Adult Nonfiction

By: Laurie Greene (Author), 2020, Paperback

The Miss America pageant has been held in Atlantic City for the past hundred years, helping to promote the city as a tourist destination. But just a few streets away, the city hosts a smaller event that, in its own way, is equally vital to the local community: the Miss’d America drag pageant.
 
Drag Queens and Beauty Queens presents a vivid ethnography of the Miss’d America pageant and the gay neighborhood from which it emerged in the early 1990s as a moment of campy celebration in the midst of the AIDS crisis. It examines how the pageant strengthened community bonds and activism, as well as how it has changed now that Rupaul’s Drag Race has brought many of its practices into the cultural mainstream. Comparing the Miss’d America pageant with its glitzy cisgender big sister, anthropologist Laurie Greene discovers how the two pageants have influenced each other in unexpected ways. 
 
Drag Queens and Beauty Queens deepens our understanding of how femininity is performed at pageants, exploring the various ways that both the Miss’d America and Miss America pageants have negotiated between embracing and critiquing traditional gender roles. Ultimately, it celebrates the rich tradition of drag performance and the community it engenders.

By:  Frank Decaro (Author) & Bruce Vilanch (Foreword), 2022, Hardcover

Drag celebrates the fabulous current and historical influence of drag, and its talented and inspiring performers.

Since man first walked the Earth...in heels, no other art form has wielded as unique an influence on pop culture as Drag. Drag artists have now sashayed their way to snatch the crowns as the Queens of mainstream entertainment.
Through informative and witty essays chronicling over 100 years of drag, readers will embark on a Priscilla-like journey through pop culture, from television shows like The Milton Berle Show, Bosom Buddies, and RuPaul's Drag Race, films like Some Like It Hot, To Wong Foo..., and Tootsie, and Broadway shows like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, La Cage aux Folles, and Kinky Boots.
With stops in cities around the globe, and packed with interviews and commentaries on the dramas, joys, and love that "make-up" a life in wigs and heels, Drag features contributions from today's most groundbreaking and popular artists, including Bianca del Rio, Miss Coco Peru, Hedda Lettuce, Lypsinka, and Varla Jean Merman, as well as notable performers as Harvey Fierstein and Charles Busch. It includes more than 100 photos--many from performers' personal collections, and a comprehensive timeline of drag "herstory."

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.

A beautifully illustrated, irreverent guide to breaking out of the anxious thought patterns that hold us back. This little self-help book contains 101 anxiety spiral-stopping exercises, inspiring pep talks, and calm-the-F-down activities. With a no f*cks given tone, research-backed therapeutic techniques, and fun, fresh illustration, F*ck Anxiety will help you take control over your anxious thought patterns and make you laugh at the same time. Divided into six chapters—the first two will help kick that anxiety spiral in it's scrawny ass, and the next four help build and flex anti-anxiety powers on the daily—F*ck Anxiety covers the following:- Get Out of Your Head in Ten Minutes or Less - Get Stubborn Against a Longer Spiral - Do These Eight Things Every Day—You Deserve It! - A Grab Bag of Ways to Be Amazing to You - Truths + Tending for Shitty Situations - Hush Up, It's Time for Your Daily Moment of Zen In addition, the book also includes an explanation of how anxi

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. 

By: Sabrina Strings (Author), 2019, Paperback

Winner, 2020 Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award, given by the American Sociological Association

Honorable Mention, 2020 Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association

How the female body has been racialized for over two hundred years

There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor Black women are particularly stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat Black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago.

Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals―where fat bodies were once praised―showing that fat phobia, as it relates to Black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority.

The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

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