The original gay liberation struggle and story in the words of Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society, the first organization to openly discuss and champion queer issues at a time (late 1940s) when you could be imprisoned, institutionalized or worse for “coming out.” Hay discusses such seemingly disparate topics as Indian Berdache traditions, trade unionism, Marxism, even New Age spirituality, reconciling these and many more subjects into a cohesive whole, all the while living a remarkable life observed through queer-tinted glasses. MW

Publisher: Beacon
Hardback: 352 pages

Originally written in 1983, this revised edition of the classic Weinberg-Kamel work has collected recent research and writing on sadomasochism, including material never before published. Topics include gay and lesbian SM; SM and prostitution; women in the SM scene; unusual body modifications, including piercing, branding and burning; sadomasochistic organizations; the role of pain and fantasy in SM; and the increasing integration of SM themes into areas of popular culture such as the arts, literature, mass media and fashion. Eighteen articles explaining the weirdness of human nature and sexuality.
Discusses the urge for non-mainstream body modification as a rite of passage, ceremonial symbolism and affiliation. The ritual symbolism is to make visible and tangible beliefs, ideas, values, sentiments and psychological dispositions that cannot directly be perceived. For the purpose of affiliation with a desired social order, people surrender what is dearest to them: the body itself. Through adornment, the naked skin moves one from the biological world to the cultural world. CF

Publisher: Prometheus
Paperback: 312 pages

According to Paris, some women who choose abortion are actually expressing their long-term maternal feelings. A child must be wanted, they believe, or else its life is a living death. Women who abort see beyond the fetus to the true care that every child must have, making abortion a sacrificial act. The author’s writings on issues of life and death, of love and children, are religious, unlike the work of those who favor abortion but rationalize it as a private and medical act only. “At the other extreme, the pro-lifers see the spiritual dimension, but keep it imprisoned within official orthodoxies, as if no other form of spirituality existed,” she says. Paris presents abortion as a sacrifice to Artemis, who refuses to give of life if the gift is not pure. She holds that there are spiritual standards govern family and children other than those dictated by courts, medicine and traditional religion. SC

Publisher: Spring
Paperback: 113 pages

I was really hoping to learn something fantastic from this book. Nay, even enjoy it. No such luck. Totally incomprehensible linguistic definitions. There’s no respite from the convoluted grammar and impenetrable ramblings. You’ll have to be desperate for one more book to read on de Sade, or in need of someone else’s opinion to crib for an end of term paper, before you get anything practical out of this thing.
The only revealing detail of this whole monolith is that we are repeatedly informed that Monsieur Pierre Klossowski finds it indisputable—and the one and only, totally triumphant key to understanding and appreciating de Sade—that sodomy is the ultimate symbolic and actual social taboo around which all else falls into place. What a sheltered, cerebral life he must have led. Ah me… next! GPO

Publisher: Northwestern University
Paperback: 144 pages

How science conquered sin, from a noted sexology “sexpert.” “The story of how sex research developed, from its early roots in religious doctrine and folklore to its current status as an emerging science.” Reveals how both the personalities of influential investigators and changing public attitudes have shaped the substance and direction of sex research. Chapters on such issues as theory, gender, changing attitudes and Freud and his gang of mind benders.

Publisher: Basic
Paperback: 384 pages

An unabashedly cheerful, unpretentious and thoroughly comprehensive how-to manual as well as demystification of SM sexuality. “While we welcome the growing acceptance of SM in society, trendiness has its inherent perils and is one of the reasons that we felt our book was needed. Misinformation is being circulated as novice players teach other novices practices they have gleaned from fiction… We want those interested in sadomasochism or any of its subsets including dominance and submission, bondage and discipline, spanking, erotic humiliation, role-play and others to understand the importance of having access to the SM community. We discuss safety issues, ideas for scenes, recognizing good and bad attitudes, finding playmates, knowing the difference between fantasy and reality and learning that techniques are means not ends.”
Chapters include: “Learning the Body You Want to Bludgeon,” “Non-Government Sanctioned Sex and Torture,” “Steering Your Love-Boat Into the Rapids,” “Conditioning—3 Ways to Skinner a Pussy,” “Straight Facts and Bent Phalluses,” “Bondage Techniques (Breast Bondage, Oriental Rope Dress, Plastic Wrap Bondage, Hoods and Sensory Deprivation, Spandex, etc.),” “Reading the Submissive’s Butt After a Scene,” “Orchestrating Your Percussion,” “When the Inner Child Deserves a Spanking,” “Experiencing Pain as Pleasure,” “Mindfuck, Not Mental Rape,” “Furnishing Your Dungeon,” and much more.

