Last week we shared some new and notable LGBTQ+ adult fiction and this week we are back with nonfiction. Enjoy these memoirs, essay collections, histories, and more!
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The secret to superhuman strength
by Alison Bechdel From the author of Fun Home, a profoundly affecting graphic memoir of Bechdel's lifelong love affair with exercise, set against a hilarious chronicle of fitness fads in our times. |
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The Natural Mother of the Child : A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood
by Krys Malcolm Belc Essentially this book is a heavily visual memoir-in-essays that explores how the experience of gestational parenthood-conceiving, birthing, and breastfeeding my son Samson-eventually clarified my gender identity and allowed me to project a different moremasculine self. Ruminating on how the experiences contained under the umbrella of "motherhood" don't fully describe my experience amplifies the outsiderness the speaker, who is almost always addressing a cis "you," sometimes his mother, sometimes strangers, mostly his cis female partner. Instead of using a straight narrative, the book circles around this concept of motherhood and of my relationship to it. The book is also an archive of my queerness, of childhood photos of me smiling impossibly wide, of my original birth certificate and the legal documents surrounding Samson's adoption. It's a direct engagement with the documentation we think constitutes a record of one's life. The book ends on an exploration of how much we can really know when we enter into parenting a person, and of my ambivalence about the "before" and "after" that is so prevalent in trans stories and that feels so outside my experience as a nonbinary transmasculine person. |
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The other mothers : two women's journey to find the family that was always theirs
by Jennifer Berney Reflecting on the odds stacked against her because of her sexual orientation while giving us a wonderful glimpse of what America can be, the author shares her and her partner’s struggle with fertility and how they navigated a patriarchal medical community to build a family together. |
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Hola Papi : How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons
by John Paul Brammer The popular LGBTQ columnist and writer presents a memoir though a series of essays that chronicle his life growing up as queer, mixed race kid and offers advice for young people facing the same journey. |
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Punch me up to the gods
by Brian Broome Playful, poignant and wholly original, this coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity and addiction follows the author, a poet and screenwriter, as he recounts his experiences, revealing a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. |
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Dear Senthuran : a Black spirit memoir
by Akwaeke Emezi The New York Times-bestselling author presents a memoir of their journey through a challenging path of resistance towards success as a writer through candid and revealing correspondence with friends, lovers and family. |
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Girlhood : essays
by Melissa Febos The acclaimed author looks back on her experiences growing up as a female and how the values that she and other women learned in girlhood failed to prioritize their personal safety, happiness and freedom. |
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Last call : a true story of love, lust, and murder in queer New York
by Elon Green Documents the decades-long effort to capture the “Last Call Killer” of 1980s and 1990s New York City, discussing how he took advantage of period discrimination to prey upon gay victims against a backdrop of the AIDS epidemic. |
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The Queer Bible : Essays
by Jack Guinness A love letter to the queer community, an essay collection follows contemporary queer icons as they pay homage to those who helped pave their paths, including Susan Sontag, David Bowie, RuPaul, Divine and George Michael. |
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Leaving isn't the hardest thing : essays
by Lauren Hough The author, who has had many identities – an airman in the U.S. Air Force, a cable guy, a bouncer at a gay club – recounts her childhood growing up in the infamous cult The Children of God, in this searing and extremely personal collection of essays. |
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The engagement : a quarter century of defending, defining, and expanding marriage in America
by Sasha Issenberg This definitive account of the conflict over same-sex marriage in the U.S. follows the coast-to-coast conflict through courtrooms and war rooms, bedrooms and boardrooms, to shed light on every aspect of a political and legal controversy that divided Americans like no other. |
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Love is an ex-country : a memoir
by Randa Jarrar A gay, Muslim, overweight, Arab-American woman describes her road trip from California to Connecticut to reclaim her autonomy and explore everything she has survived in life, schooling a rest-stop racist and destroying Confederate flags in the desert along the way. |
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Mouths of rain : an anthology of Black lesbian thought
by Briona Simone Jones This companion anthology to Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s classic Words of Fire traces the long history of intellectual thought produced by Black Lesbian writers, from the 19th century through the 21st century. |
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The renunciations : poems
by Donika Kelly These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves. With the companionship of "the oracle"--an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends--the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility. |
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Everybody else is perfect : how I survived hypocrisy, beauty, clicks, and likes
by Gabrielle Korn A collection of essays from the former editor of the lifestyle publication Nylon that reveals her struggle to overcome insecurities about her body and finding love as a lesbian in New York. |
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Gay bar : why we went out
by Jeremy Atherton Lin From the warren of cruising tunnels built beneath London in the 1770s to today’s fluid queer spaces, the author takes readers on a time-traveling, transatlantic journey through generations of gay men in the places they created and claimed. |
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Nonbinary : A Memoir
by Genesis P-Orridge Perfect for fans of industrial music, performance art, gender bending, the occult and punk rock, this revealing memoir takes readers on a journey through creativity and destruction, pleasure and pain as it follows the life of a pioneering industrial music and visual artist. |
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Outlove : A Queer Christian Survival Story
by Julie Rodgers A leading voice in LGBTQ+ advocacy details her deeply personal journey from a life of self-denial in the name of faith to her role in leading the take-down of Exodus International, the largest ex-gay organization in the world, to her marriage to a woman at the Washington National Cathedral. |
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Let the record show : a political history of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993
by Sarah Schulman In just six years, ACT UP, New York, a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, changed the world. Armed with rancor, desperation, intelligence, and creativity, it took on the AIDS crisis with an indefatigable, ingenious, and multifaceted attack on the corporations, institutions, governments, and individuals who stood in the way of AIDS treatment for all. They stormed the FDA and NIH in Washington, DC, and started needle exchange programs in New York; they took over Grand Central Terminal and fought to change the legal definition of AIDS to include women; they transformed the American insurance industry, weaponized art and advertising to push their agenda, and battled--and beat--The New York Times, the Catholic Church, and the pharmaceutical industry. Their activism, in its complex and intersectional power, transformed the lives of people with AIDS and the bigoted society that had abandoned them. |
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Black boy out of time : a memoir
by Hari Ziyad A cultural critic, screenwriter, and editor in chief of RaceBaitr and discusses gender, race and the challenges of growing up Black and queer as one of nineteen children in a blended family in Cleveland, Ohio. |