Those identifying as LGBTQ+ experience an excess of mental health problems and suicide in our society, and their mental health needs are poorly catered for. In the recent past, aversion therapy was given to lesbian and transwomen and conversion therapy remains legal. The ‘gender wars’ have also opened up spaces within society and feminism that can be difficult to negotiate. For transwomen, timely access to adequate care remains a major problem causing considerable emotional distress while public anti-trans sentiment has increased. Repeated denial of the lived experience of trans people is causing psychological harm. The rise in gender dysphoria in assigned female at birth (AFAB; or natal female) girls and their treatment has caused major controvery. We must to acknowledge both the distress of trans people, who feel frustrated and angry at having to jump through the hoops of psychiatric assessment and being blamed for male violence from which they are also at risk, and the distress and fear of women who have been conditioned lifelong to fear, and/or have experienced violence, at losing their safe spaces. Seeking ways to ensure that everyone feels welcomed not only in services but also in society.

The fight for gay and lesbian rights has become one of the most conspicuous social justice movements in American history. Although numerous scholars and popular writers have detailed the history of the marriage equality movement, the struggle for marriage equality was only one small part of a more than half century-long movement for queer family rights. Decades before the United States became embroiled in debates over same-sex marriage, advocates were working to support and promote the rights of queer couples and their children. Family Matters uncovers this hidden history of gay and lesbian rights advocacy. Instead of focusing on marriage rights, it highlights the legal reforms that predated the marriage equality movement. The introduction sets out the book’s arguments and methodology. As it explains, the transformation of gay and lesbian rights in America depended on advocacy at the state and local levels, as well as the work of nonlegal actors.

As we’ve seen, bitch has been used against men for almost as long as it’s been used against women. Bitch is still thrown at men and women alike, but it’s used somewhat differently. Bitch can have positive connotations when a woman reclaims it, but when aimed at a man, bitch is rarely a compliment. While a bitch can be a strong woman, it usually means a weak man. But unlike powerful women who are hit with the word, men are targeted with bitch when they are considered to be powerless. Bitch likens a woman to a man, while it likens a man to a woman. It’s an emasculating insult that suggests he’s lacking in courage and strength. Bitch might also accuse him of being effeminate or gay. There are many different versions of the slur for a man – he’s a little bitch, someone’s bitch, a prison bitch, or he’s a son of a bitch.

The term “romantic friendship” was coined in eighteenth-century England to describe relationships between women that were passionate, intense, and exclusive. The sexual potential of such relationships were seldom discussed by those outside the dyad. When two women of the aristocracy, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, ran off together in 1778, their friends were relieved to know that “no serious impropriety had been committed” because, as one of them wrote, “There were no gentlemen concerned, nor does it appear to be anything more than a scheme of Romantic Friendship.” Romantic friendship between women, depicted in several eighteenth- and nineteen-century American literary works, was described by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1849 as “a rehearsal in girlhood of the great drama of woman’s life.” The term “Boston marriage” was coined in the late nineteenth century, when women’s increasing economic independence—enjoyed particularly by the “New Woman”—meant that their same-sex love relationship need no longer be a “rehearsal” for heterosexual marriage. With the popular dissemination in the twentieth century of the ideas of late-nineteenth sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, romantic friendships and Boston marriages came under suspicion as being “sexually inverted” or “lesbian” and therefore pathological.

This chapter illuminates how camp conceives reading in affective terms. Camp diminishes the intensity of strong affects, such as shame, anxiety, and rage, to make room for relief, laughter, and even sexual interest. In this way, camp protects queer eroticism from being snuffed out by a wide range of phobic discourses. While scholars often oppose camp to sexual desire, I trace different orientations to eroticism that arise in in lesbian, queer of color, and trans camp. As examples, I turn to three camp touchstones, Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (1928), Tommy Pico’s Junk (2018), and Torrey Peters’ “CisWorld (2019), which each seduce readers into scenes of pleasure. For these writers, campiness does not deflate queer and trans desires but makes them narratable and available for readers. In doing so, these texts demonstrate how camp dreams of a queerer social order, and it shields these fantasies from the suffocating forces of white supremacy and cis-heteronormativity. Making affective scenes for queer fantasy, I conclude, is a powerful if still under-appreciated force of camp’s poetics and politics.

