LGBTQIA+ Nonfiction bestsellers

The Future Is Disabled

Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs

By: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Narrated by: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Length: 9 hours 20 minutes

In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled—and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and... Read more

Ace

What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

By: Angela Chen
Narrated by: Natalie Naudus
Length: 7 hours 43 minutes

“This book is an eye-opening collection of personal testimonies, research, and history about asexuality, and to a lesser extent, aromanticism. Whether you are new to learning about asexuality or are asexual yourself, by the end of the book you will have a richer and multifaceted understanding of ace identity and experience. Read more

Refusing Compulsory Sexuality

A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture

By: Sherronda J. Brown
Narrated by: Yu-Li Alice Shen
Length: 6 hours 54 minutes

For readers of Ace and Belly of the Beast: A Black queer feminist exploration of asexuality--and an incisive interrogation of the sex-obsessed culture that invisibilizes and ignores asexual and A-spec identity.

Everything you know about sex and asexuality is (probably) wrong.

The notion that everyone wants sex--and that we all have to have it--is... Read more

Before We Were Trans

A New History of Gender

By: Dr. Kit Heyam
Narrated by: Dr. Kit Heyam
Length: 8 hours 2 minutes

A groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity  

Today’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people’s lives.  
 
Before We Were Trans illuminates... Read more

Better Living Through Birding

Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World

By: Christian Cooper
Narrated by: Christian Cooper
Length: 10 hours 25 minutes

Central Park birder Christian Cooper takes us beyond the viral video that shocked a nation and into a world of avian adventures, global excursions, and the unexpected lessons you can learn from a life spent looking up.

"Wondrous . . . captivating.”—Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of An Immense World

Christian Cooper is a self-described... Read more

The LGBTQ + History Book

DK Big Ideas

By: DK
Narrated by: Willow Heath
Length: 15 hours 56 minutes

Discover the rich and complex history of LGBTQ+ people around the world - their struggles, triumphs, and cultural contributions.

Exploring and explaining the most important ideas and events in LGBTQ+ history and culture, this book showcases the breadth of the LGBTQ+ experience. This diverse, global account explores the most important moments,... Read more

Captive Genders

Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, Expanded Second Edition

By: Eric A. Stanley & Nat Smith
Narrated by: Adi Cabral
Length: 12 hours 17 minutes

Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the prison industrial complex. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics for a new understanding of how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing... Read more

The Book of Pride

LGBTQ Heroes Who Changed the World

By: Mason Funk
Narrated by: Mason Funk, Robin Miles, Eileen Stevens, Kevin R. Free, Charles Constant & Rick Adamson
Length: 10 hours 25 minutes

THE BOOK OF PRIDE captures the true story of the gay rights movement from the 1960s to the present, through richly detailed, stunning interviews with the leaders, activists, and ordinary people who witnessed the movement and made it happen. These individuals fought battles both personal and political, often without the support of family or... Read more

Moby Dyke

An Obsessive Quest To Track Down The Last Remaining Lesbian Bars In America

By: Krista Burton
Narrated by: Sarah Beth Pfeifer
Length: 12 hours 13 minutes

“Follow author Krista Burton as she embarks on a pilgrimage to the last remaining lesbian bars in the country. Part memoir, part travel essays, part social history of why lesbian bars are important, this book is both enlightening and delightful (and will make you want to sing Goodbye Earl at your next queer karaoke night). Read more

He/She/They

How We Talk About Gender and Why It Matters

By: Schuyler Bailar
Narrated by: Schuyler Bailar
Length: 11 hours 14 minutes

Go‑to expert on gender identity, Schuyler Bailar, offers an essential, urgent guide that changes the conversation about gender identity and how we talk about it.

Anti-transgender legislation is being introduced in state governments around the United States in record-breaking numbers. Trans people are under attack in sports, healthcare, school... Read more

Who's Afraid of Gender?

