Philly AIDS Thrift @ Giovanni's Room

“A deeply generous and honest gift to the world.”
–Elliot Page

The author of I’m Afraid of Men lets readers in on the secrets to a life of reinvention.

Vivek Shraya knows this to be true: people change. We change our haircuts and our outfits and our minds. We change names, titles, labels. We attempt to blend in or to stand out. We outgrow relationships, we abandon dreams for new ones, we start fresh. We seize control of our stories. We make resolutions.

In fact, nobody knows this better than Vivek, who’s made a career of embracing many roles: artist, performer, musician, writer, model, teacher. In People Change, she reflects on the origins of this impulse, tracing it to childhood influences from Hinduism to Madonna. What emerges is a meditation on change itself: why we fear it, why we’re drawn to it, what motivates us to change, and what traps us in place.

At a time when we’re especially contemplating who we want to be, this slim and stylish handbook is an essential companion—a guide to celebrating our many selves and the inspiration to discover who we’ll become next.

Freddie Mercury, Sylvia Rivera, Alison Bechdel, Dusty Springfield. This book is a celebration of queer icons of the past and present and their furry feline friends. From images of lost legends such as Josephine Baker and James Baldwin, to snapshots of contemporary trailblazers like comedian Tig Notaro and fashion designer Jason Wu–these charming and eccentric photographs capture what it truly means to be a cat purr-son.

– PURR-FECT FOR CAT LOVERS: This book celebrates the love between human and cat. What better gift could you get the feline fancier in your life?
– AMEWSING ANECDOTES AND IMPAWTENT MOMENTS: Learn about the lives of the queer heroes who came before us and those who are still fighting for equality and inclusion. We’re not kitten around–with watershed moments like the Stonewall riots and sweet stories of domestic bliss, this book will both entertain and inspire you.
– PHOTOS WITH CATITUDE: In these purr-ecious photographs, you’ll get to see your heroes in unguarded moments expressing love for their pets. This collection of images will bring joy to any cat lover’s heart.

Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced their defiance in a tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her mother and aunts and cousins, but haunted by the unspoken, untold stories of the barrio–even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars. Her family became her private pantheon, a gathering circle of powerful orisha-like women with tragic real-world wounds, and she vowed to tell their stories–but first she’d have to get off the stairs and join the dance. She’d have to find her language.

Weaving together Hudes’s love of music with the songs of her family, the lessons of North Philly with those of Yale, this is a multimythic dive into home, memory, and belonging–narrated by an obsessed girl who fought to become an artist so she could capture the world she loved in all its wild and delicate beauty.

Body art can tell personal stories.. When linked to a difficult or traumatic life, it can even restore one’s sense of well-being. As director of a community health center for twenty-seven years and as a nurse practitioner for over forty years, Donna Torrisi became fascinated with the stories behind her patients’ tattoos. When she began to ask her female patients about their markings, themes of trauma, pain, and loss emerged, and it became clear that the art indelibly marked on their bodies had played a part in their healing and redemption.