Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER | TIME's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 | New York Post's 30 Best Books for Spring | Amazon's Best Books of the Month | BookRiot's Best Books of April | Queerty's Spring 2025 LGBTQ+ Books | Town & Country's Must-Read Books of...

An unflinching memoir about growing up in Iran where homosexuality is punishable by death, and yet underground, hidden from Sharia law, is a vibrant gay scene threatening to burst open. The dawn prayer calls echo through the streets. As many make their way to mosques, for some it signals the end of another illegal gay party. Under the cover of darkness, smiles on lips and sweat on foreheads, the gays of Tehran blend back into daily life. Hidden in plain sight, they plan when and where they will meet again.

'AN ESSENTIAL READ FOR ANYONE WITH A HEART' JOE LOCKE, star of Heartstopper 'SHOULD BE REQUIRED READING FOR ANYONE LOOKING TO EXPAND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO THE LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY' Kristin Chenoweth 'DYLAN MAKES ME LAUGH AND MAKES ME BRAVE. I LOVE PAPER DOLL AND I LOVE THIS WOMAN' Glennon Doyle, #1...

From comedian and TikTok star Kevin James Thornton comes a hilarious and heartfelt story of growing up in a Christian fundamentalist church, turning trauma into comedy, and finding your own way. Growing up in the 90s in a small town in Indiana, Kevin James Thornton had little notion he would one...

Sarah Churchill, first Duchess of Marlborough, was the glamorous and controversial subject of hundreds of satires, newspaper articles and publications both during her lifetime and after her death. This biography brings Sarah Churchill's own voice, passionate and intelligent, back to life and casts a critical eye over images of the Duchess handed down through art, history and literature. Here is an unforgettable portrait of a woman who cared intensely about how we would remember her.

Brought to you by Penguin. Yehudis Fletcher was six years old when she decided to find out if there was actually a G-d. One Sabbath evening, she dared to defy a fundamental rule. She didn’t wash her hands before breaking bread. At the table, Yehudis braced herself for a terrible, biblical...

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER A humorous collection of autobiographical essays from comedian and Emmy Award–winning actor Jeff Hiller, who shares his journey from growing up “profoundly gay” in 1980s Texas to his experiences as an inept social worker and how he clawed, scraped, and brawled to...

Alaska Thunderfuck spills the tea on her meteoric rise from timid Pennsylvania kid to drag superstar in this intimate photographic memoir that will appeal to diehard Alaska admirers and broader drag fans alike. Before RuPaul's Drag Race became a worldwide phenomenon, Drag was mostly an...

The Times Art Book of the Year 2021 FINALIST FOR THE PLUTARCH AWARD 2022 ‘Must surely be the definitive life of Francis Bacon … A biography that no Bacon fan – or indeed foe – can afford to overlook … Mesmerising’ THE TIMES ‘A magnificent triumph … I was captivated by every...

'Fluent and witty . . . confident . . . highly readable' Kathryn Hughes, GUARDIAN 'Brilliant - so vivid and so sharp, fantastically clever and consistently fascinating' KATHERINE RUNDELL, author of Super-Infinite Was Shakespeare gay? The answer is both simpler and more complex than you might...

The story of Christopher Isherwood's life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born the heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner, Don Bachardy, painted his death portrait.

Bloomsbury presents Oscar by Matthew Sturgis, read by Jot Davies. The first major biography of Oscar Wilde in thirty years, and the most complete telling of his life and times to date. NOMINATED FOR THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2019 'The Book of the Year, perhaps of the decade' TLS 'Simply the best...

Mohsin grew up in a deprived pocket of East London; his family was close-knit but very religiously conservative. From a young age Mohsin felt different, but in a home where being gay was inconceivable, he also felt very alone. Outside of home Mohsin went to a failing inner city school where gang violence was a fact of life. As he grew up, life didn’t seem to offer teenage Mohsin any choices: he was disenfranchised as a poor brown boy, and he was isolated from his family as a closet gay Muslim.

'This is the biography - truthful, sympathetic and thorough - that Coward deserves' DAILY TELEGRAPH The voice, the dressing-gown, the cigarette in its holder, remain unmistakable. There is rarely a week when one of Private Lives, Hay Fever, and Blithe Spirit is not in production somewhere in the...

Richard Coles narrates this witty account of life as a parish priest and Radio 4 broadcaster. After a life of sex and drugs and the Communards - brilliantly recounted in the highly acclaimed first volume of his memoirs Fathomless Riches - the Reverend Richard Coles went on to devote his life to God and Christianity. He is also a much-loved broadcaster, presenting Saturday Live on Radio 4 and giving us regular reason to Pause for Thought on Radio 2.

Brought to you by Penguin. An inspiring and intimate self-portrait of the champion of equality that encompasses her brilliant tennis career, unwavering activism, and an ongoing commitment to fairness and social justice. In this spirited account, Billie Jean King details her life's journey to...

Brought to you by Penguin. ‘We ache for love, but love eludes us. Out of this crisis comes so much of what it means to be human’ Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every...

Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez was an invisible architect behind evangelical Christianity's digital empire, crafting messages of belonging for some of the most influential megachurches, all while secretly questioning his own place within the faith. In a desperate attempt to "fix" himself, he turned to conversion therapy, spending eight years trying to pray the gay away. And he wasn't alone. Even though Exodus International, the largest ex-gay organization, closed in 2013, the practice still thrives in many conservative religious communities.

Travis Alabanza examines seven phrases people have directed at them about their gender identity. These phrases have stayed with them over the years. Some are deceptively innocuous, some deliberately loaded or offensive, some celebratory; sentences that have impacted them for better and for worse; sentences that speak to the broader issues raised by a world that insists that gender must be a binary. Through these seven phrases, which include some of their most transformative experiences as a Black, mixed-race, non-binary person, Travis Alabanza turns a mirror back on society.

Ewan Forbes was born Elizabeth to a wealthy landowning family in 1912. As young as six, it was clear that the gender assigned to him at birth was incorrect. With the financial means of seeing specialist doctors in Europe and procuring synthetic hormones, Ewan was able to live as a boy, and then as a man, even correcting the gender on his birth certificate in order to marry. Then, in 1965, Ewan found himself in line to inherit the family baronetcy.

'Your book is the "really good book. Just one" that Roger Butler would have wanted' - Sir Ian McKellen 'Miraculous. The Light of Day reclaims a forgotten hero . . . I couldn't put it down' - Will Tosh 'Sir, we are homosexuals . . .' So began the letter penned by Roger Butler and sent to several...

In a crawlspace at the offices of Switchboard, a queer helpline in operation since 1974, lie dozens of log books kept by volunteers describing the phone calls they had taken: a teenager kicked out of home for dressing as the wrong gender; a lesbian terrified of having her baby taken away from her; a man arrested for chatting up another man; a young person wanting to know how to come out. These logs documented traces of tens of thousands of queer lives, captured by people who lent an ear to those in need.

ONE OF BILLBOARD'S "100 GREATEST MUSIC BOOKS OF ALL TIME": The provocative transgender advocate and lead singer of the punk rock band Against Me! provides a searing account of her search for identity and her true self. It began in a bedroom in Naples, Florida, when a misbehaving punk teenager...

A 2025 AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION STONEWALL HONOR BOOK In this “searing testament to the strength in claiming one’s destiny” (The Washington Post), a young woman desperately attempts to protect her children and family while also embracing her queer identity in a controlling Hasidic...

Barry Diller, one of America’s most successful businessmen, reveals himself here—his successes, failures, and struggles—with surprising candor and intimacy in a memoir rich in Hollywood lore and filled with business acumen. Writing in his singular voice, Barry Diller delivers an astute...

THE BOOK OF PRIDE captures the true story of the gay rights movement from the 1960s to the present, through richly detailed, stunning interviews with the leaders, activists, and ordinary people who witnessed the movement and made it happen. These individuals fought battles both personal and...

Paul Burston wasn’t always the iconic voice of LGBTQ+ London that he is today. Paul came out in the mid-1980s, when ‘gay’ still felt like a dirty word, especially in the small Welsh town where he grew up. He moved to London hoping for a happier life, only to watch in horror as his new-found community was decimated by AIDS. But even in the depths of his grief, Paul vowed never to stop fighting back on behalf of his young friends whose lives were cut tragically short.

Edward Enninful has lived an extraordinary life. Here, for the first time, he shares the remarkable, inspiring story of his journey from a childhood bedroom in Ghana overlooking firing squads, to 1990s London—becoming the youngest-ever fashion director of i-D magazine at just eighteen years old. Now the first Black editor-in-chief of British Vogue, he has created game-changing images of everyone from Beyoncé to Meghan Markle, Kate Moss to Oprah Winfrey, Adele to Rihanna, and many more stars he now counts as friends.

In a gay nightclub in Orlando on June 12, 2016, the shooter, Omar Mateen, murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others. The attack was the deadliest act of violence against the LGBTQ+ community in US history and the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. But there’s a story you haven’t heard. The FBI had a secret history with the shooter and his father. To obscure that history, the FBI pushed a false story that the media dutifully carried—that the attacker was a secretly gay Islamist extremist who had chosen to target Pulse and planned the attack for weeks.

In 2001 Will Young shot to fame as the first winner of Pop Idol. It was clear from the start that he would never be a typical pop star - and more than ten years later he has become one of our best-loved and most intriguing artists. From his dramatic experiences on Pop Idol; to coming out in the...

When Jill Nalder arrived at drama school in London in the early 1980s, she was ready for her life to begin. With her band of best friends—of which many were talented young gay men with big dreams of their own—she grabbed London by the horns: partying with drag queens at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, hosting cabarets at her glamorous flat, flitting across town to any jobs could get. But soon rumours were spreading from America about a frightening illness being dubbed the 'gay flu', and Jill and her friends found that their formerly carefree existence now under threat.