Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

Inspiring and honest, this unique memoir of gender transition and coming of age proves it’s never too late to find your true identity.

The Stone Shelter: A Stonebutch/Stonefemme Love Affair invites listeners into their first-ever glimpse of a real-life love affair between a stone couple. The audio is filled with copies of actual letters, texts, gifts, and stories that passed between the two. Included are the genteel and insightful discussions where they negotiate kinkier aspects of their dynamics; share their navigation of a blooming long distant love; as well as the erotic objectification, worship, and sexual banter that characterizes the evolution and expression of butch-femme desire.

It’s funny how life never pans out the way you’d expect. I always knew that something wasn’t right, that some part of my inside didn’t match my outside. What I didn’t know then is that I’m transgender, a realization that took a lifetime to fully unpack and understand. And to embrace. Growing up in Michigan I started off sheltered with no idea of what lay over the horizon, but serving in the navy opened my eyes to what possibilities might be within my grasp. I encountered many forks in the road, sometimes I made the right choice, sometimes my decisions were terribly wrong.

Sexual healer and entrepreneur David P. Wichman has lived through it all: Childhood abuse, foster care, homelessness, survival sex work, and the blackest pits of drug and alcohol addiction. After white-collar crime landed him in jail, David resolved to finally conquer the sense of brokenness that had been driving him to self-destruction throughout his life. In his moving memoir, he recounts how his recovery and spiritual journey have revealed to him his inherent wholeness and worth, a message of love and belonging that he now carries to others.

Eighteen Moons is the extraordinary and moving story of Andi and John and how they set out to have the family they longed for. Not many people noticed the end of a multibillion-pound industry that touched many, many thousands of lives...but this devoted couple lived through the final wave of International Surrogacy in both India and Thailand, then finally (before it had barely begun) in Nepal on the roof of the world.

Recounting her experiences with sexist discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual violence - beginning in childhood, through the present - Woods lays out clear and unflinching personal vignettes that build in intensity as the number of times grows. Individually, and especially taken as a whole, these stories amount to powerful proof that sexual violence and discrimination are never just one-time occurrences, but part of a constant battle all women face every day.

"Mom, Dad, I'm gay." One Facebook message completely changed Becky Mackintosh's life in the blink of an eye. Though she had often wondered about her son Sean when he was young, she had never entertained the possibility that her suspicions could be true. And just like that, battle lines were drawn between siblings, parents, and friends with the church somewhere in the middle. A choice was before the Mackintosh family. Just not the one they were expecting.

At just 16, Marsha Carter (now Stevens-Pino) shared her newly born-again Christianity with a song that went on to become one of the most widely recognized and translated hymns in Christian circles: "For Those Tears I Died (Come to the Water)". Some historians have said it was the first song to be called "contemporary Christian music". Since those modest beginnings, Marsha has continued her journey in the world of Christian music.

D.J. Burr is a man on a mission; successful business owner, highly respected psychotherapist, and survivor of a dysfunctional life. At a young age, all he wanted was to be loved, but instead found himself targeted by a sexual predator. D.J. slipped into a life of addiction and clawed his way through broken relationships and seedy sex clubs - looking for love in all the wrong places. D.J. will take listeners on a roller coaster of emotions as he details his search for grace and love.

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.

Born in the postwar East End of London, young Michael’s life is changed when he is spotted in a school play, cast in Lionel Bart’s Oliver! and is transported to the glittering West End. Acting on stage and screen into adulthood, he finds his most defining role as Colin in Eastenders, making television history as one half of the first gay kiss ever broadcast on a British soap. But it is a chance encounter in a Butlins resort that leads Michael to the great love of his life: Paul Cottingham, who would become his husband and partner of 31 years.

Diligently sourced and researched, Boy with the Bullhorn provides both an intimate look into how activist strategies are developed and deployed, as well as a snapshot of life in New York City during the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic. He relies on his extensive archive of original ACT UP documents, news articles, and other published material, as well as activist videos and oral histories, to help flesh out actions, events, and the background stories of key activists.

In To Name the Bigger Lie, Sarah Viren “has pulled off a magic trick of fantastic proportion” (The Washington Post), telling the story of an all-too-real investigation into her personal and professional life that she expands into a profound exploration of the nature of truth. The memoir begins as Viren is researching what she believes will be a book about her high school philosophy teacher, a charismatic instructor who taught her and her classmates to question everything—eventually, even the reality of historical atrocities.

Peggy Caserta, founder of the famous Haight-Ashbury hippie boutique Mnasidika and lover and girlfriend of Janis Joplin, was a Louisiana homecoming queen turned airsick stewardess who eventually landed in 1960s San Francisco and set up shop. Her store was a hang-out for The Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company; it was where Wes Wilson’s posters hung, where Bill Graham sold concert tickets, and where Owsley’s LSD was enjoyed.

Jessi Hempel was raised in a seemingly picture-perfect, middle-class American family. But the truth was far from perfect. Her father was constantly away from home, traveling for work, while her stay-at-home mother became increasingly lonely and erratic. Growing up, Jessi and her two siblings struggled to make sense of their family, their world, their changing bodies, and the emotional turmoil each was experiencing. And each, in their own way, was hiding their true self from the world.

Anne Hull grew up in rural Central Florida, barefoot half the time and running through the orange groves her father’s family had worked for generations. The ground trembled from the vibrations of bulldozers and jackhammers clearing land for Walt Disney World. “Look now,” her father told her as they rode through the mossy landscape together. “It will all be gone.” But the real threat was at home, where Hull was pulled between her idealistic but self-destructive father and her mother, a glamorous outsider from Brooklyn struggling with her own aspirations.

Collecting deeply personal conversations with inspirational LGBTQ+ trailblazers (from Troye Sivan to Margaret Cho) about how they leveraged the challenges and insights they had as relative outsiders to succeed in the worlds of business, tech, politics, Hollywood, sports and beyond, Andrew Gelwick’s The Queer Advantage celebrates the unique power of queer identity. Their stories brim with the hard-won lessons gained over their careers.

Lambda Award and American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award-winning author Dorothy Allison is known for her bold and insightful writing on issues of class and sexuality. In Skin, she approaches these topics through 23 impassioned essays that explore her identity - from her childhood in a poor family in South Carolina to her adult life as a lesbian in the suburbs of New York - and her sexuality.

My Dalek Has Another Puncture is Simon Fisher-Becker’s second book in his autobiographical trilogy. An honest and inspiring account of his life after Doctor Who, the audiobook takes us on a switchback ride of auditions, castings, filming, and recording as Simon meets old friends and makes new ones while taking Dorium Maldovar, the bald blue intergalactic black-marketer, around the world to meet his fans. Natural raconteur Simon relates both tragedies and triumphs with refreshing honesty.

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.