Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

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....

Hargrove’s memoir picks up where Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy left off, exploring generational trauma and pulling back the curtain on family court and poverty in America. Moving and inspiring, Mama is an ode to motherhood and identity, to never giving up, and to finding strength in family and community.

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.

In The Lives of Michel Foucault, David Macey quotes the iconic French philosopher as speaking “nostalgically...of 'an unforgettable evening on LSD, in carefully prepared doses, in the desert night, with delicious music, [and] nice people'". This came to pass in 1975, when Foucault spent Memorial Day weekend in Southern California at the invitation of Simeon Wade - ostensibly to guest-lecture at the Claremont Graduate School where Wade was an assistant professor, but in truth to explore what he called the Valley of Death.

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.

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.

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.

It’s hard enough coming out, but playing basketball for a nationally ranked school and trying to figure out your sexual identity in the closeted and paranoid world of big-time college sports - that’s a challenge. Kate Fagan’s love for basketball and for her religious teammates at the University of Colorado was tested by the gut-wrenching realization that she could no longer ignore the feelings of otherness inside her. In trying to blend in, Kate had created a hilariously incongruous world for herself in Boulder.

When Paul Lisicky arrived in Provincetown in the early 1990s, he was leaving behind a history of family trauma to live in a place outside of time, known for its values of inclusion, acceptance, and art. In this idyllic haven, Lisicky searches for love and connection and comes into his own as he finds a sense of belonging. At the same time, the center of this community is consumed by the AIDS crisis, and the very structure of town life is being rewired out of necessity: What might this utopia look like during a time of dystopia?

The “Willie Tales,” you are about to listen to, was originally written to share as FaceBook entries and will take you on the journey we experienced from my age of 5 to 55 and Willie from age 30-85. I am now 84, so you see how little time we have to get it right. If we had not chosen to face our demons, I would not be who I am today. I took the chance to know and develop a father / son relationship with Willie and I am eternally grateful. It was the one most precious gifts I could have given to my father and in turn, the gift of his open love valve brings me blessings to this day.

Homoflexible opens with me finding my footing at the age of nineteen and takes the listener on an expedition spanning a decade worth of new beginnings, love, loss, and overall triumph. The journey is the destination as I met my husband and moved to Washington, DC where our open relationship evolved and we formed a thruple: three person relationship, with a female. I discover a belonging in the polyamorous community and find a new identity as homoflexible; primarily homosexual but with a limited amount of attraction to the opposite sex or willingness to take part in heterosexual activity.

Rachel Matlow’s eccentric mom, Elaine, never quite followed the script handed down to her. Her bold out-there-ness made it okay for Rachel to be their genderqueer self and live life on their own terms. But when Elaine decides to try to heal her cancer naturally, Rachel has to draw the line.

Mississippi Sissy is the stunning memoir from Kevin Sessums, a celebrity journalist who grew up scaring other children, hiding terrible secrets, pretending to be Arlene Frances and running wild in the South. As he grew up in Forest, Mississippi, befriended by the family maid, Mattie May, he became a young man who turned the word "sissy" on its head, just as his mother taught him. In Jackson, he is befriended by Eudora Welty and journalist Frank Hains, but when Hains is brutally murdered in his antebellum mansion, Kevin's long road north towards celebrity begins.

Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky / to world inside”. Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay”.

In "I'm Not Dead...Yet: How I Turned My Misfortunes Into Strengths," Industrial-Organizational Psychologist Dr. Joshua J. Caraballo takes listeners on an unforgettable journey through the depths of his personal struggles and triumphant resilience. With poignant honesty and raw vulnerability, Joshua shares his battles with mental health, addiction, self-hate, surviving cancer, and coming to terms with his queer identity.

It Gets Better is a collection of expanded essays and new material from celebrities, everyday people, and teens who have posted videos of encouragement, as well as new contributors who have yet to post videos to the site. While many of these teens couldn’t see a positive future for themselves, others can. We can show LGBT youth the levels of happiness, potential, and positivity their lives will reach if they can just get through their teen years.

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.

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.

As a trans man born into an evangelical Christian family that prevented his true identity from emerging, Alex spent years struggling with depression, anxiety, and addiction, trying to break free of the oppressive beliefs that bound him. After years of fighting—for his life, his freedom, and his truth—Alex learnt to surrender and come home to himself. In this part memoir, part self-help book, Alex weaves his own story with healing guidance for you to take away and implement in your own life.

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.