Books

A quick, easy, and educational comic book guide that will help change the way we talk about sex and sexuality for all bodies.

"This guide can help disabled people (and their partners) on their journey toward self-love, better communication, and confidence." –– Alice Wong, Founder and Director, Disability Visibility Project

All different kinds of bods want to connect with other bods, but lots of them get left out of the conversation when it comes to S-E-X. As explained by disabled cartoonist A. Andrews, this easy-to-read guide covers the basics of disability sexuality, common myths about disabled bodies, communication tips, and practical suggestions for having the best sexual experience possible. Whether you yourself are disabled, you love someone who is, or you just want to know more, consider this your handy starter kit to understanding disability sexuality, and your path to achieving accessible (and fulfilling) sex.

Part of the bestselling and critically acclaimed A Quick & Easy Guide series from Oni Press.

Starred Review from Booklist, “this powerful account will comfort those who grew up feeling broken.”

What does love look like when you are not interested in sex?

Growing up, Caitlin Cook knew the recipe for social success from watching television and reading books: two best friends, two enemies, and a boyfriend. So she arranged her life accordingly: making friends and dreaming of the boys she met in school.

But she felt that inside, something was wrong with her. Because though she wanted to get close to people, every time she experimented with sex, she just felt bored.

This graphic novel follows Caitlin Cook, who is asexual but does not yet fully realize it. From evangelical purity politics to the footloose college campus, Caitlin navigates different worlds each with their own sexual orthodoxies, and clumsily attempts to fit into each of them. A thoughtful and immersive coming-of-age memoir about one girl's struggle to figure out and then claim her asexual identity.

An engaging exploration of what it means to be asexual in a world that’s obsessed with sexual attraction, and what the ace perspective can teach all of us about desire and identity.

What exactly is sexual attraction and what is it like to go through life not experiencing it? What does asexuality reveal about gender roles, about romance and consent, and the pressures of society? This accessible examination of asexuality shows that the issues that aces face—confusion around sexual activity, the intersection of sexuality and identity, navigating different needs in relationships—are the same conflicts that nearly all of us will experience. Through a blend of reporting, cultural criticism, and memoir, Ace addresses the misconceptions around the “A” of LGBTQIA and invites everyone to rethink pleasure and intimacy.

Journalist Angela Chen creates her path to understanding her own asexuality with the perspectives of a diverse group of asexual people. Vulnerable and honest, these stories include a woman who had blood tests done because she was convinced that “not wanting sex” was a sign of serious illness, and a man who grew up in a religious household and did everything “right,” only to realize after marriage that his experience of sexuality had never been the same as that of others. Disabled aces, aces of color, gender-nonconforming aces, and aces who both do and don’t want romantic relationships all share their experiences navigating a society in which a lack of sexual attraction is considered abnormal. Chen’s careful cultural analysis explores how societal norms limit understanding of sex and relationships and celebrates the breadth of sexuality and queerness.

A New York Times bestseller and enduring classic, All About Love is the acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' "Love Song to the Nation" trilogy.  All About Love reveals what causes a polarized society, and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces.

“The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness--not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love. 

As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the “100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life.” All About Love is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better.

Essential Reading for Pride: Selected as a Favorite LGBTQ+ Book for Adults by People Magazine

A provocative, eye-opening, and original book on the science of sexuality beyond gender from an internationally bestselling psychologist.

For psychological scientist and bestselling author Dr. Julia Shaw, the dearth of information on bisexuality was crushing, so she dug deep and found a colorful and fascinating world that she could help bring out of the shadows.

In Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality, Shaw explores all that we know about the world’s largest sexual minority through a personal journey that starts with her own openly bisexual identity and celebrates the resilience and beautiful diversity of the bi community. This rigorous and entertaining book will challenge us to think deeper about who we are and how we love.

Significant strides have been made in the movement for LGBTQ+ rights, visibility, and empowerment, but the conversation is far from over.

