For the last five years, David Steinberg has been photographing transsexual women who frequent San Francisco's Divas Nightclub and Bar, the most prominent transgender club in the U.S. With this collection of intimate, revealing photographs, Steinberg honors the individuality, diversity, and fierce integrity of a group of people who are alternatively ignored and fetishized, but rarely acknowledged and appreciated for who they really are. These 59 full-page color portraits of transsexual dancers, bartenders, lip-sync performers, disc jockeys, regulars and visitors reach beneath an often glamorous surface to present a broad spectrum of remarkable women in all their complexity -- their joy, sadness, strength, uncertainty, toughness, vulnerability and, most of all, their courage in embracing the core of who they know themselves to be in the face of a misunderstanding, frightened, and often hostile world.

Divas of San Francisco: Portraits of Transsexual Women

Arts & Photography

David Steinberg

Photography & Video

Red Alder Books

<p>In this long-anticipated collection, columnist, photographer, critic, and sexual explorer David Steinberg has gathered the best of his essays, anecdotes, and photographs into a uniquely insightful, engaging overview of sex in America. For 25 years, Steinberg has documented the American sexual landscape from teenage sexuality to Viagra, swingers’ parties to erotic spirituality, lap dancing to women’s sexual liberation, fine art sexual photography to pornography, homophobia to BDSM. He calls on readers to question their sexual assumptions and fears, and to embrace sex as an opportunity for intimacy, self-understanding, and psychic adventure. Rejecting sensationalized rhetoric rooted in shame and fear, Steinberg offers an emotionally grounded understanding of a topic that is endlessly debated but rarely approached with depth and calm awareness. Whimsical, philosophical, unapologetically political, and revealingly personal, This Thing We Call Sex will take you into sexual worlds that include Marco Vassi, the Marquis de Sade, 19th-century feminist Victoria Woodhull, erotic photographer Jan Saudek, and porn producer Kink.com, exploring the spectrum of human sexuality with an unflinching eye, a compassionate heart, and a keen mind. After reading this book, you will find yourself doing the same.</p>

This Thing We Call Sex: A Radically Sensible Look at Sex in America

Politics & Social Sciences

Steinberg, David

Sociology

The Shepherd and the Nymph: The Erotic Letters of Marco Vassi and Eve Diana

Literature & Fiction

Vassi, Marco

Diana, Eve

Erotica

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