Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

“An excellent history of the queer world’s countless music scenes.” —Emma Alpern, Vulture “An essential book for this moment.” —Rob Sheffield The definitive history of LGBTQ music, from Stonewall to RuPaul, and its impact on culture and American life From the underground...

In the wake of a disastrous two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break—for three months she would abstain from dating, relationships and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Melissa, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship or another. It was time to focus on herself and examine the lifelong patterns that had got her to this point. When those three months ended, she decided to extend her celibate period, fearing that she had not yet gained the clarity she was searching for.

Bloomsbury presents Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs, read by Ron Butler ‘For me,’ wrote James Baldwin in 1959, ‘the difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject – his key and ours to his...

Few people knew that Freddie Mercury kept a diary. When he died in 1991, he left behind seventeen handwritten notebooks chronicling his life and times, which he had begun to write in 1976 when Queen were at the height of their global fame. His final entry was made just weeks before his death. Only four of his nearest and dearest ever knew what became of those diaries. To one of them, Freddie secretly entrusted the collection just before he died. A mind-blowing listen, they constitute the closest thing to a Freddie Mercury autobiography that the world will ever know.

Rainbow History Class is your entry into LGBTQ+ history, sharing queer and trans stories from Ancient civilisations all the way up to the internet. So much of queer and trans history and culture has been erased, but Hannah McElhinney, writer and creator of Rainbow History Class (as seen on TikTok), is here to help us all with this crash course.

Hidden in the margins of history books, classical literature, and thousands of years of stories, myths and legends, through to contemporary literature, TV and film, there is a diverse and other-worldly super community of queer heroes to discover, learn from, and celebrate. Queer Heroes of Myth & Legend brings to life characters who are romantic, brave, mysterious, and always fantastical. It is a magnificent celebration of queerness through the ages in all its legendary glory.

Rita Gigante grew up in a world swirling with secrets, lies, and multiple sins. Her father, notorious Mafia boss Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, was the leader of the Genovese crime clan and the head of all five New York crime families for decades. But until Rita was sixteen, she was kept in the dark about his underworld activities. She unknowingly hung out at mob headquarters and witnessed her dad's whispered meetings around the dinner table, but only knew what she was told by her mother and siblings about his odd behavior: Dad's sick. Keep your mouth shut. Don't talk about the family.

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...

'Thoughtful, beautiful, incredibly necessary. People need to read this book, especially if they feel a resistance to. I wish everyone would.' Sofie Hagen ‘Uncompromising, anguished, combative: culture wars have victims, and this is an agonising story told with honesty and passion.’ Richard...

When the AIDS epidemic hit in the early 1980s, Strub was living in New York and soon found himself attending "more funerals than birthday parties". Scared and angry, he turned to radical activism to combat discrimination and demand research. Strub takes you through his own diagnosis and inside ACT UP, the organization that transformed a stigmatized cause into one of the defining political movements of our time.

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.

It’s easy to be yourself when who and what you are is in vogue. But growing up Black and gay in America has never been easy. Before Billy Porter was slaying red carpets and giving an iconic performance in the celebrated TV show Pose; before he was the Tony Award-winning star of Broadway’s Kinky Boots; and before he was an acclaimed recording artist, actor, playwright, and all-around diva, Porter was a young boy who didn’t fit in. 

A 2025 Audie Award winner for Best Nonfiction Narrator! This program is read by cabaret legend Justin Vivian Bond. A Must-Read: The New York Times Book Review, Nylon, Star Tribune, Ms., Kirkus Reviews, The Bay Area Reporter, Town & Country, InsideHook “[A] monumental biography.” —Hilton...

A sex and relationship columnist bares it all in a series of essays—part memoir, part manifesto—that explore the author’s coming of age and coming out as a bisexual man and move toward embracing and celebrating sex unencumbered by shame.

Winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2025 A Sunday Times Best Book of 2025 A Guardian Best Sports Book 2025 A unique memoir from British cycling’s most fascinating competitor. In the summer of 2020, sportswriter David Walsh invited Pippa York began a series of journeys...

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...

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.

Brought to you by Penguin. My friends will respect me, I hope, just as much under my jacket as under my dress... So take me for a man or a woman as you wish. By the age of thirty, the novelist who had been born Aurore Dupin in 1804 had become the internationally renowned George Sand. In English...

Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries. Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists - mostly women, mostly queer - whose public contribution has risen out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships to change the way we understand, experience and appreciate the universe.

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.