Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

Dotson Rader arrived in New York in 1963, a young stranger to the city, knowing no one, owning nothing - until a few lucky events opened up an extraordinary new world for him. Through his words, we enter this ardent, unforgettable world of writers, artists, radicals, and sexual rebels in a time of unprecedented cultural freedom and defiance. Against the backdrop of the women's rights, gay liberation, civil rights, and anti-war movements, a singular new period of experimentation and liberation is born.

Brutally frank but buoyed throughout by McLeod’s unquenchable spirit, Peyakow - a title borrowed from the Cree word for “one who walks alone” - is an inspiring account of triumph against unimaginable odds. McLeod’s perspective as someone whose career path has crossed both sides of the Indigenous/White chasm resonates with particular force in today’s Canada.

Before Jacqueline Woodson met Juliet, before her own self-realization, there were decades of friends, lovers, and family who defined the woman she’d become. In this haunting story of memory and identity, Jacqueline shares the profound impact they had on bending the path of her life; how they informed the dreams of her future; and how each one - some lost, all loved - would bring her to Juliet, her one and only.

Danica Roem made national headlines when—as a transgender former frontwoman for a metal band and a political newcomer—she unseated Virginia's most notoriously anti-LGBTQ 26-year incumbent Bob Marshall as state delegate. But before Danica made history, she had to change her vision of what was possible in her own life. Doing so was a matter of storytelling: During her campaign, Danica hired an opposition researcher to dredge up every story from her past that her opponent might seize on to paint her negatively.

Ewan Forbes was born to a wealthy, landowning family, holders of a baronetcy, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 1912. Assigned female at birth, his true identity was nevertheless clear even in childhood - and so, with the support of his mother, he was taken to European specialists and eventually treated with early preparations of synthetic testosterone. Socially obliged to present himself as a girl in public until his official coming out to the Queen, Ewan lived a quiet life as a husband, doctor, and a pillar of the local community.

If you doubt and you’re angry, if you’re confused and hurting, if Sundays feel weird and you want something more, this book is for you. As millions exit the church due to its politics and treatment of LGBTQ people, Brandon Flanery brings us Stumbling: A Sassy Memoir about Coming Out of Evangelicalism, an LGBTQ memoir that gives us a glimpse into why he and others are leaving and to show us the hope he’s found on the other side.

Brian Belovitch has the rare distinction of coming out three times: first as a queer teenager; second as a glamorous transgender woman named Tish, and later, Natalia Gervais; and finally as an HIV-positive gay man surviving the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. From growing up in a barely-working-class first-generation immigrant family in Fall River, Massachusetts, to spinning across the disco dance floor of Studio 54 in New York City, Brian escaped many near-death experiences. Trans Figured chronicles a life lived on the edge with an unforgettable cast of characters.

Bautizada Vicente Aurelio, Samantha se encamina hacia los senderos de la masculinidad, por los cuales los tropiezos y las trampas son frecuentes: niño afeminado, sensible, es seducido, a sus doce años, por el atlético y viril David que le promete amor eterno en la iglesia de San José. Asus diecinueve años, deja Orizaba para emanciparse y liberarse en la Ciudad de México. Tras haber concluido sus estudios de hotelería, trabaja como recepcionista en varios hoteles, pero a Samantha le gusta el mundo de la farándula y de la diversión nocturna.

The voice, the dressing-down, the cigarette in its holder, remain unmistakable. There is rarely a week when one of Private Lives, Hay Fever, and Blithe Spirit is not in production somewhere in the world. Phrases from Noël Coward's songs - "Mad About The Boy", "Mad Dogs and Englishman" - are forever lodged in the public consciousness. He was at one point the most highly paid author in the world. Yet some of his most striking and daring writing remains unfamiliar.

