By Christian Coleman | Gasp! Google Calendar looks much less iridescent and fabulous this June. It’s giving a serious case of the blahs, and the face card is nothing but a 404 error. Where’s that righteous realness for human rights? Oh, that’s right. Google Calendar banished Pride Month into the cyber memory hole. Well, that’s on them. They’ll sashay away into the quicksand of queerphobia as we werk it to keep the party going nonstop. Read more →

A Q&A with Terry Galloway | I was really pissed that most of the YouTube videos featuring babies getting cochlear implants show their little faces lighting up with joy when they first hear Mama cooing their names. Hah. Don’t believe it. A lot of those babies—me and a ton of others—scream bloody murder when those things are first turned on. Your brain can be so overwhelmed that you want the bang that implant right out of your head. I want to inspire more of those videos. Read more →

A Q&A with Terry Galloway | I’m so honored that Beacon has published this anniversary edition. They love writers at Beacon, and even though I’m a one-book writer, I’m glad to be caught up in their regard. As for rereading “Mean Little deaf Queer”—oh my god! I could see every flaw, every misstep, every mouthy sentence. And not just that. I was blithely writing about things I wouldn’t have admitted to a therapist (if I had one). Read more →

A Q&A with Susan Swan | With the exception of my novel about a fraudster like Canada’s Conrad Black, you’re correct to say I’ve drawn from my life experiences for my fiction. Maybe that’s why it didn’t feel strange to write a memoir, a form that distills and dramatizes like a novel. And I had to find a trajectory through my story the way I do when I’m writing a novel. Read more →

By Michael Andor Brodeur | These days there’s a guru waiting around every corner for young men to come clicking. They cover fitness, diet and nutrition, dating, politics, philosophy (however rudimentary), and, their favorite topic, masculinity—its dire state, its necessary preservation, its unlockable secrets, its bestowal of dominion. The difference between the manfluencers of old and today’s glut is that, because white heterosexual men now perceive themselves as having (so generously!) ceded physical, financial, professional, and cultural ground to women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks (i.e., everyone else), they’re doubling down on their occupation of virtual space. Unlike any other comparable Internet niche or eddy, the manosphere carries itself like it owns the place. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | It wasn’t just Black History Month that Google Calendar removed from its holiday list. They did away with Women’s History Month, too. Just check your phones. In true fashion of an avowed fascist’s pick me, Big Tech was thorough with the forty-seventh administration’s anti-DEI scourge. But we said it once and we’ll say it again: We don’t need you to recognize Women’s History Month. Keep on with pandering to the patriarchy as we keep this party rolling. Read more →

By Gayatri Patnaik | Beacon Press sides with the trans and nonbinary community always—and especially in these times. As a book publisher, we speak through our books and want to lift up authors we have had the privilege of publishing over the last thirty years who affirm trans and nonbinary lives and identities. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | Did you check your phones? Is it any shock that Google Calendar genuflected to the current scorched-earth administration’s anti-DEI tour and removed Black History Month from its holiday list during Black History Month? Is it a shock that they claimed their holiday list wasn’t “globally scalable or sustainable?” Talk about Big Tech being an avowed fascist’s pick me. Doublespeak and all. Well, guess what, Google Calendar? We don’t need you to recognize Black History Month. Read more →

A Q&A with Jeanne Theoharis and Gayatri Patnaik | When I published the original edition, I did so without being able to see a cache of Rosa Parks’s papers that had been held for years by Guernsey’s auction following a dispute over her estate. In late 2014, Howard Buffett, horrified by a news story about how Rosa Parks’s papers and effects were being held by this auction house, instructed his foundation to act, bought them and then donated the papers and photographs to the Library of Congress. Read more →

Primarily known as the president of Planned Parenthood and champion of reproductive rights, Cecile Richards was a feminist activist on more than one front. She brought her A-game to intersectionality in several social justice movements and political arenas. She deserves all the accolades and recognition, the most recent of which was the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden at the White House last November. Read more →

