejected the prayer book and advocated for extemporaneous or free prayer. In 1645, the mainly Puritan Long Parliament proscribed the Book of Common Prayer and dismantled the Anglican Church in the midst of civil war. This led Anglican poets and liturgists to defend their tradition with energy and erudition in print. In 1662, with monarchy restored, the mainly Anglican Cavalier Parliament reinstated the Church and its prayer book to impose religious uniformity. This galvanized English Nonconformity and Dissent and gave rise to a vibrant literary counter-tradition. Addressing this fascinating history, David Gay examines competing claims to spiritual gifts and graces in polemical texts and their influence on prayer and poetry. Amid the contention of differing voices, the disputed connection of poetry and prayer, imagination and religion, emerges as a central tension in early modern literature and culture.
Understanding Gay and Lesbian Youth assists the classroom teacher, school counselor, and administrator in relating to gay and lesbian youth and creating accepting and supportive learning climates. David Campos begins with a discussion of the current state of affairs regarding gay and lesbian youth in schools, including a discourse on the developmental milestones, and provides practical strategies for working effectively with these students. The text, concise, yet comprehensive, features: _
Get out your gay/lesbian rice and celebrate! Taking you from the wedding announcement to the thank you notes, this is the ultimate guide to same-sex ceremonies." -Michael Musto, Village Voice Your wedding team is here! Let GayWeddings.com help you and your partner plan a ceremony that suits your taste and budget without losing your mind in the process. The absolute authority for same-sex unions on the web, K.C. David and his devoted staff of experts are at your side from the proposal to the honeymoon. - Marriage, civil union, or domestic partnership: protecting your rights and assets together - Finding gay-friendly venues, caterers, and yes, even clergy - Tips for notifying friends and family, and which newspapers run same-sex announcements - Ideas from folks who have already tied the knot PLUS: A wedding timeline checklist, vow writing exercise, sample menus, budget worksheet and more.
In I Was Born This Way, Carl Bean, former Motown recording artist, noted AIDS activist, and founder of the Unity Fellowship of Christ Church in Los Angeles, shares his extraordinary personal journey from Baltimore foster homes to the stage of the Apollo Theater and beyond. CARL BEAN has been crossing boundaries all his life and helping others do the same. He’s never been stopped by his race or orientation, never fit or stayed in the boxes people have wanted to put him in. He left his foster home in Baltimore at seventeen and took the bus to New York City, where he quickly found the rich culture of the Harlem churches. As a singer, first with the gospel Alex Bradford Singers and later as a Motown recording artist, Bean was a sensation. When Berry Gordy signed him to record "I Was Born This Way," it was a first: the biggest black-owned record company broadcasting a statement on gender identity. The #1 song, recorded with the Sweet Inspirations, was the first gay liberation dance club hit. Whether making records, educating the black community about HIV and AIDS, or preaching to his growing congregation, Archbishop Bean has never wanted to minister to just one group. He’s worked on AIDS issues with C. Everett Koop and Elizabeth Taylor and on civil rights issues with Maxine Waters, Julian Bond, and Reverend Joseph Lowery. At the height of his recording career, he worked with Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach, Miles Davis, and Sammy Davis Jr. He’s brought South Central Los Angeles gang members into his church, which now has 25,000 members in twelve cities nationwide; those same Crips and Bloods have shown up at the Gay Pride parades Bean has organized with U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters. And he has courageously devoted his time and energy to spurring black civil rights leaders to address the AIDS health crisis within the African American community—an issue on which they had been silent. Preaching an all-embracing progressive theology, he is an outspoken practitioner of brotherly love, a dynamic preacher, and a social activist. The Unity Fellowship message is grace: "God is love, and God is for everyone"; "God is gay, God is straight, God is black, God is white." I Was Born This Way is the rare personal history of one of black gospel’s biggest stars and a frank, powerful, and warmhearted testament to how one man found his calling.
Teens are more aware of sexuality and identity than ever, and they’re looking for answers and insights, as well as a community of others. In order to help create that community, YA authors David Levithan and Billy Merrell have collected original poems, essays, and stories by young adults in their teens and early 20s. The Full Spectrum includes a variety of writers—gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight, transitioning, and questioning—on a variety of subjects: coming out, family, friendship, religion/faith, first kisses, break-ups, and many others. This one of a kind collection will, perhaps, help all readers see themselves and the world around them in ways they might never have imagined. We have partnered with the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and a portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to them.
The idea of this book began in a conversation David Blankenhorn had with the president of Freedom to Marry, a group advocating equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. This man asked Blankenhorn, a leading figure in the “marriage movement,” to endorse his group’s objectives. Feeling a bit defensive, Blankenhorn replied, “Every child deserves a mother and a father.” The Future of Marriage is the result of that conversation. In their current demands, Blankenhorn points out, gay and lesbian leaders are not asking for marriage with an adjective in front of it, but marriage itself. So in that sense, what marriage is and why it matters is ultimately what this debate is all about. What exactly is this institution to which gay and lesbian activists are seeking access? Why do we have it in the first place? Where did it come from? What is it for? How is it changing? These are some of the hard questions The Future of Marriage confronts. David Blankenhorn says that if same sex marriage debate is to be “redemptive rather than merely divisive,” it must accept the principle that all persons are equal in dignity. But it must also help us to rediscover and renew marriage as the main protector of our children and our primary social institution.