In and of itself, the category of the bestseller presumes neither literary status nor political consensus. As Ruth Miller Elson remarks, “bestselling books… offer clues to the world view of that mythical creature—the average American.” LGBT bestsellers likewise offer clues about the average queer American—and a perspective on dominant trends and themes in queer culture and consumption since the 1970s. This chapter charts the history of the LGBT bestseller alongside a broader history of LGBT culture in the post-Stonewall era. It traces a shift in popular LGBT literature and publishing from separatism to assimilation, from its roots in the independent gay presses of the 1970s through the peak of the AIDS epidemic to the post-AIDS bestsellers popular with both queer and straight readerships. Texts considered include Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Larry Kramer’s Faggots (1978), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978-2014), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015).

The relationship between feminism and sexuality in the long twentieth century is both complex and multifaceted. Whether sexuality is understood as congenital or acquired, defined by object choice or aim, central to the character of an individual or the health of a population, it is a highly contested and contradictory set of discourses and institutional practices. Feminism is similarly impossible to define as a coherent ideology or political praxis. At once a historically specific political and cultural phenomenon emerging in the first decades of the twentieth century, feminism is also a highly differentiated transnational event that belies a single origin, set of beliefs, or constituency. Organized around two key historical figures–the modern girl and the feminist-as-lesbian–this essay draws on feminist, queer, and historical studies of the world-wide feminist movements of the 1910s-1930s, and of the women’s liberation era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, to trace the connections between the commodification and politicization of women’s sexuality as two axes around which the unsettled and generative relationship between modern sexuality and feminism revolves.

This chapter examines how lexicographers symbolically policed the borders of English not only by distancing same-sex practices from English society but by disbarring words for those practices from the English language. Though terms for women who had sex with women existed in other Early Modern English text types (and in the bilingual dictionaries that influenced early monolingual lexicographers), they were barely acknowledged in hard-word and general dictionaries. Sexuality between men, though initially well-represented, was also excised by many general lexicographers in the wake of Samuel Johnson, reflecting a growing concern that dictionaries should record only ‘proper’ English. Acts that were inadmissible in polite lexicography would partially re-emerge in dictionaries of criminal cant, which encoded an earthy alternative vocabulary for the men associated with London’s molly houses during the eighteenth century. However, even cant dictionaries would edge carefully around the existence of intimacy between women. And as dictionaries of the underworld gave way to those of fashionable slang in the nineteenth century, unnatural sex of any sort was once again thrust beyond the pale.

Chapter 4 moves from eating to feeding, returning to Nightwood and juxtaposing it with Olive Moore’s novel Spleen in order to reveal the ethics of care and control that are developed in each book. Feeding, in both novels, is a way of nurturing that is also a mode of control. In Spleen, a woman rejects the normative pleasures of marriage and motherhood, refusing to feed her child. While this might seem like a valorization of queer negativity in the form of the literal rejection of the child, the chapter reads the novel instead as one that values queer potentiality by refusing the coercive pleasures of nurture. Turning back to Nightwood, it discusses a metaphorical hunger, arguing that Barnes draws on the figure of the mother feeding her child to demonstrate how care may be coercive even in a relationship between adults.

LGBTQIA+ patients are an important patient population to highlight when discussing urban emergency medicine. There are a multitude of terms regarding gender expression and identity that emergency medicine providers should familiarize themselves with if they plan on taking care of this patient population. Within the LGBTQIA+ population, there are specific medical and psychological issues that are relevant to each subgroup. Providers are not expected to know everything about their patients, but they must remember to remain open-minded and non-judgmental as they take care of everyone with precision and dedication. If a provider feels that the patient needs help in ways they cannot be of service, then the provider should be able to point the patient in the right direction via resources and referrals.

What can a model of continence based in male physiology have to offer female writers? This chapter argues that the strong opinions that Vernon Lee expressed about sex and its relation to art in her early writing should not be dismissed as the result of repression or parental indoctrination, as they have been by previous critics. Lee, like Johnson, combined Paterian sensuous continence with other nineteenth-century discourses, particularly discussions of sexual health by New Women writers, and the result is central to her theorizing about life, social ethics, and art. She insisted on the harmfulness of sex to both individuals and society, and that those who felt otherwise were suffering from ‘logical misconception’. But Lee was also an aesthete, for whom sensuous experience was extremely important. She worried that continent aestheticism would limit an aesthete’s experience and lead to solipsism and waste. Her answer was a Paterian disciplined love, a reaching out to what is unhealthy and corrupt, whether people, places, or artworks, and learning to filter the good from the bad, to ‘cleanse and recreate it in the fire of intellectual and almost abstract passion’.

