Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

Charles Finger’s book efficiently covers Oscar Wilde’s background, his early years and education, and his beginnings as an author, poet, and critic for several magazines. The author then turns to the activities of Wilde that drew the attention of others, culminating in the Marquess of Queensbury calling Wilde out as a homosexual. Wilde sued for slander, but the Marquess was acquitted and materials brought forth during the trial resulted in Wilde being arrested and tried for homosexuality. He was convicted and sentenced to two years of hard labor, from which he never really recovered.

Salah Bachir, who immigrated to Canada from Lebanon in the 1960s, has been a gay activist who has worked in the film world for over four decades. While this has given him undeniable front-row access to Hollywood’s biggest stars, it is Salah’s personal charm and kindness, his philanthropy, his overall style (think hats, scarves, brooches, pearls, diamonds) and deep involvement in the art world that has made him a friend, companion, confidante, and/or lover to so many.

During Mardi Gras 1973, Stewart Butler (1930–2020) fell in love with Alfred Doolittle—a wealthy socialite and schizophrenic from San Francisco. Their relationship was an improbable love story that changed the course of LGBTQ+ history. With Doolittle's money, Butler was able to retire and devote his life to political activism in the cause of queer liberation.

Was ist Männlichkeit? Gibt es mehr als eine? Wer entscheidet darüber? Und wo findet ein trans Mann bei alledem seinen Platz? "Männer & Zerbrechlichkeiten" erzählt die Geschichte von Paul Ninus Naujoks, wie er als trans Mann seinen Weg in die Männlichkeit fand, welche Hürden und Überforderungen ihm dabei begegneten und auch, wie wir als Gesellschaft transfreundlicher sein können.

A sequel to First Gear: A Motorcycle Memoir, Horses in the Sand is a collection of stories that document a queer Métis woman’s journey from her sparse beginnings as a child to becoming a tradeswoman, teacher, and artist. With courage, humour, and frank honesty, the stories describe what it was like to grow up as a girl who was starkly different from "normal" and how "coming out" became a lifelong process of self-acceptance and changing identities.

Born and raised in New York to a food-phobic mother and food-fanatical father, Elissa was trained early on that fancy is always best. After a childhood spent dining everywhere from Le Pavillion to La Grenouille, she devoted her life to all things gastronomical, from the rare game birds she served at elaborate dinner parties in an apartment so tiny that guests couldn’t turn around to the eight timbale molds she bought while working at Dean & DeLuca, just so she could make tall food.

Growing up as a fat kid is hard. Growing up as a fat and gay kid in a religious community is extra hard. William J. Ufton recalls his early childhood navigating trauma, mental health issues, and issues surrounding food.

Throughout his life, clothes have provided an outlet through which journalist Teo van den Broeke understands both himself and the world around him. From the blue princess dress he coveted as a child, that first led him to question whether he was ‘normal’, through to the Nike cap and Gucci loafers he wore to impress the men he first desired, fabric has long enveloped and shaped his formative moments. Using the wardrobe of his past as a lens through which to explore the myriad trials and tribulations of adolescence, The Closet charts Teo’s growth from uncertainty to self-acceptance.

My plan was simple. Serve a full-time mission. Go to college. Get married. Stick it out 'til death. That’s not what happened. I began my studies at BYU, hoping to strengthen my faith while I searched for love. That's when I met both Claire and Easton.

A queer minister, politician and staunch activist for LGBTQ rights, Cheri DiNovo went from living on the streets as a teenager to performing the first legalized same-sex marriage registered in Canada in 2001. From rights for queer parents to banning conversion therapy, her story will inspire people (queer or ally) to not only resist the system—but change it.

J.R. Jamison spends his days in a world of trigger warnings and safe spaces, while his trigger-happy dad, Dave, spends his questioning why Americans have become so sensitive. Yet at the height of the 2016 election, the two decide to put political differences aside and travel together to rural Missouri for Dave’s fifty-five year class reunion. But with theco nstant backdrop of the Trump vs. Clinton battle at every turn, they are forced to explore one formidable question: Will the trip push them further apart or bring them closer together?

As a trans man born into an evangelical Christian family that prevented his true identity from emerging, Alex spent years struggling with depression, anxiety, and addiction, trying to break free of the oppressive beliefs that bound him. After years of fighting—for his life, his freedom, and his truth—Alex learnt to surrender and come home to himself. In this part memoir, part self-help audiobook, Alex weaves his own story with healing guidance for you to take away and implement in your own life.

Tania De Rozario was just twelve years old when she was gay-exorcised. Convinced that her boyish style and demeanor were a sign of something wicked, her mother and a pair of her church friends tried to “banish the evil” from Tania. That day, the young girl realized that monsters weren’t just found in horror tales. They could lurk anywhere—including your own family and community—and look just like you. Dinner on Monster Island is Tania’s memoir of her life and childhood in Singapore—where she discovered how difference is often perceived as deviant, damaged, disobedient, and sometimes, demonic.

As a multiracial household in Chicago’s North Side community of Rogers Park, race is at the core of Francesca T. Royster and her family's world, influencing everyday acts of parenting and the conception of what family truly means. Like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, this lyrical and affecting memoir focuses on a unit of three: the author; her wife Annie, who's white; and Cecilia, the Black daughter they adopt as a couple in their forties and fifties.

Emerson Whitney writes, "Really, I can't explain myself without making a mess." What follows is that mess—electrifying, gorgeous, defiant. At Heaven's center, Whitney seeks to understand their relationship to their mother and grandmother, those first windows into womanhood and all its consequences. Whitney retraces a roving youth in deeply observant, psychedelic prose—all the while folding in the work of thinkers like Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and C. Riley Snorton—to engage transness and the breathing, morphing nature of selfhood.

Having spent over 20 years in the adult entertainment industry, I have grown tired of the typical ill adjusted, drug addicted stripper story. Contrary to the reigning stereotype, I offer a candid look at my own adventures in the industry and how it has affected my life. I present my memoirs as a rebuttal to the talk show depiction of exotic dancers as chemically challenged, poorly disguised prostitutes with severe daddy and body image issues.

Father Shannon Kearns is familiar with liminal spaces. He’s lived in them his whole life. And while his experience as a transgender man has often made it difficult for him to fit in—especially in the context of Christianity—it has also shaped his perspective in important ways on complicated, gender-transgressing aspects of theology and Scripture.

My Uncle Gloria is his nephew Steven's story. Told from his perspective, it is a gritty, graphic, and salacious memoir that digs deep into the core of a dysfunctional family, as they find a way to not only cope with each other, but also how to "accept" each other.

Growing up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, the lean child of working-class Chicago transplants, Judy Grahn hungered to connect with the larger world, to create a place for herself beyond the deprivations and repressions of small-town 1950s life. Refusing the imperative to silence that was her inheritance as a woman and as a lesbian, Grahn found her way to poetry, to activism, and to the intoxicating beauty and power of openly loving other women.

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.