Who's coming out to play

Who's Coming Out to Play paints a vivid picture of the lived experiences of queer bodies in queer sporting spaces, exploring both the possibilities and the continued problems they face. Exploring queer teams and leagues of varying sizes and from various locations, this book focuses on leagues tha...

Political stages

Political Stages examines the role of openly gay, politically engaged playwrights in the emergence of gay liberation and Toronto’s Alternative theatre scene. Through a rigorously materialist analysis, it demonstrates gay theatre’s transformative cultural influence on the city’s queer life.

Winter kept us warm

Winter Kept Us Warm explores a romance between two young men at the University of Toronto in the early 1960s, when being gay was still a crime in Canada. The film achieved international success when first released but has largely disappeared form the contemporary queer film canon. Chris Dupuis ex...

The children's hour

The Children’s Hour (1961) was the first mainstream US film to feature a lesbian character in a leading role. Julia Erhart explores how the film’s conception, production, and reception reveal deep insights into the politics of sexuality and censorship in midcentury America and into social and pol...

Y tu mamá también

Y Tu Mamá También explores the film as a touchstone for queer and sex cinema that continues to teach us how to find queer resonances across national and international film styles and to imagine queer media as complex networks of influence and rediscovery, more than two decades after its original ...

Making out in the mainstream

A behind-the-scenes look at the challenges of LGBT media activism during a period of rapid societal change.

Lost and found voices

Lost and Found Voices explores how four gay writers – Gombrowicz, Pereleshin, Taïa, and Mogutin – use language and exilic realities to voice their identities. Tracing their expressions of desire in language, culture, and community, Beaudoin offers a contextual queer reading that navigates the art...

Queer atlantic

The instability of modernist form has everything to do with the social, political, and economic shakeups of the nineteenth century that left masculinity a site of contestation, racial anxiety, homophobic paranoia, performative display, and queer desire. Refusing to take white masculinity for gran...

Writing in the flesh

Writing in the Flesh confronts the struggle of writing the self, recounting Waugh’s transitions and transformations from preacher’s kid to porn teacher, New Left activist, and expert in documentary, queer, and Canadian film.

Homosexuality and literature

Rent boys

Rent Boys paints a vivid picture of the men who service men in an urban Western context. Using interviews with forty young male sex workers, Michel Dorais analyses their differences in terms of self-esteem, control over their lives, relations to their clients, and risk of HIV infection. He insigh...

The adventures of priscilla, queen of the desert

Renée Middlemost provides valuable insight into the production, reception, and continued relevance of the iconic film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Midnight cowboy

An iconic and controversial film, Midnight Cowboy is given its due as a classic of queer cinema. By shifting the perspective away from interpretations of Midnight Cowboy as homophobic, Jon Towlson argues for a new interpretation of the film as a proto-queer buddy movie and portrait of a friendship.

Untimely bodies, untimely aesthetics

Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics examines the fluidity of time in eight contemporary films by focusing on characters who struggle for connection in an environment shaped by heteronormative temporality and intimacies. The book proposes a model for viewing non-normative relationality through th...

Maurice

Maurice (1987), a British film based on the novel by E.M. Forster, follows an Edwardian man’s journey to self-acceptance as someone who loves and desires men. Rebutting its critical reception, this volume champions the film as a sympathetic adaptation, making a case for its underappreciated posit...

Damned women

Damned Women charts the previously unexplored literary territory of the place of lesbians in the French novel. Beginning with the early depictions of lesbians as "decadent monsters" by nineteenth-century male authors such as Diderot, Balzac, and Gautier, Jennifer Waelti-Walters shows how later, l...

Dead boys can't dance

Dead Boys Can't Dance is a ground-breaking exploration of the double taboos of homosexuality and suicide and their effect on males from fourteen to twenty-five. North American society has been reluctant to recognize that there is a link between the social stigmatization of homosexuality and the h...

The ethical canary

The Ethical Canary is a major contribution to the debate about the hottest issues in ethics today, from one of the world's leading authorities.

Boys don't cry

The Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry (1999) offered the first mainstream access to transmasculine embodiment in North America. This book relocates the film within historical and conceptual contexts that influenced its ambivalent reception while emphasizing the importance of trans visibilities an...

Unplanned visitors

The emergence of queer theory in architecture – and its potential for a renewed ethics of design.

Grossières indécences

Histoire de la culture gaie et lesbienne à Montréal au tournant du XXe siècle.

Orlando

A film that transcends time, Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) follows its titular character through nearly four hundred years of British history. Orlando starts life as a young man in the 1600s and then, mid-film, becomes a woman in the 1800s. Russell Sheaffer meticulously charts the distinct shift ...

Anders als die andern

Released in 1919, Anders als die Andern is a remarkable artefact of the pre-Stonewall homosexual rights movement of early-twentieth-century Germany. Ervin Malakaj shows how the film’s “mournful cinema” is key to its endurance, fostering connection through emotions and acting as a springboard to e...

À tout prendre et il était une fois dans l’est

Ce livre s’impose tel un véritable devoir de mémoire envers les pionniers du cinéma de fiction LGBTQ+ québécois avec ce premier et courageux aveu queer de Claude Jutra dans À tout prendre ainsi que la mise en scène par le duo Brassard-Tremblay dans Il était une fois dans l’Est d’une faune colorée...

