Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes by Call Number: PS3515.U274 Z6687 2013
Michealangelo
Michelangelo by Call Number: N6923.B9 U54 2014
Billie Jean King
Game, Set, Match by Call Number: eBook GV994.K56 W37 2011
Alan Turing
The Imitation Game by Call Number: QA29.T8 O772 2016
Databases
- Biography Reference Bank This link opens in a new window
Biographical articles about people in the news, arts, literature, sports, and history.
- ProQuest Central This link opens in a new window
Articles on any subject. This is a good place to start.
LGBTQ Biography Sites
- LGBTQ Histories
Biographies from the British Library - Famous Gay People
from Biography.com
Harvey Milk
The Mayor of Castro Street by
The Mayor of Castro Street is Shilts's acclaimed story of Harvey Milk, the man whose personal life, public career, and tragic assassination mirrored the dramatic and unprecedented emergence of the gay community in America during the 1970s. Known as "The Mayor of Castro Street" even before he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Harvey Milk's personal and political life is a story full of personal tragedies and political intrigues, assassinations at City Hall, massive riots in the streets, the miscarriage of justice, and the consolidation of gay power and gay hope. The Mayor of Castro Street is a story of personal tragedies and political intrigues, assassination in City Hall and massive riots in the streets, the miscarriage of justice and the consolidation of gay power and gay hope. Harvey Milk has been the subject of numerous books and movies, including the Academy Award-winning 1984 documentary,The Times of Harvey Milk. His life is also the basis of a 2008 major motion picture,Milk,starring Sean Penn.
Call Number: F869.S353 M547 2008
Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe by
Creating a sensation with her risqu?? nightclub act and strolls down the Champs Elys??es, pet cheetah in tow, Josephine Baker lives on in popular memory as the banana-skirted siren of Jazz Age Paris. In Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe, Matthew Pratt Guterl brings out a little known side of the celebrated personality, showing how her ambitions of later years were even more daring and subversive than the youthful exploits that made her the first African American superstar. Her performing days numbered, Baker settled down in a sixteenth-century chateau she named Les Milandes, in the south of France. Then, in 1953, she did something completely unexpected and, in the context of racially sensitive times, outrageous. Adopting twelve children from around the globe, she transformed her estate into a theme park, complete with rides, hotels, a collective farm, and singing and dancing. The main attraction was her Rainbow Tribe, the family of the future, which showcased children of all skin colors, nations, and religions living together in harmony. Les Milandes attracted an adoring public eager to spend money on a utopian vision, and to worship at the feet of Josephine, mother of the world. Alerting readers to some of the contradictions at the heart of the Rainbow Tribe project--its undertow of child exploitation and megalomania in particular--Guterl concludes that Baker was a serious and determined activist who believed she could make a positive difference by creating a family out of the troublesome material of race.
Call Number: GV1785.B3 G88 2014
Josephine Baker in Art and Life by
Josephine Baker (1906-1975) was a dancer, singer, actress, author, politician, militant, and philanthropist, whose images and cultural legacy have survived beyond the hundredth anniversary of her birth. Neither an exercise in postmodern deconstruction nor simple biography, Josephine Baker in Art and Life presents a critical cultural study of the life and art of the Franco-American performer whose appearances as the savage dancer Fatou shocked the world. Although the study remains firmly anchored in Josephine Baker's life and times, presenting and challenging carefully researched biographical facts, it also offers in-depth analyses of the images that she constructed and advanced. Bennetta Jules-Rosette explores Baker's far-ranging and dynamic career from a sociological and cultural perspective, using the tools of sociosemiotics to excavate the narratives, images, and representations that trace the story of her life and fit together as a cultural production.
