Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

Precious Brady-Davis remembers the sense of being singular and grappling with “otherness." Born into traumatic circumstances, Davis was brought up in the Omaha foster care system and the Pentecostal faith. As a biracial, gender-nonconforming kid, she felt displaced. Yet she realized by coming into her identity that she had a purpose all along. In I Have Always Been Me, Brady-Davis reflects on a childhood of neglect, instability, and abandonment.

Made famous by the great success of her psychological thrillers, Patricia Highsmith is lauded as one of the most influential and celebrated modern writers. The relationship between Highsmith's lesbianism, her fraught personality - by parts self-destructive and malicious - and her fiction has been largely avoided by biographers. She was openly homosexual and wrote the seminal lesbian love story, Carol. However, her status as an LGBT icon is undermined by the fact that she was excessively cruel and exploitative of her friends and lovers.

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.

So often trans and nonbinary people’s stories are told only through the lens of their struggles and challenges, including their political battles for legal rights, but trans and nonbinary people live rich and fulfilling lives full of joy and community too. Authentic Selves: Celebrating Trans and Nonbinary People and Their Families is a sweeping compilation of life stories and portraits of trans and nonbinary people, as well as their partners, parents, children, siblings, and chosen family members.

Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks posthumously discovered behind Highsmith’s linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta—traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who “[worked] like mad to be something”.

On December 11, 1973, Mark Segal disrupted a live broadcast of the CBS Evening News when he sat on the desk directly between the camera and news anchor Walter Cronkite, yelling, "Gays protest CBS prejudice!" He was wrestled to the studio floor by the stagehands on live national television, thus ending LGBT invisibility. But this one victory left many more battles to fight, and creativity was required to find a way to challenge stereotypes surrounding the LGBT community.

In A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten, award-winning author, sex educator, filmmaker, and podcast host Tristan Taormino shares her coming-of-age story, revealing how her radical sexuality and unconventional career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship. Raised by a hard-working single mother on Long Island, Tristan got her sex ed from the 1980s TV show Solid Gold and The Joy of Sex. She spent summers at drag shows in Provincetown with her father, Bill, who had come out as gay in the mid-1970s.

In "I Change Course," Kate offers a candid reflection on the power of choice and the beauty in every ordinary moment. Her story is both inspiring and entertaining, showing how embracing change with an open heart can lead to remarkable personal growth. With wisdom and humor, Kate Bean guides listeners through the process of rediscovering, reimagining, and rebuilding their lives after change. Whether you are facing your own crossroads or simply seeking inspiration, this memoir is a beacon of hope and a reminder of the transformative power of embracing life's uncertainties.

Have you ever been around people, yet still felt alone? Dr. bird has too. Within the first variant of their envirusmental series, they revealed thirty years of their late-in-life realized secrets. In this second volume, they, literally and figuratively, Zoom in on the last four "unprecedented" ones. This includes them cutting-the-s--t about how, half-way through their PhD, COVID-19 hit. And how, a couple years later, they added "Dr." to the front of their nickname.

As a young child, in many ways, Shaley didn't stand a chance. Growing up as a closeted lesbian in the 1970's, in a dysfunctional family with an often mentally unstable mother, the only thing on her mind was survival. Turning to alcohol and drugs at an early age, she thought she'd found the perfect escape from the shame of being gay and her mother's erratic emotional roller-coaster ride.

In this clear and absorbing memoir, John Sam Jones writes of a life lived on the edge. It is story of journeys and realisation, of acceptance and joy. From a boyhood on the coast of Wales to a traumatic period studying at Aberystwyth, to a scholarship at Berkley in California as the AIDS epidemic began to take hold before returning to Liverpool and north Wales to work in community engagement and sexual health. A journey of becoming a writer and chronicler of his experiences with award-winning books and the desire to become a campaigner for LGBT rights in Wales.

The year was 1991. Vivek was eight. He realized he was gay. Only he didn't: he just figured that he wanted to be different. And that he was in love - for want of a better word - with Deepak, his best friend. Then Mast Kalandar released, with Anupam Kher playing Pinku, a stereotypical gay character. And Vivek realized he didn't want to be Pinku. So he tried to walk differently, gesticulate differently, and speak in as gruff a voice as he could - all to avoid being Pinku.

This provocative story is about an adolescent who was initiated into a clandestine sexual society. He was spirited to the Middle East, from his UK boarding school. He attended the Bahriji School in the United Arab Emirates in preparation for serving in harems for the wealthy and elite.

This is a true story of a biological male who lived through much adversity since birth. His quest to fit into society because of his gender non-conformity made life a struggle, but interesting. Take a journey with this author, from sandy coasts to rugged mountains.

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

Henry Gerber was the father of American gay liberation. Born in 1892 in Germany, Henry Gerber was expelled from school as a boy and lost several jobs as a young man because of his homosexual activities. He emigrated to the United States and enlisted in the army for employment. After his release, he explored Chicago’s gay subculture: cruising Bughouse Square, getting arrested for “disorderly conduct,” and falling in love.

In 1959, the year Terry Galloway turned nine, the voices of everyone she loved began to disappear. No one yet knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system, eventually causing her to go deaf. As a self-proclaimed "child freak," she acted out her fury with her boxy hearing aids and Coke-bottle glasses by faking her own drowning at a camp for crippled children

On a hot summer day, twenty-eight-year-old Tommy Dorfman was enjoying a beautiful outing on a boat. But inside she felt unmoored. After a lifetime of confusion, she’d finally gained clarity around her gender and had begun to transition. But there were still parts of herself she’d locked away, elements of her story that she needed, for the first time, to fully confront. She sought guidance in a tarot deck, using it as a tool to make sense of her life up until that point. Maybe This Will Save Me, Dorfman’s spellbinding debut memoir, is structured through the cards of that tarot pull.

A riotous collection of "witty and captivating" (Bitch Magazine) essays by a gay Filipino immigrant in America learning that everything is about sex - and sex is about power.

Tim and Rod grew up a few suburbs from each other in Newcastle, New South Wales. They were gay, but their worlds were not. Before they found each other, they were alone and miserable, marooned in a sea of impossible expectations. Rod was shackled by a conservative Christian upbringing, while Tim felt unmanly and inferior beside his macho, sport-obsessed older brothers. After enduring their own private versions of hell, Tim and Rod crossed paths on a dating app. They swiped for Mr Right, and suddenly everything clicked.