Tomboy

An exploration of Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy, a quiet, understated examination of childhood, gender, and queer selfhood amidst the shifting sands of late childhood and early adolescence.

L'homme blessé

Robert Payne guides readers through the powerfully erotic underworld of L’Homme blessé, giving the cinematic milestone the critical attention it deserves. Combining formal analysis, historical research, and original interviews, this book cements L’Homme blessé in its rightful place within queer c...

Worldwise

Édouard Roditi (1910–1992) was a singular witness to the twentieth century; his writings are an account of a life lived across continents and languages, and at flashpoints of history. Worldwise brings together a wide range of Roditi’s writings, focusing renewed attention on the polygot writer, cr...

Appropriate behavior

Maria San Filippo explores Desiree Akhavan’s debut feature, Appropriate Behavior (2014), as an instant classic of 2010’s US indie filmmaking, a radical reappropriation of straight and gay film genres, a model for feminist-queer creative collaboration, and an unparalleled portrayal of bisexuality.

I confess!

A critique and excavation of sexual confession as the key ritual of twenty-first-century moving image culture, from the banal to the forbidden.

Boneyard

Jake Yoder, a precocious boy caught between Amish culture and the modern world, sits in his sixth-grade classroom writing stories at the behest of a stern but charismatic teacher. His stories feature children who are crushed, imprisoned, and distorted, yet flailing around with a kind of bedazzled...

Some phantom/no time flat

“Stephen Beachy is a visionary. In these twin novellas, he explores madness and crime with the nocturnal lyricism of empty time and space. Beachy’s dear criminals reach an exquisite isolation and so does his reader, a non place where categories collapse, like freedom and confinement, chaos and lu...

Museum queeries: two-spirit, indigiqueer, and lgbttq* interventions into museums, archives, and curating

This book explores Two-Spirit and LGBTTQ* contributions to and interventions in museums and museum studies, both as a means of addressing structural exclusions and of opening new modes of productive inquiry and activism.

Agency 3

Three novellas, Teresa Carmody's Today Must Be Sunday, Kim Chinquee’s I Thought of England, and Allison Pitinii Davis’s Business, unique in style and narrative, deal with longing, loneliness, fear, and the relationships their characters make, and break, on their way to something like peace, if no...

Wrong feast

"Where the erotic meets mortality, where the spirit meets the body, where one dream-meets another—this is the landscape where these poems unfold," Kathryn Nuernberger writes of Rivka Clifton's, Wrong Feast. Indeed, in Cliftons’ second full-length collection, the lyric image, in all its ambiguous ...

Betweenness

Varun Ravindran's full-length debut,Betweenness, is poetic polyphony and counterpoint. Formally inventive, at times layering multiple voices, and at other points, implementing sheet music as poetic form, Ravindran explores spirituality; his experience as an immigrant existing in the peripheries o...

Elvira totterheels in gran canaria

In 1992, when smartphones and social media were still science fiction, Elvira Totterheels and Brenda, her very very bestest friend, set off for Gran Canaria to escape the winter. Join them and the outrageous crowd of international jessies they encounter in the gay arena of Playa del Ingles.This b...

Mudflowers

FINALST FOR THE 2023 BMO WINTERSET AWARD“A gorgeous depiction of the tender, painful stretching required to love well and expansively, to recast our ideas of romance and family.” — Aimee Wall, author of We, Jane In the year following her mother’s death, Sophie navigates a complicated love triangl...

Jade is a twisted green

Jade Is a Twisted Green follows the coming of age of Jade Brown, a young Black queer woman on the cusp of turning twenty-five. Her becoming story explores Jamaican Canadian identity, love, passion, chosen family, and rediscovering life’s pleasures after loss.

I, gloria grahame

Shy, effeminate Professor Denton Moulton lives in his head, and in his head he is really a long-dead movie star — the glamorous Gloria Grahame, from the golden age of Hollywood. His own sex life is nonexistent and he feels he hardly has a right to exist, let alone to tell anyone else’s stories. B...

Social media and lgbtqi activism in lebanon

Addressing a gap in research on LGBTQI social media activism in Lebanon, Antoine Badaoui draws attention to the social media affordances of visibility and association in the work of non-profit organisations.

All the world in thee

All the World in Thee presents a selection of poems about LGBTQ+ experiences.

Fantasies of the body

In this short, masterful gem of a novel, David Plante’s seasoned narrator contemplates the connection between physical beauty and love, drawing on literary references and personal experiences to explore these themes. The unnamed narrator of this brief, urgent novel, a young novelist making his wa...

The angels came to sodom in the evening

A novel that dares to take on some of the fiercest forces of our times—ones that use Biblical language to cast minorities as evil.Rory's life is built on secrets—from his childhood playing a Crusader in the vanishing woods of Memphis, through his passionate, hidden bond with his friend Drew, to h...

An archive of brightness

Two stoic lobstermen harboring a secret affection. A lonely architect building houses and machines from the exoskeletons of scorpions in a desert town. A girl painfully growing into new wings. A flock of crows and an untidy vulture observe and collect these moments of human tenderness as they bui...