Recommendations based on "Middlesex"

Published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race and liberal America in the 1960s. Set in Greenwhich Village, Harlem and France, ANOTHER COUNTRY tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way.

Inspired by E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End, and set in New York three decades after the height of the AIDS epidemic, The Inheritance wrestles with what it means to be a gay man today, exploring relationships and connections across age and social class and asking what one generation’s responsibilities may be to the next. Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance premiered at the Young Vic Theatre, London, in 2018, before transferring to the West End’s Noel Coward Theatre. It premiered on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 2019. This edition includes revisions made for the Broadway production.

A deluxe edition of James Baldwin's haunting coming-of-age story, with a new introduction by Roxane Gay and a stunning package.Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle toward self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.

In this tender-hearted debut, set against the tumultuous backdrop of life in 1973, when homosexuality is still considered a mental illness, two boys defy all the odds and fall in love.The year is 1973. The Watergate hearings are in full swing. The Vietnam War is still raging. And homosexuality is still officially considered a mental illness. In the midst of these trying times is sixteen-year-old Jonathan Collins, a bullied, anxious, asthmatic kid, who aside from an alcoholic father and his sympathetic neighbor and friend Starla, is completely alone. To cope, Jonathan escapes to the safe haven of his imagination, where his hero David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and dead relatives, including his mother, guide him through the rough terrain of his life. In his alternate reality, Jonathan can be anything: a superhero, an astronaut, Ziggy Stardust, himself, or completely "normal" and not a boy who likes other boys. When he completes his treatments, he will be normal--at least he hopes. But before that can happen, Web stumbles into his life. Web is everything Jonathan wishes he could be: fearless, fearsome and, most importantly, not ashamed of being gay.Jonathan doesn't want to like brooding Web, who has secrets all his own. Jonathan wants nothing more than to be "fixed" once and for all. But he's drawn to Web anyway. Web is the first person in the real world to see Jonathan completely and think he's perfect. Web is a kind of escape Jonathan has never known. For the first time in his life, he may finally feel free enough to love and accept himself as he is.A poignant coming-of-age tale, Ziggy, Stardust and Me heralds the arrival of a stunning and important new voice in YA.

'Big Daddy' Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta, is about to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. His two sons have returned home for the Gooper, his wife and children, Brick, an ageing football hero who has turned to drink, and his feisty wife Maggie. As the hot summer evening unfolds, the veneer of happy family life and Southern gentility gradually slips away as unpleasant truths emerge and greed, lies, jealousy and suppressed sexuality threaten to reach boiling point. Made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" is a masterly portrayal of family tensions and individuals trapped in prisons of their own making.

Jodie Patterson, activist and Chair of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation Board, shares her transgender son's experience in this important picture book about identity and acceptance.Penelope knows that he's a boy. (And a ninja.) The problem is getting everyone else to realize it.In this exuberant companion to Jodie Patterson's adult memoir, The Bold World, Patterson shares her son Penelope's frustrations and triumphs on his journey to share himself with the world. Penelope's experiences show children that it always makes you stronger when you are true to yourself and who you really are.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER“We should aspire to Colapinto's stellar journalist example: listening carefully to the circumstances of those who are different rather than demanding that they conform to our own.” —Washington PostThe true story about the "twins case" and a riveting exploration of medical arrogance, misguided science, societal confusion, gender differences, and one man's ultimate triumphIn 1967, after a twin baby boy suffered a botched circumcision, his family agreed to a radical treatment that would alter his gender. The case would become one of the most famous in modern medicine—and a total failure. The boy's uninjured brother, raised as a boy, provided to the experiment the perfect matched control. As Nature Made Him tells the extraordinary story of David Reimer, who, when finally informed of his medical history, made the decision to live as a male.Writing with uncommon intelligence, insight, and compassion, John Colapinto sets the historical and medical context for the case, exposing the thirty-year-long scientific feud between Dr. John Money and his fellow sex researcher, Dr. Milton Diamond—a rivalry over the nature/nurture debate whose very bitterness finally brought the truth to light.A macabre tale of medical arrogance, it is first and foremost a human drama of one man's—and one family's—amazing survival in the face of terrible odds.

Publisher Description The mid-seventies: at an all-boys Catholic school in Melbourne, Timothy Conigrave falls wildly and sweetly in love with the captain of the football team. So begins a relationship that weathers disapproval, separation and, ultimately, death. With honesty and insight, Holding the Man explores the highs and lows of any partnership, and the strength of heart both men have to find when they test positive to HIV. This is a book as refreshing and uplifting as it is moving; a funny and sad and celebratory account of growing up gay.

Full Length DramaCharacters: 8 male 1 femaleUnit set.A searing drama about public and private indifference to the AIDS plague and one man's lonely fight to awaken the world to the crisis. Produced to acclaim in New York London and Los Angeles The Normal Heart follows Ned Weeks a gay activist enraged at the indifference of public officials and the gay community. While trying to save the world from itself he confronts the personal toll of AIDS when his lover die

'A quiet masterpiece' Gay Times In the world of his large family - affluent Tamils living in Colombo, Sri Lanka - Arjie is an oddity, a 'funny boy' who prefers dressing as a girl to playing cricket with his brother. But as Arjie comes to terms with his own homo-sexuality and with the racism of the society in which he lives, Sri Lanka is plunged into civil war as fighting between the army and the Tamil Tigers gradually begins to encroach on the family's comfortable life. Sporadic acts of violence flare into full-scale riots and lead, ultimately, to tragedy. 'A graceful and intelligent account of the random nature of growing up' Observer