It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today's ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come. Smith ( Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall ( Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. Bear Bergman ( Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor ( All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn ( Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri ( Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson ( Code White), Anne Fleming ( Anomaly), Michael V.

'Ĭontributors such as Jewelle Gomez ( The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman ( Intersex), S. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words 'butch' or 'femme. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. In the summer of 2009, butch writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote and gender researcher and femme dynamo Zena Sharman wrote down a wish-list of their favourite queer authors they wanted to continue and expand the butch-femme conversation. Whether she’s pondering quirky family tendencies (“Drag”), reflecting on “queerness” (“Another”), or recounting scintillating adventures in San Francisco’s sex clubs, Hillman’s brave and fierce vision for cultural and societal change shines through.Named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association

In first-person prose as intimate as a diary, Thea Hillman redefines memoir in a series of compelling stories that take a no-holds-barred look at sex, gender, family, and community. What is “intersex”? According to the Intersex Society of North America, the word describes someone born with sex chromosomes, genitalia, or an internal reproductive system that are neither clearly male nor clearly female. Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word) chronicles one person’s search for self in a world obsessed with normal. Poetic, political, and deeply personal.”-Beth Lisick, author of Helping Me Help Myself “An important and wonderfully disarming book. “There’s nothing else in print like this amazing and courageous book.”-Patrick Califia, author of Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism 'It's utterly impossible to not be spellbound by performer-activist Thea Hillman, in person or in print. Intersex, too, is gorgeously written.'-Women's Review of Books 'Hillman's utterly unabashed memoir.showcases both the personal, embodied realities of intersex, and the social and political milieus that shape them.

“Hillman’s writing is sexy because it’s smart and refuses to simplify things.”- Fabula Magazine “In Hillman’s world, the surer you become about who you are, the more vulnerable you get.”- The San Francisco Bay Guardian

Intersex by Thea Hillman