LGBTQ+ Studies

Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera....

Set in the 1950’s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality....

In the era of Grindr and same-sex marriage, gay bars are closing down at an alarming rate. What, then, was the gay bar? Set between Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London, Gay Bar takes us on a time-traveling, transatlantic bar hop through pulsing nightclubs....

The effects of traditionally defined masculinity have become one of the most prevalent social issues of our time. In this engaging and provocative new book, beloved actor, director, and social activist Justin Baldoni reflects on his own struggles with masculinity....

International sex researcher, neuroscientist, and columnist Debra Soh debunks popular gender myths in this scientific examination of the many facets of gender identity that “is not only eminently reasonable and beautifully-written, it is brave and vital"....

Ox was 23 when murder came to town and tore a hole in his head and heart....

Covering American transgender history from the mid-20th century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history....

From a young Harvard and Cambridge-trained historian, the secret history of the fight for gay rights that began a generation before Stonewall....

Presenting an original audiobook performance of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, starring the cast of the National Theatre's 2018 Broadway revival....

Christopher Yuan, the son of Chinese immigrants, discovered at an early age that he was different. He was attracted to other boys....

Washington, D.C., has always been a city of secrets. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick’s Secret City....

An engaging exploration of what it means to be asexual in a world that's obsessed with sexual attraction, and what the ace perspective can teach all of us about desire and identity....

This audiobook abounds with startling examples of unknown or often ignored aspects of American history. Bronski documents how various incarnations of social purity movements have consistently attempted to regulate all sexuality, including fantasies, masturbation, and queer sex....

Today’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people’s lives....

Before she became the first transgender person to speak at a national political convention in 2016 at the age of 26, Sarah McBride struggled with the decision to come out - not just to her family but to the students of American University, where she was serving as student body president....

In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions....

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.... 

Is it just a phase, or a real issue with your teen? This comprehensive guidebook explores the challenges that thousands of families face raising a teenager who may be transgender....

In 1998, 21-year-old Matthew Shepard left a bar with two alleged “strangers”. Eighteen hours later, Matthew was found tied to a log fence on the outskirts of town, unconscious and barely alive. Overnight, a politically expedient myth took the place of important facts....

For more than three decades Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture....

Based on the hugely popular podcast series, Bad Gays subverts the notion of gay icons and queer heroes and asks what we can learn about LGBTQ+ history, sexuality and identity through its villains and baddies....

I left my family and tiny Texas hometown 15 years ago to escape small-town gossips and to give my mom and sister the chance at a better life. But when a phone call....

For those who are givers, carers, and empaths, a guide to focusing that energy on yourself—even if that feels frightening, from popular LGBTQ+ activist and advocate Jeffrey Marsh....

If you are transgendered, the feeling of wanting your body to match the sex you feel you are never goes away. For some, though, especially those who grew up before trans people were widely out and advocating for equality, these feelings were often compartmentalized and rarely acted upon....

The author of landmark manifesto Whipping Girl exposes the violent ways we are all sexualized—then offers a bold path for resistance....

Wanting to be a dancer while growing up in a large military family made Christine Barker somewhat of a black sheep, but she followed her dreams to New York City, where—in a moment of almost unbelievable good fortune—she was chosen for the London cast of A Chorus Line. London, and then New York, in the '70s and '80s opened up Christine’s world. The creativity, culture, and nightlife were intoxicating, enough so to compel her older brother Laughlin to join her. Once there, the divorced father, veteran, and corporate lawyer met rising fashion star Perry Ellis.

Rainbow History Class is your entry into LGBTQ+ history, sharing queer and trans stories from Ancient civilisations all the way up to the internet. So much of queer and trans history and culture has been erased, but Hannah McElhinney, writer and creator of Rainbow History Class (as seen on TikTok), is here to help us all with this crash course.

The term killjoy has been used to dismiss feminism by claiming that it causes misery. But by naming ourselves feminist killjoys, we recover a feminist history, turning it into a source of strength as well as an inspiration. Drawing on her own stories and those of others, especially Black and brown feminists and queer thinkers, Sara Ahmed combines depth of thought with honesty and intimacy. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook unpicks the lies our culture tells us and provides a form of solidarity and companionship that can be returned to over a lifetime.

Are We Free Yet? The Black Queer Guide to Divorcing America is simultaneously a personal reflection and a collective examination of our relationship to liberation and oppression. In it, Tina Strawn, host of the Speaking of Racism podcast and Instagram platform of the same name, shares her intimate experiences of queerness and Blackness, heartbreak and loss, foreign and home, as she navigates and finds freedom.

Dale Scott's career as a professional baseball umpire spanned nearly forty years, including thirty-three in the Major Leagues, from 1985 to 2017. He worked exactly a thousand games behind the plate, calling balls and strikes at the pinnacle of his profession, working in every Major League Baseball stadium, and interacting with dozens of other top-flight umpires, colorful managers, and hundreds of players. What makes Scott's book truly different is his unique perspective as the only umpire in the history of professional baseball to come out as gay during his career.

In the 1970s, gay men and lesbians were openly despised and drag queens scared the public. Yet that was the era when Doris Fish (born Philip Mills in 1952) painted and padded his way to stardom. He was a leader of the generation that prepared the world not just for drag queens on TV but for a society that welcomes and even celebrates queer people. How did we get from there to here? In Who Does That Bitch Think She Is? Craig Seligman looks at Doris’s short but overstuffed life as a way to provide some answers.

Transitioning is an alignment of the invisible and the physical. It is truth rising to the surface. It is one of the most fundamental aspects of the human condition - a part of our experience as a conscious being, no matter who we are. As time goes on, we all develop as people. None of us ever becomes someone else entirely - regardless of how we identify – but nor do we stay the same forever. We all transition. It’s what binds us, not what separates us. 

Workplaces have traditionally been viewed as “straight spaces” in which queer people passed. As a result, historians have directed limited attention to the experiences of queer people on the job. Queer Career rectifies this, offering an expansive historical look at sexual minorities in the modern American workforce. Arguing that queer workers were more visible than hidden and, against the backdrop of state aggression, vulnerable to employer exploitation, Margot Canaday positions employment and fear of job loss as central to gay life in postwar America.

The Straight State is the most expansive study of the federal regulation of homosexuality yet written. Unearthing startling new evidence from the National Archives, Margot Canaday shows how the state systematically came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under today.

Swipe. Match. Get ghosted. Repeat. Modern dating can quickly start to feel like an overwhelming slog. It’s easy to forget the point of it all: this is supposed to be fun. Enter professional sex and dating coach Myisha Battle. Drawing on an engaging and diverse collection of client stories, This Is Supposed to Be Fun is a uniquely inclusive, sex-positive guide to help you skip past the games and get what you really want out of dating and relationships—no matter what that may be.