Award Winners LibGuide: Nonfiction Winners

LGBTQ Nonfiction Winner in 30th Annual
The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today's struggles. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. Her book, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, won the 2016 Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book. Her articles have been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Jacobin, New Politics, The Guardian, In These Times, Black Agenda Report, Ms., International Socialist Review, and other publications. Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

LGBT Nonfiction Winner 28th Annual
In "No One Helped", Marcia M. Gallo examines one of America’s most infamous true-crime stories: the 1964 rape and murder of Catherine "Kitty" Genovese in a middle-class neighborhood of Queens, New York. Front-page reports in the New York Times incorrectly identified thirty-eight indifferent witnesses to the crime, fueling fears of apathy and urban decay. Genovese’s life, including her lesbian relationship, also was obscured in media accounts of the crime. Fifty years later, the story of Kitty Genovese continues to circulate in popular culture. Although it is now widely known that there were far fewer actual witnesses to the crime than was reported in 1964, the moral of the story continues to be urban apathy. "No One Helped" traces the Genovese story’s development and resilience while challenging the myth it created. It places the conscious creation and promotion of the Genovese story within a changing urban environment. Gallo reviews New York’s shifting racial and economic demographics, and explores post–World War II examinations of conscience regarding the horrors of Nazism. These were important factors in the uncritical acceptance of the story by most media, political leaders, and the public despite repeated protests from Genovese’s Kew Gardens neighbors at their inaccurate portrayal. The crime led to advances in criminal justice and psychology, such as the development of the 911 emergency system and numerous studies of bystander behaviors. Gallo emphasizes that the response to the crime also led to increased community organizing as well as feminist campaigns against sexual violence. Even though the particulars of the sad story of her death were distorted, Kitty Genovese left an enduring legacy of positive changes to the urban environment.

LGBT Nonfiction Winner 24th Annual
The first book to cover the entirety of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from pre-1492 to the present. In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage. Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to "Publick Universal Friend," refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in upstate New York. In the mid-nineteenth century, internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized "female marriage." And in the late 1920s, Augustus Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP's magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter. These are just a few moments of queer history that Michael Bronski highlights in this groundbreaking book.  
Intellectually dynamic and endlessly provocative, A Queer History of the United States is more than a "who's who" of queer history: it is a book that radically challenges how we understand American history. Drawing upon primary documents, literature, and cultural histories noted scholar and activist Michael Bronski charts the breadth of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from 1492 to the 1990s, and has written a testament to how the LGBT experience has profoundly shaped our country, culture, and history. A Queer History of the United States abounds with startling examples of unknown or often ignored aspects of American history, the ineffectiveness of sodomy laws in the colonies, the prevalence of cross-dressing women soldiers in the Civil War, the impact of new technologies on LGBT life in the nineteenth century, and how rock music and popular culture were, in large part, responsible for the devastating backlash against gay rights in the late 1970s. Most striking, Bronski documents how, over centuries, various incarnations of social purity movements have consistently attempted to regulate all sexuality, including fantasies, masturbation, and queer sex. Resisting these efforts, same-sex desire flourished and helped make America what it is today. At heart, A Queer History of the United States is simply about American history. It is a book that will matter both to LGBT people and heterosexuals. This engrossing and revelatory history will make readers appreciate just how queer America really is.

LGBT Nonfiction Winner 20th Annual
Today it is widely recognized that gay men played a prominent role in defining the culture of mid-twentieth-century America, with such icons as Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Montgomery Clift, and Rock Hudson defining much of what seemed distinctly "American" on the stage and screen. Even though few gay artists were "out," their sexuality caused significant anxiety during a time of rampant antihomosexual attitudes. Michael Sherry offers a sophisticated analysis of the tension between the nation's simultaneous dependence on and fear of the cultural influence of gay artists. Sherry places conspiracy theories about the "homintern" (homosexual international) taking control and debasing American culture within the paranoia of the time that included anti-communism, antisemitism, and racism. Gay artists, he argues, helped shape a lyrical, often nationalist version of American modernism that served the nation's ambitions to create a cultural empire and win the Cold War. Their success made them valuable to the country's cultural empire but also exposed them to rising antigay sentiment voiced even at the highest levels of power (for example, by President Richard Nixon). Only late in the twentieth century, Sherry concludes, did suspicion slowly give way to an uneasy accommodation of gay artists' place in American life.

LGBT Nonfiction Winner 19th Annual
The exhortation to "Go West!" has always had a stronghold on the American imagination. But for the gays, lesbians, and transgendered people, who have moved to L.A. over the past two centuries, the City of Angels has offered a special home, which, in turn, gave rise to one of the most influential gay cultures in the world. Drawing upon untouched archives of documents and photographs and over 200 new interviews, Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons chart L.A.'s unique gay history, from the first missionary encounters with Native American cross-gendered "two spirits" to cross-dressing frontier women in search of their fortunes; from the bohemian freedom of early Hollywood to the explosion of gay life during World War II to the underground radicalism sparked by the 1950s blacklist; from the 1960s gay liberation movement to the creation of gay marketing in the 1990s. Faderman and Timmons show how geography, economic opportunity, and a constant influx of new people created a city that was more compatible with gay life than any other in America. Combining broad historical scope with deftly wrought stories of real people, from the Hollywood sound stage to the barrio, Gay L.A. is American social history at its best.

