Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Biographies & Memoirs

In this nuanced mix of memoir, motivational musings, and wisdom, legendary celebrity stylist Ty Hunter recounts both the trying times and brightest moments of his life. Faced with physical, mental, and emotional obstacles that range from a gunshot wound to caring for his sick parents to simply existing as a Black, gay man in America, Ty channeled his energy into surmounting the unconquerable, along the way developing a resilient spirit—one that begs to be shared with the world.

As a journalist in London, William discovered the Eurovision Song Contest—an annual competition known for its extravagant performers and cutthroat politics. Initially just a fan, he started blogging about the contest, ultimately becoming the most sought-after expert on the subject. William was soon jetting across the continent to meet divas, drag queens, and aspiring singers, who welcomed him to their beautiful, if dysfunctional, family of choice.

Britney Daniels is a Black, masculine-presenting, tattooed lesbian from a working-class background. For the last five years, she has been working as an emergency-room nurse. She began Journal of a Black Queer Nurse as a personal diary, a tool to heal from the day-to-day traumas of seeing too much and caring too much. Hilarious, gut-wrenching, and infuriating by turns, these stories are told from the perspective of a deeply empathetic, no-nonsense young nurse, who highlights the way race, inequality, and a profit-driven healthcare system make the hospital a place where systemic racism is lived.

When Maeve DuVally came out as a transgender woman while working as a corporate communications manager at Goldman Sachs, she knew she couldn't do it quietly. DuVally intimately documents her struggle to be herself in this environment, initially keeping her identity a secret with wardrobe changes in the lobby bathroom after work. Eventually she declares herself and, to her surprise, Goldman Sachs embraces the effort. Surgery follows. When DuVally finally takes those first steps on heels through the corridors of this institution on the way to her first meeting as a woman, the listener cheers.

After a chance meeting aboard the ocean liner Paris in 1924, Harvard University scholar and activist F. O. Matthiessen and artist Russell Cheney fell in love and remained inseparable until Cheney's death in 1945. During the intervening years, the men traveled throughout Europe and the United States, achieving great professional success while contending with serious personal challenges, including addiction, chronic disease, and severe depression.

The body that Robyn Henderson-Espinoza inhabits is a nonbinary body, a trans body, a body in two races—and a body continually in discovery. Theirs is also a body on sojourn invested in experience, body understanding, and engagement in and for human thriving. Henderson-Espinoza relates coming into a new body story, beginning with the deep emotional work of connecting the abstract intelligence of their mind with their body's intelligence, to explore the relationship between living and becoming, doing and listening.

Mark Scarbrough has been searching for something his entire life. Whether it’s his birth mother, true love, his purpose, or his sexual identity, Mark has been on a constant quest to find out who he really is, with the great Western texts as his steadfast companions. As a boy with his head constantly in a book, desperate to discover new worlds, he can hardly distinguish between their plots and his own reality.

Men I've Never Been recounts Michael Sadowski's odyssey as a boy who shuns his own identity - and, ultimately, his sexual orientation - in order to become who he thinks he's supposed to be.

The world was not the least bit surprised when Branden James became a finalist on season eight of America's Got Talent, receiving high praise from the judges for his emotional, operatic vocals. Coming out and sharing intimate details of his broken ties with his religious family on the show, he received countless messages from fans who could relate to his personal struggles.

Harvey Milk - eloquent, charismatic, and a smart-aleck - was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, but he had not even served a full year in office when he was shot by a homophobic fellow supervisor. Milk's assassination at the age of 48 made him the most famous gay man in modern history; 20 years later, Time magazine included him on its list of the hundred most influential individuals of the 20th century.

Adam Prashaw's life was full of surprises from the moment he was born. Assigned female at birth, and with parents who had been expecting a boy, he spent years living as "Rebecca Danielle Adam Prashaw" before coming to terms with being a transgender man. Adam captured hearts with his humor, compassion, and intensity. After a tragic accident cut his life short, he left a legacy of changed lives and a trove of social media posts documenting his life, relationships, transition, and struggles with epilepsy, all with remarkable transparency and directness.

Craig Russell was an internationally admired entertainer and actor, known for his outrageous impersonations of some of Hollywood's greatest female celebrities: Mae West, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Carol Channing, and Judy Garland, to name a few. Lori Russell Eadie, a shy theater lover, was Craig's number-one fan and, eventually, his wife. Together they were fun, fabulous, and eschewed convention. But behind the curtains, Craig and Lori's lives were troubled by their mental health, drug addiction, sexual assault, and abuse.

I'm Prancing as Fast as I Can is a coming of Gay story that takes us from a scared, self-hating kid who spends most of his time under his desk staring at the hunky man on the Doan's Pills box, to becoming a writer on Will & Grace, helping to make it a little easier for other scared, self-hating kids who might also be hiding and staring at their secret desire.

In No Son of Mine, Corcoran traces his messy estrangement from his mother through lost geographies as well as the lost relationships with friends and family and the sense of home that were stripped away when she said he was no longer her son. Through grief, anger, questioning, and growth, Corcoran explores the entwined yet separate histories and identities of his mother and himself.

This quietly powerful memoir of longing and acceptance casts a humanizing eye on a little-understood American religious tradition and a woman's striving to grow within and beyond it.

While we can all recall Martin Luther King Jr. giving his "I Have a Dream" speech in front of a massive crowd at Lincoln Memorial, few of us remember the man who organized this watershed nonviolent protest in eight short weeks: Bayard Rustin. This was far from Rustin's first foray into the fight for civil rights. As a world-traveling pacifist, he brought Gandhi's protest techniques to the forefront of US civil rights demonstrations, helped build the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led the fight for economic justice, and played a deeply influential role in the life of Dr. King.

Chief Warrant Officer Necole Belanger created a professional persona that was no-nonsense and highly put-together. But the truth was much more complex. Necole's story is a tale of two lives, the CWO raised in a military family, and the woman coming to terms with her sexuality, in a time where the two could not coexist. A lesbian member of the military police during the LGBTQ Purge in the Canadian Armed Forces, Necole would achieve success and promotion in her career despite a near-constant struggle. But the higher she rose in rank within the Canadian Armed Forces, the less her voice was heard.

In a series of intimate and humorous dispatches, McOuat examines her identity as a queer woman, and as a mother, through the lens of the pop culture moments in the '80s and '90s that molded her identity. McOuat stirs the ingredients required to conjure an unsettled spirit: the horrors of pregnancy and motherhood, love and loss, the supernatural, kaleidoscopic sexuality, near-miss experiences, and the unexplained moments in life that leave you haunted.

Weaving together memoir and cutting-edge science, Mothership is not just a queer coming-of-age story. It's a deeply researched account of how coral reefs and a psychedelic tea called ayahuasca helped Greg heal from complex PTSD—a disorder of trust, which makes the very act of bonding with someone else panic-inducing. From the tide pools in Florida where he grew up, to Indonesia's Raja Ampat archipelago and the Amazon rainforest, this is his search for wholeness when talk therapy and pharmaceuticals did little to help.

Randy Shilts was the preeminent LGBTQ+ reporter of his generation. He was the first openly gay reporter assigned to a gay beat at a mainstream paper and one of the nation's most influential chroniclers of gay history, politics, and culture. Shilts wrote three seminal works on the community: The Mayor of Castro Street, on the life, assassination, and legacy of Harvey Milk; And the Band Played On, detailing the failure of politics as usual during the early AIDS epidemic; and Conduct Unbecoming, a history of the US military's mistreatment of LGBTQ service members.