Best LGBT Biographies Books
Here you will get Best LGBT Biographies Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Gay Bar: Why We Went Out
Author: by Jeremy Atherton Lin
Published at: Little, Brown and Company (February 9, 2021)
ISBN: 978-0316458733
An indispensable, intimate, and stylish celebration. Gay Bar is an absolute tour de force. (Maggie Nelson)”Beautiful… Atherton Lin has a five-octave, Mariah Carey-esque range for discussing gay sex. New York Times Book ReviewStrobing lights and dark rooms; throbbing house and drag queens on counters; first kisses, last call: the gay bar has long been a place of solidarity and sexual expressionwhatever your scene, whoever you’re seeking.
But in urban centers around the world, they are closing, a cultural demolition that has Jeremy Atherton Lin wondering: What was the gay bar? How have they shaped him? And could this spell the end of gay identity as we know it?
In Gay Bar, the author embarks upon a transatlantic tour of the hangouts that marked his life, with each club, pub, and dive revealing itself to be a palimpsest of queer history. In prose as exuberant as a hit of poppers and dazzling as a disco ball, he time-travels from Hollywood nights in the 1970s to a warren of cruising tunnels built beneath London in the 1770s; from chichi bars in the aftermath of AIDS to today’s fluid queer spaces; through glory holes, into Crisco-slicked dungeons and down San Francisco alleys.
2. In the Dream House: A Memoir
Author: by Carmen Maria Machado
Published at: Graywolf Press (December 1, 2020)
ISBN: 978-1644450383
A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other PartiesIn the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse.
Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative tropethe haunted house, erotica, the bildungsromanthrough which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles.
She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry.
3. One Life
Author: by Megan Rapinoe
Published at: Penguin Press (November 10, 2020)
ISBN: 978-1984881168
An instant New York Times bestseller! Rapinoe’s ‘signature pose’ from the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup is synonymous to the feeling we got when finishing this book: heart full, arms wide and ready to take up space in this world. USA Today Megan Rapinoe, Olympic gold medalist and two-time Women’s World Cup champion, reveals for the first time her life both on and off the field.
Guided by her personal journey into social justice, brimming with humor, humanity, and joy, she urges all of us to ask ourselves, What will you do with your one life? Only four years old when she kicked her first soccer ball, Megan Rapinoe developed a love and clear talent for the game at a young age.
But it was her parents who taught her that winning was much less important than how she lived her life. From childhood on, Rapinoe always did what she could to stand up for what was righteven if it meant going up against people who disagreed.
In One Life, Megan Rapinoe invites readers on a remarkable journey, looking back on both her victories and her failures, and pulls back the curtain on events we know only from the headlines. After the 2011 World Cup, discouraged by how few athletes were open about their sexuality, Rapinoe decided to come out publicly as gay and use her platform to advocate for marriage equality.
4. Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir
Author: by Hari Ziyad
Published at: Little A (March 1, 2021)
ISBN: 978-1542091329
An eloquent, restless, and enlightening memoir by one of the most thought-provoking journalists today about growing up Black and queer in America, reuniting with the past, and coming of age their own way. One of nineteen children in a blended family, Hari Ziyad was raised by a Hindu Hare Ka mother and a Muslim father.
Through reframing their own coming-of-age story, Ziyad takes readers on a powerful journey of growing up queer and Black in Cleveland, Ohio, and of navigating the equally complex path toward finding their true self in New York City. Exploring childhood, gender, race, and the trust that is built, broken, and repaired through generations, Ziyad investigates what it means to live beyond the limited narratives Black children are given and challenges the irreconcilable binaries that restrict them.
Heartwarming and heart-wrenching, radical and reflective, Hari Ziyad’s vital memoir is for the outcast, the unheard, the unborn, and the dead. It offers us a new way to think about survival and the necessary disruption of social norms. It looks back in tenderness as well as justified rage, forces us to address where we are now, and, born out of hope, illuminates the possibilities for the future.
5. Confess: The Autobiography
Author: by Rob Halford
Published at: Hachette Books (September 29, 2020)
ISBN: 978-0306874949
Named one of the Best Music Books of 2020 by Rolling Stone and Kirkus Reviews*The legendary frontman of Judas Priest, one of the most successful heavy metal bands of all time, celebrates five decades of heavy metal in this tell-all memoir.
Most priests hear confessions. This one is making his. Rob Halford, front man of global iconic metal band Judas Priest, is a true “Metal God.” Raised in Britain’s hard-working, heavy industrial heartland, he and his music were forged in the Black Country.
Confess, his full autobiography, is an unforgettable rock ‘n’ roll story-a journey from a Walsall council estate to musical fame via alcoholism, addiction, police cells, ill-fated sexual trysts, and bleak personal tragedy, through to rehab, coming out, redemption …And finding love.