My partner doesn't believe I'm bisexual, what should I do?
How should I approach sex with someone of a different gender for the first time?
Can I reconcile being bisexual with wanting a biological child?
Identifying as bisexual can be a pretty confusing experience - navigating experimentation versus orientation, at times presenting as a straight-passing member of a queer community, at other times having people discredit your attraction to multiple genders. Lewis Oakley, creator of the Ask A Bi Dad column, knows every trick in the book - and he's here to answer your most burning questions...
Warm, chatty, wise and startlingly honest - this is your new bi bible.

From erotic labor, to the rights of people who use psychoactive substances, to reproductive health and carcerality—we are living through a political moment when debates about bodily autonomy are at a fever pitch.

Body Autonomy: Decolonizing Sex Work and Drug Use is a bold and timely collection that confronts these charged issues at the intersection of social justice and public health. It reveals the histories behind the United State's ideological wars and illustrates their costs to all of us. It is a primer on healing-centered harm reduction, which presents a visionary framework and set of practical strategies to advance unity and care while working to transform conditions for communities that bear the brunt of interpersonal and systemic violence, overdose deaths, and health inequities. In the words of leading advocates, service providers, and the scholars whose lives and communities have been harmed by American neo-colonial policies, Body Autonomy offers promising, healing-centered interventions that represent a critical culture shift. 

This collection features trusted voices on health and social policy reform, including Kate D'Adamo, Justice Rivera, Ismail Ali, Paula Kahn, and Sasanka Jinadasa, as well as respected healers like Richael Faithful, Amira Barakat Al-Baladi, and Mona Knotte. The articles, interviews, worksheets, and poems within are an offering to expand our collective understanding of survival, healing, and embodied freedom. Body Autonomy is a must read for anyone with a compassionate worldview, people seeking to know more about underground economies, and those who know that punishment doesn't lead to security. It is a liberatory design and a prayer for what's possible.

A revised and updated edition of Emily Nagoski’s game-changing New York Times bestseller Come As You Are, featuring new information and research on mindfulness, desire, and pleasure that will radically transform your sex life.

For much of the 20th and 21st centuries, women’s sexuality was an uncharted territory in science, studied far less frequently—and far less seriously—than its male counterpart.

That is, until Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which used groundbreaking science and research to prove that the most important factor in creating and sustaining a sex life filled with confidence and joy is not what the parts are or how they’re organized but how you feel about them. In the years since the book’s initial publication, countless women have learned through Nagoski’s accessible and informative guide that things like stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it—and that even if you don’t always feel like it, you are already sexually whole by just being yourself. This revised and updated edition continues that mission with new information and advanced research, demystifying and decoding the science of sex so that everyone can create a better sex life and discover more pleasure than you ever thought possible.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Come as You Are and co-author of Burnout comes an illuminating exploration of how to maintain a happy sex life in a long-term relationship.

“Emily Nagoski is a national treasure—helping us all understand how to finally build true, joyful, confident sex lives.”—Glennon Doyle, author of Untamed

In Come as You Are, Emily Nagoski, PhD, revolutionized the way we think about women’s sexuality. Now, in Come Together, Nagoski takes on a fundamentally misunderstood subject: sex in long-term relationships. 

Most of us struggle at some point to maintain a sexual connection with our partner/s or spouse. And many of us are given not-very-good advice on what to do about it. In this book, Nagoski dispels the myths we’ve been taught about sex—for instance, the belief that sexual satisfaction and desire are highest at the beginning of a relationship and that they inevitably decline the longer that relationship lasts. Nagoski assures us that’s not true.

So, what is true? Come Together isn’t about how much we want sex, or how often we’re having it; it’s about whether we like the sex we’re having. Nagoski breaks down the obstacles that impede us from enjoying sex—from stress and body image to relationship difficulties and gendered beliefs about how sex “should” be—and presents the best ways to overcome them. You’ll learn:

• that “spontaneous desire” is not the kind of desire to strive for if you want to have great sex for decades
• vocabulary for talking with partners about ways to get in “the mood” and how to not take it personally when “the mood” is nowhere to be found
• how to understand your own and your partner’s “emotional floorplan,” so that you have a blueprint for how to get to a sexy state of mind

Written with scientific rigor, humor, and compassion, Nagoski shows us what great sex can look like, how to create it in our own lives, and what to do when struggles arise.

