LGBTQI+

Acclaimed actor, recording artist, playwright, and director Billy Porter can now add published author to his long list of accomplishments. Unprotected: A Memoir – a powerful and revealing autobiography about race, sexuality, art, and healing – is the story of a boy whose talent and courage opened doors for him, but only a crack; a teenager discovering himself while learning his voice and his craft amid deep trauma; and a young man whose unbreakable determination led him through countless hard times to where he is now: a proud icon who refuses to back down or hide.…

Mary Alice Roth, the central character in Bobby Finger‘s The Old Place, retired from Billington High after nearly four decades just a few months ago, and she’s already bored. Billington, Texas, is a place where nothing changes. But then Mary Alice’s sister arrives with a piece of news that threatens friendships, questions the very fabric of Billington, and might force the unflappable Mary Alice to change after all. In Steven Rowley‘s The Guncle, Patrick, or Gay Uncle Patrick – aka “Guncle” – loves spending time with his niece and nephew.…

Woman Without Shame: Poems is Sandra Cisneros‘ first book of poetry in 28 years. The collection comprises dozens of never-before-seen poems and includes songs, elegies, and declarations that chronicle her pilgrimage toward rebirth and the recognition of her prerogative as a woman artist. These are bluntly honest and often humorous meditations on memory, desire, and the essential nature of love. The stories in Manuel Muñoz‘s The Consequences are mostly set in the 1980s in the small towns surrounding Fresno.…

Diana Goetsch‘s This Body I Wore: A Memoir chronicles one woman’s long journey to coming out, a path that runs parallel to the emergence of the trans community over the past several decades. Offered here is not a transition memoir, but rather a full account of trans life, one at once unusually public and closeted. In Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay, Lars Horn explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology,…

Completing his trilogy of poetic pop-culture explorations of family, love, and memory, Gregg Shapiro‘s Fear of Muses: Poems explores the evolving depth of love and becoming through a delicate and fine-tuned reckoning with familial and relational history. Through the spare beauty of haiku and fineness of belles-lettres, Nicole Tallman‘s Something Kindred: Prose & Poetry is a testament to the living, not the dying, in an evocative and stirring account of grieving that echoes with ache in our hearts,…

In Fly Girl: A Memoir, novelist Ann Hood reflects on her time as a flight attendant. She learned how to evacuate seven kinds of aircraft, deliver a baby, mix proper cocktails, administer oxygen, and fend off passengers’ advances – while walking a million miles in high heels. Despite its roots in sexist standards, the job empowered her. And in The Family Outing: A Memoir, Jessi Hempel writes about growing up in a seemingly picture-perfect, middle-class American family.…

Set in Cuba in 1998, Ernesto Mestre-Reed‘s Sacrificio: A Novel is a triumphant work of violence, loss, and identity, following a group of young HIV-positive counterrevolutionaries who seek to overthrow the Castro government. Captured on its pages are the fury, passion, fatalism, and grim humor of young lives lived at the margins of a society they desperately wish to change. In Andrea Yaryura Clark‘s On a Night of a Thousand Stars: A Novel, the daughter of a wealthy Argentine diplomat living large in New York gets curious about her father’s life in the years leading up to the military dictatorship and Argentina’s “Dirty War” of the late 1970s.…

Beginning with the tragic story of Sumner Welles, FDR’s brilliant diplomatic advisor, James Kirchick‘s Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Cultural and political anxiety over gay people impacted everything from the ascent of Joseph McCarthy and the struggle for civil rights to the rise of the conservative movement. In First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (and Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents, Gary Ginsberg explores presidential friendships and their profound impact.…

In Hell Followed with Us by Andrew Joseph White, 16-year-old trans boy Benji is on the run from the cult that raised him – the fundamentalist sect that unleashed Armageddon and decimated the world’s population. Desperately, he searches for a place where the cult can’t get their hands on him, or more importantly, on the bioweapon they infected him with. But when cornered by monsters born from the destruction, Benji is rescued by a group of teens from the local Acheson LGBTQ+ Center,…