Book Review - Love's Melody Lost

A secretive artist with a haunted past and a young woman escaping a life that proved to be a lie find their destinies entwined.
Victim of a terrible accident, famed composer and pianist Graham Yardley loses her sight, her heart and her soul. Wealth and fame mean nothing after the devastating loss of her beloved music; her life is reduced to silence, darkness and bitter regret. In a bleak mansion atop windswept cliffs, the blind woman withdraws from the world, her once consuming passions now a source of anguish and fear. Then Anna, a lost woman seeking a place in the world, comes into her life and awakens feelings she thought were dead forever. A fragile melody of love is played between these damaged souls, a song made sweeter and stronger by the day... but will their blossoming romance be destroyed by an outsider's greed or will it succumb to the discord of Graham's tormented heart?

Book Review - Wet : True Lesbian Sex Stories

Intense and vibrantly real lesbian erotica in the spirit of Skin Deep, these quick and dirty true stories revel in hot lesbian sex. As they peek into the diary of a very busy (and very bad) girl, readers will be panting hungrily as women from around the world reveal their most intimate lesbian encounters.

Nicole Foster edited the best-selling books, Skin Deep, Awakening the Virgin, Body Check, and Electric. She undresses in front of her window in Los Angeles

Book Review - This Is What Lesbian Looks Like: Dyke Activists Take on the 21st Century

One of the greatest civil rights success stories of the 20th century has been the movement for gay liberation, and the century's end is the perfect--in fact, irresistible--moment for summing up its enormous but uneven achievements and for plotting its future. In This Is What Lesbian Looks Like, dyke activists reflect on race, class, conflict, and differences within the movement, and the rise of the religious right. Carol Queen pieces together her erotic awakenings amid the sex wars of the early 1970s. Dorothy Allison writes about her and her partner's recent decision to move in with their son's birth father and form their "own design of a happy family." Carmen Vazquez argues against the urge to conform, claiming that we are so wounded "by the denial of belonging, by the loss of family, community, and a right to faith in whatever we understand to be god, that we accept the absurdity and the illusion that we can belong to America's family if we are 'good.'" If the collection as a whole strikes a less-than-celebratory note, it is a mark of the ground yet to cover, as well as the vigilance of those on the front lines. --Regina Marler

Book Review - Now That You Know: A Parents' Guide to Understanding Their Gay and Lesbian Children, Updated Edition

If the coming out process is difficult for gay people, it is often equally difficult for their parents. Confusion, anger, and fear frequently cause fathers and mothers of gay men and lesbians to disavow, strike out against, and even resent their children. For many parents, a child's coming out feels like the ultimate rejection--not only of their dreams and hopes but of their own heterosexuality. In Now That You Know: A Parent's Guide to Understanding Their Gay and Lesbian Children, Betty Fairchild and Nancy Hayward--the mothers of, respectively, a gay man and a lesbian--have charted the rough seas that almost every parent of a gay person travels.
Fairchild and Hayward presume that homosexuality is a positive good, and that it is willful ignorance and homophobia that are moral wrongs. They also believe that families can and should love all members and that it is distraught or confused parents (not their gay offspring) who must change. Mixing common sense with a firm sense of social justice and love, the authors systematically address almost all of the problems faced by parents of gay people. Answering questions on religion, AIDS, health, children, alternative families, and sex, they make the complicated gay world--often a nightmare vision for "just out" parents of gays--not only manageable but happy and nurturing. --Michael Bronski

Book Review - The Politics and Poetics of Camp

The Politics and Poetics of Camp is a radical reappraisal of the discourse of camp. The contributors to this volume examine both activist strategies of camp performance--such as those employed by ACTUP--and theoretical debates on the meaning of camp as a signifying practice. They also question whether camp is a frivolous, apolitical style or a powerful cultural critique and expression of queer identity.

The essays investigate camp from its early formations in the 17th and 18th-century homosexual subculture of London to its present manifestations in queer theatre and literature. They also take a fascinating look at the complex relationship between queer discourse and pop culture's decidedly ``un-queer'' appropriations of this style on film.