Adult Nonfiction

By Davis Buckley, 2019 Paperback

This updated and fully revised biography of Elton John pays tribute to the not only his music, but his influence on the world as a whole. With his groundbreaking music he broke through the music business, but he also fought in the struggle for LGBTQ rights during the AIDS crisis. In a combination of meticulous research and new interviews from close friends and associates, this biography is not afraid to be both serious and entertaining as it details the rich and influential life of the Queen Mum of Pop.(This book may contain a sharpie mark on the top or bottom edge and may show mild signs of shelfwear.)

By: Alex Alberto (Author), 2024, Paperback

In a series of genre-blending essays, Entwined tells the story of Alex Alberto’s decade-long polyamorous journey towards a new kind of family.

In these essays, Alex attempts to build two committed relationships at once when no one involved has done it before; develops a powerful bond with the woman their partner loves; sits through a tense Thanksgiving Dinner with religious in-laws; questions the need for rules and hierarchy in their relationships; experiences the intensity of a triad; wrestles with the fragility baked into the nuclear family after their father’s stroke; and explores their queerness and gender identity in English, in New York, while struggling to reconcile their newfound self in their native French-Canadian language and culture.

For too long, Christianity has been distorted by an overapplied purity-disgust metaphor: fueling exclusion, reinforcing fear, and enabling Christian Nationalism. Eucontamination challenges this toxic framework, arguing that Jesus did not retreat from impurity but transformed it.
This interdisciplinary work weaves together psychology, psychoanalysis, theology, and sociology to expose how disgust has shaped Christian witness—from theological education to church exclusion and social scapegoating. But there is a better way.
The authors propose that Christ is not fragile in the face of sin but a “good infection,” a force that spreads healing and redemption. Instead of protecting a brittle purity, true faith embraces eucontamination—a sanctifying engagement with the world, not a retreat from it.
For Christians seeking a faith that resists exclusion and embraces radical love, Eucontamination offers a vision of transformation—one where Truth, Life, and the Way are not delicate things to be defended but powerful forces moving through and within us all.

Over twenty-two months in 1979 and 1981 nearly two dozen children were unspeakably murdered in Atlanta despite national attention and outcry; they were all Black. James Baldwin investigated these murders, the Black administration in Atlanta, and Wayne Williams, the Black man tried for the crimes. Because there was only evidence to convict Williams for the murders of two men, the children's cases were closed, offering no justice to the families or the country. Baldwin's incisive analysis implicates the failures of integration as the guilt party, arguing, "There could be no more devastating proof of this assault than the slaughter of the children."

As Stacey Abrams writes in her foreword, "The humanity of black children, of black men and women, of black lives, has ever been a conundrum for America. Forty years on, Baldwin's writing reminds us that we have never resolved the core query: Do black lives matter? Unequivocally, the moral answer is yes, but James Baldwin refuses such rhetorical comfort." In this, his last book, by excavating American race relations Baldwin exposes the hard-to-face ingrained issues and demands that we all reckon with them.

When Garrett Glaser came out as gay to his mother at age fourteen, she said, “You are going to a psychiatrist right now, young man! We are going to nip this in the bud.” Fortunately, she came around to accept her son’s orientation, and Garrett used his psychiatric sessions to address the challenges of finding a boyfriend.

It was 1967, and Garrett was a tenth grader at the prestigious Dalton School in New York City. When he graduated, the headmaster was heard to say of Garrett and his friend, “We just graduated our first fags.” Such was the world before the Stonewall rebellion. It was a time before rainbow flags, when very few gay people were able to live honestly and openly.

Garrett was an unusually adventurous and self-assured teenager. In FAIRYBOY, readers will follow as he explores the hidden world of gay New York, from the infamous “trucks” along the West Side Highway to the Continental Baths in its opening weeks.

Garrett grew up to become an Emmy Award-winning TV news correspondent, with stints at CNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS and Entertainment Tonight. During his thirty-year career, he interviewed the biggest stars and notables of the era, from Elizabeth Taylor and President George H.W. Bush to Oprah Winfrey and even Charles Manson.

In FAIRYBOY, Garrett muses on changes in gay politics over the decades and weaves stories demonstrating the importance of mentors—and of remaining true to oneself.

