Adult Nonfiction

Lambda Literary Award winner for Best LBTQ+ Anthology

More than forty trans writers and artists have joined forces to explore the deeper meanings of the Fast & Furious franchise (and also gender). There's really no way to know why this exists, but it does, and you can own it! Suitable for F&F fans and newcomers alike.

Includes:
- A new short story by Manhunt author Gretchen Felker-Martin
- A demolition derby driver’s perspective on 2 Fast 2 Furious’s derby scene
- An essay contemplating the queer symbolism of Cipher’s bowl cut
- The scoop on the franchise’s only canonically nonbinary character - Instructions for an F&F-themed tabletop role-playing game - A contemplation of which Taylor Swift album represents each F&F character

Plus: Bingo cards! Comics! Haiku! And, of course, hot gay erotica…

2 Trans 2 Furious is edited by Tuck Woodstock and Niko Stratis, with cover art by Mattie Lubchansky and zine design by Shay Mirk.

Zine. Bookstores are important. So are booksellers. And they—and the ideas and communities they serve—need protection. Danny Caine, the best-selling author of How to Resist Amazon and Why and co-owner of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, writes a stirring call to action. Bookstores are not charities, he writes, and they shouldn't get a pass on exploitative labor practices, but they play a vital role in our society that is worth upholding. Preparing the ground for a more expansive book on the topic, Caine offers 50 ideas for protecting this idiosyncratic business niche and, by extension, the neighborhoods that bookstores anchor. Readers, publishers, politicians, workers, union organizers, and landlords can all find tailor-made calls to action in these pages. Especially now, with freedom of speech under attack from the right, it's time for us to protect books and those who sell them.

By: Daina Ramey Berry (Author), Kali Nicole Gross (Author), 2021, Paperback

The award-winning Revisioning American History series continues with this “groundbreaking new history of Black women in the United States” (Ibram X. Kendi)—the perfect companion to An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and An African American and Latinx History of the United States.

An empowering and intersectional history that centers the stories of African American women across 400+ years, showing how they are—and have always been—instrumental in shaping our country.

In centering Black women’s stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women’s unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today.

A Black Women’s History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women’s lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women’s history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.

An engaging illustrated history of feminism from antiquity through third-wave feminism, featuring Sappho, Mary Magdalene, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Simone de Beauvoir, and many others.

The history of feminism? The right to vote, Susan B. Anthony, Gloria Steinem, white pantsuits? Oh, but there's so much more. And we need to know about it, especially now. In pithy text and pithier comics, A Brief History of Feminism engages us, educates us, makes us laugh, and makes us angry. It begins with antiquity and the early days of Judeo-Christianity. (Mary Magdalene questions the maleness of Jesus's inner circle: “People will end up getting the notion you don't want women to be priests.” Jesus: “Really, Mary, do you always have to be so negative?”) It continues through the Middle Ages, the Early Modern period, and the Enlightenment (“Liberty, equality, fraternity!” “But fraternity means brotherhood!”). It covers the beginnings of an organized women's movement in the nineteenth century, second-wave Feminism, queer feminism, and third-wave Feminism.

Along the way, we learn about important figures: Olympe de Gouges, author of the “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen” (guillotined by Robespierre); Flora Tristan, who linked the oppression of women and the oppression of the proletariat before Marx and Engels set pen to paper; and the poet Audre Lorde, who pointed to the racial obliviousness of mainstream feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. We learn about bourgeois and working-class issues, and the angry racism of some American feminists when black men got the vote before women did. We see God as a long-bearded old man emerging from a cloud (and once, as a woman with her hair in curlers). And we learn the story so far of a history that is still being written.

By: Kate Lister (Author), 2021, Paperback

Based on the popular research project Whores of Yore and written with her distinctive humour and wit, A Curious History of Sex draws upon Dr. Kate Lister’s extensive knowledge of sex history. From medieval impotence tests to twentieth-century testicle thefts, from the erotic frescoes of Pompeii, to modern-day sex doll brothels, Lister unashamedly roots around in the pants of history, debunking myths, challenging stereotypes, and generally getting her hands dirty. This fascinating book is peppered with surprising and informative historical slang, and illustrated with eye-opening, toe-curling, and meticulously sourced images from the past. You will laugh, you will wince, and you will wonder just how much has actually changed.