By: Judith Butler
Narrated by: Judith Butler
Length: 11 hours 47 minutes

This program is read by the author.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Time, Elle, Kirkus, Literary Hub, The Millions, Electric Literature, and them.

"A profoundly urgent intervention.” —Naomi Klein

"A timely must-read for anyone actively invested in re-imagining collective futurity.” —Claudia Rankine

From a global icon, a bold, essential... Read more

Transgender History, second edition

The Roots of Today's Revolution

Seal Studies

By: Susan Stryker
Narrated by: Emily Cauldwell
Length: 7 hours 49 minutes

Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans... Read more

Why Are People Into That?

A Cultural Investigation of Kink

By: Tina Horn
Narrated by: Tina Horn
Length: 10 hours 2 minutes

From a #1 Apple podcast host, Lambda Literary fellow, and dominatrix comes a sex-positive, judgment-free cultural deep-dive into the world of kink.
 

When celebrated BDSM educator Tina Horn first launched Why Are People Into That?!, publications from Vice to Buzzfeed heralded it as one of the best sex podcasts around. Each episode centered... Read more

This Book Is Gay

By: Juno Dawson
Narrated by: Christopher Solimene
Length: 6 hours 47 minutes

Lesbian. Bisexual. Queer. Transgender. Straight. Curious. This book is for everyone, regardless of gender or sexual preference. This book is for anyone who's ever dared to wonder. This book is for you.



There's a long-running joke that, after "coming out," a lesbian, gay guy, bisexual, or trans person should receive a membership card and... Read more

Angels in America

A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

By: Tony Kushner
Narrated by: Andrew Garfield, Nathan Lane, Susan Brown, Denise Gough, Beth Malone, James McArdle, Lee Pace, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Bobby Cannavale & Edie Falco
Length: 6 hours 52 minutes

Presenting an original audiobook performance of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, starring the cast of the National Theatre's 2018 Broadway revival.

In this production, adapted especially for the listening experience, Andrew Garfield, Nathan Lane, and the entire cast recreate their acclaimed performances from the 2018 Tony Award-winning National... Read more

Gay New York

Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940

By: George Chauncey
Narrated by: Graham Halstead
Length: 18 hours 40 minutes

The award-winning, field-defining history of gay life in New York City in the early to mid-20th century

Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Drawing on a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents,... Read more

Sorted

Growing Up, Coming Out, and Finding My Place (A Transgender Memoir)

By: Jackson Bird
Narrated by: Jackson Bird
Length: 5 hours 57 minutes

An unflinching and endearing memoir from LGBTQ+ advocate Jackson Bird about how he finally sorted things out and came out as a transgender man.

When Jackson Bird was twenty-five, he came out as transgender to his friends, family, and anyone in the world with an internet connection.

Assigned female at birth and raised as a girl, he often wondered... Read more

I'm Afraid of Men

By: Vivek Shraya
Narrated by: Vivek Shraya
Length: 1 hour 26 minutes

Named a Best Book by: The Globe and Mail, Indigo, Out Magazine, Audible, CBC, Apple, Quill & Quire, Kirkus Reviews, Brooklyn Public Library, Writers’ Trust of Canada, Autostraddle, Bitch, and BookRiot.

Finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award, Transgender Nonfiction
Nominated for the 2019 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award
Winner of the... Read more

And the Category Is.

Inside New York's Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community

By: Ricky Tucker
Narrated by: Ricky Tucker
Length: 8 hours 48 minutes

A 2023 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Nonfiction

An Electric Literature “Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of 2022” Selection

A love letter to the legendary Black and Latinx LGBTQ underground subculture, uncovering its abundant legacy and influence in popular culture.

What is Ballroom? Not a song, a documentary, a catchphrase, a TV show, or an... Read more

Becoming a Visible Man

Second Edition

By: Jamison Green
Narrated by: Jamison Green & Aaron H. Devor
Length: 10 hours 32 minutes

At least two generations of transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people have emerged since Becoming a Visible Man was first published in 2004, but the book remains a beloved resource for trans people and their allies.