The Dead Don’t Need Reminding is a braided story of Julian Randall’s return from the cliff edge of a harrowing depression and his determination to retrace the hustle of a white-passing grandfather to the Mississippi town from which he was driven amid threats of tar and feather. Alternatively wry, lyrical, and heartfelt, Randall transforms pop culture moments into deeply personal explorations of grief, family, and the American way

In Too Much, with his trademark wit and insight, Tom Allen takes a funny and moving look at how he's been thrown into adulthood, as he finally leaves the family home and starts a relationship with a new boyfriend. He shares his unwillingness to move on from the arrested development of millennial life. But ultimately, he has to grow up fast in the wake of the unexpected death of his father in late 2021.The audiobook becomes an emotional ode to his beloved dad and how you learn to navigate grief.

Ink from the Pen is the story of an educated, HIV+ gay man whose decades-long walk on the wild side came crashing down in 2004, when he found himself facing nine months in prison for dealing the crystal meth he’d become addicted to during the worst of the AIDS epidemic. Olmsted soon discovered his love of words was precisely what would get him through the experience. With a keen eye for detail and an unerring capacity to deftly convey the poignancy and absurdities of incarceration, Mark learned that creativity is one of the most powerful survival tools there is.

"We're the buttf--kers of rock-and-roll, We want to sock it to your hole!" With these words written in a notebook, Jon Ginoli sets off on a journey of self-discovery and musical passion to become the founding member of Pansy Division, the first out and proud queercore punk rock band to hit the semi-big time. Set against the changing decades of music, we follow the band from their inception in San Francisco, to their search for a music label and a permanent drummer to their current status as indie rock icons.

Growing up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 1970s was an easy life. Well, easy as long as you didn't have dyslexia or ADD, or were a Jew. And once you added gay into the mix, life became more difficult. So Todd Glass decided to hide the gay part, no matter how comic, tragic, or comically tragic the results. Now, Todd has written an open, honest, and hilarious memoir in an effort to help everyone - young and old, gay and straight - breathe a little more freely.

Eve Adams was a rebel. Born Chawa Zloczewer into a Jewish family in Poland, Adams emigrated to the United States in 1912. The young woman befriended anarchists, sold radical publications, took a new name, and ran lesbian-and-gay-friendly speakeasies in Chicago and New York. Then, in 1925, Adams risked all to write and publish a book titled Lesbian Love. In The Daring Life and Deadly Times of Eve Adams, acclaimed historian Jonathan Ned Katz has recovered the extraordinary story of an early daring activist.

In the Shadow of the American Dream is a stunning collection of riveting and revealing chapters from Wojnarowicz's extensive personal diaries - 30 volumes' worth of memories and lucid observations, some bitter, some sweet - that the author began writing when he was 17 and continued until his death two decades later. Here is a brilliant chronicle of an artist's emergence - a young man's still achingly fresh memories of his unhappy adolescence and his glorious discovery of self.

Queer. Muslim. Arab American. A proudly Fat woman. Randa Jarrar is all of these things. In this provocative memoir of a cross-country road trip, she explores how to claim joy in an unraveling and hostile America.

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.

Growing up in the tiny village of Smith, Alberta, Darrel J. McLeod was surrounded by his Cree family's history. In shifting and unpredictable stories, his mother, Bertha, shared narratives of their culture, their family, and the cruelty that she and her sisters endured in residential school. Bertha taught him to be fiercely proud of his heritage and to listen to the birds that would return to watch over and guide him at key junctures of his life. However, in a spiral of events, Darrel's mother turned wild and unstable, and their home life became chaotic.

André Gide, a towering figure in French letters, draws upon his friendship with Oscar Wilde to sketch a compelling portrait of the tragic, doomed author, both celebrated and shunned in his time. Rather than compile a complete biography, Gide invites us to discover Wilde as he did - from their first meeting in 1891 to their final parting just two years before Wilde’s death - all told through Gide’s sensitive, incomparable prose. Using his notes, recollections, and conversations, Gide illuminates Wilde as a man whose true art was not writing, but living.