Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

Martin Duberman, one of the LGBTQ+ community’s maverick thinkers and historians, looks back on ninety years of life, his history in the movement, and what he’s learned. In the early sixties, Martin Duberman published a path-breaking article defending the Abolitionists against the then-standard view of them as “misguided fanatics.” In 1964, his documentary play, In White America, which reread the history of racist oppression in this country, toured the country—most notably during Freedom Summer—and became an international hit.

Life After Losses is a memoir with a message. Author James LaVeck offers help for grieving while taking listeners on an intimate journey of love, loss, healing, recovery, and discovery.

Leaving her garden to the mercy of the slugs, award-winning writer Alys Fowler set out in an inflatable kayak to explore Birmingham's canal network, full of little-used waterways where huge pike skulk and kingfishers dart. Her book is about noticing the wild everywhere and what it means to see beauty where you least expect it. What happens when someone who has learned to observe her external world in such detail decides to examine her internal world with the same care?

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.

A parish priest in Northamptonshire; a former rock-star whose number-one hit with The Communards was the biggest-selling single of 1986; the regular host of BBC Radio 4's SATURDAY LIVE - these three people are not usually embodied in one person. The Reverend Richard Coles' memoir offers his rich and personal insights into one of the most diverse of lives, encompassed with the wit and humour he brings to his popular radio show. Richard Coles gives the phrase 'time management' a new emphasis.

Join Kendra Cassidy on a hilarious, heartwarming journey through centuries, as she recounts the misadventures and enduring bond with her best friend and soulmate, Aiyana, in a world where technology knows no bounds but friendship proves timeless. "Quantum Quirks" by Adam Gaffen is a delightful memoir-like narrative, blending humor with a dash of science fiction. It's an informal, witty recollection from Kendra Cassidy, the future Admiral of the Terran Federation, sharing her childhood and teenage years with her lifelong friend and eventual wife, Aiyana. The memoir transcends the typical ...

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.

Pageboy is a groundbreaking coming-of-age memoir from the Academy Award-nominated actor Elliot Page. A generation-defining actor and one of the most famous trans advocates of our time, Elliot will now be known as an uncommon literary talent, as he shares never-before-heard details and intimate interrogations on gender, love, mental health, relationships, and Hollywood.

When Trisha Low moves West, her journey is motivated by the need to arrive “somewhere better” - someplace utopian, like revolution; or safe, like home; or even clarifying, like identity. Instead, she faces the end of her relationships, a family whose values she has difficulty sharing, and America’s casual racism, sexism, and homophobia. In this book-length essay, the problem of how to account for one’s life comes to the fore - sliding unpredictably between memory, speculation, self-criticism, and art criticism, Low seeks answers that she knows she won’t find.

Eve Adams was a rebel. Born Chawa Zloczewer into a Jewish family in Poland, Adams emigrated to the United States in 1912. The young woman befriended anarchists, sold radical publications, took a new name, and ran lesbian-and-gay-friendly speakeasies in Chicago and New York. Then, in 1925, Adams risked all to write and publish a book titled Lesbian Love. In The Daring Life and Deadly Times of Eve Adams, acclaimed historian Jonathan Ned Katz has recovered the extraordinary story of an early daring activist.

Through her own – often bloody-minded – determination and the medical skill of others, April Ashley became the woman she had always believed herself to be. And for half a dozen decades she soared around, over and above momentous and turbulent times, difficult, and changing times when, finally, who you wanted to be and who you could be became the cultural topic of the day. She overcame opprobrium and penury and became renowned and celebrated for one specific achievement: being April Ashley.

In this poignant memoir of personal transformation, Jill Soloway takes us on a patriarchy-toppling emotional and professional journey. When Jill’s parent came out as transgender, Jill pushed through the male-dominated landscape of Hollywood to create the groundbreaking and award-winning Amazon TV series Transparent. Exploring identity, love, sexuality, and the blurring of boundaries through the dynamics of a complicated and profoundly resonant American family, Transparent gave birth to a new cultural consciousness.

A compelling memoir of a gay Catholic woman struggling to find balance between being a daughter and a mother raising her son with a loving partner in the face of discrimination. From the time she was born, Michelle Theall knew she was different. Coming of age in the Texas Bible Belt, a place where it was unacceptable to be gay, Theall found herself at odds with her strict parents, bullied by her classmates, abandoned by her evangelical best friend, and kicked out of Christian organizations that claimed to embrace her - all before she’d ever held a girl’s hand.

Sein Coming-out 2014 als homosexueller Profifußballer war ein Meilenstein für den Kampf gegen Schwulenfeindlichkeit im Fußball und in der Gesellschaft. Seine Fußballerkarriere war eine Reise voller Erfolge und Abenteuer. Den Mut, mit dem sich Thomas Hitzlsperger am 8. Januar 2014 als erster deutscher Fußballprofi öffentlich zu seiner Homosexualität bekannt hat, hat er in seinem Leben immer wieder gezeigt: Schon als 18-Jähriger wechselte er als Jugendspieler von Bayern München in die englische Premier League zu Aston Villa.

In 2009, Juliet Patterson was recovering from a serious car accident when she learned her father had died by suicide. His death was part of a disturbing pattern in her family. Her father’s father had taken his own life; so had her mother’s. Over the weeks and months that followed, grieving and in physical pain, Patterson kept returning to one question: Why? Why had her family lost so many men, so many fathers, and what lay beneath the silence that had taken hold?

Paul Burston wasn’t always the iconic voice of LGBTQ+ London that he is today. Paul came out in the mid-1980s, when ‘gay’ still felt like a dirty word, especially in the small Welsh town where he grew up. He moved to London hoping for a happier life, only to watch in horror as his new-found community was decimated by AIDS. But even in the depths of his grief, Paul vowed never to stop fighting back on behalf of his young friends whose lives were cut tragically short.

The stunning popularity of the “New Atheist” movement - whose most famous spokesmen include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens - speaks to both the growing ranks of atheists and the widespread, vehement disdain for religion among many of them. In Faitheist, Chris Stedman tells his own story to challenge the orthodoxies of this movement and make a passionate argument that atheists should engage religious diversity respectfully.

This is the memoir of James C. Hormel - a man who grew up feeling different not only because his family owned the Hormel “empire” and lived in a 26 bedroom house in a small Midwest town, but because he was gay at a time when homosexuality was not discussed or accepted. Outwardly he tried to live up to the life his father wanted for him - he was a successful professional, had married a lovely woman, and had children - but as volatile changes in the late 1960s impeded on the American psyche, Hormel realized that he could not hide his true self forever.

Scott Pomfret serves as a lector at St. Anthony Shrine in Boston. He also writes gay porn. His boyfriend is a flaming atheist, and his boyfriend’s Protestant grandmother counts Catholicism as a sin worse than sodomy. From Pentecost to Pride, from the books of the Bible to the articles of The Advocate, Pomfret's wry, hysterically funny memoir maps with matchless humor the full spectrum of the gay Catholic experience.

In 2000, Rebekah Robertson gave birth to twin boys, George and Harry. But as they grew older, their preferences began to show, and by the age of three it was clear Georgie was drawn to anything that was pretty or had a skirt that could swirl. Before long Georgie began to insist that she was a girl and became distressed that she had to hide who she really was when she started school. Soon the bullying started, and she would come home in floods of tears, begging her mother to help her.