Since the first edition's publication, author Jamison Green's writings and advocacy among business and governmental... Read more

Care Work

Dreaming Disability Justice

By: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Narrated by: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Length: 8 hours 7 minutes

“A primer on disability justice, memoir, personal activism history, and love letter to disabled BIPOC femmes all at once. Read more

All Boys Aren't Blue

A Memoir-Manifesto

By: George M. Johnson
Narrated by: George M. Johnson
Length: 5 hours 11 minutes

This program is read by the author.

In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson's All Boys Aren't Blue explores their childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia.

A New York Times Bestseller!
Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News, Today Show, and MSNBC feature stories

From... Read more

Neuroqueer Heresies

Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities

By: Nick Walker
Narrated by: Janet Metzger
Length: 6 hours 16 minutes

The work of queer autistic scholar Nick Walker has played a key role in the evolving discourse on human neurodiversity.



Neuroqueer Heresies collects a decade's worth of Dr. Walker's most influential writings, along with new commentary by the author and new material on her radical conceptualization of Neuroqueer Theory.



This book is essential for... Read more

Love and Rage

The Path of Liberation through Anger

By: Lama Rod Owens
Narrated by: Lama Rod Owens
Length: 8 hours 59 minutes

A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER
 
In the face of systemic racism and state-sanctioned violence, how can we metabolize our anger into a force for liberation?

White supremacy in the United States has long necessitated that Black rage be suppressed, repressed, or denied, often as a means of survival, a literal matter of life and death. In Love and... Read more

Glitter and Concrete

A Cultural History of Drag in New York City

By: Elyssa Maxx Goodman
Narrated by: Kevin R. Free & Natalie Duke
Length: 12 hours 10 minutes

*The Millions Most Anticipated List of 2023*
*A Vogue Best LGBTQ+ Book of 2023*

"Deeply researched and featuring a cast of characters who can truly be described as fabulous, Glitter and Concrete is urban history on fire." —Thomas Dyja, author of New York, New York, New York

An intimate, evocative history of drag in New York City exploring its... Read more

A Queer History of the United States

ReVisioning History

By: Michael Bronski
Narrated by: Vikas Adams
Length: 10 hours 28 minutes

Winner of a 2012 Stonewall Book Award in nonfiction

The first book to cover the entirety of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from pre-1492 to the present.

In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage. Transgender evangelist Jemima... Read more

The Stonewall Reader

By: New York Public Library
Narrated by: Various
Length: 10 hours 44 minutes

"...a remarkable audio experience that emphasizes the revolutionary power of LGBTQ voices and provides an invaluable record of a community that refuses to be silenced." -AudioFile magazine Earphones Award winner

For the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, an anthology chronicling the tumultuous fight for LGBTQ rights in the 1960s and... Read more

Hi Honey, I'm Homo!

Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture

By: Matt Baume
Narrated by: Matt Baume
Length: 6 hours 41 minutes

For decades, amidst the bright lights, studio-audience laughs, and absurdly large apartment sets, the real-life story of American LGBTQ+ liberation unfolded in plain sight in front of millions of viewers, most of whom were laughing too hard to mind. From flamboyant relatives on Bewitched to closely-guarded secrets on All in the Family, from... Read more

The Natural Mother of the Child

A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood

By: Krys Malcolm Belc
Narrated by: Krys Malcolm Belc
Length: 4 hours 21 minutes

Krys Malcolm Belc has thought a lot about the interplay between parenthood and gender. As a nonbinary, transmasculine parent, giving birth to his son Samson clarified his gender identity. And yet, when his partner Anna adopted Samson, the legal documents listed Belc as the natural mother of the child. By considering how the experiences contained... Read more

