When Things Go Really South No one is surprised when feisty Delilah Dickinson opens her own literary travel agency in Atlanta after her divorce. But during her first group's tour of an old plantation modeled after Tara from Gone with the Wind--complete with a full cast of actors--things go south really fast. The actor playing Clark Gable playing Rhett Butler is found dead, apparently the victim of a fatal dose of Southern in-hospitality. Before anyone can even think "Where shall I go? What shall I do?" Delilah finds herself taking over the investigation when the #1 suspect turns out to be her son-in-law. But life starts imitating art when the actors begin taking their roles a little too seriously--believing they actually are Ashley Wilkes, Scarlett O'Hara, and Melanie. Next stop: Sunset Boulevard. "Amusing, breathlessly quick." --Publishers Weekly "Liva J. Washburn's mysteries are among the best." --Mystery News "Gone with the Wind fans will cozy up to this tale." --Mystery Scene

Growing Your Own Truth is a deconstruction of the gay coming out process, as well as a defense of the concept of “personal truth,” with many personal stories, examples and applications to relationships in general. Andrew Phineas exposes the inside of his coming out, following his story as well as building upon reflections about life and Truth as we individually and traditionally understand it. The author envisions a world where personal truth is more easily shared among individuals to arrive at broader concepts and offers several aids as appendices to assist in the process of effectively sharing personal truth with others and listening to their revelations without judgement. The work is philosophy studded with deeply human illustrations and occasionally unique observations. Coming out later in life after a fairly conservative religious upbringing and a divorce, the author worked on three continents, met a variety of friends and potential partners, and after a long process, offers some unique combinations of ideas, cultural reactions, and personal stubbornness in order to clarify and live out his personal truth.

Meet the out crowd that’s really “in”—the gay and lesbian stand-up comics who’ve come out of the closet and stormed the mainstream with the hippest and wittiest comedy acts of the last three decades. In A Funny Time to Be Gay, Ed Karvoski Jr. traces the evolution of gay and lesbian comedy from the few pioneers in New York's Greenwich Village in the seventies, to the mavericks who played San Francisco's famed Valencia Rose in the eighties, to the comics who starred in their own TV specials in the nineties and continue to headline comedy clubs. With short introductions that reveal the performers’ approaches to both their sexual and professional identities, over thirty hilarious monologues capture the diversity of the gay and lesbian comic community.

Haskell keeps both novel and movie at hand, moving from one to the other, comparing and distinguishing what Margaret Mitchell expresses from what obsessive producer David O. Selznick, directors George Cukor and Victor Fleming, screenplaywrights Sidney Howard and a host of fixers (including Ben Hecht and Scott Fitzgerald), and actors Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Hattie McDaniel, and others convey. She emphasizes the contributions of Selznick, Leigh, and in an entire chapter, Mitchell, drawing heavily and analytically on existing biographies, the literature of women and the Civil War, Civil War films (especially Birth of a Nation and Jezebel), and film criticism to such engaging effect as to not just revisit GWTW but to revive and intensify the enduring fascination of what Selznick dubbed the American Bible. --Olson, Ray Copyright 2009 Booklist.

A Working History of Working Girls (and Guys) Have you ever wondered how Heidi Fleiss came to be the face of upscale prostitution or if Casanova really was the world's greatest lover? How about why Latin playboy Rubi Rubirosa got the nickname "The Ding Dong Daddy"? Anything but judgmental, Whore Stories sheds light on one of our more stigmatized icons: The Prostitute. Featuring the true stories of famous streetwalkers, call girls, rent boys, and go-go dancers, this book offers a revealing look at the men and women who have blazed the bawdy trail of prostitution since the dawn of time. While you may think that you know everything about this occupation, Whore Stories includes plenty of details and even celebrities, such as Maya Angelou and Bob Dylan, that will leave you in awe. From private schools and child preachers to mime fantasies and unfortunate amputations, this book uncovers the truth behind the world's oldest profession.

What happens when the defining moment of your life might be a figment of your imagination? How do you understand -- and live with -- definitive feelings of having been abused when the origin of those feelings won't adhere to a singular event but are rather diffused across years of experience? In Bullied: The Story of an Abuse, Jonathan Alexander meditates on how, as a young man, he struggled with the realization that the story he'd been telling himself about being abused by a favorite uncle as a child might actually just have been a “story” -- a story he told himself and others to justify both his lifelong struggle with anxiety and to explain his attraction to other men. Story though it was, Alexander maintains that some form of abuse did occur. In writing that is at turns reflective, analytic, and hallucinatory, Alexander traces what it means to suffer homophobic abuse when such is diffused across multiple actors and locales, implicating a family, a school, a culture, and a politics -- as opposed to a singular individual who just happened to be the only openly gay man in young Alexander's life. Along the way, Alexander reflects on Jussie Smollett, drug abuse, MAGA-capped boys, sadomasochism, Catholic priests, cruising, teaching young adult fiction about rape, and a host of other oddly but intimately related topics.