Inspiring LGBTQ Memoirs

Memoirs To Touch Your Heart and Expand Your Mind

Let's share the love with these best LGBTQ memoirs for Pride Month celebrations! Personal hardships and first person coming of age diverse stories show love, identity, and acceptance. These powerful memoirs celebrate the LGBTQIA community's rich experiences and struggles. The rich narratives honor diversity, inclusion, and the beauty of being true to oneself. Celebrate Pride Month with these must-read LGBTQ memoirs that inspire, educate, and empower.

Recommended LGBTQ MEMOIRS:

Cells: Memories for My Mother

by Gavin McCrea

Gavin is spending the quarantine in a small flat in south Dublin with his eighty-year-old mother, whose mind is slowly slipping away. He has lived most of his adult life abroad and has returned home to care for her and to write a novel. But he finds that all he can write about is her.

Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant: A Memoir

by Curtis Chin

Best Nonfiction Books of the Year--Kirkus Reviews
Best Books of the Year--Apple Books

TIME's Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2023 - San Francisco Eater's Best Food Books to Read 2023 - Lambda Literary Review's Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Literature

Nineteen eighties Detroit was a volatile place to live, but above the fray stood a safe haven: Chung's Cantonese Cuisine, where anyone--from the city's first Black mayor to the local drag queens, from a big-time Hollywood star to elderly Jewish couples--could sit down for a warm, home-cooked meal. Here was where, beneath a bright-red awning and surrounded by his multigenerational family, filmmaker and activist Curtis Chin came of age; where he learned to embrace his identity as a gay ABC, or American-born Chinese.

Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir

by Lamya H

AN AUDACIOUS BOOK CLUB PICK - WINNER: The Brooklyn Public
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher--her female teacher--she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can't yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown. Born in South Asia, she moved to the Middle East at a young age and has spent years feeling out of place, like her own desires and dreams don't matter, and it's easier to hide in plain sight. To disappear. But one day in Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam that changes everything: When Maryam learned that she was pregnant, she insisted no man had touched her. Could Maryam, uninterested in men, be . . . like Lamya?

The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir

by Rupaul Rupaul

***An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller!***

Central to RuPaul's success has been his chameleonic adaptability. From drag icon to powerhouse producer of one of the world's largest television franchises, RuPaul's ever-shifting nature has always been part of his brand as both supermodel and supermogul. Yet that adaptability has made him enigmatic to the public. In this memoir, his most intimate and detailed book yet, RuPaul makes himself truly known.

Late Bloomer: Finding My Authentic Self at Midlife

by Melissa Giberson

Facing an existential crisis, Melissa Giberson-a suburban woman in midlife--searches for her authentic self even as she desperately clings to the stable life she's created for her children. Can she be true to herself and be a good mother? Or will her children hate her for changing their story?

Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives

by Amelia Possanza

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards

When Amelia Possanza moved to Brooklyn to build a life of her own, she found herself surrounded by queer stories: she read them on landmark placards, overheard them on the pool deck when she joined the world's largest LGBTQ swim team, and even watched them on TV in her cockroach-infested apartment. These stories inspired her to seek out lesbians throughout history who could become her role models, in romance and in life.

Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover If a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

by Jedidiah Jenkins

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the author of To Shake the Sleeping Self . . .

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST

When his mother, Barbara, turns seventy, Jedidiah Jenkins is reminded of a sobering truth: Our parents won't live forever. For years, he and Barbara have talked about taking a trip together, just the two of them. They disagree about politics, about God, about the project of society--disagreements that hurt. But they love thrift stores, they love eating at diners, they love true crime, and they love each other. Jedidiah wants to step into Barbara's world and get to know her in a way that occasional visits haven't allowed.

Old Gays Guide to the Good Life: Lessons Learned about Love and Death, Sex and Sin, and Saving the Best for Last

by Mick Peterson - Bill Lyons - Robert Reeves - Jessay Martin

From America's most beloved foursome--the TikTok sensation @oldgays--a book of unexpected aspirational advice and inspirational stories drawn from their decades of living, from pre-Stonewall to the rise of the LGBTQ+ movement to gay marriage and beyond.

