In and of itself, the category of the bestseller presumes neither literary status nor political consensus. As Ruth Miller Elson remarks, “bestselling books… offer clues to the world view of that mythical creature—the average American.” LGBT bestsellers likewise offer clues about the average queer American—and a perspective on dominant trends and themes in queer culture and consumption since the 1970s. This chapter charts the history of the LGBT bestseller alongside a broader history of LGBT culture in the post-Stonewall era. It traces a shift in popular LGBT literature and publishing from separatism to assimilation, from its roots in the independent gay presses of the 1970s through the peak of the AIDS epidemic to the post-AIDS bestsellers popular with both queer and straight readerships. Texts considered include Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Larry Kramer’s Faggots (1978), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978-2014), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015).

[5.1] Judges are required to be independent in statutory interpretation in two main senses. First, they are independent in the sense of sovereign. In Australian law, judges are the sole authoritative arbiters of the meaning of legislation.

This study investigates the perceptual accuracy of eight English obstruents in the onset and coda position by Mandarin and Korean-speaking L2 learners and by a control group of native English speakers. According to the current theoretical models on second language speech learning, L1 Mandarin and Korean speakers are expected to differ in their perception of English obstruents due to the different correspondence between their respective L1 obstruents and those in English. On the other hand, theories based on intrinsic differences in the difficulty of different linguistic skills imply that some L2 sounds would be more difficult than others regardless of the L1 background. The results showed that all three groups were significantly more accurate in perceiving obstruents in the onset than in the coda position, voiceless than voiced targets, stops than fricatives, and labials than coronals. /θ/ and /ð/ were particularly poorly identified. The two learner groups were equally accurate in the onset position, but the Mandarin group outperformed the Korean group in the coda position. Regarding the specific obstruents, some patterns were predicted by mapping to the L1. Nonetheless, the general similarity between the two groups suggests a robust and pervasive language-independent tendency in speech perception.