Gay Men's Nonfiction Winner 4th Annual
The Zuni Man-Woman focuses on the life of We'wha (1849-96), the Zuni who was perhaps the most famous berdache (an individual who combined the work and traits of both men and women) in American Indian history. Through We'wha's exceptional life, Will Roscoe creates a vivid picture of an alternative gender role whose history has been hidden and almost forgotten. Two spirits often held honored and influential positions. We’wha was an accomplished potter and weaver, and a recognized expert in Zuni religion. That such an individual could become a representative for his tribe underscores the degree to which individual differences in gender and sexuality were accepted. In most tribes, the ability to combine male and female skills was not viewed as a liability but a talent. It came as no surprise to the Zunis that We’wha would travel thousands of miles, overcoming the obstacles of language and culture, to live and mingle with the leaders of a powerful nation. Berdaches were expected to be extraordinary. The Zuni Man-Woman reveals an American West strikingly different from “cowboy-and-Indian” stereotypes. It was a frontier of gender as well as culture, where an ambitious woman like Matilda Stevenson could prove herself the equal of men and where a visionary like Frank Cushing could find the meaning of life by “Going Native.” And it was a frontier where a man dressed as a woman could earn the respect and admiration of Indians and non-Indians alike.

Gay Men's Nonfiction Winner 3rd Annual
During World War II, as the United States called on its citizens to serve in unprecedented numbers, the presence of gay Americans in the armed forces increasingly conflicted with the expanding antihomosexual policies and procedures of the military. In Coming Out Under Fire, Allan Berube examines in-depth and detail these social and political confrontations, not as a story of how the military victimized homosexuals, but as a story of how a dynamic power relationship developed between gay citizens and their government, transforming them both. Drawing on GIs' wartime letters, extensive interviews with gay veterans, and declassified military documents, Berube thoughtfully constructs a startling history of the two wars gay military men and women fought, one for America and another as homosexuals within the military. Berube's book, the inspiration for the 1995 Peabody Award-winning documentary film of the same name, has become a classic since it was published in 1990, just three years prior to the controversial "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which has continued to serve as an uneasy compromise between gays and the military. With a new foreword by historians John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, this book remains a valuable contribution to the history of World War II, as well as to the ongoing debate regarding the role of gays in the U.S. military.

Lesbian Nonfiction Winner 5th Annual
The second volume plunges into the White House years and the Great Depression, the time when Eleanor exerted enormous influence over the course of the country. In the thirties, Eleanor becomes even more surprising and multifaceted. A loyal wife, a devoted mother, a woman who courted romance and adventure, Eleanor Roosevelt was America's most compelling, charismatic, and visionary First Lady. She ran a virtual parallel administration that championed civil rights, affordable housing, and a New Deal for women. She took unpopular stands and often countered her husband's policies, particularly concerning racial justice, women's rights, the plight of refugees, and approaches to Fascism and the Spanish Civil War. The book closes in 1938, as Europe moves toward war. This is an unparalleled presentation of a woman whose life was filled with passionate commitment and who struggled for personal fulfillment. It is a book for all readers of American history and politics, and as the New Deal comes under assault today, a book for readers who care about a decent future for all people.

Bisexual Nonfiction Winner in 30th Annual
New York Times bestseller National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Lambda Literary Award winner The best book of 2017: Time; NPR; People; Elle; The Washington Post; The Los Angeles Times; The Chicago Tribune; Newsday; St. Louis Post-Dispatch; PopSugar; BookRiot  Library Journal; Booklist; Kirkus Reviews; Shelf Awareness; and New York Times bestselling author, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as "wildly undisciplined," Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she casts an insightful and critical eye on her childhood, teens, and twenties, including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life, and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life. With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers and tells a story that hasn't yet been told but needs to be.

Bisexual Nonfiction Winner 26th Annual
Often disguised in public discourse by terms like "gay," "homoerotic," "homosocial," or "queer," bisexuality is strangely absent from queer studies and virtually untreated in film and media criticism. Maria San Filippo aims to explore the central role bisexuality plays in contemporary screen culture, establishing its importance in representation, marketing, and spectatorship. By examining a variety of media genres including art cinema, sexploitation cinema, and vampire films, "bromances," and series television, San Filippo discovers "missed moments" where bisexual readings of these texts reveal a more malleable notion of subjectivity and eroticism. San Filippo's work moves beyond the subject of heteronormativity and responds to "compulsory monosexuality," where it's not necessarily a couple's gender that is at issue, but rather that an individual chooses one or the other. The B Word transcends dominant relational formation (gay, straight, or otherwise) and brings a discursive voice to the field of queer and film studies.

