LGBTQ+ Art & Photography Books

Over the last century, many artists have made works that challenge dominant models of gender and sexuality. The results can be sexy or serious, satirical or tender, discreetly coded or defiantly outspoken.

This beautiful book illustrates the wide variety of queer art from around the world exploring bodies and identity, love and desire, prejudice and protest through drawing, painting, photography, sculpture and installation.

70 outstanding works from 1900 to the present reveal how queer experiences have differed across time and place, and how art has been part of a story of changing attitudes and emerging identities.

Featuring works by, among others, Egon Schiele, Duncan Grant, Claude Cahun, Hannah Höch, Frida Kahlo, David Hockney, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, Allyson Mitchell and Tomoko Kashiki all of whom subverted the norms of their day via bold, new forms of expression, A Queer Little History of Art is a celebration of over 100 years of queer creativity.

This ad is gender neutral , proclaimed a 2016 poster for the fashion brand Diesel; I resist definitions , announced a Calvin Klein ad in the same year, while a Louis Vuitton shoot featured Jaden Smith, son of actor Will Smith, wearing a skirt like a natural.

Fashion magazines have printed countless features on the blurring of gender barriers, while brands including Yves Saint-Laurent, Gucci, Burberry, Givenchy and Dolce & Gabbana have all interpreted the concept girls will be boys and boys will be girls in their own individual style.

The previous turn of the century was as obsessed with androgyny as this one, as seen in the art of Edward Burne-Jones and Gustave Moreau, and the writings of Oscar Wilde and the mystic Joséphin Péladan.

From the late 19th to the early 21st century, the genders have blended: from Berlin in the 1920s to Hollywood of the 1930s with Garbo to Dietrich; from the 1940s Bright Young Things to the androgynous pop stars of the 1970s, and beyond.

What do these variations on a theme have in common? What has caused the dizzying rise of androgyny? Why has this concept, a staple of ancient myth that was first discussed in Plato s Symposium, been revived today?

Accompanied by a striking selection of contemporary photographs, Patrick Mauriès presents a condensed cultural history of androgyny, drawing on the worlds of art and literature to give us a deeper understanding of the strange but timeless human drive to escape from defined categories.

A revised, updated edition of the acclaimed historical overview of Queer art – available for the first time in paperback

Art & Queer Culture  is an unprecedented survey of visual art and alternative sexualities from the late nineteenth century to the present. Beautifully illustrated and clearly written, this special edition has been updated to include the art and visual culture that has emerged since the publication of its acclaimed first edition in 2013.

A group of new contributors – themselves gay, lesbian, queer and trans – join the primary authors in emphasising the global sweep of queer contemporary art and the newfound visibility of gender non-conforming artists. In a compact, reader-friendly format, this revised volume packs over 130 years of queer art history.

Art and Queer Culture   features work by famous artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe alongside that of AIDS activists, lesbian separatists, and pre-Stonewall photographers and scrapbook-keepers who did not regard themselves as artists at all. The volume traces a spectacular history of queer life and creativity in the modern age.

MarsArt after Stonewall reveals the impact of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender civil rights movement on the art world.

Illustrated with more than 200 works, this groundbreaking volume stands as a visual history of twenty years in American queer life. It focuses on openly LGBT artists like Nan Goldin, Harmony Hammond, Lyle Ashton Harris, Greer Langton, Glenn Ligon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Catherine Opie, and Andy Warhol, as well as the practices of such artists as Diane Arbus, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Karen Finley in terms of their engagement with queer subcultures.

The Stonewall Riots of June 1969 sparked the beginning of the struggle for gay and lesbian equality, and yet fifty years later, key artists who fomented the movement remain little known.

This book tells the stories behind their works which cut across media, mixing performance, photographs, painting, sculpture, film, and music with images taken from magazines, newspapers, and television.

David Wojnarowicz was a Polish-American painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter/recording artist and AIDS activist prominent in the East Village art scene. He incorporated personal narratives influenced by both his struggle with AIDS as well as his political activism in his art until his death from the disease in 1992.

From the author's violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most provocative artists of his generation - Close to the Knives is his powerful and iconoclastic memoir.

Street life, drugs, art and nature, family, AIDS, politics, friendship and acceptance: Wojnarowicz challenges us to examine our lives - politically, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically.

Frida Kahlo stepped into the limelight in 1929 when she married the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. She was 22; he was 43. Hailed as Rivera's exotic young wife who 'dabbles in art', she went on to produce brilliant paintings, but remained in her husband's shadow throughout her life.

Today, almost six decades after her untimely death, Kahlo's fame rivals that of Rivera and she has gained international acclaim as a path-breaking artist and a cultural icon. Cutting through 'Fridamania', this book explores Kahlo's life, art and legacies, while also scrutinising the myths, contradictions and ambiguities that riddle her dramatic story.

Gannit Ankori examines Kahlo's early childhood, medical problems, volatile marriage, political affiliations, religious beliefs and, most important, her unparalleled and innovative art. Based on detailed analyses of the artist's paintings, diary, letters, photographs, medical records and interviews, the book also assesses Kahlo's critical impact on contemporary art and culture.

Kahlo was of her time, deeply immersed in the issues that dominated the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, as this book reveals, she was also ahead of her time.Her paintings challenged social norms and broke taboos, addressing themes such as the female body, gender, cross-dressing, hybridity, identity and trauma, in ways that continue to inspire contemporary artists across the globe.

