Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

Growing up in small-town Ohio isn't easy, particularly when you're a closeted gay kid surrounded by...no one openly gay. Luckily, Danny Pellegrino grew up in the '90s, coming of age when the internet opened up a whole new world for a curious kid itching for life outside of Midwest suburbia.

Connection is a Song is a journey through the sounds of the 1990s; the story of a life-defining love of music and the tracks that shaped this girl's adventures through the decade. It travels from the impossibly mournful 'Nothing Compares 2 U' by Sinead O'Connor to the delirium of the KLF's '3 a.m. Eternal' via the cartoon swagger of EMF's 'Unbelievable', Madonna's terrifyingly sexy 'Vogue' and the guitar indie heart of the '90s where Elastica's 'Connection' beats Blur and Oasis in Anna's own Battle of Britpop.

We talk about achieving 'LGBTQ+ equality', but around the world, LGBTQ+ people are still suffering discrimination and extreme violence. How do we solve this urgent problem, allowing queer people everywhere the opportunity to thrive? In We Can Do Better Than This, 35 voices explore this question. Through deeply moving stories and provocative new arguments on safety and visibility, dating and gender, care and community, they map new global frontiers in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights.

This taboo memoir eavesdrops into the unguarded mind of a Christian husband and father who came of age attracted to men. As a boy, Harrison Bly craved male affection and camaraderie but never found his footing in the world of boys. Secretly gay in a conservative Christian world, Harrison compromised authenticity only to find shallow acceptance. On the crooked path to manhood, Harrison fumbled in the dark between ideologies on faith and homosexuality that failed to acknowledge his deepest wounds and longings.

Through his experience of boxing - learning to get hit and to hit back; wrestling with the camaraderie of the gym; confronting the betrayals and strength of his own body - McBee examines the weight of male violence, the pervasiveness of gender stereotypes and the limitations of conventional masculinity. A wide-ranging exploration of gender in our society, Amateur is ultimately a story of hope, as McBee traces a way forward: a new masculinity, inside the ring and out of it.

What’s it like to parent a child in transition? Inspired by the acclaimed podcast How to Be a Girl, this is a highly personal and beautifully narrated memoir by Marlo Mack recounting the journey she’s been on since her three-year-old declared he should have been born a girl. And Mack agrees to the child’s request to be a girl.

Cody Rigsby has a lot of opinions: Kevin is the hottest Backstreet Boy; grape jelly is a crime against nature; if you wear flip-flops in New York City, you do not love yourself. But if there is one opinion - one truth - that he holds above all others, it's that we shouldn't let the fear of looking stupid or being judged hold us back from living our best lives. Cody didn't always feel this way. In XOXO, Cody, he opens up about his journey toward accepting himself.

Grappling with the era's body shaming and blatant sexism while dealing with a growing body of her own, Gina found herself struggling with a lack of fat representation and role models long before anyone had heard of body positivity. With time, Gina's body became something to love, enjoy and celebrate, and in Greedy Guts she challenges how we think about body beauty standards, fatphobic culture and ourselves. Gina shows just how fat liberation - and female liberation - are essential.

Born in New York City’s Black ghetto Harlem at the start of World War II, Samuel R. Delany married White poet Marilyn Hacker right out of high school. The interracial couple moved into the city’s new bohemian quarter, the Lower East Side, in 1961. Through the decade’s opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new political awareness burgeoned. Beautifully, vividly, insightfully, Delany calls up this era of exploration and adventure as he details his development as a Black gay writer in an open marriage, with walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, and more.

Returning to Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War, Fritz Bauer – a gay Jewish lawyer and outspoken critic of Hitler – was determined to reclaim the Germany he had once loved. But he soon saw that the perpetrators of the Holocaust had largely got away with their crimes. Top Nazi officers – mass-murders and cruel sadists – had been given plum jobs at major German companies; held prestigious offices in top universities; were in positions of power as lawyers, judges and political advisors.

