This memoir is a historical reflection from the 1930s to 2001 of how I adapted to being gay and living through an era of discrimination, rejection and suspicion by many individuals and acceptance, love and support of others.. It takes place in a moment of time now forgotten. It relates my determination to live a productive life in the straight world and achieve in spite of obstacles. It tells how I found love and friendship in spite of societys prejudices and fear. It is also a love story ...

A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and ’80s San Francisco with an openly gay father.After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst of revolution, bustling with gay men in search of liberation—few of whom are raising a child.Steve throws himself into San Francisco’s vibrant cultural scene. He takes Alysia to raucous pa...

“The Meaning of Matthew is Judy Shepard’s passionate and courageous attempt to understand what no mother should have to understand, which is why her son was murdered in Laramie, Wyoming, in the fall of 1998. It is a vivid testimony to a life cut short, and testimony too, to the bravery and compassion of Judy and Dennis—Matthew’s parents—as they struggle to survive a grief that won’t go away.”—Larry McMurty, author of Terms of Endearment and Lonesome Dove

The National Book Award–winning coming-out memoir. "One of the most complex, moral, personal, and political books to have been written about gay life" ( LA Weekly).Paul Monette grew up all-American, Catholic, overachieving . . . and closeted. As a child of the 1950s, a time when a kid suspected of being a "homo" would routinely be beaten up, Monette kept his secret throughout his adolescence. He wrestled with his sexuality for the first thirty years of his ...

The New York Times columnist recounts growing up in rural Louisiana in this "brave and powerful memoir" of poverty, abuse, sexuality, and perseverance ( Publishers Weekly).Charles M. Blow's mother was a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, and a job plucking poultry at a factory near their segregated Louisiana town, where slavery's legacy felt close. When her philandering husband finally pushed her over the edge, s...

'A sparkling memoir ... A delight from start to finish' NINA STIBBE'Anyone who loves the theatre will love this book' ZOË WANAMAKERIn 1980s London, Sweetpea Slight is en route to drama school when she is snapped up to work as an assistant to the maverick theatre producer Thelma Holt. Full of wit, charm and backstage intrigue, her irresistible memoir of the resulting twenty years is at once the poignant story of a young woman coming of age, a...

Hailed for its searing emotional insights, and for the astonishing originality with which it weaves together personal history, cultural essay, and readings of classical texts by Sophocles, Ovid, Euripides, and Sappho, The Elusive Embrace is a profound exploration of the mysteries of identity. It is also a meditation in which the author uses his own divided life to investigate the "rich conflictedness of things," the double lives all of us lead.Daniel Mendelsohn rec...

When Kelly Cogswell plunged into New York’s East Village in 1992, she had just come out. An ex–Southern Baptist born in Kentucky, she was camping in an Avenue B loft, scribbling poems, and playing in an underground band, trying to figure out her next move. A couple of months later she was consumed by the Lesbian Avengers, instigating direct action campaigns, battling cops on Fifth Avenue, mobilizing 20,000 dykes for a march on Washington, D.C., and eating fire—literally—in front of the Whi...

The first collection of nonfiction from the author Tony Kushner calls "one of the best novelists writing in the world today"Over a thirty-year period, novelist Christopher Bram witnessed, and lived through, the powerful experiences of coming out, the AIDS epidemic, gay marriage, and the social changes that have occurred in lower Manhattan. From the title piece, which maps the state of gay fiction, to "A Body in Books," about the gay books that changed the author's ...

Love Song for Baby X is the moving and humorous story of a lesbian couple's struggles with infertility as they attempt to become parents, set against the backdrop of the marriage equality movement.While poet Cheryl Dumesnil suspects she'll confront some formidable obstacles on her path to parenthood, she is nevertheless unprepared for what she actually encounters, including navigating the maze of the high-tech fertility business, the emotional conundrum of pregnancy loss, ...

From life in the streets and love in the alleys to fame in the spotlight and an untimely death—raw, biting, and brilliant selections from the personal journals of one of the most uniquely creative artists of the late twentieth centuryWhen his life ended at age thirty-seven—a casualty of the AIDS epidemic that took so many before their time—David Wojnarowicz had long since established himself as one of America's most vital artists and activists. In the Shadow of ...

A thrilling, poignant, and bold memoir of the early years and accomplishments—both musical and sexual—of renowned contemporary composer Ned RoremNed Rorem, arguably the greatest composer of art songs that America has produced in more than a hundred years, is also revered as a diarist and essayist whose unexpurgated writings are at once enthralling, enlightening, and provocative. In Knowing When to Stop, one of the most creative American artists of our time ...