Sex and minority groups such as LGBT, sexual desire and sexual identity as fluid or dimensional phenomena, differences (or lack of differences) in desire in minority groups, special issues in relationships for minority groups such as discrimination, and effects of ageing,

This chapter queries the notion of “the queer essay” and the idea of the essay as an intrinsically queer form. The author considers a particular tradition of essays in which “queer literary critics writ[e] about famous queer literary critics,” with emphasis on Terry Castle’s memoir of Susan Sontag, focusing on the desire for the writer to “come out” in an essay, a form by its very nature not interested in the full, disclosive out.

Chapter Three focuses on Faith and Compton Mackenzie’s choice to rethink their marriage in highly unconventional terms, allowing one another to conduct affairs with other partners, spending a great deal of time apart while at the same time remaining committed to an ideal of loving friendship with one another. They came to this agreement while living abroad on the Italian island of Capri and mingling with the queer expatriate community of Decadent aesthetes on the island. This chapter relies on analysis of the Mackenzies’ life writing and fiction as well as extensive work with their diaries, notebooks, and correspondence to develop an understanding of the rhythms of their alternative form of affiliation and the manner in which their porous bond was influenced by their time on Capri. Throughout the chapter, I consider the role of place in the Mackenzies’ experiences, the manner in which the islandness of Capri enabled and sheltered queer experiments in connection, while at the same time attending to the manner in which visitors to Capri extracted pleasure from the island and its inhabitants, approaching the site according to an ethos of “Mediterraneanism” that structurally resembles Orientalism.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex persons are at particular risk of being targeted because of their gender or sexual preference. Discrimination against LGBTI persons may be based on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or sex characteristics. The chapter looks first at the right to life of LGBTI persons under global standards. This comprises extrajudicial executions by State agents, the failure to exercise due diligence in protecting LGBTI persons, and the imposition of the death penalty for homosexual activity. In nine States, the penal code prescribes the death penalty as a possible judicial sanction for same-sex sexual activity.

This chapter looks to recent hybrid Latina queer writings for what they might offer us as a method and approach to the question of women’s accountability to women in a context of gendered violence. Through hybrid life writing that combines elements of non-fiction and fiction, Gabby Rivera’s Juliet take a Breath (2016), Mean by Myriam Gurba, (2017), and Desert Blood (2005) by Alicia Gaspar de Alba explore how queer Latinas negotiate violence against women within their cultural sphere and in conversation with dominant Anglo culture. The forms of violence introduced in these works range from cultural erasure (Juliet takes a Breath), to assault and rape (Mean), and the ongoing slaughter of women on the Mexico/US border (Desert Blood). This essay explores how the authors frame the obstacles queer Latinas confront as they strategize individually and collectively to address public and private assaults in relation to others; in each case, the authors depict Latinas who respond to these challenges by putting women first as they respond to simultaneous and competing racial and sexual politics.

This chapter describes psychological science’s contributions to the global rights agenda on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). First, we trace the historical stance taken in psychology on same-sex sexualities and on gender diversity, and how this positioning shaped how psychologists addressed (or did not address) SOGI concerns. Second, we examine how global rights entities such as the United Nations have engaged SOGI concerns. Third, we review four continuing challenges for SOGI-related human rights: (1) the persistent problem of LGBT pathologisation (including its manifestation in the form of so-called conversion therapy, or sexual orientation change efforts), (2) the increasing gap in the enjoyment of equal human rights for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other gender and sexual minority) individuals among people in different parts of the world, (3) the mobilization of human rights language against LGBT equality and diversity of gender identities and expressions, and (4) previously unrecognized concerns related to LGBT migrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees. Finally, we analyze how psychology as an academic discipline, as a profession, and as an organized network of professional associations has contributed to and could help in furthering the protection and promotion of rights across the spectrum of human sexual and gender diversity.

This chapter explores discriminatory language with regard to sexual orientation and sexuality. Starting with the story of playwright Oscar Wilde and his imprisonment, we look at the history of criminalizing same-sex attraction. Ways of talking about same-sex sexuality over time are discussed, both in-group and out-group, and the use of coded language, such as Polari. Slurs are treated, as well as the reclamation of some of these terms, especially queer and gay. We look at historical and contemporary cases of homophobia in language from popular culture and the media.