Does communicating about needs and boundaries with multiple partners seem like a labyrinth of emotional landmines?

Discover a comprehensive yet easy to understand method for communicating that will have partners compassionately making room for the needs of multiple relationships, and ethically defining and respecting each person's boundaries.

Are you tired of feeling like metas are competing for scarce resources, or that your needs come last? How can you meet the needs of all partners when some of their needs seem to conflict?

Sander T. Jones is a licensed psychotherapist with well over a decade of experience living polyamory and helping clients in non-monogamous relationships.

And now Sander is sharing this unique system for repairing relationships and nurturing harmony.

Drawing from polyvagal and attachment theories, Cultivating Connection is written with practical application in mind and exercises to help you and your partners practice new skills together.

Within Cultivating Connection, you'll discover:

* How to communicate compassionately with partners, and come together as a team to solve problems in a way that meets each person's needs.
* How personal boundaries need to adhere to specific principles to be ethical rather than coercive.
* How to overcome our individual obstacles to creating and enforcing the boundaries we need to live authentically within our relationships.
* Four simple questions to tell when we are overstepping a partner's rights and need to focus on our own growth and change.
* How to know when relationship agreements are healthy and support the needs of all the people impacted in our multiple relationships.

Cultivating Connection is your comprehensive guide for bringing harmony and joy to your multiple relationships while taking responsibility for the impact we have on others, living authentically, and continuing to grow as individuals. It's also solidly affirming of LGBTQ+, BIPOC readers, and readers engaged in relationships that are unequal by design.

If you liked Polysecure, Power Circuits, and Unf*ck Your Boundaries, you'll love Sander T. Jones' invaluable roadmap to collaborative, clear, loving communication. Buy Cultivating Connection, today!

A much-needed guide for disabled and chronically ill people to dating - from apps to hooking up, sex, and more - from disabled essayist and author Jessica Slice and bioethicist Caroline Cupp.

Disabled people date, have casual sex, marry, and parent. Yet our romantic lives are conspicuously absent from the media and cultural conversation. Sexual education does not typically address the specific information needed by disabled students. Mainstream dating apps fail to include disability as an aspect of one’s identity alongside race, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation. The few underutilized disability-focused apps are paternalistic and unappealing. Bestselling dating books do not address disability, and the few relationship books marketed to disabled people focus on the mechanics of sex rather than the complex interactions that create the conditions for it.

In Dateable, disabled authors Jessica Slice Caroline Cupp team up to address the serious gap in the dating space. Dateable is the first book on disabled dating and relationships; it’s a dating guide made especially for disabled and chronically ill people, that also calls in nondisabled readers. Jessica and Caroline take on everything from rom-com representation and dating apps to sex and breakups with a strong narrative underpinning and down-to-earth advice. The book is as much a practical tool as it is an empowering guide.

An unapologetic guide for readers who are Black, masc, and bi—unlearning biphobia, coming out, combatting erasure, and embodying your whole self

Through cutting social analysis, personal stories, and need-to-know advice, Dear Bi Men reclaims bi+ visibility in a culture of erasure—and unapologetically centers Blackness in a practical and deeply researched guide to navigating life, work, and relationships as a Black bi+ man.

Popular representation of bi and pansexual men is growing, but we’re not there yet: It’s mostly white. It collapses bisexual identity into tired, hypersexualized tropes. And it fails to interrogate the deeply entrenched stereotypes that insist: You’re confused. You just don’t know you’re gay. You’re greedy. You must be great in bed.

Author, peer counselor, and creator of #bisexualmenspeak J.R. Yussuf pushes back against these stigmas and misconceptions, exploring how white supremacy reinforces biphobia and dictates what society thinks it means to “be a man.” He contextualizes discourse around queerness and bisexuality within a larger framework that honors readers’ intersecting identities. And he offers deeply practical advice, sharing how to:

* Unlearn internalized biphobia and homophobia
* Navigate an increasingly hostile digital landscape
* Think about coming out: who to tell, why to tell them, and how to do it
* Fight back against erasure and stigma
* Navigate sex, dating, partnerships, marriage, friendship, and work
* Understand your bi+ sexuality through a political lens
* Process Black bi+ representation

Rich with personal narratives, insightful analysis, and practical advice, this book is a powerful resource for Black bi+ men to reclaim their identity, counter biphobia, and get empowered—and an offering to all readers looking to fight back against the erasure and dehumanization wrought by patriarchy.