By: Melissa Dilkes Pateras (Author), 2023, Hardcover

Everything you need to know about laundry, cleaning, and basic home repairs—from the TikTok star who made bluing a thing, showed you how to fold a fitted sheet, and taught you to properly use your (caulk) gun.

“[Melissa Pateras] makes chores enjoyable in her bawdy debut. . . . Doing laundry has never sounded so fun.”—Publishers Weekly

Melissa Dilkes Pateras is the most competent housekeeper, DIY-project master, and home repair genius that you’ve ever fantasized about becoming. When she followed her kids on to TikTok, she discovered a community hungry for her approachable, tongue-in-cheek advice on everything from balls—dryer balls, that is—to why color-coded closets are a spiritual experience. She doesn’t expect you to know what you were never taught, and she doesn’t care about transforming your home into a minimal, beige Instagram post; she simply wants to help make your life easier.

Whether you’re terrified of your laundry pile or have an inner handyperson who’s been longing for their moment, A Dirty Guide to a Clean Home is a joyful all-purpose guide to organizing, cleaning, laundry, repairs, and beyond. As Melissa says, “Your home shouldn’t be your adversary.”

By: Alicia Elliot (Author), 2020, Paperback

"In her raw, unflinching memoir . . . she tells the impassioned, wrenching story of the mental health crisis within her own family and community . . . A searing cry." —New York Times Book Review

The Mohawk phrase for depression can be roughly translated to "a mind spread out on the ground." In this urgent and visceral work, Alicia Elliott explores how apt a description that is for the ongoing effects of personal, intergenerational, and colonial traumas she and so many Native people have experienced.

Elliott's deeply personal writing details a life spent between Indigenous and white communities, a divide reflected in her own family, and engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, art, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, and representation. Throughout, she makes thrilling connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political.

A national bestseller in Canada, this updated and expanded American edition helps us better understand legacy, oppression, and racism throughout North America, and offers us a profound new way to decolonize our minds.

By: Kate Bornstein, 2013, Paperback

In the early 1970s, a boy from a Conservative Jewish family joined the Church of Scientology. In 1981, that boy officially left the movement and ultimately transitioned into a woman. A few years later, she stopped calling herself a woman—and became a famous gender outlaw.

Gender theorist, performance artist, and author Kate Bornstein is set to change lives with her stunningly original memoir. Wickedly funny and disarmingly honest, this is Bornstein's most intimate book yet, encompassing her early childhood and adolescence, college at Brown, a life in the theater, three marriages and fatherhood, the Scientology hierarchy, transsexual life, LGBTQ politics, and life on the road as a sought-after speaker.

By:  Jacoby Ballard (Author), Susanna Barkataki (Foreword), 2021, Paperback

Jacoby Ballard provides an empowering and affirming guide to embodied healing through yoga and the dharma, grounded in the brilliance, resilience, and lived experiences of queer folks.

Part I deconstructs the ways mainstream yoga perpetuates queer- and transphobia and other systemic oppressions, exploring the intersections of yoga, capitalism, cultural appropriation, and sexual violence. Ballard also addresses the trauma--complex, vicarious, historical, and collective--perpetuated against queer communities. In response, he offers tools for self-compassion, tonglen, lovingkindness, and grounding, and helps readers explore questions like:

• What is trauma? How is it a product of injustice--and how can healing it create justice?
• The world won't stop being homo- and transphobic, so how do I encounter that in a way that does the least harm?
• How do we love what is uniquely trans about us?
• What are affinity groups, and why do we need them?

In part II, Ballard offers a queer-centered, fully embodied, and equity-rooted practice with meditations, practices, and sequences for processing and healing from trauma individually and in community. He explains concepts like lovingkindness, letting go, compassion, joy, forgiveness, and equanimity through a queer lens, and pairs each with corresponding meditations, practices, and beautiful line drawings of queer bodies.

