Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

As long as there have been humans, there have been LGBTQI+ people. From an 18th century gentleman’s servant known as 'Princess Seraphina', to a lesbian punk rocker in Malaysia, challenging her country’s homophobic laws today; queer life always finds a way. We join Queer Eye’s Tan France to take a look at the lives, past and present, of those who have proudly defied rigid concepts of normality.

Midlife Emergence is a revelatory memoir and an inviting guidebook; it is a compassionate companion that belongs in the collection of every woman who finds herself burning to reclaim powerful parts of herself that social conditioning locked away. Midlife doesn’t need to be a crisis or an emergency—rather, it’s an emergence, an opportunity to make those beautiful, unexpressed facets shamelessly visible.

In The Lavender Legacy: Unlocking the Queer Subtext of MGM Musicals, author Richard Fleischman delves into the shimmering world of Hollywood’s golden age to uncover the hidden, often overlooked queer elements in the beloved MGM musicals that defined a generation. Drawing from his lifelong love of these films, Fleischman reveals how characters, performances, and subtle subtexts reflect themes of desire, identity, and self-discovery. With a personal connection to the LGBTQ+ community, Fleischman offers a unique perspective on how these musicals spoke to those who, like him, recognized ...

A Mural in Space is a healing memoir in three acts, exploring Kameron Tyler’s childhood, his teenage years, and the transformative moments that reshaped his identity. Tyler eloquently articulates the feelings of becoming untethered from reality—a floating anxiety that is both uniquely personal and universally relatable. He examines the coping mechanisms he developed while navigating this vast expanse of uncertainty, through a journey which includes self-discovery, attachment, sex, addiction, friendship, betrayal, loss, and grief.

A groundbreaking look at the history of transgender representation in TV and film, by an of-the-moment and in-demand culture reporter. Narrated by Tre'vell Anderson, WE SEE EACH OTHER is a personal history of trans visibility since the beginning of moving images. A literary reckoning, it unearths a transcestry that's long existed in plain sight and in the shadows of history's annals, and further contextualizes our present moment of increased representation.

An unflinching and, at times, raw memoir, The Storm is filled with heart, optimism, and love, interspersed with Los Angeles history, gay and lesbian history, AIDS history, and the backdrop of the 1980s and 1990s.

In 2019, R.K. Russell broke the mold when he came out as bisexual in an essay for ESPN that ignited the sports world. Now, in his powerful memoir, THE YARDS BETWEEN US, he shares his story and explores his love of football, men and women, walking the devastating tightrope of keeping his sexuality secret, the tension between his private and public lives, and the importance of crashing through barriers.

When Jill Nalder arrived at drama school in London in the early 1980s, she was ready for her life to begin. With her band of best friends—of which many were talented young gay men with big dreams of their own—she grabbed London by the horns: partying with drag queens at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, hosting cabarets at her glamorous flat, flitting across town to any jobs could get. But soon rumours were spreading from America about a frightening illness being dubbed the 'gay flu', and Jill and her friends found that their formerly carefree existence now under threat.

Milena and Margarete loved each other at the risk of their lives. But in the post-war survivors’ accounts, lesbians were stigmatized, and survivors kept silent. This book explores those silences, and finally celebrates two strong women who never gave up and continue to inspire. As Margaret wrote: “I was thankful for having been sent to Ravensbrück, because it was there I met Milena.”

Growing up a Guyanese Indian immigrant in Central Florida, Rajiv Mohabir is fascinated by his family’s stifled Hindu history and the legacy of his ancestors, who were indentured laborers on British sugarcane plantations. In Toronto he sits at the feet of Aji, his unlettered grandmother, listening to stories and songs in her Caribbean Bhojpuri. By now Aji’s eleven children have immigrated to North America and busied themselves with ascension, Christianity, and the erasure of their heritage. But Rajiv wants to know more: where did he come from, and why does he feel so out of place?

