Prices in AUD. Shipping worldwide. Flat rate $8 postage per order within Australia. International by weight calculated at checkout. Read full terms.
-
Who Does That Bitch Think She Is? Doris Fish and the Rise of Drag
AU$35.00 Read MoreAdd to cartCraig Seligman
Sydney: Hachette, 2023.“An exciting new history of drag told through the life of the remarkable, flawed, and singular Australian-born Doris Fish. In the 1970s, gay men and lesbians were openly despised and drag queens scared the public. Yet that was the era when Doris Fish (born Philip Mills in 1952) painted and padded his way to stardom. He was a leader of the generation that prepared the world not just for drag queens on TV but for a society that welcomes and even celebrates queer people. How did we get from there to here? In Who Does That Bitch Think She Is? Craig Seligman looks at Doris’s short but overstuffed life as a way to provide some answers. There were effectively three Dorises – the quiet visual artist, the glorious drag queen, and the hunky male prostitute who supported the other two. He started performing in Sydney in 1972 as a member of Sylvia and the Synthetics, a psycho troupe that represented the first anarchic flowering of queer creative energy in the post-Stonewall era. After moving to San Francisco in the mid-70s, he became the driving force behind years of sidesplitting drag shows that were loved as much as you can love throwaway trash – which is what everybody thought they were. No one, Doris included, perceived them as political theater, when in fact they were accomplishing satire’s deepest dream: not just to rail against society, but to change it. Seligman recounts this dynamic period in queer history – from Stonewall to AIDS – giving insight into how our ideas about gender have broadened to make drag the phenomenon we know it as today. In a book filled with interviews and letters about a life that ricocheted between hilarity and tragedy, he revisits the places and people Doris knew in order to shed light on the multi-hued era that his remarkable life encapsulated.” (publisher’s blurb)
-
Wild, Fearless Chests
AU$29.00 Read MoreAdd to cartMandy Beaumont
Sydney: Hachette, 2020.“She is the explosion, the clamour, the thunder. She is the beat, the rage. She is every piece of violence imagined on the skin. She is the near miss. She is the woman you once were, the woman you could be, the woman you are. She is a triumph of our shared history, is every one of you, is your wild and screaming voice on street corners, is the madwoman you fear you may become. She loves you. As women’s voices begin to rise together, Mandy Beaumont’s brutal and uncompromising stories are a compelling reminder of the ways in which women have fallen, been dismissed, hurt, hated and loved from afar. These are the stories we have always known, have always heard about and are perhaps just short moments away from. They are yours, ours, mine. They are booming anger. They are wild love. They are the distorted and the decided, the imagined and the wanted. They are the shaking ground beneath our feet. A powerful call to arms. They compel us to stand tall. To break free. To defy the gaze. To claim our space. Wild, Fearless Chests is the sound of a certain revolution.” (publisher’s blurb) “Drowning in Thick Air” is shocking… It is not like anything I have read in recent years and takes me to a place I have never been in my life or imagination or in fiction.’ (Frank Moorhouse)