‘I’ve been waiting for this book for years – a beautifully written, compelling study of the significance of the dense bonds of friendship in fostering and preserving progressive politics. A joyful, empowering read’ Lynne Segal, author of Lean on Me

‘A moving exploration of the importance and the difficulty of forging intimate relationships within capitalism’ Hannah Proctor, author of Burnout

Friendship is full of revolutionary potential in the face of a profoundly anti-social capitalist system. Friends in Common explores friendship as a radical practice, capable of upending hierarchies and producing social change.

Friendship can transcend social boundaries and political borders. It is vital in building communities and underpinning solidarity. But its transformative potency ensures that it is heavily policed and restrained by the state. Understanding the radical possibilities of friendship can help us rethink our approach to family, work and politics, and show us new routes to resistance and ways to open up spaces of solidarity and escape.

Friends in Common shows that friendship as a political practice is foundational to strengthening revolutionary ideas and projects, and can be the antidote to capitalist despair.

Laura C. Forster is a historian and writer based in Newcastle. She is a lecturer in Modern History at the University of York, and has written for Tribune, ROAR and DOPE. Joel White is a writer and researcher based in Glasgow. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Wire and Tribune. He co-runs the record label GLARC.

An examination of hysterectomy and the struggle for bodily and reproductive autonomy

At least one hysterectomy is performed every minute of the year, making it the most common gynecological surgery worldwide. By the age of sixty-five, one out of five people born with a uterus will have it removed. So, why do we seldom talk about this surgery? Highly performed yet overlooked, examining the paradox of hysterectomy begins to unravel the various problems with how we medically treat uteruses and the people who have them.

Get It Out weaves centuries of medical history with rich qualitative data from 100 women, trans men, and nonbinary people who had, want, or are considering hysterectomy. In compelling detail, Andréa Becker reveals how America’s healthcare system routinely deprives people of the ability to control their own bodies along race and gender lines. When people ask for a hysterectomy, they are often met with pushback: Are you sick enough? Old enough? Have you had enough babies? Will you regret this? How will your future husband feel about this? Yet this pushback is not equally experienced. While some people are barred access, others are ushered toward a hysterectomy. These contradictory recommendations reveal the persistent biases entrenched within healthcare.

Get It Out interrogates how little choice people with uteruses ultimately have over their reproductive health, and explores what these “choices” signify amid interlocking systems of inequality.

An inclusive and essential new resource for reproductive health―including period problems, pelvic pain, menopause, fertility, sexual health, vaginal and urinary conditions, and overall wellbeing―from leading expert and fierce advocate Dr. Karen Tang

"Dr. Karen Tang is a literal godsend to women in a time still filled with great ignorance in medical research and financing of women's health initiatives. Please read her book, follow her on Instagram as I have, and feel blessed as I do to have an advocate for our body, our health, and our human rights." ―Sharon Stone

Did you know that up to 90% of women experience menstrual abnormalities or pelvic issues in their lifetime? Yet these conditions are overwhelmingly misunderstood, misdiagnosed, or dismissed. The root causes for these issues, such as PCOS, endometriosis, fibroids, ovarian cysts, PMDD, or pelvic floor dysfunction, don’t receive the stream of funding for research and new treatments that other conditions do, despite affecting up to half the population.

Dr. Karen Tang is on a mission to transform how we engage with our bodies and our healthcare. It’s Not Hysteria is a comprehensive guide to common conditions and potential treatment options, with practical tools such as symptom prompts and sample questions for your provider, to equip readers to take control of their gynecologic health.

Reproductive healthcare, from abortion to gender-affirming care, is under siege. The onus continues to fall on patients to find and advocate for the care they need. In the face of uncertainty and misinformation, It’s Not Hysteria is destined to become a new classic that educates and empowers women and those assigned female at birth.