Now, he is telling his gospel truth. Told with Halford’s trademark self-deprecating, deadpan Black Country humor, Confess is the story of an extraordinary five decades in the music industry. It is also the tale of unlikely encounters with everybody from Superman to Andy Warhol, Madonna, Jack Nicholson, and the Queen.
6. Francis Bacon: Revelations
Author: by Mark Stevens
Published at: Knopf (March 23, 2021)
ISBN: 978-0307271624
A decade in the making: the first comprehensive look at the life and art of Francis Bacon, one of the iconic painters of the twentieth century-from the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of de Kooning: An American Master. Francis Bacon created an indelible image of mankind in modern times, and played an outsized role in both twentieth century art and life-from his public emergence with his legendary Triptych 1944 (its images “so unrelievedly awful” that people fled the gallery), to his death in Madrid in 1992.
Bacon was a witty free spirit and unabashed homosexual at a time when many others remained closeted, and his exploits were as unforgettable as his images. He moved among the worlds of London’s Soho and East End, the literary salons of London and Paris, and the homosexual life of Tangier.
Through hundreds of interviews, and extensive new research, the authors probe Bacon’s childhood in Ireland (he earned his father’s lasting disdain because his asthma prevented him from hunting); his increasingly open homosexuality; his early design career-never before explored in detail; the formation of his vision; his early failure as an artist; his uneasy relationship with American abstract art; and his improbable late emergence onto the international stage as one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century.
7. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name – A Biomythography (Crossing Press Feminist Series)
Author: by Audre Lorde
Published at: Crossing Press; F First Edition Used (January 1, 1982)
ISBN: 978-0895941220
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 who have shaped her …
Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page.Off Our Backs
8. Conundrum (New York Review Books Classics)
Author: by Jan Morris
Published at: NYRB Classics; New York Review Books Classics edition (May 16, 2006)
ISBN: 978-1590171899
The great travel writer Jan Morris was born James Morris. James Morris distinguished himself in the British military, became a successful and physically daring reporter, climbed mountains, crossed deserts, and established a reputation as a historian of the British empire.
He was happily married, with several children. To all appearances, he was not only a man, but a man’s man. Except that appearances, as James Morris had known from early childhood, can be deeply misleading. James Morris had known all his conscious life that at heart he was a woman.
Conundrum, one of the earliest books to discuss transsexuality with honesty and without prurience, tells the story of James Morris’s hidden life and how he decided to bring it into the open, as he resolved first on a hormone treatment and, second, on risky experimental surgery that would turn him into the woman that he truly was.
9. Three Dads and a Baby: Adventures in Modern Parenting
Author: by Ian Jenkins MD
Published at: Cleis Press (March 9, 2021)
ISBN: 978-1627783101
Families come in all forms, but parental love is universal … As a closeted teen, Ian wondered if he would ever be able to live openly with a male partner. Years later, he had not one but two partners in a polyamorous Throuplewhat more could he ask for?
But something was still missing … Join Ian and his partners, Alan and Jeremy, as they embark on a sometimes hilarious, sometimes tearful quest to become parents. They run the gauntlet: IVF failures, the threat of Zika virus, the urgent hunt for a new doctor, pregnancy-threatening bleeds, costly legal battles and a reluctant superior court judge.
Ultimately the grace of womenembryo donors, their egg donor, their surrogate, even a surprise milk donorallow them to complete their family with one perfect girl, and become the first polyamorous family ever named as the legal parents of a child.
10. Burke's Law: A Life in Hockey
Author: by Brian Burke
Published at: Viking (October 13, 2020)
ISBN: 978-0735239470
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLERThe gruffest man in hockey opens up about the challenges, the feuds, and the tragedies he’s fought through. Brian Burke is one of the biggest hockey personalities-no, personalities full-stop-in the media landscape. His brashness makes him a magnet for attention, and he does nothing to shy away from it.
Most famous for advocating “pugnacity, truculence, testosterone, and belligerence” during his tenure at the helm of the Maple Leafs, Burke has lived and breathed hockey his whole life. He has been a player, an agent, a league executive, a scout, a Stanley Cup-winning GM, an Olympic GM, and a media analyst.
He has worked with Pat Quinn, Gary Bettman, and an array of future Hall of Fame players. No one knows the game better, and no one commands more attention when they open up about it. But there is more to Brian Burke than hockey.
He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, and an accomplished businessman with hard-earned lessons that comefrom highly scrutinized decisions made at the helm of multi-million-dollar companies. And despite his brusque persona on camera and in the boardroom, he is nevertheless a father with a story to tell.
