LGBTQ Lives

Libby Davies is a Canadian activist and politician from British Columbia. She moved to Vancouver in 1968 and served as a city councilor from 1982 to 1993, then represented the federal riding of Vancouver East from 1997 to 2015 under the New Democratic Party banner. She was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2016 and is Canada's first openly lesbian MP. She is the author of Outside In: A Political Memoir (Between the Lines). For more than four decades, Libby Davies has worked steadfastly for social justice. She became a community organizer in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside at the age of nineteen, later became active in Vancouver municipal politics, and eventually worked her way to become Deputy Leader of the federal New Democratic Party. Davies lays bare the challenges she has faced with candid reflections on her experience as both an insider in the established political world and an outsider working in the activist community on controversial issues such as homelessness, sex workers' rights, and ending drug prohibition. Part memoir, part analysis of the political process, Davies's forty years of work at the intersection of the political process and social movements is both inspirational and comforting for anyone interested in getting involved in the politics and activism today.

Samantha Allen is a GLAAD Award-winning journalist and the author of Love & Estrogen. She is a senior reporter for The Daily Beast covering LGBT issues and a former Sex + Life reporter for Fusion. She received her Ph.D. in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University in 2015 and was the 2013 recipient of the Kinsey Institute's John Money Fellowship for Scholars of Sexology. She has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR's. Her most recent book Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States (Little, Brown and Company) is a "powerful, profoundly moving"(New York Times Book Review) narrative tour through the surprisingly vibrant queer communities sprouting up in red states. Allen takes us on a cross-country road-trip stretching all the way from Provo, Utah to the Rio Grande Valley to the Bible Belt to the Deep South. Her motto for the trip: "Something gay every day." Making pit stops at drag shows, political rallies, and hubs of queer life across the heartland, she introduces us to scores of extraordinary LGBT people working for change, from the first openly transgender mayor in Texas history to the manager of the only queer night club in Bloomington, Indiana, and many more. Capturing profound cultural shifts underway in unexpected places and revealing a national network of chosen family fighting for a better world, Real Queer America is a treasure trove of uplifting stories and a much-needed source of hope and inspiration in these divided times.