MsUnderstood By: Jerry “Nykole” Hodges On October 10, 1956, a baby was born to a middle-class family in Mobile, Alabama. The couple, Steve Edmond Ray and Lois Arlene Mott-Ray, already had two other children, Lila Louise and Doyle Edmond. They were a happy family. However, their third child’s life would not be an easy one. Being born as a hermaphrodite, intersex, brought forth many struggles in her life. From a young age, Jerry “Nykole” Hodges always had female tendencies, like playing with paper dolls, wearing her sister’s dresses, and even attending ballet class. Throughout her sixty-four years of life, Hodges has faced abuse, physical, emotional, and sexual, from churches, classmates, and people in her everyday walks in life. After a marriage to a woman for twenty-seven years failed, Hodges began to live as a woman. She is now married to Charles Hodges, and even her husband has felt the ridicule and abuse thrusted upon him for his relationship with her. In the past, Hodges struggled with suicidal thoughts, but with major help from her husband and God, she is able to find comfort. Hodges’ hope in writing her story is to help others like her. While it is not easy, there is hope in faith, walking with God, and those family and friends who are supportive. Please know there are others out there who can share in your pain and who can help guide you to a better life living as your true self.

Gwendoline Summers knows what it is like to baby her husband. Her first book is a guide to other women seeking to take their partner in hand and make them the baby they both need him to be. This is not an enforced babying guide, but rather one to help women who already KNOW that their partners need the security of nappies, a dummy and a babyish lifestyle, to achieve that goal. This book is not just for women with AB partners but for ALL women whether their partners are AB or not! She takes it step by step on how to slowly get your partner into nappies and other baby items. If your partner is AB then you are already part way there, but if they are non-AB, this book is still for you. It is a guidebook along a journey of letting our men express the infancy inside that is so often just beneath the surface.

"Sebring, Florida knew nothing about Grand Prix Racing when Adora Bayles was born there in 1931. Growing up in a dysfunctional family, she married into a dysfunctional family. Sometime, during that marriage, she realized there was a way out of the bickering, manipulative, jealousy-ridden, envy-ridden, low self-esteem-ridden life style. Through nine months of extensive counseling, she suddenly became functional. The rest of the family remained dysfunctional."

In Sissy Insurgencies Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how sissiness constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Whether examining Washington’s practice of cleaning as an iteration of sissiness, Baldwin’s self-fashioned sissy deportment, or sissiphobia in professional sports and black nationalism, Ross demonstrates that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy. In this way, sissiness constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.

If They Didn't Talk To Daddy is the story of Lanell, Victoria, Adrianna and O Kyle, the victims of their father's warped and brutal misogyny. Although outwardly happy and prosperous, with a stable home life, behind closed doors, the Kyles were a family plagued by abusive marriages and imbalanced power dynamics between husband and wife. It all began when O was sixteen. Adrianna, the snoop of the family and the novel's narrator, notices her father started disappearing with O for long stretches of

The empty Sky Room was an oval Victorian greenhouse restaurant atop Chicago’s about-to-be-destroyed 17-story Majestic Hotel. It was a penthouse covering three-fourths of the roof, which was surrounded by a safety parapet about three feet high, capped with glazed tile the green color of oxidized bronze. I expected that Willie would be waiting to leap out at me from behind one of the abandoned fake plants. All I heard over the storm was the murmuring of pigeons hiding in the chimney from the rain. I stood in the center of the room, figuring Willie must have secreted herself in her trench coat and hat against one of the ebony oak pilasters along the edge of the room. I waited for lightning to give away her position. It did. I saw her outside the glass walls through rivulets of rain, as sheet lightning illuminated the clouds over the lake, silhouetting Willie perched atop the parapet wall on the far corner of the building like some sort of gargoyle. The tails of her trench coat were flapping in the gale rising from Quincy Street. Her rain hat was gone and her drenched black curls were writhing on each side of her face. I ran to the door she’d left open and stepped toward her. She crouched like a swimmer on a starting block, staring at the bottom of the pool stories below... a very dark pool. A flashing traffic light jaundiced her face like some wild Hitchcock effect. She didn’t look at me, but down toward the blinking amber light. I stopped dead in my tracks, not sure what to do. She was perched only a few feet from where I stood. If I startled her, she could fall. I looked for a gentle way to get her attention. The low thunder from the sheet lightning over Lake Michigan growled in our faces. Suddenly a shock wave of light and heat, like a nuclear blast, erupted as lightning struck the boom of the demolition derrick. A gust of hot firey dragon breath belched from the crane. Willie bolted straight up, but she lost her footing on the parapet’s wet glazed cap. As she did, I leapt from the doorway and was able to catch hold of the tail of her trench coat just as her butt hit the edge and slipped over the side. I had the trench coat and the trench coat had Willie, but only by her arms. I was in a tug-of-war where both sides would win, or both sides would lose. Without thought, I collected all the material from her coat that I could and twisted it by ducking and pirouetting behind the parapet. This wrapped the makeshift hawser around my left forearm for a more-secure grip. I peered over the parapet where I could see the top of Willie’s head with her arms raised up above her like count Dracula about to turn into a bat and take flight. “Cross your arms!” I shouted, but there was no response.

On a dusty Texas roadside Jenna Garwood has just gone into labor. Hardheaded rancher Dax comes to her rescue and delivers her baby daughter. Single dad Dax knows what it's like to raise a newborn alone, and won't turn his back on Jenna—so he offers her a housekeeping job. But he's not prepared for the fireworks between them, or for Jenna's secret, which could shatter their hard-won trust….