Frida Kahlo is a succinct and powerful account of the life, art and legacy of this iconic artist.

Author: Gannit Ankori
Format: Paperback
Pages: 244
ISBN: 9781780231983

Queer people have always flocked to New York seeking freedom, forging close-knit groups for support and inspiration. Gay Gotham brings to life the countercultural artistic communities that sprang up over the last hundred years, a creative class whose radical ideas would determine much of modern culture.

More than 200 images both works of art, such as paintings and photographs, as well as letters, snapshots, and ephemera illuminate their personal bonds, scandal-provoking secrets at the time and many largely unknown to the public since.

Starting with the bohemian era of the 1910s and 1920s, when the pansy craze drew voyeurs of all types to Greenwich Village and Harlem, the book winds through midcentury Broadway as well as Fire Island as it emerged as a hotbed, turns to the post-Stonewall, decade-long wild party that revolved around clubs like the Mineshaft and Studio 54, and continues all the way through the activist mobilisation spurred by the AIDS crisis and the move toward acceptance at the century's close.

Throughout, readers encounter famous figures, from James Baldwin and Mae West to Leonard Bernstein, and discover lesser-known ones, such as Harmony Hammond, Greer Lankton, and Richard Bruce Nugent. Surprising relationships emerge: Andy Warhol and Mercedes de Acosta, Robert Mapplethorpe and Cecil Beaton, George Platt Lynes and Gertrude Stein.

By peeling back the overlapping layers of this cultural network that thrived despite its illicitness, this groundbreaking publication reveals a whole new side of the history of New York and celebrates the power of artistic collaboration to transcend oppression.

The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature. Described by the London Review of Books as one of the most brilliant critics writing in America today, Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments.

With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work-from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post-summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality.

Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognise in this-his most personal book yet-the same mixture of humour and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing.

Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.

This is the definitive visual account of the gay liberation movement in New York, following the Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village in 1969, an event that marked the coming-out of New York's gay community

As a direct outcome of Stonewall, gay pride marches were held in 1970 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.

Fifty years later Pride will be celebrated in thousands of cities across the world.

In 1967, Sex between consenting men in England and Wales was finally decriminalised an entire century after the death penalty was abolished for sodomy in Britain in 1861. Between these legal landmarks lies a century of seismic shifts in gender and sexuality which found expression across the arts as artists, collectors and consumers explored transgressive identities, experiences and perspectives.

Some of the resulting artworks were intensely personal, celebrating lovers or expressing private desires. Others addressed a wider public, helping to forge a sense of community at a time when the modern categories of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender were largely unrecognised.

Ranging from the playful to the political, the explicit to the domestic, these works reveal the rich diversity of queer British art. This beautiful book explores coded desires in aestheticism; the impact of the new science of sexology; queer domesticities; eroticism in the artist s studio; intersections of gender and sexuality; seedy dives and visions of Arcadia; and love and lust in sixties Soho.

Featuring works by major artists such as Simeon Solomon, Clare Atwood, Ethel Sands, Duncan Grant, Francis Bacon and David Hockney among others, Queer British Art pays homage to the wealth of queer creativity in Britain between the 1860s and the 1960s. 

The first-ever illustrated history of the iconic designs, symbols, and graphic art representing more than 5 decades of LGBTQ pride and activism--from the evolution of Gilbert Baker's rainbow flag to the NYC Pride typeface launched in 2017 and beyond.

Organised by decade beginning with Pre-Liberation and then spanning the 1970s through the millennium, QUEER X DESIGN will be an empowering, uplifting, and colourful celebration of the hundreds of graphics-from shapes and symbols to flags and iconic posters-that have stood for the powerful and ever-evolving LGBTQ movement over the last five-plus decades

Included in the collection will be everything from Gilbert Baker's original rainbow flag, ACT-UP's Silence = Death poster, the AIDS quilt, and Keith Haring's "Heritage of Pride" logo, as well as the original Lavender Menace t-shirt design, logos such as "The Pleasure Chest," protest buttons such as "Anita Bryant Sucks Oranges," and so much more. Sidebars throughout will cover important visual grouping such as a "Lexicon of Pride Flags," explaining the now more than a dozen flags that represent segments of the community and the evolution of the pink triangle.

Have pride in history.

A rich and sweeping photographic history of the Queer Liberation Movement, from the creators and curators of the massively popular Instagram account @lgbt_history, released in time for the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.

Through the lenses of protest, power, and pride, We Are Everywhere is an essential and empowering introduction to the history of the fight for queer liberation. Combining exhaustively researched narrative with meticulously curated photographs, the book traces queer activism from its roots in late-nineteenth-century Europe--long before the pivotal Stonewall Riots of 1969--to the gender warriors leading the charge today.

Featuring more than 300 images from more than seventy photographers and twenty archives, this inclusive and intersectional book enables us to truly see queer history unlike anything before, with glimpses of activism in the decades preceding and following Stonewall, family life, marches, protests, celebrations, mourning, and Pride.

By challenging many of the assumptions that dominate mainstream LGBTQ+ history, We Are Everywhere shows readers how they can--and must--honor the queer past in order to shape our liberated future.

Author: Leighton Brown & Matthew Riemer
Format: Hardback
Pages: 368
ISBN: 9780399581816