Bisexual Nonfiction Winner 23rd Annual
The first book of its kind internationally, Border Sexualities, Border Families in Schools explores the experiences of bisexual students, mixed sexual orientation families, and polyamorous families in schools. For the first time, a book foregrounds the voices and experiences of these students and families who are "falling into the gaps" or on the borders of a school's gay/straight divide in anti-homophobia policies and programs, and schools recognizing families as meaning either heterosexual couples or, increasingly, homosexual couples. In particular, the research findings which are reported in this book show that "border sexualities" and "border families" use three types of strategies: - passing or normalization and assimilation in school settings; - bordering or negotiation and navigation between the private world of home and public world of the school; and - polluting or non-compliance and resistance, thereby outing their sexualities and families within the school world. Within a social deconstructionist, multicultural, post-colonial, feminist, queer theoretical framework, this book spans health, education, sociology, psychology, gender, family, sexuality, and cultural studies.

Transgender Nonfiction Winner in 30th Annual
Winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association 2018; Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association 2018; Winner of an American Library Association Stonewall Honor 2018; Winner of Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction 2018; and the Winner of the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. The story of Christine Jorgensen, America's first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives, ones lived by African-Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials, early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films, Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the "father of American gynecology," to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible. Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of "cross-dressing" and canonical black literary works that express black men's access to the "female within," Black on Both Sides concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don't Cry out of narrative convenience. Reconstructing these theoretical and historical trajectories furthers our imaginative capacities to conceive more livable black and trans worlds.

Transgender Nonfiction Winner 25th Annual
If feminist studies and transgender studies are so intimately connected, why are they not more deeply integrated? Offering multidisciplinary models for this assimilation, the vibrant essays in Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies suggest timely and necessary changes for institutions of higher learning. Responding to the more visible presence of transgender persons as well as gender theories, the contributing essayists focus on how gender is practiced in academia, health care, social services, and even national border patrols. Working from the premise that transgender is both material and cultural, the contributors address such aspects of the university as administration, sports, curriculum, pedagogy, and the appropriate location for transgender studies. Combining feminist theory, transgender studies, and activism centered on social diversity and justice, these essays examine how institutions as lived contexts shape everyday life.

Anthologies/Nonfiction Winner 16th Annual
This book gives an inside perspective on life as a disabled gay man. Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories reverberates with the sound of "crip-gay" voices rising to be heard above the din of indifference and bias, oppression, and ignorance. This unique collection of compelling first-person narratives is at once assertive, bold, and groundbreaking, filled with characters, and character. Through the intimacy of one-on-one storytelling, gay men with mobility and neuromuscular disorders, spinal cord injury, deafness, blindness, and AIDS, fight isolation from society--and each other--to establish a public identity and a common culture. Queer Crips features more than 30 first-hand accounts from a variety of perspectives, illuminating the reality of the everyday struggle disabled gay men face in a culture obsessed with conformist good looks. Themes include rejection, love, sex, dating rituals, gay-crip married life, and the profound difference between growing up queer and disabled and suffering a life-altering injury or illness in adulthood. Co-edited by Bob Guter, creator, and editor of the webzine BENT: A Journal of Cripgay Voices, the book includes two performance pieces from acclaimed author and actor Greg Walloch poetry from Chris Hewitt, Joel S. Riche, Raymond Luczak, Mark Moody, and co-editor John Killacky essays from BENT contributors Blaine Waterman, Raymond J. Aguilera, Danny Kodmur, Thomas Metz, Max Verga, and Eli Clare interviews with community activist Gordon Elkins and Alan Sable, one of the first self-identified gay psychotherapists in the United States and much more! Queer Crips is a forum for neglected crip-gay voices speaking words that are candid, edgy, bold, dreamy, challenging, and sexy. The book is essential reading for academics and students working in lesbian and gay studies, and disability studies, and for anyone who's ever visited the place where queerness and disability meet.

A concise and balanced guide to the history, people, places, and ideas are important to lesbian and gay communities worldwide. Linking a detailed chronology of homosexual life and achievement to nearly 600 fascinating articles, ranging from ACT UP to Lesbian Continuum, from Military to Wilde, it explores many facets of today's gay and lesbian subcultures in remarkable depth. Features fascinating quotes, little-known facts, reading lists, and useful tables: one lists famous pseudonyms; another, gay detective novels. More than 250 photos and illustrations, this is the first guide to cover both lesbian and gay male points of view, offering information on their common concerns as well as their different histories and interests.

Anthologies/Nonfiction Winner 8th Annual
An overview of the gay and lesbian presence in a variety of literature and historical periods includes nearly four hundred works by such figures as Michaelangelo, Armistead Maupin, Sappho, and Shakespeare. The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage is a reader's companion to this impressive body of work. It provides overviews of gay and lesbian presence in a variety of literature and historical periods; in-depth critical essays on major gay and lesbian authors in world literature; and briefer treatments of other topics and figures important in appreciating the rich and varied gay and lesbian literary traditions. Included are nearly 400 alphabetically arranged articles by more than 175 scholars from around the world.