Adult Nonfiction

By: Nico Lang (Author), 2024, Hardcover

** NATIONAL BESTSELLER **

From an award-winning journalist comes a vivid and moving portrait of eight trans and nonbinary teenagers across the country, following their daily triumphs, struggles, and all that encompasses growing up trans in America today

“A master class in journalism as a force for change.”
—SAMANTHA ALLEN, author of Real Queer America

“With humor and compassion, Lang shows trans teenagers as they really are: kids trying their best.”
—MAIA KOBABE, author of Gender Queer: A Memoir

“Lang proves how rich the discourse is when trans youth take their rightful place at the center of their narratives.”
—RAQUEL WILLIS, activist, and author of The Risk It Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation

“An incredibly important, humane account.”
—GARRARD CONLEY, New York Times bestselling author of Boy Erased: A Memoir

Media coverage tends to sensationalize the fight over how trans kids should be allowed to live, but what is incredibly rare are the voices of the people at the heart of this debate: transgender and gender nonconforming kids themselves.

For their groundbreaking new book, journalist Nico Lang spent a year traveling the country to document the lives of transgender, nonbinary, and genderfluid teens and their families. Drawing on hundreds of hours of on-the-ground interviews with them and the people in their communities, American Teenager paints a vivid portrait of what it’s actually like to grow up trans today.

From the tip of Florida’s conservative panhandle to vibrant queer communities in California, and from Texas churches to mosques in Illinois, American Teenager gives readers a window into the lives of Wyatt, Rhydian, Mykah, Clint, Ruby, Augie, Jack, and Kylie, eight teens who, despite what some lawmakers might want us to believe, are truly just kids looking for a brighter future.

“With heartfelt empathy, Nico Lang uncovers the human stories overshadowed by political rhetoric, showcasing the struggles and resilience of transgender youth amidst adversity while simultaneously amplifying their voices, which are all too often silenced.”
—JAZZ JENNINGS, author of Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen and I Am Jazz

“An urgently necessary book. By allowing trans teens to tell their stories themselves, Lang has given them—and by extension, all of us—a great gift.”
—HUGH RYAN, award-winning author of When Brooklyn Was Queer

“Lang weaves this broad bleak terrain with warm insights and a clear immediacy of message. Expansive and compassionate.”
―GABE DUNN, New York Times bestselling author of I Hate Everyone But You

“Lang’s excellent reporting reminds us all of our shared humanity.”
—BRIAN K. BOND, CEO, PFLAG National

“An absolute must-read. An evocative and authentic story that is intimate and illuminating.”
—RODRIGO HENG-LEHTINEN, Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equity

By: Paul Ortiz (Author), 2018, Paperback  (ReVisioning History)

An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights

Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like “manifest destiny” and “Jacksonian democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism.

Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers’ Day, when migrant laborers—Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth—united in resistance on the first “Day Without Immigrants.” As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of “America First” rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas.

Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights.

(ReVisioning History)

New York Times Bestseller

Now part of the HBO docuseries "Exterminate All the Brutes," written and directed by Raoul Peck

Recipient of the American Book Award

The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples
 
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortizoffers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.

With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.”
 
Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.

Upon its first publication more than twenty years ago, And the Band Played on was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigative reporting.

An international bestseller, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made into a critically acclaimed movie, Shilts' expose revealed why AIDS was allowed to spread unchecked during the early 80's while the most trusted institutions ignored or denied the threat. One of the few true modern classics, it changed and framed how AIDS was discussed in the following years. Now republished in a special 20th Anniversary edition, And the Band Played On remains one of the essential books of our time.

By: Ricky Tucker (Author), 2022, Paperback

A 2023 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Nonfiction

An Electric Literature “Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of 2022” Selection

A love letter to the legendary Black and Latinx LGBTQ underground subculture, uncovering its abundant legacy and influence in popular culture.

What is Ballroom? Not a song, a documentary, a catchphrase, a TV show, or an individual pop star. It is an underground subculture founded over a century ago by LGBTQ African American and Latino men and women of Harlem. Arts-based and intersectional, it transcends identity, acting as a fearless response to the systemic marginalization of minority populations.

Ricky Tucker pulls from his years as a close friend of the community to reveal the complex cultural makeup and ongoing relevance of house and Ballroom, a space where trans lives are respected and applauded, and queer youth are able to find family and acceptance. With each chapter framed as a “category” (Vogue, Realness, Body, et al.), And the Category Is . . . offers an impressionistic point of entry into this subculture, its deeply integrated history, and how it’s been appropriated for mainstream audiences. Each category features an exclusive interview with fierce LGBTQ/POC Ballroom members—Lee Soulja, Benjamin Ninja, Twiggy Pucci Garçon, and more—whose lives, work, and activism drive home that very category.

