Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

One ordinary day, a caseworker from the Department of Children and Families knocked on the Hays family’s door to investigate an anonymous complaint about the upbringing of their transgender child. It was this knock, this threat, that began the family’s journey out of the Bible Belt but never far from the hate and fear resting at the nation’s core. Self-aware and intimate, A Girlhood asks us all to love better, not just for the sake of Hays’s child but for children everywhere enduring injustice and prejudice just as they begin to understand themselves.

This taboo memoir eavesdrops into the unguarded mind of a Christian husband and father who came of age attracted to men. As a boy, Harrison Bly craved male affection and camaraderie but never found his footing in the world of boys. Secretly gay in a conservative Christian world, Harrison compromised authenticity only to find shallow acceptance. On the crooked path to manhood, Harrison fumbled in the dark between ideologies on faith and homosexuality that failed to acknowledge his deepest wounds and longings.

Charlotte Bellows wrote The Definition of Beautiful between the ages of 15 and 17, in the wake of lockdown and in recovery from anorexia. In the tradition of Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar and Françoise Sagan in Bonjour Tristesse, Bellows writes with deceptively straightforward urgency, pushing through society's constraints on the bodies and minds of girls and women to offer a story both achingly familiar and devastatingly new.

One of NPR’s Best Books of 2020 One of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 From the New York Times bestselling author of I Can’t Date Jesus, which Vogue called “a piece of personal and cultural storytelling that is as fun as it is illuminating,” comes a wry and insightful essay...

FINALIST FOR THE 2026 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FOR TRANSGENDER NONFICTION An Electric Literature Best Nonfiction Book of the Year A them Best LGBTQ+ Book of the Year A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year An Autostraddle Most Anticipated October Read A BookRiot Most...

A “scrupulously honest” (O, The Oprah Magazine) debut memoir that explores a trans man’s gender transition amid a pivotal political moment in America. Becoming a Man is a “moving narrative [that] illuminates the joy, courage, necessity, and risk-taking of gender transition” (Kirkus...

Others have turned to Janet W. Hardy's The Ethical Slut, The New Topping Book, and The New Bottoming Book for advice on the most challenging questions of sex, polyamory, kink, and self-identity. But Janet had to make it up as she went. Here, in Impervious: Confessions of a Semi-Retired Deviant, Janet takes you through the five twisty stages of her own kinky life - mirroring those of any good scene - negotiation, warmup, engagement, climax, and aftercare.

This Boy and His Mother: Healing from Trauma as a Gay Latter-day Saint chronicles Preston Jenkins' journey back to faith and activity in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Speaking with authenticity, Preston offers gospel insights gleaned from his experiences involving same-sex attraction, sexual and emotional abuse, an early return from an LDS mission, mental illness, and the eventual completion of a mission. Hope, faith, and never-failing charity are strikingly displayed. So, too, is the sufficient grace of Jesus Christ to holistically heal all wounds.

A fascinating story of growing up as a gay fan of comic books in the 1960s, building a fifty-year career as an award-winning writer, and interacting with acclaimed comic book legends Award-winning writer Bill Schelly relates how comics and fandom saved his life in this engrossing story that...

A groundbreaking account of New York's Fire Island, chronicling its influence on art, literature, culture and queer liberation over the past century Fire Island, a thin strip of beach off the Long Island coast, has long been a vital space in the queer history of America. Both utopian and...

This is a book written primarily for gay Christians and those who love them. Part memoir, part pastoral-theological reflection, this book wrestles with three main areas of struggle that many gay Christians face: (1) What is God’s will for sexuality? (2) If the historic Christian tradition is...

Raised like a princess in one of the most powerful families in the American South, Henrietta Bingham was offered the helm of a publishing empire. Instead she ripped through the Jazz Age like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character. In New York, Louisville, and London, she drove both men and women wild with desire, and her youth blazed with sex. But her love affairs with women made her the subject of derision, and she suffered from years of addiction and breakdowns.

In Cooking as Fast as I Can, Cat Cora reveals, for the first time, coming-of-age experiences from early childhood sexual abuse to the realities of life as a lesbian in the Deep South. She shares how she found her passion in the kitchen and went on to attend the prestigious Culinary Institute of America and apprentice under Michelin-star chefs in France. After her big break as a cohost on the Food Network's Melting Pot, Cat broke barriers by becoming the first-ever female Iron Chef.

In 1987, somebody shoved a flyer into the hand of Peter Staley: Massive AIDS demonstration, it announced. After four years on Wall Street as a closeted gay man, Staley was familiar with the homophobia common on trading floors. He also knew that he was not beyond the reach of HIV, having recently been diagnosed with AIDS-related complex. A week after the protest, Staley found his way to a packed meeting of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power - ACT UP - in the West Village. It would prove to be the best decision he ever made.

“An essential book for this moment.” —Rob Sheffield The definitive history of LGBTQ music, from Stonewall to RuPaul, and its impact on culture and American life From the underground dancefloors of the Seventies to the global charts of the Nineties, LGBTQ artists and audiences shaped...

Harvey Milk - eloquent, charismatic, and a smart-aleck - was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, but he had not even served a full year in office when he was shot by a homophobic fellow supervisor. Milk's assassination at the age of 48 made him the most famous gay man in modern history; 20 years later, Time magazine included him on its list of the hundred most influential individuals of the 20th century.

Raw, moving and savagely funny, What You Into? is Josh Fox's autobiographical account of his spiral into the Grindr world of casual sex, hook-ups and dating apps following the break-up of his marriage. He documents this journey diary-style, chronicling the often weird, at times dark world of casual sex as he navigates his grief and anger through the consumption of men—only to discover that he too is being consumed by the process.

Patricia Highsmith, author of classics such as The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, was a lesbian and a writer who defied simple categorization. Marijane Meaker is the author of more than 40 books. Meaker and Highsmith met in New York City, became lovers, and embarked on a romance amidst the bohemian set of Greenwich Village and the literary crowd of Fire Island. Written with wit and brassy candor, this is a revealing look at a controversial icon of popular American fiction.

Named a Best Book by: The Globe and Mail, Indigo, Out Magazine, Audible, CBC, Apple, Quill & Quire, Kirkus Reviews, Brooklyn Public Library, Writers’ Trust of Canada, Autostraddle, Bitch, and BookRiot. Finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award, Transgender Nonfiction Nominated for the 2019...

Caroline "Tula" Cossey was born with male genitalia but went on to become a beautiful woman with a successful modeling career. My Story is Tula's candid thought-provoking, enlightening, humorous, heart wrenching, and motivational account of her struggles: her troubled childhood being bullied and taunted in East Anglia, her dreams of becoming a woman, the operations that liberated her sexually, and the journey from showgirl to James Bond girl to top international model.