In this one of a kind memoir, author Monique Jenkinson tells the story of her time as a drag queen, and what it meant for her to win a major drag queen pageant as a cis woman. Naming her drag persona Fauxnique, Jenkinson consciously pays tribute to the queer men and trans woman for whom drag has held so much meaning even as she recognizes how unusual it is for a cis woman to dress in drag. A Valentine to a queer culture that Jenkinson nonetheless finds herself on the outside of, Faux Queen is a fascinating glimpse into the politics of gender and sex that permeate the world of drag and inflect the ways that people of various identities and orientations can participate in it. 

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MEMOIR
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOKS CRITICS CIRCLE JOHN LEONARD PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2025 ANISFIELD WOLF PRIZE
WINNER OF THE LIBBY AWARD FOR BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL

KIRKUS NONFICTION PRIZE FINALIST, LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL, SHORTLISTED FOR THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST BOOK AWARD

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY Time, Forbes, NPR, Minnesota Star Tribune, LitHub, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Chicago Public Library

"Feeding Ghosts reminds us how much the personal is political . . . an audacious, awe-inspiring feat. For me, it was an essential read." ―Ling Ma, author of Bliss Montage

An astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity.

In her acclaimed graphic memoir debut, Tessa Hulls traces the reverberations of Chinese history across three generations of women in her family. Tessa’s grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist swept up by the turmoil of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong, she wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival―then promptly had a mental breakdown from which she never recovered.

Growing up with Sun Yi, Tessa watches both her mother and grandmother struggle beneath the weight of unexamined trauma and mental illness, and bolts to the most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away. Feeding Ghosts is Tessa’s homecoming, a vivid, heartbreaking journey into history that exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, andthe love that holds them together.

By: Casey Tanner LCPC, CST (Author), 2024, Hardcover

A groundbreaking guide to sexuality that dispels the stale cultural attitudes about sex that leave too many feeling inadequate, and offers an expansive, attachment-based framework to free us and develop bolder, more satisfying relationships with our sexual selves.

When it comes to sex, most people feel insecure. But it’s not because we’re deficient; it’s because we’ve been under-resourced and miseducated.      

Certified sex therapist Casey Tanner argues that our sex lives are a microcosm of every untruth we’ve internalized about gender, sex, relationships, our bodies, and ourselves. Most of us were taught that healthy sexuality is only for a certain kind of person, in a certain kind of relationship, with a certain kind of body. As a result, the way we’ve learned how to define “good sex” is reflective of how good, worthy, and loveable we see ourselves.

Feel It All is a comprehensive guide to help everyone uncover their personal misconceptions about sexuality and relationships. Tanner helps you recognize and assess your core beliefs surrounding relationships, sexuality, gender, and more; identify past trauma; find pathways to healing that work for you; and redefine sex based on knowledge and possibilities, rather than potential consequences.

Comprehensive yet accessible, informative, warm, and nonjudgmental, Feel It All provides a pathway for personal healing, creating stronger relationships, and achieving deeper intimacy.

By: Renee Lane (Author), 0formant0 (Illustrator), 2022, Paperback

Dominatrix Renee Lane and her submissive husband live in Memphis, Tennessee, disguised as an average married couple. In private life, they are mistress and slave. For the last ten years, Ms. Renee has employed erotic S&M, mind control, and brainwashing techniques to forge an intimate and loving bond with her submissive partner. They consider themselves explorers of the boundaries of consensual female domination. Ms. Renee's intense and radical approach to their relationship will challenge the reader who merely dabbles in BDSM.

The book is a collection of e-mails between Renee and a close friend, as well as Butler's journal detailing his ever deepening submission to his true love. We follow the story as Renee continually challenges him to give up control and abandon his own agency. All the while she urged on by her lover and confidant, Heather, who acts as both observer and accomplice to his total enslavement.

Make no mistake, this is a love story. A story of unrelenting faith, trust, and devotion, and a couple's willingness to cross boundaries and take things to the limit together in their own special world. Mind-bendingly erotic, and heart-wrenchingly romantic. An answer to the misconceptions of BDSM and Total Power Exchange portrayed in popular media.

