LGBTQ+
How to write an autobiographical novel : essays
Alexander Chee
"From the author of The Queen of the Night, an essay collection exploring how we form our identities in life, in politics, and in art"--
Afterglow : a dog memoir
Eileen Myles
636.78 /Myles
Memoir, LGBTQ+, Animals
The author writes an account of their relationship with their pit bull Rosie. Starting from the emptiness following Rosie's death, the author launches a heartfelt and fabulist investigation into the true nature of the bond between pet and pet owner.
Added by Melody
Are you my mother? : a comic drama
Alison Bechdel
BIOGRAPHY Bechdel, Alison
Memoir, LGBTQ+
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.
Added by Melody
Fun home : a family tragicomic
Alison Bechdel
BIOGRAPHY Bechdel, Alison
Memoir, LGBTQ+
In this graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father. Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
Added by Melody
The argonauts
Maggie Nelson
BIOGRAPHY /Nelson, Maggie
Memoir, LGBTQ+
A genre-bending memoir, a work of 'autotheory' offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.
Added by Melody
Logical family : a memoir
Armistead Maupin
BIOGRAPHY /Maupin, Armistead
Memoir, LGBTQ+
The long-awaited memoir from the beloved author of the bestselling Tales of the City series. 'Sooner or later, no matter where in the world we live, we have to venture beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us. We have to, if we are to live without squandering our lives.'--from Logical Family. Born in the mid-twentieth century and raised in the heart of conservative North Carolina, Armistead Maupin lost his virginity to another man 'on the very spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired.' Realizing that the South was too small for him, this son of a traditional lawyer packed his earthly belongings into his Opel GT (including a beloved portrait of a Confederate ancestor) and took to the road in search of adventure. It was a journey that would lead him from a homoerotic navy initiation ceremony in the jungles of Vietnam to that strangest of strange lands: San Francisco in the early 1970s. Over the course of the next forty years Maupin would weave his impressions of the city into an epic urban saga: Tales of the City would provide him with a very public coming-out platform and forever transform both his politics and his heart. With humor and unflinching honesty, Maupin brings to life flesh-and-blood characters every bit as endearing and indelible as the vivid men and women who populate his novels. Logical Family offers an unforgettable portrait of the man who chronicled the liberation and evolution of America's queer community over the last four decades with honesty and compassion and inspired millions to claim their own lives.
Added by Melody
Karamo : my story of embracing purpose, healing, and hope
Karamo Brown
BIOGRAPHY /Brown, Karamo
Memoir, LGBTQ+
An insightful, candid, and inspiring memoir from Karamo Brown--Queer Eye's beloved culture expert--as he shares his story for the first time, exploring how the challenges in his own life have allowed him to forever transform the lives of those in need.
Added by Melody
Native country of the heart : a memoir
Cherríe Moraga
BIOGRAPHY /Moraga, Cherríe
Memoir, LGBTQ+
As a young woman, Elvira left California to work as a cigarette girl in glamorous late-1920s Tijuana, where an ambiguous relationship with a wealthy white man taught her life lessons about power, sex, and opportunity. As Moraga charts her mother's journey from impressionable young girl to battle-tested matriarch to, later on, an old woman suffering under the yoke of Alzheimer, she traces her own self-discovery of her gender-queer body and Lesbian identity, as well as her passion for activism and the history of her pueblo. As her mother's memory fails, Moraga is driven to unearth forgotten remnants of a U.S. Mexican diaspora, its indigenous origins, and an American story of cultural loss.
Added by Melody
Looking for Lorraine : the radiant and radical life of Lorraine Hansberry
Imani Perry
BIOGRAPHY /Hansberry, Lorraine
Biographies, LGBTQ+
Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work--until now. In 2018, Hansberry will get the recognition she deserves with the PBS American Masters documentary "Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart" and Imani Perry's multi-dimensional, illuminating biography, Looking for Lorraine. After the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry used her prominence in myriad ways: challenging President Kennedy and his brother to take bolder stances on Civil Rights, supporting African anti-colonial leaders, and confronting the romantic racism of the Beat poets and Village hipsters. Though she married a man, she identified as lesbian and, risking censure and the prospect of being outed, joined one of the nation's first lesbian organizations. Hansberry associated with many activists, writers, and musicians, including Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, among others. Looking for Lorraine is a powerful insight into Hansberry's extraordinary life--a life that was tragically cut far too short.
Added by Melody
The new Negro : the life of Alain Locke
Jeffrey C. Stewart
BIOGRAPHY /Locke, Alain
Biographies, LGBTQ+
A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro--the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness. In The New Negro : The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. Locke also received a cosmopolitan, aesthetic education through his travels in continental Europe, where he came to appreciate the beauty of art and experienced a freedom unknown to him in the United States. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America and his promotion of the literary and artistic work of African Americans as the quintessential creations of American modernism. In the process he looked to Africa to find the proud and beautiful roots of the race. Shifting the discussion of race from politics and economics to the arts, he helped establish the idea that Black urban communities could be crucibles of creativity. Stewart explores both Locke's professional and private life, including his relationships with his mother, his friends, and his white patrons, as well as his lifelong search for love as a gay man. Stewart's thought-provoking biography recreates the worlds of this illustrious, enigmatic man who, in promoting the cultural heritage of Black people, became--in the process--a New Negro himself.
Added by Melody
Added by Melody