A Q&A with Cheryl L. Neely | When I wrote my first book, “You’re Dead—So What?: Media, Police, and the Invisibility of Black Women as Victims of Homicide,” I shared the story of the murder of my schoolmate and friend, Michelle Kimberly Jackson in 1984 in the book’s prologue, focusing on the lack of media coverage and police response it garnered. Her case was solved a few years after the book was released and almost forty years after she was killed. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | And the New Year’s category is . . . Transformation! As the oligarchs of the free world steer us on a rocky ride toward dire changes we didn’t want, we’ll be focused on changing ourselves for the greater good. What shall we work on? Expanding our minds about what Buddhism is and what it has to offer? Ditching the me-centric trend of girlboss feminism? Renegotiating our relationship with social media? Beefing up at the gym without the macho trappings? This handful of titles from Beacon’s catalog will set us on the runway of life to get tens across the board for progress and self-reinvention! Read more →

Whew! Now that we are shutting the door on that messy guest called 2024, we are officially in our unwind and imbibe era until further notice. Join us, won’t you? Because your books should be as good as your booze. We asked our staff members which beverage, cocktail, or mocktail they would pair with their favorite Beacon book, and they did not disappoint. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | Here we are again with the nail-biting tension from four years ago. The neck-and-neck polls between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump alerted our attention to other issues at play in addition to the debate and rally talking points. Lies about voter fraud that distract us from how voter suppression at the systemic level threatens our voting rights. Read more →

By Remica Bingham-Risher | I met [Sonia] Sanchez at the second Furious Flower Conference in 2004, where she performed with her band Full Moon of Sonia, and interviewed her a few years later. As we had just begun to get to know each other and I was a young mostly unpublished poet, I was surprised to be invited to a gathering at her house that first evening we sat together. At Sanchez’s party, there was food spread from end to end on a large wooden table; people filled the house and were almost as interesting and varied as the art stationed in every room. Read more →

By Michael Andor Brodeur | For millions of gym bros like me, the closure of gyms nationwide amounted to the loss of a primary habitat, a source of identity. And for many of the men I watched unravel online—throwing tantrums on social media over the perceived oppression of public health measures, mask mandates, and home quarantines—the loss of the gym compromised a key source of their manhood. Read more →

By Arielle Greenberg | One of my friends—someone I met through the sex-positive, ethical non-monogamy world—likes to say “life gets life-y.” What she means by this is that all of us are challenged, at times, by difficulty. Even those of us who dedicate ourselves to naughty delights have moments where that kind of stuff is the last thing on our minds. And in fact, ever since I celebrated the publication of my book, “Superfreaks: Kink, Pleasure and the Pursuit of Happiness,” my own life has been life-y, with unanticipated hardships that put quite a stumbling block in the path to my own pursuit of happiness. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | This Sunday, it’s dad’s turn to be given his flowers—or tie or power tool or gift card. You get the idea. Our flowers come in the form of books, some of which are written by fathers. Books for the daddies and zaddies on their muscle-bound journey. For the House fathers taking the rejected queer kids under their wing. For the feminist dads who don’t want to go the way of the Kens in “Barbie.” For the fathers living from hustle to hustle to keep a roof over their loved ones’ heads. Read more →

By Alexander Kriss, PhD | Matthew, a twenty-year-old man I’d worked with in individual psychotherapy for a few months, began a session saying he was in crisis. “I think I’m a narcissist,” he told me. “I’m terrified of it.” I asked Matthew why he thought this. He said the night before he had, after much agonizing, confronted his boyfriend, Patrick, about his controlling behavior: Patrick decided when they socialized and with whom; he required advance approval of any expenses related to the apartment they shared; he discouraged Matthew from engaging in any interests that did not help to “build the relationship,” especially Matthew’s longtime passion for oil painting. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | Sometimes it happens by trailblazing a path in a testosterone-choked arena. Sometimes it happens through organizing to demand the end of bias and discrimination from our lives and institutions. Sometimes it happens in the quiet of her personal life. And, of course, it happens through her writing. These are some of the ways empowered women empower women through history and today. Read more →