After a rough tumble and maybe-serious head injury, a disillusioned trans poet falls for a charming corporate lawyer in a love story that grapples with the explosive ghosts of relationships past, romantic and familial, from the Lambda Award-nominated author of Bellies, Nicola Dinan “Fell down the stairs and woke up a trad wife.” Max is thirty, a published poet and grossly overpaid legal counsel for a tech company. With a lifetime of dysphoria and fuccbois rattling around in her head, Max is plagued with a deep dissatisfaction during what should be the best years of her life. After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First things first: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity. Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent, a corporate lawyer and hobby baker, whose trad friendship group may as well speak a foreign language, and whose Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman. This uncharted territory may have rough terrain, but Vincent cares for Max in a way she’d long given up on as a foolish fantasy. Yet Vincent is carrying his own baggage from his gap year in Thailand a decade prior: an explosive entanglement with a mysterious, gorgeous traveler. Voice-driven, warm, and poignant, Disappoint Me is an exploration of millennial angst, race, trans panic, and the allure of bourgeois domesticity that asks if we are defined by our worst mistakes.

After a rough tumble and maybe-serious head injury, a disillusioned trans poet falls for a charming corporate lawyer in a love story that grapples with the explosive ghosts of relationships past, romantic and familial, from the Lambda Award-nominated author of Bellies, Nicola Dinan “Fell down the stairs and woke up a trad wife.” Max is thirty, a published poet and grossly overpaid legal counsel for a tech company. With a lifetime of dysphoria and fuccbois rattling around in her head, Max is plagued with a deep dissatisfaction during what should be the best years of her life. After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First things first: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity. Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent, a corporate lawyer and hobby baker, whose trad friendship group may as well speak a foreign language, and whose Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman. This uncharted territory may have rough terrain, but Vincent cares for Max in a way she’d long given up on as a foolish fantasy. Yet Vincent is carrying his own baggage from his gap year in Thailand a decade prior: an explosive entanglement with a mysterious, gorgeous traveler. Voice-driven, warm, and poignant, Disappoint Me is an exploration of millennial angst, race, trans panic, and the allure of bourgeois domesticity that asks if we are defined by our worst mistakes.

‘When you are someone that falls outside of categories in so many ways, a lot of things are said to you. And I have had a lot of things said to me.’ In None of the Above, Travis Alabanza examines seven phrases people have directed at them about their gender identity. These phrases have stayed with them over the years. Some are deceptively innocuous, some deliberately loaded or offensive, some celebratory; sentences that have impacted them for better and for worse; sentences that speak to the broader issues raised by a world that insists that gender must be a binary. Through these seven phrases, which include some of their most transformative experiences as a Black, mixed race, non binary person, Travis Alabanza turns a mirror back on society, giving us reason to question the very framework in which we live and the ways we treat each other.

His own words and artwork follow the evolution of the late artist, from early chalk sketches to massive steel sculptures, in a volume illustrated with previously unpublished drawings from his notebooks

“An essential book for this moment.”—Rob Sheffield The definitive history of LGBTQ music, from Stonewall to RuPaul, and its impact on culture and American life From the underground dancefloors of the Seventies to the global charts of the Nineties, LGBTQ artists and audiences shaped music’s sound, style, and spirit. In Mighty Real, veteran journalist Barry Walters chronicles its LGBTQ history from the Velvet Underground to the 21st century’s dawn as he honors the artists who redefined gender, defied tradition, and dared to challenge sexual norms with the help of a record business that wasn’t as straight as commonly believed. Drawing on his decades as a New York- and San Francisco-based music critic, Walters examines how LGBTQ musicians, music industry executives, and fans reshaped the mainstream. He connects the dots between David Bowie’s dazzling reinventions, Grace Jones’s androgynous glamor, Prince’s boundary-shattering sexuality, and the radical candor of the Indigo Girls to prove they’re all doing the same fighting oppression. With exuberance, insight, and encyclopedic knowledge, Walters brings to life the songs and society that filled dancefloors, bedrooms, and streets as he uncovers yesteryear’s coded LGBTQ messages that paved the way for today’s unabashedly queer hits. Mighty Real is a masterful love letter to the music that liberated generations, and it’s written in a binge-worthy, personal way that blurs distinctions between chronicle and memoir. This is the rare and revolutionary music history told to help you laugh, cry, and then rally against lingering inequality.

