This contributed volume brings together personal accounts and scholarly research in an examination of the LGBTQIA+ Italian American experience and representation in North American media. This is a population that has long been ignored both as an object of study and as a media-maker and consumer. Through consistent filmic representation, the image of the Italian American has become archetypal, leaving us with a set of immediately recognizable characters: the hyper macho blue-collar greaser, the anti-intellectual GTL Guido, the child-obsessed mamma, and the heteronormative mafia family. The rhetorical and literal loudness of these characters drowns out other possible embodiments of Italian American identity so that few examples survive of Italian Americans that do not conform to these classed, heterosexual modes of being. This volume fills that void, foregrounding the importance of representation and of rethinking the historical narratives and cultural stereotypes surrounding Italian American identity. This book is especially designed for those with an interest in queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, Italian American studies, and media and cultural studies.

The groundbreaking work on being homosexual in America—available again only from Penguin Classics and with a new foreword by Dan Savage Originally published in 1971, Merle Miller’s On Being Different is a pioneering and thought-provoking book about being homosexual in the United States. Just two years after the Stonewall riots, Miller wrote a poignant essay for the New York Times Magazine entitled “What It Means To Be a Homosexual” in response to a homophobic article published in Harper’s Magazine. Described as “the most widely read and discussed essay of the decade,” it carried the seed that would blossom into On Being Different—one of the earliest memoirs to affirm the importance of coming out. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Queering Italian Media analyzes and offers queer readings of LGBTQIA+ representation in Italian media. The contributors apply various understandings of "queer" and "media" as they discuss the relationship between the political and social lives of queer populations in Italy and investigate their representations in film, news media, television, social media, and viewer-generated media sites. Queering Italian Media examines queer positionality, challenges notions of Italianness as it relates to and is reflected in media, and queers understandings of viewer engagement and participation in media consumption and production.

Finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award in the Lesbian Memoir/Biography Category presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation This vivid memoir speaks the intense truth of a Bronx tomboy whose 1960s girlhood was marked by her father's lullabies laced with his dissociative memories of combat in World War II. At four years old, Annie Rachele Lanzillotto bounced her Spaldeen on the stoop and watched the boys play stickball in the street; inside, she hid silver teaspoons behind the heat pipes to tap calls for help while her father beat her mother. At eighteen, on the edge of ambitious freedom, her studies at Brown University were halted by the growth of a massive tumor inside her chest. Thus began a wild, truth-seeking journey for survival, fueled by the lessons of lasagna vows, and Spaldeen ascensions. From the stoops of the Bronx to cross-dressing on the streets of Egypt, from the cancer ward at Memorial Sloan-Kettering to New York City's gay club scene of the '80s, this poignant and authentic story takes us from underneath the dining room table to the stoop, the sidewalk, the street, and, ultimately, out into the wide world of immigration, gay subculture, cancer treatment, mental illness, gender dynamics, drug addiction, domestic violence, and a vast array of Italian American characters. With a quintessential New Yorker as narrator and guide, this journey crescendos in a reluctant return home to the timeless wisdom of a peasant, immigrant grandmother, Rosa Marsico Petruzzelli, who shows us the sweetest essence of soul.

A cult modern classic, Tropic of Capricorn is as daring, frank and influential as Henry Miller first novel, Tropic of Cancer A story of sexual and spiritual awakening, Tropic of Capricorn shocked readers when it was published in 1939. A mixture of fiction and autobiography, it is the story of Henry V. Miller who works for the Cosmodemonic telegraph company in New York in the 1920s and tries to write the most important work of literature that was ever published. Tropic of Capricorn paints a dazzling picture of the life of the writer and of New York City between the wars: the skyscrapers and the sewers, the lust and the dejection, the smells and the sounds of a city that is perpetually in motion, threatening to swallow everyone and everything. 'Literature begins and ends with the meaning of what Miller has done' Lawrence Durrell 'The only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past' George Orwell 'The greatest American writer' Bob Dylan Henry Miller (1891-1980) is one of the most important American writers of the 20th century. His best-known novels include Tropic of Cancer (1934), Tropic of Capricorn (1939), and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, 1949, Plexus, 1953, and Nexus, 1959), all published in France and banned in the US and the UK until 1964. He is widely recognised as an irreverent, risk-taking writer who redefined the novel and made the link between the European avant-garde and the American Beat generation.

“A vast, thoroughly wonderful assortment of poetry, memoirs and stories . . . that defines today’s female Italian-American experience” (Publishers Weekly). Often stereotyped as nurturing others through food, Italian-American women have often struggled against this simplistic image to express the realities of their lives. In this unique collection, over 50 Italian-American female writers speak in voices that are loud, boisterous, sweet, savvy, and often subversively funny. Drawing on personal and cultural memories rooted in experiences of food, they dissolve conventional images, replacing them with a sumptuous, communal feast of poetry, stories, and memoir. This collection also delves into unexpected, sometimes shocking terrain as these courageous authors bear witness to aspects of the Italian American experience that normally go unspoken—mental illness, family violence, incest, drug addiction, AIDS, and environmental degradation. As provocative as it is appetizing, “this collection of verse and prose pieces . . . reveals the evocative and provocative power of food as event and as symbol, as well as the diversity of these women’s lives and their ambivalence regarding the role of nurturer” (Library Journal).

A Companion to Asian American Studies is comprised of 20 previously published essays that have played an important historical role in the conceptualization of Asian American studies as a field. Essays are drawn from international publications, from the 1970s to the present Includes coverage of psychology, history, literature, feminism, sexuality, identity politics, cyberspace, pop culture, queerness, hybridity, and diasporic consciousness Features a useful introduction by the editor reviewing the selections, and outlining future possibilities for the field Can be used alongside Asian American Studies After Critical Mass, edited by Kent A. Ono, for a complete reference to Asian American Studies.