Ivan Coyote is a celebrated storyteller and the author of 10 previous books, including Gender Failure (with Rae Spoon) and One in Every Crowd, a collection for LGBT youth. Tomboy Survival Guide is a funny and moving memoir told in stories, in which Ivan recounts the pleasures and difficulties of growing up a tomboy in Canada's Yukon, and how they learned to embrace their tomboy past while carving out a space for those of us who don't fit neatly into boxes or identities or labels.

Suzette Mullen had been raised to play it safe—and she hated causing others pain. With college and law degrees, a kind and successful husband, two thriving adult sons, and an ocean-view vacation home, she lived a life many people would envy. But beneath the happy facade was a woman who watched her friends walk boldly through their lives and wondered what was holding her back from doing the same.

In 1987, somebody shoved a flyer into the hand of Peter Staley: Massive AIDS demonstration, it announced. After four years on Wall Street as a closeted gay man, Staley was familiar with the homophobia common on trading floors. He also knew that he was not beyond the reach of HIV, having recently been diagnosed with AIDS-related complex. A week after the protest, Staley found his way to a packed meeting of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power - ACT UP - in the West Village. It would prove to be the best decision he ever made.

Before becoming the actor, producer, advocate, and model that people know today, Nyle DiMarco was half of a pair of Deaf twins born to a multi-generational Deaf family in Queens, New York. At the hospital one day after he was born, Nyle “failed” his first test—a hearing test—to the joy and excitement of his parents.

Martin Milnes was born in the wrong era or at least that's how it seemed. As a child, he wore jazz-shoes to his junior school disco, expecting eight-year-olds to Mambo like the dancers in West Side Story.... But his childhood and school days were no Broadway musical. Martin was different: the cat who walked alone. Birthdays, stingingly empty, held a horrific reminder that he possessed no talent for friendship. Yet once Martin emerged on stage, the jeering turned to cheering; the lonely void was filled by Hollywood stars of yesteryear, worshiped from afar.

From a young age, Guy Branum always felt as if he were on the outside looking in. Self-taught, introspective, and from a boring farm town, he couldn’t relate to his neighbors. While other boys played outside, he stayed indoors reading Greek mythology. And being gay and overweight, he got used to diminishing himself. But little by little, he started learning from all the strange, lonely outcasts in history, and he started to feel hope. In this collection of personal essays, Guy talks about finding a sense of belonging at Berkeley, being typecast as the “Sassy Gay Friend”, and more....

Vivek Shraya has reason to be afraid. Throughout her life she's endured acts of cruelty and aggression for being too feminine as a boy and not feminine enough as a girl. In order to survive childhood, she had to learn to convincingly perform masculinity. As an adult, she makes daily compromises to steel herself against everything from verbal attacks to heartbreak. Now, with raw honesty, Shraya delivers an important record of the cumulative damage caused by misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, releasing trauma from a body that has always refused to assimilate.

In To Name the Bigger Lie, Sarah Viren “has pulled off a magic trick of fantastic proportion” (The Washington Post), telling the story of an all-too-real investigation into her personal and professional life that she expands into a profound exploration of the nature of truth. The memoir begins as Viren is researching what she believes will be a book about her high school philosophy teacher, a charismatic instructor who taught her and her classmates to question everything—eventually, even the reality of historical atrocities.

Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography tells the life story of a gifted performer whose gleeful irreverence, sharp wit, and generous spirit inspired millions. Richard Hunt was one of the original main five performers in the Muppet troupe. He brought to life an impressive range of characters on The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, and various Muppet movies, everyone from eager gofer Scooter to elderly heckler Statler, groovy girl Janice to freaked-out lab helper Beaker, even early versions of Miss Piggy and Elmo.

At 18, after moving to London with dreams of becoming an actress, an impressionable girl who paints freckles on her face begins work experience in a West End theatre company. In between mail-outs and making cups of coffee she meets the formidable producer Thelma Holt. Within a fortnight Thelma has stolen her, cancelled her audition for RADA, sent her to evening classes to learn to type, organised a miniscule salary and renamed her. From that moment she becomes Sweetpea.