Enhanced with stories from Ballard's personal practice and professional experience teaching yoga in schools, prisons, conferences, and his weekly Queer and Trans Yoga class, A Queer Dharma is a guidebook, reclamation, and unapologetically queer heart offering for true healing and transformation.

(ReVisioning History)

Winner of the Stonewall Book Award in nonfiction

The first comprehensive history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender America, from pre-1492 to the present

"Readable, radical, and smart—a must read."—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home

Intellectually dynamic and endlessly provocative, this is more than a “who’s who” of queer history: it is a narrative that radically challenges how we understand American history. Drawing upon primary documents, literature, and cultural histories, scholar and activist Michael Bronski charts the breadth of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from 1492 to the present, a testament to how the LGBTQ+ experience has profoundly shaped American culture and history.

American history abounds with unknown or ignored examples of queer life, from the ineffectiveness of sodomy laws in the colonies to the prevalence of cross-dressing women soldiers in the Civil War and resistance to homophobic social purity movements. Bronski highlights such groundbreaking moments of queer history as:

• In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage.

•Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to "Publick Universal Friend," refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in upstate New York.

• In the mid-19th century, internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized “female marriage.”

• in the late 1920s, Augustus Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter.

Informative and empowering, this engrossing and revelatory treatise emphasizes that there is no American history without queer history.

By:  Molly Muldoon & Will Hernandez, 2022, Paperback

Asexuality is often called The Invisible Orientation. You don’t learn about it in school, you don’t hear “ace” on television. So, it’s kinda hard to be ace in a society so steeped in sex that no one knows you exist. Too many young people grow up believing that their lack of sexual desire means they are broken – so writer Molly Muldoon and cartoonist Will Hernandez, both in the ace community, are here to shed light on society’s misconceptions of asexuality and what being ace is really like. This book is for anyone who wants to learn about asexuality, and for Ace people themselves, to validate their experiences. Asexuality is a real identity and it’s time the world recognizes it. Here’s to being invisible no more! 

Queer women have always existed – let’s put them back in the history books

No, they weren’t ‘just friends’!

Queer women have been written out of history since, well, forever. ‘But historians famously care about women!’, said no one. From Anne Bonny and Mary Read who sailed the seas together disguised as pirates, to US football captain Megan Rapinoe declaring ‘You can’t win a championship without gays on your team’, via countless literary salons and tuxedos, A Short History of Queer Women sets the record straight on women who have loved other women through the ages.

Who says lesbians can’t be funny?

By: Melissa Febos, 2017, Hardcover

Named One of the Best Books of 2017 by:
Esquire, Refinery29, LitHub, BookRiot, Medium, Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Largehearted Boy, The Coil and The Cut.

Winner of the Lambda Literary Jeanne Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography
Finalist, Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
An Indie Next Pick

For readers of Maggie Nelson and Leslie Jamison, a fierce and dazzling personal narrative that explores the many ways identity and art are shaped by love and loss.

In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment.

In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection -- with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery. As Febos tentatively reconnects, she sees how both these lineages manifest in her own life, marked by compulsion and an instinct for self-erasure. Meanwhile, she remains closely tied to the sea captain who raised her, his parenting ardent but intermittent as his work took him away for months at a time. Woven throughout is the hypnotic story of an all-consuming, long-distance love affair with a woman, marked equally by worship and withdrawal. In visceral, erotic prose, Febos captures their mutual abandonment to passion and obsession -- and the terror and exhilaration of losing herself in another.

At once a fearlessly vulnerable memoir and an incisive investigation of art, love, and identity, Abandon Me draws on childhood stories, religion, psychology, mythology, popular culture, and the intimacies of one writer’s life to reveal intellectual and emotional truths that feel startlingly universal.

