Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Biographies & Memoirs

In 1987, somebody shoved a flyer into the hand of Peter Staley: Massive AIDS demonstration, it announced. After four years on Wall Street as a closeted gay man, Staley was familiar with the homophobia common on trading floors. He also knew that he was not beyond the reach of HIV, having recently been diagnosed with AIDS-related complex. A week after the protest, Staley found his way to a packed meeting of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power - ACT UP - in the West Village. It would prove to be the best decision he ever made. 

The world was not the least bit surprised when Branden James became a finalist on season eight of America's Got Talent, receiving high praise from the judges for his emotional, operatic vocals. Coming out and sharing intimate details of his broken ties with his religious family on the show, he received countless messages from fans who could relate to his personal struggles.

After author Harlyn Aizley gave birth to her daughter, she watched in unanticipated horror as her partner scooped up the baby and said, "I'm your new mommy!" While they both had worked to find the perfect sperm donor, Aizley had spent nine months carrying the baby and hours in labor, so how could her partner claim to be their child's mommy? Many diapers later, Aizley began to appreciate the complexity of her partner's new role as the other mother. Together, they searched for stories about families like their own.

What do you do when, just before Thanksgiving at your mother's, your 14-year-old son asks you to iron the dress he recently purchased and plans to wear? Listeners learn the answer and much more in this wonderfully frank, loving, and practical account of parenting a transgender teen. Hassouri chronicles what amounts to a dual transition: as her child transitions from male to female, she navigates through anger, denial, and grief to eventual acceptance. Despite her experience advising other parents in her work as a pediatrician, she was blindsided by her child's gender identity.

Ryan never envisioned just how far his football career would take him. But bubbling under the surface of his entire NFL career was a collision course between his secret sexuality and his hidden drug use. As injuries mounted and his daily intake of opioids reached a near-lethal level, he wrote his suicide note to his parents and plotted his death. Yet, someone had been watching. A member of the Chiefs organization stepped in, recognizing the signs of drug addiction. Ryan reluctantly sought psychological help, and it was there that he revealed his lifelong secret for the very first time.

In Flipping the Script, AJ Gibson shows how his life has been a series of personal roadblocks and rock-bottom moments. The true stories in Flipping the Script will make you laugh, encourage you to keep fighting for happiness, and inspire you to turn your own rock-bottom moments into your proudest accomplishments!   

Author Kate Bornstein ushers listeners on a funny, fearless, and wonderfully scenic journey across the terrains of gender and identity. On one level, Gender Outlaw details Bornstein's transformation from heterosexual male to lesbian woman, from a one-time IBM salesperson to a playwright and performance artist. But this particular coming-of-age story is also a provocative investigation into our notions of male and female, from a self-described nonbinary transfeminine diesel femme dyke who never stops questioning our cultural assumptions.

Harvey Milk - eloquent, charismatic, and a smart-aleck - was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, but he had not even served a full year in office when he was shot by a homophobic fellow supervisor. Milk's assassination at the age of 48 made him the most famous gay man in modern history; 20 years later, Time magazine included him on its list of the hundred most influential individuals of the 20th century. 

Adam Prashaw's life was full of surprises from the moment he was born. Assigned female at birth, and with parents who had been expecting a boy, he spent years living as "Rebecca Danielle Adam Prashaw" before coming to terms with being a transgender man. Adam captured hearts with his humor, compassion, and intensity. After a tragic accident cut his life short, he left a legacy of changed lives and a trove of social media posts documenting his life, relationships, transition, and struggles with epilepsy, all with remarkable transparency and directness. 

Eve Adams was a rebel. Born Chawa Zloczewer into a Jewish family in Poland, Adams emigrated to the United States in 1912. The young woman befriended anarchists, sold radical publications, took a new name, and ran lesbian-and-gay-friendly speakeasies in Chicago and New York. Then, in 1925, Adams risked all to write and publish a book titled Lesbian Love. In The Daring Life and Deadly Times of Eve Adams, acclaimed historian Jonathan Ned Katz has recovered the extraordinary story of an early daring activist. 

Craig Russell was an internationally admired entertainer and actor, known for his outrageous impersonations of some of Hollywood's greatest female celebrities: Mae West, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Carol Channing, and Judy Garland, to name a few. Lori Russell Eadie, a shy theater lover, was Craig's number-one fan and, eventually, his wife. Together they were fun, fabulous, and eschewed convention. But behind the curtains, Craig and Lori's lives were troubled by their mental health, drug addiction, sexual assault, and abuse.

As a closeted teen, Ian wondered if he would ever be able to live openly with a male partner. Years later, he had not one but two partners in a polyamorous throuple - what more could he ask for? But something was still missing.... Join Ian and his partners, Alan and Jeremy, as they embark on a sometimes hilarious, sometimes tearful quest to become parents. 

Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians provides access into an underrepresented and misunderstood community and will change the way listeners think about transgender people, faith, and the future of Christianity. By introducing transgender issues and language and providing stories of both biblical characters and real-life narratives from transgender Christians living today, Hartke helps listeners visualize a more inclusive Christianity, equipping them with the confidence and tools to change both the church and the world. 

I'm Prancing as Fast as I Can is a coming of Gay story that takes us from a scared, self-hating kid who spends most of his time under his desk staring at the hunky man on the Doan's Pills box, to becoming a writer on Will & Grace, helping to make it a little easier for other scared, self-hating kids who might also be hiding and staring at their secret desire.

In this unique oral biography, Bachardy recounts his astonishing story, providing illuminating recollections of celebrity portrait sittings and revelations about his thirty-year relationship with Christopher Isherwood. From their meeting in the 1950s until Isherwood's death in 1986, theirs was a legendary love story, courageous and uncompromising for its time, and remarkable in any era for the creative collaborations and art it continues to inspire.

In a series of intimate and humorous dispatches, McOuat examines her identity as a queer woman, and as a mother, through the lens of the pop culture moments in the '80s and '90s that molded her identity. McOuat stirs the ingredients required to conjure an unsettled spirit: the horrors of pregnancy and motherhood, love and loss, the supernatural, kaleidoscopic sexuality, near-miss experiences, and the unexplained moments in life that leave you haunted.

Weaving together memoir and cutting-edge science, Mothership is not just a queer coming-of-age story. It's a deeply researched account of how coral reefs and a psychedelic tea called ayahuasca helped Greg heal from complex PTSD—a disorder of trust, which makes the very act of bonding with someone else panic-inducing. From the tide pools in Florida where he grew up, to Indonesia's Raja Ampat archipelago and the Amazon rainforest, this is his search for wholeness when talk therapy and pharmaceuticals did little to help.

In No Son of Mine, Corcoran traces his messy estrangement from his mother through lost geographies as well as the lost relationships with friends and family and the sense of home that were stripped away when she said he was no longer her son. Through grief, anger, questioning, and growth, Corcoran explores the entwined yet separate histories and identities of his mother and himself.

In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author's characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness.

Randy Shilts was the preeminent LGBTQ+ reporter of his generation. He was the first openly gay reporter assigned to a gay beat at a mainstream paper and one of the nation's most influential chroniclers of gay history, politics, and culture. Shilts wrote three seminal works on the community: The Mayor of Castro Street, on the life, assassination, and legacy of Harvey Milk; And the Band Played On, detailing the failure of politics as usual during the early AIDS epidemic; and Conduct Unbecoming, a history of the US military's mistreatment of LGBTQ service members.