A sparkling, funny, and often wrenching portrait-in-essays on the dairy industry, queer intimacy, family, fluidity, whiteness, and cows. For decades, Megan Milks has wondered what it means to share a last name with the classic white American beverage. Now, Milks takes on their namesake subject in all its dimensions, venturing into the worlds of small dairies, bovine genetics, and manure while also turning their eye on their family and themself. The resulting essays connect the dots between human lactation, Big Dairy, being queer and lonely, climate change, transmasculinity, the bull semen industry, the milky roots of white supremacy, and the best practices for giving and receiving a hug. With Mega Milk, Megan Milks confirms their place as one of our most exciting queer thinkers and writers.

A grassroots tour of the nation's lesbian bars that illuminates their past, present, and hopeful future, from the co-creator of the hit podcast CruisingLesbian bars are so much more than a place to get a drink. For over a century, they’ve acted as community posts, political organizing grounds, and sanctuaries. Yet whereas in the 1980s there were an estimated 200 lesbian bars across the US, the current count sits at a few dozen.In The Lesbian Bar Chronicles, author and co-creator of the hit podcast Cruising Rachel Karp embarks across the country with her wife and best friend to chronicle the stories of the remaining US lesbian bars. Recent narratives have claimed lesbian bars are dying, but Karp’s group finds many of the places they visit to be thriving, their communities sustaining themselves over decades of change and challenges.Weaving together over 100 hours of immersive interviews with bar owners, staff, and regulars, Karp highlights places like-Chicago spot Nobody’s Darling, where readers meet “the mayor” Shirley J, who in the 1970s was instrumental in the birth of house music-Frankie’s in Oklahoma City, where readers attend a “family night” to learn how a lesbian bar can birth a chosen family-Redz, a Chicana lesbian bar in East LA involved in the precedent setting court case that followed years of arrests for patrons wearing men’s clothingA heartfelt reclamation of queer history and queer lives, Karp’s narrative examines how these beacons for community and inclusion can teach us to live openly, cultivate connection, and continue to take up space.

A lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel. A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience. When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call “ellay.” As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate Do they want to eat a person, or become one? Henry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world recounted by a lovable mountain lion. Feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings the mythic to life.

‘When you are someone that falls outside of categories in so many ways, a lot of things are said to you. And I have had a lot of things said to me.’ In None of the Above, Travis Alabanza examines seven phrases people have directed at them about their gender identity. These phrases have stayed with them over the years. Some are deceptively innocuous, some deliberately loaded or offensive, some celebratory; sentences that have impacted them for better and for worse; sentences that speak to the broader issues raised by a world that insists that gender must be a binary. Through these seven phrases, which include some of their most transformative experiences as a Black, mixed race, non binary person, Travis Alabanza turns a mirror back on society, giving us reason to question the very framework in which we live and the ways we treat each other.

For readers of Maggie Nelson and Jeremy Atherton Lin, Say Nephew is an eclectic and inquisitive exploration of the rich and complex mythology of gay unclesBlending memoir and criticism, Steven Pfau pays tribute to the gay uncles who have shaped his sense of queer identity, culture, and history. The most influential—the mentor who would set the standard for all of Steven’s future mentors—was his uncle Bruce.A charismatic storyteller with a Burt Reynolds–esque bravado (and a mustache, leather jacket, and pair of cowboy boots to match), Bruce came out in 1950s Memphis and lived in New York City through many of the defining events of the gay liberation era. Bruce was both a unique fixture in Steven’s upbringing and an archetypal figure within a much broader history—a link in a long lineage of uncles, literal and figurative, who have offered various forms of queer tutelage to younger men.But what role is the nephew supposed to play in these bonds? And who does he become once his uncles are no longer there to guide him? Both a coming-of-age story and a wide-ranging study, Say Nephew is a wholly original and expansive consideration of queer mentorship.

Over a hot summer in New York a painter falls for a priest, in this captivating modern love story from the Booker-Prize shortlisted Brandon Taylor Wyeth is a newcomer to New York, a young Black painter who is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. He shares a studio with his friends and earns money working for a gallery and an art restorer but he’s struggling with his portrait painting, unable to truly capture the life of his subjects. Then he meets Keating, a white former priest struggling with his faith. The two men seemingly have nothing in common, and yet Keating shows Wyeth how to see the world anew. The hot summer progresses, filled with art openings, walks around the city, and Wyeth’s search for a long forgotten Black artist. But as the men grow closer, the differences between them become more stark, until Wyeth and Keating must decide what they are willing to risk – for art and for love. A page-turning New York novel and a sweeping modern romance, Minor Black Figures is an involving and tender portrait of loneliness and connection.