At the height of public intrigue and awareness about Ballroom, thanks to TV shows like FX’s Pose, Tucker’s compelling narratives help us understand its relevance in pop culture, dance, public policy with regard to queer communities, and so much more. Welcome to the norm-defying realness of Ballroom.

A gripping account of one family’s battle to protect their daughter against transphobia and hate in contemporary America

Our country stands at a critical cultural crossroads, with a wave of anti-trans legislation emerging at unprecedented levels, targeting trans children, in particular, who face increasing stigmatization and erasure. Sim Butler’s And the Dragons Do Come is a poignant account of one family’s experience of parenting and supporting a trans child against this nightmarish backdrop.

In recent years, the Butler family faced an impossible reality in their home state of Alabama, where trans rights are increasingly under attack. Butler recounts their family’s struggles and sacrifices to protect their trans child against the barrage of state-sanctioned intolerance in the legal, educational, and health arenas.

Around the time she turned twelve, his daughter’s personal struggles became political fodder. Along with other trans kids, she was outlawed from playing sports and forbidden to use the girls’ bathroom. Another law made Butler and his wife felons for seeking trans-affirming health care for her. When her charter school was featured in several gubernatorial campaign ads, local community members began driving through the parking lot to yell at the trans kids.

Serving both as a compassionate story of one family’s struggle for acceptance and as a window onto a fraught issue that parents, grandparents, other family members, and friends are confronting across the nation, And the Dragons Do Come provides a firsthand perspective on the human cost of anti-trans sentiment.

By: Neema Avashia, 2022, Paperback

When Neema Avashia tells people where she’s from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving “There are Indian people in West Virginia?” A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves through the world today: how she loves, how she teaches, how she advocates, how she struggles.

Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia’s identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, gun culture, and more, Another Appalachia mixes nostalgia and humor, sadness and sweetness, personal reflection and universal questions.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • “A rich, penetrating, and moving portrayal of Arab-Jewish hostility, told in human terms.”—Newsday

Now expanded and updated • “The best and most comprehensive work there is in the English language on this subject.”—The New York Times

In this monumental work, extensively researched and more relevant than ever, David Shipler delves into the origins of the prejudices that exist between Jews and Arabs that have been intensified by war, terrorism, and nationalism.

Focusing on the diverse cultures that exist side by side in Israel and Palestine, Shipler examines the process of indoctrination that begins in schools; he discusses the effects of socioeconomic differences, the clashes of Israeli and Palestinian historical narratives, religious conflicts between Islam and Judaism, views of the Holocaust, and much more. And he writes of the people: the Arab woman in love with a Jew, the retired Israeli military officer now disillusioned, the Palestinian militant devoted to violent means, the Israeli and Palestinian schoolchildren who reach across the divides in search of reconciliation. 
 
Their stories, and the hundreds of others, reflect not only the reality of “wounded spirits” but also the healing inside minds necessary for eventual coexistence in the promised land.

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.
In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

By: Lindsay King-Miller, 2016, Paperback

This book gives actually useful advice instead of the bizarre conditioning and often useless tips that come from parents, romcoms, and magazines. Queer readers will find seasoned advice and important discussions to help learn how to live authentic, happy, safe, and sexy lives. Includes advice on everything a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer woman needs, from dealing with workplace discrimination to going to your first pride.

These “very funny-deep dives into the lives of the most dastardly queer people in history” offer a passionate argument for rethinking gay politics beyond identity (Vogue).

What can we learn from the homosexual villains, failures, and baddies of our past?

We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those ‘bad gays’ whose unexemplary lives reveal more than we might expect? Many popular histories seek to establish homosexual heroes, pioneers, and martyrs but, as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been overlooked despite their being informative and instructive.

Based on the hugely popular podcast series of the same name, Bad Gays asks what we can learn about LGBTQ+ history, sexuality and identity through its villains, failures, and baddies. With characters such as the Emperor Hadrian, anthropologist Margaret Mead and notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors tell the story of how the figure of the white gay man was born, and how he failed. They examine a cast of kings, fascist thugs, artists and debauched bon viveurs. Imperial-era figures Lawrence of Arabia and Roger Casement get a look-in, as do FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, lawyer Roy Cohn, and architect Philip Johnson.

Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge mainstream assumptions about sexual identity: showing that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the 19th century, one central to major historical events.

Bad Gays is a passionate argument for rethinking gay politics beyond questions of identity, compelling readers to search for solidarity across boundaries.

By: Vic Liu (Editor), Adrienne Maree Brown (Foreword), 2023, Paperback

A global survey of banned books and the censorship controversies surrounding them. Books are powerful things—they have frequently altered the course of history and found themselves under fire in the court of public opinion. Banned Books profiles some of the most controversial and influential books ever published, examining the surrounding social, political, and religious climate of each.