Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

Meet the unsung sheroes of history: the diverse, defiant and daring (wo)men who changed the rules, and their identities, to get sh*t done. A call to action for the modern world, this book celebrates the #GenderRebels who paved the way for women everywhere to be soldiers and spies; kings and queens; firefighters, doctors, pilots; and a Swiss Army knife’s-worth more. These superbly spirited (wo)men all had one thing in common: they defied the rules to progress in a man’s world.

This is the memoir of James C. Hormel - a man who grew up feeling different not only because his family owned the Hormel “empire” and lived in a 26 bedroom house in a small Midwest town, but because he was gay at a time when homosexuality was not discussed or accepted. Outwardly he tried to live up to the life his father wanted for him - he was a successful professional, had married a lovely woman, and had children - but as volatile changes in the late 1960s impeded on the American psyche, Hormel realized that he could not hide his true self forever.

Eddie Mair is, by his own account, one of Britain's most beloved broadcasters. Born in Dundee, Scotland, he has worked in radio all his adult life. From the foothills of commercial radio in his hometown, through the sunlit uplands of the BBC in Scotland, he has reached the peaks of his profession with BBC network radio in London. And he's never afraid to work a metaphor beyond endurance.

When Emmett de Monterey is eighteen months old, a doctor diagnoses him with cerebral palsy. Words too big for his 25-year-old artist parents and their happy, smiling baby. Growing up in South East London in the 1980s, Emmett is spat at on the street and prayed over at church. At his school for disabled children, he's told he will be expelled if the rumours are true, if he's gay; at his mainstream school, teachers refuse to schedule his classes on the ground floor, and he loses a stone from the effort of getting up the stairs.

A definitive deep-dive into queer history and culture with hit reality show RuPaul's Drag Race as a touchstone, by the creators of the pop culture blog Tom and Lorenzo NPR's Best Books of the Year 2020 pick A New York Times New & Noteworthy book One of Logo/NewNowNext's "11 Queer Books We Can't...

SOON TO BE A TV SERIES WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ANDREW HAIGH New York Times Book Critics Favorite Book of the Year · Washington Post Notable Book of the Year “It’s all here: the grade school Walt Disney and Dr. Seuss; the adolescent acid trips; the fondness for Post-it notes and flying...

What’s a sweets-loving young boy growing up gay in North Carolina in the '80s supposed to think when he’s diagnosed with type-1 diabetes? That God is punishing him, naturally. This was, after all, when gay-hating Jesse Helms was his senator, AIDS was still the boogeyman, and no one was saying, "It gets better." And if stealing a copy of a gay porno magazine from the newsagent was a sin, then surely what the men inside were doing to one another was much worse. Sweet Tooth is Tim Anderson’s uproarious memoir of life after his hormones and blood sugar both went berserk.

I Think I Like Girls shares everything that Rosie wishes she had known when she started dating women, offering answers to the questions that cross everyone's mind. From the first moment of coming out to finding community and navigating relationships, Rosie will offer her own stories and bring in those of other women, with warmth, humour and a happy helping of chaotic dates.

Celebrate Pride with Shangela (RuPaul’s Drag Race), Nikki Levy (Don’t Tell My Mother!), and six fabulous storytellers as they share heartfelt, hilarious, true tales about coming out.

Jeremy Ivester is a transgender man. Thirty years ago, his parents welcomed him into the world as what they thought was their daughter. As a child, he preferred the toys and games our society views as masculine. He kept his hair short and wore boys’ clothing. They called him a tomboy. That’s what he called himself. By high school, when he showed no interest in flirting, his parents thought he might be lesbian. At 20, he wondered if he was asexual. At 23, he surgically removed his breasts.

In this raw and lyrical memoir as rich and insightful as How to Say Babylon and as vulnerable and provocative as Heavy, an Emmy Award-winning director chronicles his struggle to break free from—and live outside of—the prescribed paradigms of Blackness and masculinity that shaped him. Long...

Vicky Beeching, called "arguably the most influential Christian of her generation" in The Guardian, began writing songs for the church in her teens. By the time she reached her early thirties, Vicky was a household name in churches on both sides of the pond. Recording multiple albums and singing...

A darkly comic memoir-in-essays about the scam of the American Dream and doing whatever it takes to survive in the Sunshine State—from the award-winning author of High-Risk Homosexual “Relatable, funny and deeply heartfelt, this memoir is one not to miss.”—Today “Edgar Gomez is a young...

¿Por qué ser feliz cuando puedes ser normal?, preguntó la señora Winterson a su hija Jeanette cuando ella, recién cumplidos los dieciséis años, le confesó haberse enamorado de otra chica. Extraña pregunta, pero poco más podía esperarse de una mujer que había adoptado a una niña para hacer de ella una aliada en su misión religiosa, y en cambio se las tuvo que ver con un ser extraño que pedía a gritos su porción de felicidad.

Do you know me?, the email began, sparking tremors of fear that turned into a full quake of panic when William Dameron discovered that his selfie had been stolen by strangers. On social networks and dating sites, his image and identity - a forty-year-old straight white male - had been used to hook countless women into believing in lies of love and romance.

In December 1935, Zdenek Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era.

'Enjoy this story. I already jumped to the parts about me.' - Boy George The extraordinary life story of David Hodge – the ‘Very Miss Dusty O’. - 'My story is one of laughter and hedonism, dressing up and showing off. I played Queen in a parallel universe of glamour, rhinestones and...

In Uncovered, Leah Lax tells her story - beginning as a young teen who left her liberal, secular home for life as a Hasidic Jew and ending as a 40-something woman who has to abandon the only world she's known for 30 years in order to achieve personal freedom.

Zami: A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers “Zami is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women...

Although he died at a heartbreakingly young age and appeared in only a handful of movies, James Dean revolutionized American manhood. As a celebrity and icon, he melded vulnerability with determination, sensitivity with strength, in a way that offered a bracing and—for some—threatening new vision of masculinity. His massive influence and the fascination he has always inspired are inseparable from his identity as a queer man whose complex sexuality shattered the norms of midcentury American society.