Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in LGBTQ+

For 60 years, Mr George Leo John Lucas led a double life. By day, he was a civil servant at the Board of Trade, but by night—unable to live openly as a gay man before the Sexual Offences Act of 1967—he was a fixture of London's colorful underground gay scene, a twilight world of petty crime, louche pubs and public lavatories. He was also an obsessive diary writer.

Charlie's career as a filmmaker is on standby, she hasn't had a girlfriend in forever, her best friend is sickeningly successful (and being awkward since that night) and her dad is dying of cancer. So the invitation from Cork Film Festival comes like a sign - a chance to explore the Irish homeland she's never seen. But this isn't just any search for long-lost ancestry: Charlie's father is the sole survivor of a tragic accident that killed every other child on the small island where he grew up, and Charlie's one achievement is the film she made that tells his story.

The Rachel Incident is an all-consuming love story. But it's not the one you're expecting. It's unconventional and messy. It's young and foolish. It's about losing and finding yourself. But it is always about love. When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr Byrne, her best friend James helps her devise a plan to seduce him. But what begins as a harmless crush soon pushes their friendship to its limits. Over the course of a year they will find their lives ever more entwined with the Byrnes' and be faced with impossible choices and a lie that can't be taken back...

It is 1921 and at Cassowary House in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Robert Hamlyn is a well-to-do lawyer and his steely wife Lesley a society hostess. Their lives are invigorated when Willie, an old friend of Robert's, comes to stay. Willie Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest writers of his day. But he is beleaguered by an unhappy marriage, ill-health and business interests that have gone badly awry. He is also struggling to write. The more Lesley's friendship with Willie grows, the more clearly she see him as he is—a man who has no choice but to mask his true self.

Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life. Born and bred in Antigua, he's lived in Hackney since the sixties. A flamboyant, wise-cracking local character, Barrington is a husband, father and grandfather - but he is also secretly lovers with his great childhood friend, Morris. When his marriage goes into meltdown, Barrington wants to divorce Carmel and live with Morris, but after a lifetime of fear and deception, will he manage to break away?

Vera Holme, known as Jack, left a career as a jobbing actress to become Emmeline Pankhurst's chauffeur and mechanic. Evelina Haverfield was a classic beauty, the daughter of a Scottish baron and fourteen years older than Jack. They met in 1909, fell in love, lived together, and became public faces of the suffragette movement, enduring prison and doing everything they could for the cause.

Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and/or dastardly deeds have been overlooked. We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those 'bad gays' whose un-exemplary lives reveals more than we might expect? Part-revisionist history, part-historical biography and based on the hugely popular podcast series, Bad Gays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes.

In West Berlin in 1989, 18-year-old Ralf has just left school and is living a final golden summer with his three best friends. They spend their days swimming, smoking and daydreaming about the future, oblivious to the storm gathering on the other side of the Berlin Wall. But an unsettling discovery about his family and a meeting with the mysterious Oz shatters everything Ralf thought he knew about love and loyalty.

Damani is tired. Every day she cares for her mom, drives ride shares to pay the bills and is angry at a world that promised her more before spitting her out. That is until the summer she meets Jolene and life opens up. Jolene seems like she could be the perfect girlfriend—attentive, attractive, liberal—and their chemistry feels genuine. So maybe Damani can look past the one thing that's holding her back: Jolene is white. But Jolene really doesn't seem like one of the bad ones—she's done the reading, she goes to every protest, she even listens.

Luke Livingstone is a respected solicitor, a father and grandfather, a pillar of the community. Yet Luke is struggling with an unbearable secret, and it's threatening to destroy him. All his life, Luke has hidden the truth about himself and his identity. It's a truth so fundamental that it will shatter his family and leave him outcast. But to continue living, he must become the person - the woman - he knows himself to be, whatever the cost.

In Trans Like Me, CN Lester takes listeners on a measured, thoughtful, intelligent yet approachable tour through the most important and high-profile narratives around the trans community, turning them inside out and examining where we really are in terms of progress. From the impact of the media's wording in covering trans people and issues to the way parenting gender-variant children is portrayed, Lester brings their charged personal narrative to every topic and expertly lays out the work left to be done.

Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth—strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries—is the light of Roos' life. That is, until the wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop visits one of Roos' backroom seances, and the two strike up a connection.

In July 1964, the Sunday Mirror ran a front-page story headlined: Peer and a Gangster: Yard Enquiry. While withholding the names of the principal subjects, the newspaper reported that the Metropolitan Police had ordered an investigation into an alleged homosexual relationship between ‘a household name’ from the House of Lords and a leading London underworld figure. Bob Boothby was the Conservative lord in question and Ronnie Kray the gangster.

Enid is many things: lesbian, serial dater, deaf in one ear, space obsessive, true crime fanatic. When she's not listening to grizzly murder podcasts, she's managing her crippling phobia of bald people and trying hard not to think about her mortifying teenage years—which is hard, when she's lost the password to her old YouTube account and the (many) vlogs that her teen self once uploaded. She's worried about herself, her depressive mother, and what the deal is with gender reveal parties.

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Each chapter views the relationship through a different lens, as Machado holds events up to the light and examines them from distinct angles.

After Sappho is Selby Wynn Schwartz's joyous reimagining of the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late 19th and early 20th century as they battle for control over their lives; for liberation and for justice. Sarah Bernhard—Colette—Eleanora Duse—Lina Poletti—Josephine Baker—Virginia Woolf... these are just a few of the women (some famous, others hitherto unsung) sharing the minutes of a novel as fierce as it is luminous—lush and poetic; furious and funny.

Freelance journalist Lindsay Gordon is strapped for cash. Why else would she agree to cover a fund-raising gala at a girls' public school? But when the star attraction is found garrotted with her own cello string minutes before she is due on stage, Lindsay finds herself investigating a vicious murder. Who would have wanted Lorna Smith Cooper dead? Who had the key to the locked room in which her body was found? And who could have slipped out of the hall at just the right time to commit this calculated and cold-blooded crime?

We like to think we know the story of how Britain went to war with Germany in 1939, but there is one part of the story that has never been told. It features a group of MPs who repeatedly spoke out against their party and their government's policy of appeasing Hitler and Mussolini. Remarkably, nearly all of them were gay or bisexual. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain hated them. He had them followed, harassed, spied upon and derided in the press and called them 'the glamour boys' in reference to their sexuality.

When Alison Maxwell, a well-known Glaswegian journalist with an irresistible sexual attraction to both sexes, is found murdered the police look no further than the owner of the scarf used to strangle her. Lindsay Gordon, however, has other ideas. Maxwell was a serial seductress who kept a secret record of her encounters – including one with Lindsay herself. Recalling the threats that followed the end of the relationship, Lindsay knows all too well the feelings of rage, fear and passion that Alison Maxwell could invoke.

It's summer, 1984, in blue-collar Swaffham, Massachusetts. Mel is thirteen, drinking a Slush Puppie at the drugstore, when she hears a voice, ‘deep and movie-star dramatic, like Lauren Bacall': Sylvia. What follows is a story of transgender awakening. Sylvia's shameless swagger and tough-girl trans femininity is an affront to the Swaffham locals, and her presence triggers hatred and, ultimately, violence. But it is also a catalyst for Mel. Through her friendship with Sylvia, Mel comes to realize that not only is there a world beyond Swaffham, there are other ways of being.