Book Review - Gay Wedding Planning Guide: How to be the Ultimate Maid of Honor

Moments of Pride's guide to be the ultimate Maid or Matron of Honor at a gay wedding or union. Step by step instructions on everything you need to know to fulfill your duties with style and grace. Includes sample toasts. Topics include planning a shower, leading the other bride's maids, etiquette, bachelorette parties, responsibilities and more. This book is written to help you fulfill all your duties with style, grace and humor as you stand beside your loved one as they exhange vows.

Book Review - A Day for a Lay: A Century of Gay Poetry

From Greece's forthright Cavafy to France's renegade Genet; from Oscar Wilde's beloved Lord Alfred Douglas to Ginsberg and the Beats; from senior poets such as Harold Norse to the kids who will be writing poems in the new millennium--Gavin Dillard, one of the world's best-loved contemporary poets, has gathered the best of the 20th Century gay poetry "lest it be lost to us except in the lonely vaults of queer archives."

Book Review - Outing Yourself: How to Come Out as Lesbian or Gay to Your Family, Friends, and Coworkers

No matter how much you prepare, coming out as gay or lesbian is a difficult, emotional process -- a process that will continue long after the words are spoken and the secret is out. There's no magic formula, but Outing Yourself by Michelangelo Signorile offers structure, guidance, and straightforward advice to all those:

WHO ARE STRUGGLING WITH THEIR SEXUALITY AND UNSURE OF WHAT TO DO
WHO HAVE ACCEPTED THAT THEY ARE GAY BUT ARE STILL AFRAID TO COME OUT
WHO CONSIDER THEMSELVES OUT OF THE CLOSET BUT REALIZE THEY HAVE FARTHER TO GO

Signorile's 14-step program -- complete with exercises, meditation notes, and anger checks, as well as the accounts of the coming-out experiences of other lesbians and gay men -- shows how you can successfully handle this life-changing, life-renewing process. A guide for the coming-out journey, Outing Yourself will convince all who read it that, in the words of the author, "The stress of coming out will never be as hard on you as the stress of staying in was."

Book Review - A Woman Like That: Lesbian and Bisexual Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories

Although A Woman Like That is full of brave and often wrenching coming-out stories, with the expected emphasis on overcoming social and familial pressure (more than one of these writers describes involuntary stays in mental hospitals), the combined effect of these wonderful memoirs is more erotic than political--and more funny than erotic. In "Picture This," Cecilia Tan describes her suburban mother snapping up copies of Penthouse to send to friends and relatives because it contained Tan's first nationally published fiction. In "What Comes First," Holly Hughes refers in passing to a gay-bashing incident at her college cafeteria--someone threw a fruit cocktail at her--and goes on to recount her difficulty at attracting a lesbian lover. "It had been so easy with men," she recalls, "All you had to do was bend over at the bowling alley and something would happen." Judith Katz remembers a game called "Tom and Tom" that she used to play with two little boys on her street: "Tom and Tom ... were human cartoon characters who ran around together and got their genitalia caught up in all kinds of elastic knots and snags." For some, Desert Hearts; for others, Road Runner. --Regina Marler