Books like Courting justice by Joyce Murdoch

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks follows the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were taken in 1951 without her consent and later became the first immortal human cell line, HeLa, driving major scientific breakthroughs while raising questions of ethics, race, and medical exploitation.

An anthology of pioneering scholarship that uncovers the histories of gay and lesbian lives across diverse cultures and eras—from ancient Athens to post–World War II San Francisco—examining identity, community, and resistance.

Lieutenant Rebecca Frye assembles her loyal team to hunt a dangerous informant, uncovering a conspiracy that reaches into a human‑souls trafficking underworld.

Margot Canaday’s The Straight State traces how U.S. federal regulation of homosexuality developed from the early twentieth century through the postwar era, revealing the state’s role in creating second‑class citizenship for sexual minorities.

Neil Miller’s investigative history uncovers how a 1954 child‑murder case in Sioux City, Iowa, triggered the arrest, institutionalization, and stigmatization of 20 gay men during a period of widespread anti‑homosexual hysteria.

A scholarly examination of gay Americans in the U.S. armed forces during World War II, tracing the dynamic power struggle between homosexual citizens and the military and its lasting impact on U.S. defense policy.

A photographic journey through late‑1980s America that captures the varied lives of gay and lesbian communities, illustrating their efforts to form families, reconcile faith, and confront both racism and homophobia.

Gay and lesbian couples have gained a lot of legal ground in recent years. Although same-sex marriage is now legal across the U.S., laws governing civil unions and domestic partnerships continue to vary from state to state. It's still important to define your relationship in the eyes of the law--and A Legal Guide for Lesbian & Gay Couples can help. This plain-English guide shows you how to: have and raise children through adoption, donors, surrogacy, or foster parenting; jointly buy a house or other property; make decisions about living together, marrying, or registering as legal partners; make a will or living trust; make medical decisions for each other if needed; and deal with the end of a relationship. The 19th edition is completely revised to provide the latest on same-sex marriage and parentage laws.

A groundbreaking history of gay male identity in the United States, from World War I to the AIDS era.

A comprehensive, engaging reference that surveys gay and lesbian culture, featuring quotes, facts, reading lists, pseudonym tables, and coverage of gay detective fiction from both male and female perspectives.

The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage surveys nearly four hundred works across historical periods, highlighting the contributions of figures like Michelangelo, Armistead Maupin, Sappho, and Shakespeare to gay and lesbian literature.

A nonfiction account of Southern gays and lesbians from 1945 to the 1969 Stonewall Riot, detailing their hidden lives, emerging identities, and early activism amid broader civil rights struggles in the American South.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the legal issues concerning gender and sexual nonconformity in the United States. Part One, which covers the years from the post-Civil War period to the 1980s, is a history of state efforts to discipline and punish the behavior of homosexuals and other people considered to be deviant. During this period such people could get by only at the cost of suppressing their most basic feelings and emotions. Part Two addresses contemporary issues. Although it is no longer illegal to be openly gay in America, homosexuals still suffer from state discrimination in the military and in other realms, and private discrimination and violence against gays is prevalent. William Eskridge presents a rigorously argued case for the "sexualization" of the First Amendment, showing why, for example, same-sex ceremonies and intimacy should be considered "expressive conduct" deserving the protection of the courts. The author draws on legal reasoning, sociological studies, and history to develop an effective response to the arguments made in defense of the military ban. The concluding part of the book locates the author's legal arguments within the larger currents of liberal theory and integrates them into a general stance toward freedom, gender equality, and religious pluralism.

A curated collection of essays exploring lesbian literary voices and their evolution from the dawn of the 1969 gay rights movement to the present, highlighting cultural, social, and artistic developments.

Benjamin Justice, a veteran journalist struggling to regain credibility, is offered a documentary assignment that leads him into a dangerous investigation of a vanished predecessor, uncovering perilous secrets that threaten his career and his life.

No one could have predicted that the night of September 17, 1998, would be anything but routine in Houston, Texas. Even the call to police that a black man was "going crazy with a gun" was hardly unusual in this urban setting. Nobody could have imagined that the arrest of two men for a minor criminal offense would reverberate in American constitutional law, exposing a deep malignity in our judicial system and challenging the traditional conception of what makes a family. Indeed, when Harris County sheriff’s deputies entered the second-floor apartment, there was no gun. Instead, they reported that they had walked in on John Lawrence and Tyron Garner having sex in Lawrence’s bedroom. So begins Dale Carpenter’s "gripping and brilliantly researched" Flagrant Conduct, a work nine years in the making that transforms our understanding of what we thought we knew about Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark Supreme Court decision of 2003 that invalidated America’s sodomy laws. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Carpenter has taken on the "gargantuan" task of extracting the truth about the case, analyzing the claims of virtually every person involved. Carpenter first introduces us to the interracial defendants themselves, who were hardly prepared "for the strike of lightning" that would upend their lives, and then to the Harris County arresting officers, including a sheriff’s deputy who claimed he had "looked eye to eye" in the faces of the men as they allegedly fornicated. Carpenter skillfully navigates Houston’s complex gay world of the late 1990s, where a group of activists and court officers, some of them closeted themselves, refused to bury what initially seemed to be a minor arrest. The author charts not only the careful legal strategy that Lambda Legal attorneys adopted to make the case compatible to a conservative Supreme Court but also the miscalculations of the Houston prosecutors who assumed that the nation’s extant sodomy laws would be upheld. Masterfully reenacting the arguments that riveted spectators and Justices alike in 2003, Flagrant Conduct then reaches a point where legal history becomes literature, animating a Supreme Court decision as few writers have done. In situating Lawrence v. Texas within the larger framework of America’s four-century persecution of gay men and lesbians, Flagrant Conduct compellingly demonstrates that gay history is an integral part of our national civil rights story.

A candid memoir of Cleve Jones, activist, and AIDS advocate, tracing his rise in 1970s San Francisco, his partnership with Harvey Milk, and his battles against the AIDS crisis, culminating in founding the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the AIDS Memorial Quilt.