Richard Coles narrates this witty account of life as a parish priest and Radio 4 broadcaster. After a life of sex and drugs and the Communards - brilliantly recounted in the highly acclaimed first volume of his memoirs Fathomless Riches - the Reverend Richard Coles went on to devote his life to God and Christianity. He is also a much-loved broadcaster, presenting Saturday Live on Radio 4 and giving us regular reason to Pause for Thought on Radio 2.

In The Lives of Michel Foucault, David Macey quotes the iconic French philosopher as speaking “nostalgically...of 'an unforgettable evening on LSD, in carefully prepared doses, in the desert night, with delicious music, [and] nice people'". This came to pass in 1975, when Foucault spent Memorial Day weekend in Southern California at the invitation of Simeon Wade - ostensibly to guest-lecture at the Claremont Graduate School where Wade was an assistant professor, but in truth to explore what he called the Valley of Death.

Part provocateur, part seducer, this young gay man’s account of life offers one of the freshest takes on Australia and the world today. Honouring poets of the past–Jean Genet, Veronica Franco, Euripedes, Hunter S. Thompson, Oscar Wilde–and joining in their task of finding meaning in existence and the modern world, Tolcher has produced a brazenly honest debut without precedent.

Calum leaves the hometown he has been in all his life to embark on a journey that takes him all around the world, from teaching in a school on the outskirts of Rome to exploring the sex clubs of Berlin, to raising tigers in an animal sanctuary deep in the jungles of Thailand. Along the way, he meets LGBT+ people from all walks of life and every part of the rainbow - from an Italian teenager struggling with a homophobic father to a kathoey navigating life as a trans person in Thailand, to a young HIV-positive man living on the streets of London.

THE WAY FROM ME TO US is the story of two pioneers. It’s the true account of a love that began nearly 50 years ago in a Nashville gay bar called The Other Side. It was 1977, when coming out could mean you lost everything. Your job. Your friends. Your family. Mike and Ted were all too aware of the risks at the bar that night. It was literally a step to the other side for Mike, who was nowhere near as accepting of his true self as Ted was of his. “I like being gay,” Ted told him. “I’d like to find somebody who likes being gay with me.”

Flailing in jobs, failing at love, getting addicted and un-addicted to people, food, and drugs - I'll Tell You in Person is a disarmingly frank account of attempts at adulthood and all the less than perfect ways we get there. Chloe Caldwell has an unsparing knack for looking within and reporting back what's really there, rather than what she'd like you to see.

Today, the options and freedoms on offer to LGBTQ+ people living in the West are greater than ever before. But is same-sex marriage, improved media visibility and corporate endorsement all it’s cracked up to be? At what cost does this acceptance come? And who is getting left behind, particularly in parts of the world where LGBTQ+ rights aren’t so advanced? Combining intrepid journalism with her own personal experience, Amelia Abraham searches for the answers to these urgent challenges, as well as the broader question of what it means to be queer in 2019.

Michael Koresky's most formative memories were simple ones. A movie rental. A mug of tea. And a few shared hours with his mother. Years later and now a successful film critic, Koresky set out on a journey with his mother to discover more about their shared cinematic past. They rewatched ten films that she first introduced to him as a child, one from every year of the '80s, each featuring women leads.

The voice, the dressing-down, the cigarette in its holder, remain unmistakable. There is rarely a week when one of Private Lives, Hay Fever, and Blithe Spirit is not in production somewhere in the world. Phrases from Noël Coward's songs - "Mad About The Boy", "Mad Dogs and Englishman" - are forever lodged in the public consciousness. He was at one point the most highly paid author in the world. Yet some of his most striking and daring writing remains unfamiliar.

Meet. Love. Break. Recover. That’s been the routine of Staceyann Chin’s romantic life. But at 35, after yet another devasting breakup and overcome by an urgent and all-consuming desire to have a child, Chin realizes she’s running out of time. So she sets her sights on a single target: motherhood.