By Marcos Gonsalez | Chanting, cackling, shouting, and frolicking up Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue, flaunting our booty shorts and glittered skin, we marched. It was June 2019, and thousands of us queers were having a grand old gay time at the first Queer Liberation March. The march was held the same day as the yearly Pride parade, in protest against that corporatized, sanitized bigger event. At the Liberation March were anti-capitalists, gender deviants, anarchists, kink-positive folks, Marxists, and all other stripes of queer radicals. This was the parade for me. Read more →

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 →

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 →

A Q&A with Roque Raquel Salas Rivera | I teach at the University of Puerto Rico. My students are almost all Puerto Rican, and I teach a variety of courses on Gender Studies, Cinema and Human Rights, Puerto Rican History and National Thought, Introduction to Literature—a wide range. I hold a PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania, and my dissertation focused on three poets: Julia de Burgos, Sotero Rivera Avilés, and Ángela María Dávila Malavé. I focus on anticolonial movements and decolonial poetics and have a strong interest in literature and poetry, which I integrate into most of my courses. 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 | 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 | If last Christmas, you gave someone your heart, and the very next day, they gave it away, this year, to save yourself from tears, you’ll give it to your TBR list! ALL our books are 30% off through December 31 during our holiday sale! Read more →

By Christian Coleman | And the category is . . . Challenged! Challenged as in a hair’s breadth away from being banned. For Banned Books Week, United Against Book Bans released the latest roundup of challenged books, and ten Beacon Press titles are on it! Tens across the board for each one strutting their red-alert stuff! Some are par for the rabid far-right course—Race and history and queers! Oh, my!—while others, indeed, will make you do a double take. 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 Christian Coleman | Rainbow season is in full, fierce bloom, honeys! Take to the streets with your most fabulous fans and clack them with pride! Clack them to reflect, empower, and unite for queerness in all its joys and liberation! Clack back to the haters intimidated by queerness! Because this is your month. They all are, really. Read more →

By Remica Bingham-Risher | When I asked Forrest Hamer to autograph his books, I had never seen anyone so upset about such a small mistake. We were at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop where he was teaching and, like all the other students there, I became enamored with his work and unassuming nature, wanting nothing more than to spend the last few nights surveying his words. As he signed his books, he misspelled my name, and when I crossed out one letter for another, he apologized to no end. He held me there, despite the line forming behind us, repeating, “I’m so, so sorry about that. Names are important. Please let me take care of things.” 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 Christian Coleman | When Latinx workers across the US came together for International Workers’ Day on May 1, 2006, their strike sent more than one message. As historian Paul Ortiz writes in An African American and Latinx History of the United States, they protested immigration restrictions that threatened their families, their livelihoods, and their dignity. The protested to pass national legislation for a living wage. Shutting down meat packing, garment manufacturing, port transportation, trucking and food services in many parts of the country was an act of resistance to neoliberalism, mass incarceration, militarism, and imperialism. Latinx workers from numerous cultures were all in. Read more →

By Leslie Feinberg | Capitalism is one of the most irrational economic systems imaginable: those who do the most, get the least, and those who do the least, get the most. How can such a system continue? It couldn’t if the vast, laboring majority got together to fight for a new, more equitable economy. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | Ah, Florida! The hottest tourist getaway where you can refine your tan, stoke your adrenaline on Disney World rides, and soak up state-sanctioned prejudice and ignorance under the sun. Joining fellow civil rights groups League of United Latin American Citizens and Equality Florida, the NAACP issued a travel advisory for the Sunshine State to warn tourists about the laws and policies that are “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals.” If Stefon from SNL were in charge of promoting DeSantisLand—gawd forbid!—he’d say this hot spot has everything. Read more →

By Ricky Tucker | This portion of my July 26, 2020, interview with preeminent trans advocate, model, and icon Gia Love was pure joy for me on a lazy Sunday afternoon. She is a joy to be around, and accordingly, in the aftermath of a summer stricken with the murders of Black, trans, and Black trans people (which we discussed), I wanted to ask her about how she finds and leans into joy during these cruel times as a thinking and socially engaged person sitting at the intersection of those identities. Luckily, the concept of trans joy is central to her ethos, pathos, and logos. She also cast a spotlight on some of the limits of the not-for-profit industrial complex when servicing Black women of trans experience. Enjoy. Read more →

By Gayatri Patnaik and Christian Coleman | In her compelling Boston Globe article “Celebrating Black History Month as Black History Is Being Erased,” Renée Graham writes that Black History Month this year has a specific purpose and burden, “and that burden is not for Black people to bear alone.” The challenge, Graham notes, “is to save this crucial American history from being eroded book by book, law by law, and state by state.” We couldn’t agree more. Read more →