11. The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America
Author: by Eric Cervini
Published at: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Illustrated edition (June 2, 2020)
ISBN: 978-0374139797
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER AND NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICEFrom a young Harvard- and Cambridge-trained historian, the secret history of the fight for gay rights that began a generation before Stonewall. In 1957, Frank Kameny, a rising astronomer working for the U.S.
Defense Department in Hawaii, received a summons to report immediately to Washington, D.C. The Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual, and after a series of humiliating interviews, Kameny, like countless gay men and women before him, was promptly dismissed from his government job.
Unlike many others, though, Kameny fought back. Based on firsthand accounts, recently declassified FBI records, and forty thousand personal documents, Eric Cervini’s The Deviant’s War unfolds over the course of the 1960s, as the Mattachine Society of Washington, the group Kameny founded, became the first organization to protest the systematic persecution of gay federal employees.
It traces the forgotten ties that bound gay rights to the Black Freedom Movement, the New Left, lesbian activism, and trans resistance. Above all, it is a story of America (and Washington) at a cultural and sexual crossroads; of shocking, byzantine public battles with Congress; of FBI informants; murder; betrayal; sex; love; and ultimately victory.
12. The Argonauts
Author: by Maggie Nelson
Published at: Graywolf Press; Reprint edition (January 26, 2016)
ISBN: 978-1555977351
An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is 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.
It binds an account of Nelson’s relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and “family.” An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.
13. All The Young Men
Author: by Ruth Coker Burks
Published at: Grove Press (December 1, 2020)
ISBN: 978-0802157249
All The Young Men, a gripping and triumphant tale of human compassion, is the true story of Ruth Coker Burks, a young single mother in Hot Springs, Arkansas, who finds herself driven to the forefront of the AIDS crisis, and becoming a pivotal activist in America’s fight against AIDS.
In 1986, 26-year old Ruth visits a friend at the hospital when she notices that the door to one of the hospital rooms is painted red. She witnesses nurses drawing straws to see who would tend to the patient inside, all of them reluctant to enter the room.
Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and immediately begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. Before she can even process what she’s done, word spreads in the community that Ruth is the only person willing to help these young men afflicted by AIDS, and is called upon to nurse them.
As she forges deep friendships with the men she helps, she works tirelessly to find them housing and jobs, even searching for funeral homes willing to take their bodies often in the middle of the night. She cooks meals for tens of people out of discarded food found in the dumpsters behind supermarkets, stores rare medications for her most urgent patients, teaches sex-ed to drag queens after hours at secret bars, and becomes a beacon of hope to an otherwise spurned group of ailing gay men on the fringes of a deeply conservative state.
14. Me
Author: by Elton John
Published at: Griffin; Reprint edition (October 27, 2020)
ISBN: 978-1250770288
INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NOW UPDATED WITH A NEW CHAPTER In his first and only official autobiography, music icon Elton John reveals the truth about his extraordinary life, from his rollercoaster lifestyle as shown in the film Rocketman, to becoming a living legend.
Christened Reginald Dwight, he was a shy boy with Buddy Holly glasses who grew up in the London suburb of Pinner and dreamed of becoming a pop star. By the age of twenty-three he was performing his first gig in America, facing an astonished audience in his bright yellow dungarees, a star-spangled T-shirt, and boots with wings.
Elton John had arrived and the music world would never be the same again. His life has been full of drama, from the early rejection of his work with song-writing partner Bernie Taupin to spinning out of control as a chart-topping superstar; from half-heartedly trying to drown himself in his LA swimming pool to disco-dancing with Princess Diana and Queen Elizabeth; from friendships with John Lennon, Freddie Mercury, and George Michael to setting up his AIDS Foundation to conquering Broadway with Aida, The Lion King, and Billy Elliot the Musical.
15. Redefining Realness: My Path To Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More
Author: by Janet Mock
Published at: Atria Books; 1st edition (December 1, 2014)
ISBN: 978-1476709130
New York Times Bestseller Winner of the 2015 WOMEN’S WAY Book Prize Goodreads Best of 2014 Semi-Finalist Books for a Better Life Award Finalist Lambda Literary Award Finalist Time Magazine 30 Most Influential People on the Internet American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book In her profound and courageous New York Times bestseller, Janet Mock establishes herself as a resounding and inspirational voice for the transgender communityand anyone fighting to define themselves on their own terms.
With unflinching honesty and moving prose, Janet Mock relays her experiences of growing up young, multiracial, poor, and trans in America, offering readers accessible language while imparting vital insight about the unique challenges and vulnerabilities of a marginalized and misunderstood population.
Though undoubtedly an account of one woman’s quest for self at all costs, Redefining Realness is a powerful vision of possibility and self-realization, pushing us all toward greater acceptance of one anotherand of ourselvesshowing as never before how to be unapologetic and real.
