Set against a vibrant South Bronx neighborhood and the queer youth culture of Manhattan's piers, Chulito is a coming-of-age, coming out love story of a sexy, tough, hip hop-loving, young Latino man and the colorful characters who populate his block. Chulito, which means "cutie," is one of the boys, and everyone in his neighborhood has seen him grow up--the owner of the local bodega, the Lees from the Chinese restaurant, his buddies from the corner, and all of his neighbors and friends, including Carlos, who was Chulito's best friend until they hit puberty and people started calling Carlos a pato...a faggot. Culito rejects Carlos, buries his feelings for him, and becomes best friends with Kamikaze, a local drug dealer. When Carlos comes home from his first year away from college and they share a secret kiss, Chulito's worlds collide as his ideas of being a young man, being macho, and being in love are challenged. Vivid, sexy, funny, heartbreaking, and fearless, this knock out novel is destine to become a gay classic.

This volume explores the relationship between representation, affect, and emotion in texts for children and young adults. It demonstrates how texts for young people function as tools for emotional socialisation, enculturation, and political persuasion. The collection provides an introduction to this emerging field and engages with the representation of emotions, ranging from shame, grief, and anguish to compassion and happiness, as psychological and embodied states and cultural constructs with ideological significance. It also explores the role of narrative empathy in relation to emotional socialisation and to the ethics of representation in relation to politics, social justice, and identity categories including gender, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality. Addressing a range of genres, including advice literature, novels, picture books, and film, this collection examines contemporary, historical, and canonical children’s and young adult literature to highlight the variety of approaches to emotion and affect in these texts and to consider the ways in which these approaches offer new perspectives on these texts. The individual chapters apply a variety of theoretical approaches and perspectives, including cognitive poetics, narratology, and poststructuralism, to the analysis of affect and emotion in children’s and young adult literature.

This text offers secondary ELA educators guided instructional approaches for including queer-themed young adult (YA) literature in the English language arts classroom. Each chapter spotlights the reading of one queer-themed YA novel, and offers pre-, during-, and after reading activities that guide students to a deeper understanding of the content while increasing their literacy practices. While each chapter focuses on a specific queer-themed YA novel, readers will discover the many opportunities for cross-disciplinary study. Thw emphasis on English language arts content as a focus for teaching LGBTQ young adult literature marks a shift from the first edition.

"Space Oddities: Difference and Identity in the American City" approaches a space (and place) central to the American imagination-the city. In particular, this volume discusses the paradoxes of American cities and American urban life. In this way, the book critically engages with the paradoxes of the American identity, embodied by cultural practices in, and cultural representations of, urban life in the United States. (Series: American Studies in Austria, Vol. 16) [Subject: Sociology, American Studies, Cultural Studies, Urban Studies]

Editor Steve Berman has selected twenty stories--some moving essays, some splendid works of fiction--from the prior year that best feature the lives, loves and losses of gay men. With tales by fresh voices and established writers, Best Gay Stories offers readers indiscretions, poignant trysts, and reminiscences that are as evocative as they are imaginative.

This book chronicles an ethnographic teams involvement over a span of fifteen years with the people of a poor, largely Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York City. Jagna Sharff focuses on a group of families who live within a radius of a few blocks of her storefront office, especially the children who come first to interact with the team. She contrasts her teams initial observations of how people grapple with daily life with the residents expressed hopes and dreams in a community lacking jobs but rife with underground activities. Through lively and interconnected stories, she traces over time the fate of the neighborhood and the outcomes for individual children and adults during an era when the local and national policy of the war on poverty was transmuted into a war against the poor. The books lyrical, cinematically vivid style makes it appealing both for college social science courses and for the general public. }In King Kong on 4th Street, Jagna Sharff chronicles an ethnographic teams involvement over a span of fifteen years with the people of a poor, largely Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York City. Anchoring her observations in field notes, she recounts the joys, fears, and disappointments of daily life as well as the drama of large events. Arson, the murder of a popular local teenager, the mobbing of a grocery store as an act of retribution for his deathall are projected onto a canvas of shifting local and national policies toward poor people and neighborhoods.Sharff provides new insights into gender and family roles, how adaptations to available resources from the welfare state may shape the membership of households, and how children may be trained for specific adult roles that will advance the familys well-being. She also reveals how the underground economy, particularly the commerce in drugs whose profits are realized outside of the neighborhood, undermines neighborhood-wide solidarity and sends people scrambling against one another for jobs in the quasi-licit and illicit sector. Following the lives of a number of families into the next generation, Sharffs ethnographic team documents how external political decisions that change the war on poverty into a war on the poor affected them. Paramilitary sweeps of the neighborhood, in tandem with gentrification and declining social services, produce severe dislocations and relocation to homeless shelters, welfare hotels, and prisons. But the reality described is not all grim.The books vivid style shows that life is more than grim reality. People get real pleasure from raising children and taking part in the human drama around them. Kinfolk, real and fictive, keep each other afloat and reconnected to new neighborhoods and opportunities, including that of upward mobility through religious conversion. Adults and children achieve satisfaction and a measure of security through grit, wit, and acts of heroism and solidarity. }

Los Angeles, 1943. It's the era of the Zoot Suit Riots, and Flaca and Cuata have a problem. It's bigger than being grounded by their strict mother. It's bigger than tensions with the soldiers stationed nearby. And it's shaped like a five-foot-tall lizard. When a lost member of an unknown underground species needs help, the sisters must scramble to keep their new friend away from a corrupt military scientist—but they'll do it in style. Cartoonist Marco Finnegan presents Lizard in a Zoot Suit, an outrageous, historical, sci-fi graphic novel. "[Lizard in a Zoot Suit] is both a politically charged drama and a pulpy sci-fi story all in one, and an ideal graphic novel for Young Adults."—Comicon.com "A new YA graphic novel [that] takes a moment in real world history and turns it into the basis for a thrilling adventure that is never anything less than stylish."—The Hollywood Reporter