Beyond the Gender Binary

Pocket Change Collective

By: Alok Vaid-Menon
Narrated by: Alok Vaid-Menon
Length: 1 hour 7 minutes

Winner of the 2021 In The Margins Award
 
"When reading this book, all I feel is kindness."-- Sam Smith, Grammy and Oscar award-winning singer and songwriter
 
"Thank God we have Alok. And I'm learning a thing or two myself."--Billy Porter, Emmy award-winning actor, singer, and Broadway theater performer

"Beyond the Gender Binary will give readers... Read more

Bi

The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

By: Julia Shaw
Narrated by: Julia Shaw
Length: 6 hours 21 minutes

A provocative and eye-opening book on the science and history of bisexuality
Significant strides have been made in recent years in the movement for LGBTQ+ rights, visibility, and empowerment, but the conversation is far from over. After years of feeling the crushing dearth of information on bisexuality, psychological
scientist and bestselling... Read more

When Brooklyn Was Queer

By: Hugh Ryan
Narrated by: Hugh Ryan
Length: 11 hours 30 minutes

The never-before-told story of Brooklyn’s vibrant and forgotten queer history, from the mid-1850s up to the present dayHugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer is a groundbreaking exploration of the LGBT history of Brooklyn, from the early days of Walt Whitman in the 1850s up through the queer women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World... Read more

A Two-Spirit Journey

The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder

Critical Studies in Native History: Book #18

By: Ma-Nee Chacaby
Narrated by: Marsha Knight
Length: 11 hours 57 minutes

A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby’s extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby’s story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism.... Read more

The Risk it Takes to Bloom

On Life and Liberation

By: Raquel Willis
Narrated by: Raquel Willis
Length: 13 hours 40 minutes

A passionate, powerful memoir by a trailblazing Black transgender activist, tracing her life of transformation and her work towards collective liberation.
In 2017, Raquel Willis took to the National Women’s March podium just after the presidential election of Donald Trump, primed to tell her story as a young Black transgender woman from the... Read more

Pretty

A Memoir

By: KB Brookins
Narrated by: KB Brookins
Length: 6 hours 10 minutes

By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.

Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective—the tropes, the presumptions—Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for... Read more

Real Queer America

LGBT Stories from Red States

By: Samantha Allen
Narrated by: Samantha Allen
Length: 7 hours 26 minutes

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST
A transgender reporter's "powerful, profoundly moving" narrative tour through the surprisingly vibrant queer communities sprouting up in red states (New York Times Book Review), offering a vision of a stronger, more humane America.
Ten years ago, Samantha Allen was a suit-and-tie-wearing Mormon missionary. Now she's... Read more

The 57 Bus

A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives

By: Dashka Slater
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 5 hours 43 minutes

The riveting New York Times bestseller and Stonewall Book Award winner that will make you rethink all you know about race, class, gender, crime, and punishment. Artfully, compassionately, and expertly told, Dashka Slater's The 57 Bus is a must-read nonfiction book for teens that chronicles the true story of an agender teen who was set on fire by... Read more

What's Your Pronoun?

Beyond He and She

By: Dennis Baron
Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
Length: 6 hours 55 minutes

Contextualizing one of the most pressing cultural questions of our generation, Dennis Baron reveals the untold story of how we got from he and she to zie and hir and singular—they.

Like trigger warnings and gender-neutral bathrooms, pronouns are sparking a national debate, prompting new policies in schools, workplaces, even prisons, about what... Read more

The Deviant's War

The Homosexual vs. the United States of America

By: Eric Cervini
Narrated by: Vikas Adam
Length: 15 hours 34 minutes

"Vikas Adam draws the listener in, expertly narrating Cervini's work, which charts the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States...Vikas Adam does an excellent job lending unique voices to real historical figures." -- AudioFile Magazine

A Publishers Weekly most anticipated spring book

From a young Harvard- and... Read more

Life as a Unicorn

A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

By: Amrou Al-Kadhi
Narrated by: Amrou Al-Kadhi
Length: 7 hours 32 minutes

A heart-breaking and hilarious memoir about the author’s fight to be true to themself WINNER OF THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE 2020 WINNER OF A SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD Amrou knew they were gay when, aged ten, they first laid eyes on Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. It was love at first... Read more

We Are Not Broken

By: George M Johnson
Narrated by: George M Johnson
Length: 4 hours 3 minutes

George M. Johnson, activist and bestselling author ofAll Boys Aren't Blue, returns with a striking memoir that celebrates Black boyhood and brotherhood in all its glory.