American author John Horne Burns (1916–1953) led a brief and controversial life, and as a writer, transformed many of his darkest experiences into literature. Burns was born in Massachusetts, graduated from Andover and Harvard, and went on to teach English at the Loomis School, a boarding school for boys in Windsor, Connecticut. During World War II, he was stationed in Africa and Italy, and worked mainly in military intelligence. His first novel, The Gallery (1947), based on his wartime experiences, is a critically acclaimed novel and one of the first to unflinchingly depict gay life in the military. The Gallery sold half a million copies upon publication, but never again would Burns receive that kind of critical or popular attention. Dreadful follows Burns, from his education at the best schools to his final years of drinking and depression in Italy. With intelligence and insight, David Margolick examines Burns’s moral ambivalence toward the behavior of American soldiers stationed with him in Naples, and the scandal surrounding his second novel, Lucifer with a Book, an unflattering portrayal of his experiences at Loomis.
This collection examines the production and recreation of religious ideas and images in different times and locations, achieving a comparative perspective on the transmission of religious influences. The essayists look at contact and conflict between insiders and outsiders, centres and margins, Jews and Christians, Slavs and Greeks, and ancient ritual behaviours and modern television broadcasting, as part of the negotiation of new identity positions, relationships, and accommodations. The book combines the disciplines of literary studies, cultural studies, art history, religion, history, and critical theory, making it an important resource to a range of scholars as well as non-specialists.
This volume contains a dozen of David Gay's articles on various aspects of the new covenant: Assurance Instead of Doubt; Covenant Theology Tested; Gadsby's Questions for Law Men; Questions for Sabbatarians; The Invisible 'But' of John 1:17; The Law and the Confessions; The Prophets and the New Covenant; The Law on the Believer's Heart; The Law the Believer's Rule?; The Priesthood of All Believers; The Two Ministries; Three Verses Misunderstood. In his Foreword, Moe Bergeron writes: 'David H.J.Gay... stands out as a writer who does not hesitate to invite others to openly critique his work. He is anxious to know what God has said. His desire is to rightly discern the word of truth. This is why I cheer [his] efforts... Read his work and be challenged'.
Praise for Unrepentant ... : "For open-minded religious leaders, there are nuggets of enlightenment in this ecumenical array."--Publishers Weekly "Surprisingly readable as well as informative." - San Francisco Chronicle "A significant body of knowledge." - Theology Today "Publishers' catalogues are full of books on the church's view of homosexuality; Comstock here offers gay views of the church. Given the often hostile environment, he asks why gay people stay in religious institutions. Using social scientific methods, he summarizes thirty-six surveys of gay attitudes toward religious communities, including Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, and Native American traditions. He adds data from his survey of gay people in two mainline Protestant denominations." --Religious Studies Review "Explores how each religions accepts, half-accepts, or rejects gays and lesbians and how they themselves feel about their religion. The book is also filled with personal stories of how spiritual people who discovered they are homosexual came out within their community and their congregation, and how they feel about the central figures and tenets of their belief." --Gatherings "With its succinct, accessible language and rich collection of empirical research findings on lesbigay peoples, Unrepentant, Self-Affirming Practicing, would be an excellent addition to academic libraries and could be appropriately used as well in an undergraduate religion or sociology classroom." --Journal for Scientific Study of Religion>
Boys’ Secrets and Men’s Loves is the memoir of a law professor who has written over twenty books on the basic rights of American constitutionalism. He has been a prominent advocate of gay rights and feminism, which joins men and women in resistance. A gay man born into an Italian American family in New Jersey, he relates in this book his own experience on how the initiation of boys into patriarchy inflicts trauma, leading them to mindlessly accept patriarchal codes of masculinity, and how (through art, philosophy, and experience—including mutual love) he and others (straight and gay men) come to join women in resisting patriarchy through the discovery of how deeply it harms men as well as women.
After fifty years of progress and the advent of gay marriage, statistics on the well-being of gay men are as grim as ever. Rates of suicide, alcoholism, and drug abuse have not budged. Anxiety, depression, loneliness, and poor health are just as widespread. Studies have shown that gay men who live in urban gay communities actually are worse off, not better. The utopia promised by gay marriage has not materialized. Gay men seem to have run out of ideas for progress. There is little acknowledgment of the fact that something remains badly wrong. Nor is there a diagnosis of what is wrong. This book proposes that the diagnosis is obvious if we look at the origins of male sexuality and how it was expressed in other cultures. The anti-sex Puritan system in which we are now immersed is relatively recent in human history. Yet in less than 2,000 years, knowledge of how other cultures lived and loved has been systematically wiped out. Starting with the early Europeans in the last years of Rome and continuing around the globe as Europeans colonized the continents, natural male sexualities have been cruelly repressed and then obliviated. We are all Puritans now. The greatest taboo of all in male sexuality remains unchallenged and is still heavily enforced. That is the taboo of male-male sex, which until 2003 was still a crime. This book argues that the plight of gay men is only a piece of a much larger catastrophe -- the Puritanical repression of the sexualities of all men, in an attempt to co-opt the power of male sexuality, with promises of greater glories to be found in heaven. This book is not arguing for something new, untested, unknown, and radical. Rather, the challenge is to return to something very old -- the joy of male-male sex -- which took similar forms in most of the cultures that we have knowledge of. Those old worlds were worlds in which every gay man was able to take for granted what to us today is the impossible dream -- sex with a straight best friend.
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