By: Rhea Ewing, 2022, Paperback

By: Jack Parlett (Author), 2023, Paperback

"[A] concise, meticulously researched, century-spanning chronicle of queer life on Fire Island captures, with a plain-spoken yet lyric touch, the locale’s power to stun and shame, to give pleasure and symbolize evanescence." —Wayne Koestenbaum, New York Times Book Review

Fire Island, a thin strip of beach off the Long Island coast, has long been a vital space in the queer history of America. Both utopian and exclusionary, healing and destructive, the island is a locus of contradictions, all of which coalesce against a stunning ocean backdrop.

Now poet and scholar Jack Parlett tells the story of this iconic destination—its history, its meaning and its cultural significance—through the lens of the artists and creators who sought refuge on its shores. Together, figures as divergent as Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, Frank O'Hara, Patricia Highsmith and Jeremy O. Harris tell the story of a queer space in constant evolution. Transporting, impeccably researched and gorgeously written, Fire Island is a fond and fierce portrait of an iconic American destination and an essential contribution to queer history.

"Supremely engaging and highly informative." —BuzzFeed

"A fascinating, throbbing history." —Olivia Laing

“A highly informative, detailed, even thrilling account of how the Supreme Court arguments reshaped American law.”―Michael Bronkski, San Francisco Chronicle

No one could have predicted that the night of September 17, 1998, would be anything but routine in Houston, Texas. Even the call to police that a black man was "going crazy with a gun" was hardly unusual in this urban setting. Nobody could have imagined that the arrest of two men for a minor criminal offense would reverberate in American constitutional law, exposing a deep malignity in our judicial system and challenging the traditional conception of what makes a family. Indeed, when Harris County sheriff’s deputies entered the second-floor apartment, there was no gun. Instead, they reported that they had walked in on John Lawrence and Tyron Garner having sex in Lawrence’s bedroom.

So begins Dale Carpenter’s "gripping and brilliantly researched" Flagrant Conduct, a work nine years in the making that transforms our understanding of what we thought we knew about Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark Supreme Court decision of 2003 that invalidated America’s sodomy laws. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Carpenter has taken on the "gargantuan" task of extracting the truth about the case, analyzing the claims of virtually every person involved.

Carpenter first introduces us to the interracial defendants themselves, who were hardly prepared "for the strike of lightning" that would upend their lives, and then to the Harris County arresting officers, including a sheriff’s deputy who claimed he had "looked eye to eye" in the faces of the men as they allegedly fornicated. Carpenter skillfully navigates Houston’s complex gay world of the late 1990s, where a group of activists and court officers, some of them closeted themselves, refused to bury what initially seemed to be a minor arrest.

The author charts not only the careful legal strategy that Lambda Legal attorneys adopted to make the case compatible to a conservative Supreme Court but also the miscalculations of the Houston prosecutors who assumed that the nation’s extant sodomy laws would be upheld. Masterfully reenacting the arguments that riveted spectators and Justices alike in 2003, Flagrant Conduct then reaches a point where legal history becomes literature, animating a Supreme Court decision as few writers have done.

In situating Lawrence v. Texas within the larger framework of America’s four-century persecution of gay men and lesbians, Flagrant Conduct compellingly demonstrates that gay history is an integral part of our national civil rights story. 8 pages of illustrations

In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.

Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine.

Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle."

Angela Y. Davis is a political activist, scholar, author, and speaker. She is an outspoken advocate for the oppressed and exploited, writing on Black liberation, prison abolition, the intersections of race, gender, and class, and international solidarity with Palestine. She is the author of several books, including Women, Race, and Class and Are Prisons Obsolete? She is the subject of the acclaimed documentary Free Angela and All Political Prisoners and is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

One of America's most provocative public intellectuals, Dr. Cornel West has been a champion for racial justice since childhood. His writing, speaking, and teaching weave together the traditions of the black Baptist Church, progressive politics, and jazz. The New York Times has praised his "ferocious moral vision." His many books include Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and his autobiography, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud.

Frank Barat is a human rights activist and author. He was the coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine and is now the president of the Palestine Legal Action Network. His books include Gaza in Crisis and Corporate Complicity in Israel's Occupation.