The 1969 Stonewall Uprising was a tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement in America, and was largely started and led by queer Black men and women. But queer Black Americans still live at the intersection of racism, homophobia, and transphobia, and face the most risk and discrimination within the LGBTQIA+ community. These stories highlight some of the many inequalities faced by queer Black folks, while simultaneously and acknowledging and celebrating the diversity of the queer Black experience.
The story of Christine Jorgensen, America's first prominent transsexual, narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives. Their erasure from trans history masks the ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-19th century to present-day anti-Black and anti-trans legislation and violence...
An eloquent, restless, and enlightening memoir by one of the most thought-provoking journalists today about growing up Black and queer in America, reuniting with the past, and coming of age their own way....
With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, 28-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn’t know...until she does exactly that....
A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence....
An essential and revelatory coming-of-age narrative from a thrilling new voice, Rainbow Milk follows 19-year-old Jesse McCarthy as he grapples with his racial and sexual identities against the backdrop of his Jehovah's Witness upbringing....
From a leading journalist and activist comes a brave memoir. When Darnell Moore was 14, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. In No Ashes in the Fire, he shares the journey taken by that scared, bullied teen who not only survived, but found his calling....
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police....
Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist....
In this classic novel by literary great James Baldwin, David is a young American man living in Paris whose girlfriend has just left for Spain, where she plans to contemplate whether or not she wants to marry him. Meanwhile, David takes up an affair with an Italian man named Giovanni, and must reckon with his attraction to both sexes and his personal history while navigating his own desires and his family’s expectations for him. Giovanni's Room is a classic LGBTQIA+ novel, with a sensitive performance by narrator Dan Butler.
In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia....
An extraordinary debut novel, Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born "with one foot on the other side"....
Native Country of the Heart is the writer and activist Cherrie Moraga's love letter to her "unlettered" mother. It begins with her mother, Elvira Isabel Moraga, who as a child, along with her siblings, was hired out by her own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley....
This hilarious, touching debut novel by Aaron Foley, author of How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass, follows three Black gay millennial men looking for love, friendship, and professional success in the Motor City. Suddenly jobless and single after a devastating layoff and a breakup with his cheating ex, advertising copywriter Dominick Gibson flees his life in Hell's Kitchen to try to get back on track in his hometown of Detroit. He’s got one objective—exit the shallow dating pool ASAP and get married by 35—and the deadline’s approaching fast...
Meet. Love. Break. Recover. That’s been the routine of Staceyann Chin’s romantic life. But at 35, after yet another devastating breakup and overcome by an urgent and all-consuming desire to have a child, Chin realizes she’s running out of time....
In this moving memoir, award-winning poet Saeed Jones tells of his childhood in the South and his coming of age as a gay Black man. Full of vignettes from his life, this memoir covers everything from his contentious relationship with his mother to his travels across the country. At its heart, Jones’s personal story is about the lengths we go to discover who we really are and then fight to be ourselves. Jones narrates his memoir, which is only appropriate—it’s powerful to hear his words in his own voice.
An intimate, impertinent, and incisive collection about race, progress, and hypocrisy from Jill Louise Busby, a.k.a. Jillisblack. Jill Louise Busby spent years in the nonprofit sector specializing in diversity and inclusion. She spoke at academic institutions, businesses, and detention centers on the topics of race, power, and privilege and delivered over 200 workshops to nonprofit organizations all over the California Bay Area...
Three days. Two girls. One life-changing music festival. Toni is grieving the loss of her roadie father and needing to figure out where her life will go from here - and she's desperate to get back to loving music. Olivia is a hopeless romantic whose heart has just taken a beating (again) and is beginning to feel like she'll always be a square peg in a round hole - but the Farmland Music and Arts Festival is a chance to find a place where she fits...
As a Black nonbinary, queer person in a dark-skinned 6’1”, 180-pound male body born into a religious immigrant household, actor, writer, and activist Brandon Kyle Goodman knows the pain of having to hide one’s true self, the work of learning to love that true self, and the freedom of finally being your true self. In You Gotta Be You, Brandon affectionately challenges you to consider, “Who would I be if society never got its hands on me?”...