Publisher: Mystic Rose
Paperback: 277 pages
Illustrated

Written from experience and personal use, a guide to herbs and potions to enhance sexual prowess and pleasure, where to obtain them (mail-order suppliers included). Includes herbal blends, Chinese herbs, etc., and results from said experiments. A cult classic now revised and updated, once again available.
Originally published by High Times/Level Press, it is meant to be a guide to the wonderful world of altered states. There seems to be a large amount of information on the start-up, care and maintenance of an erection. Includes legal, i.e., amyl nitrate, basil, DMSO, garlic, ginseng, nutmeg and more, plus illegal, i.e., cannabis, cocaine, methaqualone and opium, and the down-right obscure, i.e., absinthe, dangerous, datura, hormones, iboga and others, listed in alphabetical order. The first sentence of each entry briefly defines the substance, what it is and where it comes from. Information on the history or scientific data is included. It is meant to derail the overpriced mail-order aphrodisiac market with accurate information along with appropriate warnings about misuse. CF

Publisher: Ronin
Paperback: 89 pages

The first of two slender volumes of black-and-white portraits from the San Francisco leather scene document a time, a place and a way of life as definitively as Weegee’s tabloid images did the street life of New York in the 1940s. The men and women captured in Rosen’s simple, uninflected pictures—lit flat against seamless backdrops—constitute a pretty effective visual census of contemporary SM culture, or at least its more unabashed exemplars. The leathermen, body-modifiers, dyke daddies and radical hets look optimistically out from the frames, needles through their genitals and fists in each other’s orifices, reveling in the photographer’s uncritical acceptance. Though a few mighties of the rad-sex underground, including Susie Bright and Fakir Musafar, put in benedictory guest appearances, most of Rosen’s models are drawn from the rank and file of the SFSM party crowd.
Indeed, the very unpretentiousness of Rosen’s style is a kind of agitprop in itself. Avoiding both the idolatrous neoclassicism of Robert Mapplethorpe and the voyeuristic grotesquery of Joel-Peter Witkin, he treats his subjects neither as icons nor as freaks, but rather as folks. In the process, he invites us to do the same. Given his unflinchingly graphic depictions of sadomasochistic practices from fisting to penis bifurcation, the invitation is pretty seditious. Almost as subversive is the casual indifference Rosen and his friends demonstrate toward conventional ideals of physical attractiveness. Received notions about what body types are suitable for sexual portraiture clearly have no applicability here. The sincerity of desire, rather than the statistics of age, weight and chromosome count, is the source of sexual allure. If Rosen’s vision is skewed toward sadomasochistic utopianism, it is a useful corrective to the transgression-for-its-own-sake approach of so much contemporary SM-derived imagery. IL

Publisher: Shaynew
Paperback: 63 pages

Nature versus nurture has long been the key question when probing the roots of sexual orientation. Written with the educated lay-person in mind, The Sexual Brain puts forward the case that the diversity of human sexual behavior and feelings is best viewed in terms of the development, structure and function of the brain circuits that produce them. In particular, LeVay posits that the hypothalamus size in homosexual men’s brains may be on average smaller than the hypothalamus of heterosexual men. While critics have questioned the diversity and size of the population group in this text’s underlying study, LeVay’s work has identified a possible physiological link in the determination of sexual orientation and will no doubt act as impetus for succeeding generations of researchers. JAT

Publisher: MIT
Paperback: 192 pages

The second of two slender volumes of black-and-white portraits from the San Francisco leather scene document a time, a place and a way of life as definitively as Weegee’s tabloid images did the street life of New York in the 1940s. The men and women captured in Rosen’s simple, uninflected pictures—lit flat against seamless backdrops—constitute a pretty effective visual census of contemporary SM culture, or at least its more unabashed exemplars. The leathermen, body-modifiers, dyke daddies and radical hets look optimistically out from the frames, needles through their genitals and fists in each other’s orifices, reveling in the photographer’s uncritical acceptance. Though a few mighties of the rad-sex underground, including Susie Bright and Fakir Musafar, put in benedictory guest appearances, most of Rosen’s models are drawn from the rank and file of the SFSM party crowd.
Indeed, the very unpretentiousness of Rosen’s style is a kind of agitprop in itself. Avoiding both the idolatrous neoclassicism of Robert Mapplethorpe and the voyeuristic grotesquery of Joel-Peter Witkin, he treats his subjects neither as icons nor as freaks, but rather as folks. In the process, he invites us to do the same. Given his unflinchingly graphic depictions of sadomasochistic practices from fisting to penis bifurcation, the invitation is pretty seditious. Almost as subversive is the casual indifference Rosen and his friends demonstrate toward conventional ideals of physical attractiveness. Received notions about what body types are suitable for sexual portraiture clearly have no applicability here. The sincerity of desire, rather than the statistics of age, weight and chromosome count, is the source of sexual allure. If Rosen’s vision is skewed toward sadomasochistic utopianism, it is a useful corrective to the transgression-for-its-own-sake approach of so much contemporary SM-derived imagery. IL

Publisher: Shaynew
Paperback: 71 pages