Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

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.

Karla Jay's memoir of an age whose tumultuous social and political movements fundamentally reshaped American culture takes listeners from her early days in the 1968 Columbia University student riots to her post-college involvement in New York radical women's groups and the New York Gay Liberation Front to Southern California in the early '70s, where she continued in the battle for gay civil rights. We see her helping to organize the takeover of The Ladies Home Journal and “ogle-ins” - where women staked out Wall Street and whistled at the men.

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Lucas Hedges, Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, and written and directed by Joel Edgerton. The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small-town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality. When Garrard was a 19-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to 'cure' him of homosexuality or risk losing family, friends and the god he had prayed to every day of his life....

A groundbreaking look at the history of transgender representation in TV and film, by an of-the-moment and in-demand culture reporter. Narrated by Tre'vell Anderson, WE SEE EACH OTHER is a personal history of trans visibility since the beginning of moving images. A literary reckoning, it unearths a transcestry that's long existed in plain sight and in the shadows of history's annals, and further contextualizes our present moment of increased representation.

Alan Turing had a radical and ingenious mind. He is considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, and his theories on this matter range from purely mechanical to almost spiritual. During World War II, his decryption of the Nazis’ Enigma codes proved vital for the Allied victory over the Axis powers. Turing’s fingerprints are everywhere, and yet his own country for quite some time failed to acknowledge it.

It is my absolute pleasure to add my own personal emotional tone as I read to you my story of redemption from trauma and addiction. "At the tender age of six, Mark Turnipseed received what he felt was a clear and devastating message: It isn't okay to like other boys, and if you do, you're bound for Hell. His confusion and self-hatred made him determined to become the boy he believed he was supposed to be, but in attempting to live a lie, he descended into a hell of his own making.

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.

In this program, listeners will find glamour and gaffes on and off the stage, clarifying snippets of queer theory, terrifyingly selfish bosses, sex, quick sex, KFC binges, group sex, the kind of honesty that banishes shame, glimmers of hope, blazes of ambition, tender sex, mad dashes in last night's heels plus a full face of make-up, and a rom-com love story for the ages. This is where the unspeakable becomes the celebrated. This is the diary of a drag queen - one dazzling, hilarious, true performance of a real, flawed, extraordinary life.

One winter's night in 1976, over 20 million people in Britain watched John Curry skate to Olympic glory on an ice rink in Austria. Many millions more watched around the world. Overnight he became one of the most famous men on the planet. He was awarded the OBE. He was chosen as BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Curry had changed ice skating from marginal sport to high art. And yet the man was - and would always remain - an absolute mystery to a world that had been dazzled by his gift.

Bent but Not Broken is an unflinchingly honest memoir about the onset of Peyronie’s disease, a painful and sexually limiting condition that is estimated to affect more than five percent of the worldwide adult male population. Don Cummings narrates humorously about the emotional and collateral damage brought on by a suddenly curved penis as he struggles to maintain his sense of sex and self.

Un récit autobiographique aussi acide que lucide d’une étoile montante du stand-up. Un récit événement, qui fait le buzz dans les médias. Un récit de coming-out, et de toutes les hontes qui ont pu entraver l’acceptation de soi.

Living on the street, Dr. George ran a prostitution and drug dealing business to feed his addiction to sex and drugs. His life spiraled out of control, leading him to the confines of a prison cell. When released on probation he risked it all on a drug blow out. This was the catalyst that started an intentional climb towards a life of freedom. In this book, Dr. George guides the listener through his personal story and how he used the power of intention to change his life.

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.

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. The lives of Cherrie and her mother, and of their people, are woven together in a story of critical reflection and deep personal revelation as Moraga charts her own coming to consciousness alongside the heartbreaking story of her mother's decline.

After the fairy tale of Happily Ever After ends in heartbreak, what then? From multi-award-winning author River Faire comes an inspiring account of second chances, healing, inexplicable magic, and following the soul's compass.

On her journey to near stardom in the music business, Monica Madrid wound up a broke, demoralized alcoholic. Through the twists and turns of a colorful life, she rubbed elbows with Prince, Rick James, and other artists and was in a musical battle with Tupac Shakur. She came close to fulfilling her childhood dream, but once it was stripped from her grasp, her path led to money, prestige - and broken relationships. Monica's story is one of loss, love, and redemption.

Drags, fags and trans-women were attracted to the Big Apple because they were able to find work as impersonators in a small number of Lower East Side clubs. Decades before Stonewall, they occupied the margins of society, determined to live as they pleased, despite of the attentions of the police. Sometimes reduced to stealing to get their costumes, these girls were unstoppable, fearless and fabulous. When a cache of their letters were discovered, these individuals were given a voice where they had traditionally been silenced.

In the 50s, gays took on stereotypical roles David Vass did not embrace. “I wasn’t a top, bottom, butch or fem - I scared the shit out of all the homos I met!” Entertaining, humorous, and shocking, he reveals secrets of the record labels (how he became a mafia money runner), juicy, never-before-told anecdotes about legendary celebrities - Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, Golden Globe and Tony award winners that he technical directed. Over 100 World Class difficult personalities were kept in line by Vass. Many shared their secrets with him.

On the eve of Edafe Okporo’s twenty-sixth birthday, he was awoken by a violent mob outside his window in Abuja, Nigeria. The mob threatened his life after discovering the secret Edafe had been hiding for years—that he is a gay man. Left with no other choice, he purchased a one-way plane ticket to New York City and fled for his life. Though America had always been painted to him as a land of freedom and opportunity, it was anything but when he arrived just days before the tumultuous 2016 Presidential Election.

Mab Segrest explores her singular experience as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent Far Right movement in North Carolina in this best-selling political memoir.