Ranging in age from sixty-seven to eighty, Mick, Jessay, Robert, and Bill are the real-life Golden Girls of the social media era, a quartet of old gays whose hard-won confidence and awesome authenticity have taken the culture by storm. They are America's queens--and, more important, they are survivors whose lives have been transformed by sweeping cultural change. In this fabulously fun and entertaining book, they share their stories--humorous, heartbreaking, shocking, and profound tales that only older gay men can tell.

Pageboy: A Memoir

by Elliot Page

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A Washington Post "50 Notable Works of Nonfiction"
An Autostraddle “Best Queer Books of 2023”

"Can I kiss you?" It was two months before the world premiere of Juno, and Elliot Page was in his first ever queer bar. The hot summer air hung heavy around him as he looked at her. And then it happened. In front of everyone. A previously unfathomable experience. Here he was on the precipice of discovering himself as a queer person, as a trans person. Getting closer to his desires, his dreams, himself, without the repression he'd carried for so long. But for Elliot, two steps forward had always come with one step back.

Race to Be Myself: A Memoir

by Caster Semenya

Olympian and World Champion Caster Semenya is finally ready to share the vivid and heartbreaking story of how the world came to know her name. Thrust into the spotlight at just eighteen years old after winning the Berlin World Championships in 2009, Semenya's win was quickly overshadowed by criticism and speculation about her body, and she became the center of a still-raging firestorm about how gender plays out in sports, our expectations of female athletes, and the right to compete as you are.

Talking to My Angels

by Melissa Etheridge

Twenty years after the success of her first memoir, the New York Times bestseller The Truth Is . . ., the Grammy and Oscar award-winning rocker and trailblazing LGBTQAI icon takes stock of the intervening years, recounting the euphoric triumphs and the life-altering tragedies of her life.

The audiobook is an exclusive musical experience, read and performed by Melissa. It features live, stripped-down performances of many of Melissa's songs, including the one that inspired the book title, Talking to My Angel; never-before performed songs including Here Comes the Pain; and original interstitial and credit music.

Ten Bridges I've Burnt: A Memoir in Verse

by Brontez Purnell

From the beloved author of 100 Boyfriends, a wrenching, sexy, and exhilaratingly energetic memoir in verse.

In Ten Bridges I've Burnt, Brontez Purnell--the bard of the underloved and overlooked--turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. "The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in," Purnell writes, “is simply existing.”

Through the Groves: A Memoir

by Anne Hull

"Hypnotic and tender, this book reminds us that even if we leave our homes, our homes never leave us."
--Oprah Daily

A richly evocative coming-of-age memoir set in the Florida orange groves of the 1960s by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

Anne Hull grew up in rural Central Florida, barefoot half the time and running through the orange groves her father's family had worked for generations. The ground trembled from the vibrations of bulldozers and jackhammers clearing land for Walt Disney World. "Look now," her father told her as they rode through the mossy landscape together. "It will all be gone." But the real threat was at home, where Hull was pulled between her idealistic but self-destructive father and her mother, a glamorous outsider from Brooklyn struggling with her own aspirations. All the while, Hull felt the pressures of girlhood closing in. She dreamed of becoming a traveling salesman who ate in motel coffee shops, accompanied by her baton-twirling babysitter. As her sexual identity took shape, Hull knew the place she loved would never love her back and began plotting her escape.

To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories

by Sarah Viren

This unforgettable memoir traces the ramifications of a series of lies that threaten to derail the author's life--exploring the line between fact and fiction, reality and conspiracy.

In To Name the Bigger Lie, Sarah Viren "has pulled off a magic trick of fantastic proportion" (The Washington Post), telling the story of an all-too-real investigation into her personal and professional life that she expands into a profound exploration of the nature of truth. The memoir begins as Viren is researching what she believes will be a book about her high school philosophy teacher, a charismatic instructor who taught her and her classmates to question everything--eventually, even the reality of historical atrocities. As she digs into the effects of his teachings, her life takes a turn into the fantastical when her wife, Marta, is notified that she's being investigated for sexual misconduct at the university where they both teach.

We Set the Night on Fire: Igniting the Gay Revolution

by Martha Shelley

Martha Shelley didn't start out in life wanting to become a gay activist, or an activist of any kind. Her story is a feminist and lesbian document that gives context and adds necessary humanity to the historical record.
The daughter of Jewish refugees and undocumented immigrants in New York City, she grew up during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s, was inspired by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements that followed, and struggled with coming out as a lesbian at a time when being gay made her a criminal.

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