Call Number: GV1785.B3 J85 2007
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903-1932 (LOA #99) by
This Library of America volume, along with its companion, surveys a literary trajectory that from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of World War II marked Gertrude Stein as a fearless and uncompromising experimenter. She was also a master of anecdote and aphorism, many of whose phrases--from "rose is a rose is a rose" to "there is no there there" and "when this you see remember me"--have passed into the language. This first volume, containing works written between 1903 and 1932, takes Stein from her first, more traditional fictional works to the exuberant and astonishing experiments of the early Paris years. She was a devoted student of William James, with whom she studied psychology at Radcliffe in the 1890s, and took an early interest in memory and the function of repetition in human character. In her early works, she sought a new kind of realism exemplified here by Q.E.D. (written 1903, published posthumously), a novel about lesbian entanglements at college, and the modern classic Three Lives (1909), a set of novellas about the lives of three ordinary women, described in the simplest and most direct of prose. In her brilliant abstract "portraits" Stein uses an extraordinary array of verbal techniques to evoke those friends and collaborators--Matisse, Picasso, Apollinaire, Juan Gris, Satie, Mabel Dodge, Carl Van Vechten, Sherwood Anderson, Virgil Thomson--with whom she shared decades of revolutionary ferment in the arts. Her play Four Saints in Three Acts (1927), which became the basis for an opera by Virgil Thomson, is written for a freewheeling theater of the mind where everything becomes possible. In "Lifting Belly" and other works she joyously celebrates her lifelong relationship with Alice B. Toklas, one of the most famous domestic partnerships of that century. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Stein's oblique and playful memoir, became an immediate bestseller and sealed Stein's international celebrity. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Call Number: PS3537.T323A613 1998
Gertrude Stein by Publication Date: 1976
- Gertrude Stein
from the Jewish Women's Archive
Barney Frank
Frank by
TheNew York Times Bestseller How did a disheveled, intellectually combative gay Jew with a thick accent become one of the most effective (and funniest) politicians of our time? Growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, the fourteen-year-old Barney Frank made two vital discoveries about himself: he was attracted to government, and to men. He resolved to make a career out of the first attraction and to keep the second a secret. Now, sixty years later, his sexual orientation is widely accepted, while his belief in government is embattled. Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage is one man's account of the country's transformation--and the tale of a truly momentous career. Many Americans recall Frank's lacerating wit, whether it was directed at the Clinton impeachment ("What did the president touch, and when did he touch it?") or the pro-life movement (some people believe "life begins at conception and ends at birth"). But the contours of his private and public lives are less well-known. For more than four decades, he was at the center of the struggle for personalfreedom and economic fairness. From the battle over AIDS funding in the 1980s to the debates over "big government" during the Clinton years to the 2008 financial crisis, the congressman from Massachusetts played a key role. In 2010, he coauthored the most far-reaching and controversial Wall Street reform bill since the era of the Great Depression, and helped bring about the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. In this feisty and often moving memoir, Frank candidly discusses the satisfactions, fears, and grudges that come with elected office. He recalls the emotional toll of living in the closet and how his public crusade against homophobia conflicted with his private accommodation of it. He discusses his painful quarrels with allies; his friendships with public figures, from Tip O'Neill to Sonny Bono; and how he found love with his husband, Jim Ready, becoming the first sitting member of Congress to enter a same-sex marriage. He also demonstrates how he used his rhetorical skills to expose his opponents' hypocrisies and delusions. Through it all, he expertly analyzes the gifts a successful politician must bring to the job, and how even Congress can be made to work. Frank is the story of an extraordinary political life, an original argument for how to rebuild trust in government, and a guide to how political change really happens--composed by a master of the art.
Call Number: E840.8.F72 A3 2015
- Barney Frank
from the New York Times
Gay Lives
Gay Lives by
A comprehensive biographical survey from ancient Chinese courtiers to pioneers of gay liberation in the twenty-first century, from the unknowable relationships of the distant past to the frankest affirmations of modern sexual identity. The exploits of the famous never cease to captivate our imaginations--rulers, artists, explorers, and all the great personalities of history. Yet many quieter lives also have the ability to impress, to teach us something about the remarkable qualities of human nature. In this book, Robert Aldrich presents a fascinating portrait of gay men and women throughout history that reveals the full diversity of gay lives as lived in their times. He gives a voice to more than seventy people from around the world and all walks of life, from poets, philosophers, and artists to radicals and activists. Along with celebrated names such as Michelangelo, Frederick the Great, and Harvey Milk are lesser-known but no less inspiring individuals: two men of ancient Egypt whose lives were closely linked over four thousand years ago; a Renaissance nun who blurred the boundaries between spiritual and physical love; and "Aimée" and "Jaguar," whose love defied the death camps of wartime Germany. Often colorful, occasionally tragic, but all in some way extraordinary, these life stories reflect--and have sometimes helped to shape--contemporary attitudes toward same-sex intimacy.
Call Number: HQ75.2 .A53 2012
E. M. Forster
A Great Unrecorded History by
ANew York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ALA Stonewall Honor Book Finalist for James Tait Black Memorial Prize E. M. Forster's homosexuality was the central fact of his life. Between Wilde's imprisonment and the Stonewall riots, Forster led a long, strange, and imaginative life as a gay man. He preserved a vast archive of his private life---a history of gay experience he believed would find its audience in a happier time. Seeing Forster's life through the lens of his sexuality, Wendy Moffat's biography offers us a dramatic new view---revealing his astuteness as a social critic, his political bravery,and his prophetic vision of gay intimacy.A Great Unrecorded Historycasts fresh light on one of the most beloved writers of the twentieth century.
Call Number: PR6011.O58 Z8228 2011ISBN: 0312572891
- E. M. Forster
from the British Library