|
Imagine the terror and exhilaration of a first sexual experience in a church where you could be caught at any moment. In Cigarettes & Wine, this is where we meet an unnamed teenage narrator in a small southern town trying to make sense of their own bisexuality, gender variance, and emerging adulthood. When our narrator leaves the church, we watch their teen years unfold alongside one first love wrestling with his own sexuality and his desire for a relationship with God, and another first love seeking to find herself as she moves away from town. Through the narrator's eyes, we also encounter a newly arrived neighbor who appears to be an all American boy, but has secrets and pain hidden behind his charming smile and athletic ability, and their oldest friend who is on the verge of romantic, artistic, and sexual transformations of her own. Along the way, these friends confront questions about gender and sexuality, violence and substance abuse, and the intricacies of love and selfhood in the shadow of churches, families, and a small southern town in the 1990's. Alongside academic and media portrayals that generally only acknowledge binary sexual and gender options, Cigarettes & Wine offers an illustration of non-binary sexual and gender experience, and provides a first person view of the ways the people, places, and narratives we encounter shape who we become. While fictional, Cigarettes & Wine is loosely grounded in hundreds of formal and informal interviews with LGBTQ people in the south as well as years of research into intersections of sexualities, gender, religion, and health. Cigarettes & Wine can be read purely for pleasure or used as supplemental reading in a variety of courses in sexualities, gender, relationships, families, religion, the life course, narratives, the American south, identities, culture, intersectionality, and arts-based research Preliminary Material /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 1 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 2 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 3 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 4 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 5 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 6 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 7 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 8 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 9 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 10 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 11 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 12 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 13 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 14 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 15 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 16 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 17 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 18 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 19 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 20 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 21 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 22 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 23 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 24 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 25 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 26 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 27 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 28 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 29 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 30 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 31 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 32 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 33 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 34 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 35 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 36 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 37 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 38 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 39 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 40 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 41 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 42 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 43 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 44 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 45 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 46 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 47 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 48 /J. E. Sumerau --Chapter 49 /J. E. Sumerau --Suggested Class Room or Book Club Use /J. E. Sumerau --About the Author /J. E. Sumerau.
|
