Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

Michigan. To tens of thousands of womyn from around the globe, the word meant not a state in the upper Midwest of the U.S., but a state of mind, a state of freedom. A culture, a community, a revolution. The Land. From 1976 to 2015, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival was home ground for the lesbian feminist movement. There we strove to embody the principles of matriarchal feminism and bring that wisdom to life in every aspect of the town we created, and the values that guided our lives together.

Father Shannon Kearns is familiar with liminal spaces. He’s lived in them his whole life. And while his experience as a transgender man has often made it difficult for him to fit in—especially in the context of Christianity—it has also shaped his perspective in important ways on complicated, gender-transgressing aspects of theology and Scripture.

Movies That Made Me Gay is a wonderfully well-informed, witty and acerbic take on iconic Hollywood films, film-stars, and indie cult favorites from an author who is himself a Black gay icon.

In the turbulent voyage of life, where traumas weigh like anchors and relationships often drift, Remember Who the F*ck You Are raises a clarion call: Keep Going. The message? Amidst life’s tempests, resilience is your compass, and tenacity, your sail. Expect a profound mix of raw vulnerability, tales that might sting with their familiarity, emotional peaks and valleys, and a sprinkle of humor to lighten the darkest corners.

After losing her job due to the coronavirus pandemic, a vet tech decides to confront the roots of her childhood traumas by hiking the Appalachian Trail. Pack Light follows a woman's journey changing the narrative of hiking while Black—because the great outdoors belongs to everyone.

In this series of stories, you will encounter attractive actors, stunning fashion models, handsome artists, a suave British aristocrat, the activist and founder of a London gay paper, and a charismatic and very persistent millionaire. Also there are some really fantastic kissers! I mean exceptionally good!

This exhilarating Cold War narrative takes listeners from top-secret Cabinet Room meetings to exclusive social clubs, and into the pages of a powerful man's intimate diary. Ike's Mystery Man brings a new dimension to our understanding of the inner-workings of the Eisenhower White House. It also shines a bright light on the indispensable contributions and sacrifices made by patriotic gay Americans. Ike's Mystery Man relies on thousands of personal letters, interviews, and previously classified archives to tell a gripping story that has never before been told.

Meet. Love. Break. Recover. That’s been the routine of Staceyann Chin’s romantic life. But at 35, after yet another devasting breakup and overcome by an urgent and all-consuming desire to have a child, Chin realizes she’s running out of time. So she sets her sights on a single target: motherhood.

Between Shadow and Sun chronicles Tina White's fifty-year journey to womanhood: her efforts to make sense of life as a man; her awkward first steps into the world as a woman; her struggle to honor and love her family. It also captures the family's struggles to cope.

From the moment Brooke Blurton appeared on Australian television, she dazzled audiences with her authenticity, self-knowledge, generosity and honesty. As a proud young Noongar-Yamatji woman, Brooke's connection to her culture and country is deep, and as an openly queer woman, she knows that love is simply love. Most of all Brooke knows the importance of family, and the uplifting power of unconditional connection. But behind the public persona Brooke presents to the world is a story of epic proportions and awe-inspiring resilience.

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.

Fiona Goodwin first kissed a girl at the age of eighteen in 1970. She was as shocked as anyone, and her confession to the pastor led to a failed Linda Blair-style exorcism. The odyssey that followed included training as a nun in Italy, a starring role as Satan with a wandering troupe of missionaries in Honduras, film sets in Hollywood, The Comedy Store in LA, a five-star review at the Edinburgh Festival 2019, and eventually a journey with ayahuasca in Peru.

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.

Recently hailed as "the greatest cabaret artist of [V's] generation" in The New Yorker, Mx. Justin Vivian Bond makes a brilliant literary debut with this staggeringly candid and hilarious novella-length memoir. With a recent diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, and news that V's first lover from childhood has been imprisoned for impersonating an undercover police officer, Bond recalls in vivid detail coming of age as a trans kid. Always haunted by the knowledge of being "different," Bond was further confused when the bully next door wanted to meet secretly. Their trysts went on for years, and made Bond acutely aware of sexual power and vulnerability. With inimitable style, Bond raises issues about LGBTQ adolescence, homophobia, parenting, and sexuality, while being utterly entertaining.

Part trans woman’s coming-out story and part queer romance, My Body Is Distant is a memoir immersed in virtual worlds, where identity is fluid and fantasies proliferate, and where Maylott can escape her battle with cancer and the life-altering decisions she must make about the body she was born in and the person she really is.

As a multiracial household in Chicago’s North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca T. Royster and her family's world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife Annie, who's white; and Cecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their forties and fifties.

Transland is a fiery and revealing memoir that delves into what happens when a non-binary person goes looking for self-worth and a sense of belonging in fetish subculture, only to find that fetish communities come with just as many problematic rules, expectations, and hierarchies as mainstream ones.

While we can all recall Martin Luther King Jr. giving his "I Have a Dream" speech in front of a massive crowd at Lincoln Memorial, few of us remember the man who organized this watershed nonviolent protest in eight short weeks: Bayard Rustin. This was far from Rustin's first foray into the fight for civil rights. As a world-traveling pacifist, he brought Gandhi's protest techniques to the forefront of US civil rights demonstrations, helped build the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led the fight for economic justice, and played a deeply influential role in the life of Dr. King.

Book about transgenders.

Dan Mathews knew that his witty, bawdy 78-year-old mother, Perry, was unable to maintain her fierce independence - so he flew her across the country to Virginia to live with him in an 1870 townhouse badly in need of repairs. But to Dan, a screwdriver is a cocktail not a tool, and he was soon overwhelmed with two fixer-uppers: the house and his mother.