By: A K Andrews, 2015, Paperback

“An asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction. Unlike celibacy, which people choose, asexuality is an intrinsic part of who we are.” (www.asexuality.org) This is an anthology of 17 true stories by real people about asexuality -- the invisible orientation that everyone's heard of, but few actually talk about or understand. Whether you’re a newly-discovered asexual, someone who’s known they’re asexual for years, the friend or family of someone asexual, or someone who’s just intrigued by asexuality in general, you’re sure to find something in this anthology that interests you. So sit back, relax, and enjoy a selection of personal experiences, insights, and anecdotes from asexual writers around the world! The contents of this book include: Foreword by Victoria Beth (AVEN Project Team) "My Self-discovery, Thus Far"—Rebecca Nesor shares her experience as a 21st century asexual teenager, which involves an amusing anecdote about phone shopping and Minecraft. "A Geeky Love Story"—Suma walks us through the romantic tale of how sie joined a comics group looking for friendship and good times, and ended up falling in love. "Growing Up"—Phil Dalton offers a series of vignettes stretching over 30 years, from his childhood to the present day, about his attempts to fit into a sexual society. "Coming Out"—Melissa Keller explains why she has chosen not to come out to her friends and family, and explores the struggles that many asexual people face when coming out. "Being 'Normal' Is Overrated Anyway"—Ren describes how she discovered she wasn’t as “normal” as she’d thought, and how she’s come to embrace her asexuality. "Finding Grace"—Betty Badinbed reflects on the 20+ years of relationships—brief and lengthy, platonic and romantic, failed and successful—which have helped her hone her gray-ace identity. "Black Women Can Be Asexual Too"—Gabriella Grange explores her experiences as a black asexual young woman, including a sweet story about a handsome cellist and their shared passion for philosophy. "Fixing What Isn’t Broken"—Emma Hopwood shares a humorous piece of prose poetry about how tough it is to be asexual in a sexual world. "I Just Don’t Get It"—Jennifer Dyse offers insight into how hard it is to navigate school and relationships as an asexual, and the dangers that can come from trying too hard to be “normal.” "An Asexual Teen"—Kaya Brown ruminates on her experiences as an asexual teen, on coming out to her mother, and on dealing with distrust from adults who don’t understand asexuality. "Dream Guy"—Cionii shares a poem about inner beauty. "It’s All Asexual To Me"—Jarrah Shub describes how learning about her asexuality early in her teenage years has helped her be more self-assured and happy with who she is. "When I Grow Up"—Shannon Brown debunks the myth that “everyone wants to have sex,” and describes the various ways she’s come out to her high school friends. "Just A Small Town Boy"—Cameron explains how growing up in a small town shaped his knowledge of sexuality, and how discovering asexuality has helped him better understand himself. "Coming Out To Myself: Not A Piece Of Cake"—Ennis discusses her journey, as a young lady with Asperger’s syndrome, toward accepting her aromantic and asexual identity. "Copper Weddings"—Martin Spangsbro-Pedersen explains why he cast off his gay identity to instead identify as asexual, and describes his experiences as an activist within Denmark’s LGBTQ+ community. "My Happily Ever After"—Cecily Summers explains how her definition of her own “happily ever after” changed after she identified herself as asexual. To find out more about asexuality, please visit the AVEN website (www.asexuality.org). To find out about future Ace & Proud projects, please visit purplecakepress.wordpress.com.

By: Eric Young (Author), 2022, Paperback

How do we experience attraction?
What does love mean to us?
When did you realise you were ace?
This is the ace community in their own words.
Drawing upon interviews with a wide range of people across the asexual spectrum, Eris Young is here to take you on an empowering, enriching journey through the rich multitudes of asexual life.
With chapters spanning everything from dating, relationships and sex, to mental and emotional health, family, community and joy, the inspirational stories and personal experiences within these pages speak to aces living and loving in unique ways. Find support amongst the diverse narratives of aces sex-repulsed and sex-favourable, alongside voices exploring what it means to be black and ace, to be queer and ace, or ace and multi-partnered - and use it as a springboard for your own ace growth.
Do you see a story like your own?