This is the vibrant story of George, Garrett, Rall, and Rasul -- four children raised by Nanny, their fiercely devoted grandmother. The boys hold one another close through early... Read more

I Have Something to Tell You—For Young Adults

A Memoir

By: Chasten Buttigieg
Narrated by: Chasten Buttigieg
Length: 4 hours 50 minutes

WITH A FOREWORD WRITTEN AND READ BY ARIANA DEBOSE!

An instant New York Times bestseller!
“A perfect juxtaposition of ordinary and extraordinary, told with humor, compassion, and unshakeable hope.” —Becky Albertalli, New York Times bestselling author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

The young adult adaptation of the “hopeful” (Kirkus Reviews)... Read more

The Women's House of Detention

A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison

By: Hugh Ryan
Narrated by: Janet Metzger
Length: 13 hours 23 minutes

This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century.

The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City’s Greenwich... Read more

Coming Out, Moving Forward: Wisconsin’s Recent Gay History

By: R. Richard Wagner
Narrated by: Vance Bastian
Length: 16 hours 41 minutes

Coming Out, Moving Forward, the second volume in R. Richard Wagner’s groundbreaking work on gay history in Wisconsin, outlines the challenges that LGBT Wisconsinites faced in their efforts to right past oppressions and secure equality in the post-Stonewall period between 1969 and 2000. During this era, Wisconsin made history as the first state... Read more

Selected Works of Audre Lorde

By: Audre Lorde
Narrated by: Mia Ellis
Length: 8 hours 11 minutes

A definitive selection of Audre Lorde's "intelligent, fierce, powerful, sensual, provocative, indelible" (Roxane Gay) prose and poetry, for a new generation of listeners.



Self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of... Read more

Bless the Blood

A Cancer Memoir

By: Walela Nehanda
Narrated by: Walela Nehanda
Length: 6 hours 16 minutes

A searing debut YA poetry and essay collection about a Black cancer patient who faces medical racism after being diagnosed with leukemia in their early twenties, for fans of Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals and Laurie Halse Anderson's Shout.

When Walela is diagnosed at twenty-three with advanced stage blood cancer, they're suddenly thrust into... Read more

Bad Gays

A Homosexual History

By: Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller
Narrated by: Ben Allen
Length: 13 hours 31 minutes

We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those 'bad gays' whose un-exemplary lives reveal more than we might expect? Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but, as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been... Read more

Gender Queer

A Memoir

By: Maia Kobabe
Narrated by: Maia Kobabe, Trini Alvarado, Stephen Graybill, Phoebe Kobabe, Jeremy Carlisle Parker & Full Cast
Length: 1 hour 58 minutes

2020 ALA Alex Award Winner
2020 Stonewall — Israel Fishman Non-fiction Award Honor Book

The ground-breaking, bestselling graphic novel is now available on audio.

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only... Read more

The Queer Art of Failure

By: Jack Halberstam
Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
Length: 10 hours 1 minute

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Halberstam... Read more

Swole

The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle

By: Michael Andor Brodeur
Narrated by: Mark Sanderlin
Length: 9 hours 22 minutes

From a Washington Post critic and self-described meathead, a witty, incisive, poignant exploration of male body image, from the history of the gym to the politics of superheroes to the world of manfluencers

Michael Andor Brodeur is a Gen-X gay writer with a passion for bodybuilding and an insatiable curiosity about masculinity—a concept in which... Read more