In Trans Figured, Brian Belovitch shares his true story of life as a gender outlier and his dramatic journey through the jungle of gender identity. Brian has had the rare distinction of coming out three times: first as a queer teenager; then as a glamorous transgender woman named Tish, and later, Natalia Gervais; and finally as an HIV-positive gay man surviving the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. From growing up in a barely-working-class first-generation...

"When Darnell Moore was fourteen, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they thought he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn't the last time he would face death. Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer, a leading Black Lives Matter activist, and an advocate for justice and liberation. In No...

Who gave Jonathan Van Ness permission to be the radiant human he is today? No one, honey. The truth is, it hasn't always been gorgeous for this beacon of positivity and joy. Before he stole our hearts as the grooming and self-care expert on Netflix's hit show Queer Eye, Jonathan was growing up in a small Midwestern town that didn't understand why he was so... over the top. From choreographed carpet figure skating routines to the unavoidable fact that...

"Gary Janetti is bothered. By a lot of things. And thank God he's here to tell us. He's bothered that he has to play football in high school gym when he'd rather be in the guidance counselor's office, faking sick and dishing about the latest dramas on his beloved soap operas. He's annoyed when, as a kid growing up in Queens, New York, there's a serial killer loose in his neighborhood, but Carole Burnett is on tv and he really doesn't want to miss...

"A fluid, poetic memoir anchored by Richard Blanco's experiences as America's fifth inaugural poet In this brief and evocative memoir, Richard Blanco shares his life as a Latino immigrant and openly gay man discovering a new, emotional understanding of what it means to be an American. He tells the story of the call from the White House committee and all the exhilaration and upheaval of the days that followed. He reveals the inspiration and challenges...

"R. Eric Thomas didn't know he was different until the world told him so. Everywhere he went -- whether it was his rich, mostly white, suburban high school, his conservative black church, or his Ivy League college in a big city -- he found himself on the outside looking in. In essays by turns hysterical and heartfelt, Eric redefines what it means to be an "other" through the lens of his own life experience. He explores the two worlds of his childhood:...

Before James Oseland was a judge on Top Chef Masters, he was a teenage rebel growing up in the California suburbs. Diving headfirst into the churning mayhem of punk, he renamed himself Jimmy Neurosis and journeyed into a vibrant underground world of visionary musicians and artists. With humor and verve, Oseland brings to life the effervescent cocktail of music, art, drugs, and sexual adventure that characterized the end of the seventies. Through his...

"In 1986, twenty-six-year-old Ruth visits a friend at the hospital when she notices a door to one of the rooms is painted red. Nurses are drawing straws to see who will tend to the patient crying for his mother on the other side, all of them unwilling to help. Ruth immediately steps into the quarantined space herself, comforting the young man in his last moments. Before she realizes what she's done, word spreads in the community that Ruth is the only...

"This intimate record lays bare one person's experience growing up in a rural Mormon community and struggling to reconcile his sexual orientation with the religious doctrine of his childhood. Weaving together prose, poetry, and stories scrawled on the margins of high school notebooks, Jonathan T. Bailey encounters truth-seeing owls, anachronistic gourds, and the hard-edged realities of family and church. In When I Was Red Clay, he navigates desert...