Results by title
486 books match the query 'LGBTQ+' and 27 start with m
Making Gay History
Memoir of a Scholar-ActivistJohn D'Emilio
Duke University Press, 2026
Making Gay History continues John D’Emilio’s story, following his memoir of his early years, Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood. Here, D’Emilio recounts his career as a public historian, activist, and academic, relating his own queer history alongside the development of the LGBTQ movement in the United States. D’Emilio was part of the first burgeoning period of LGBTQ studies while still a graduate student in New York City. From there, he takes readers through his experiences as an out professor at UNC Greensboro, his activism in Washington, DC, and finally, his employment at the University of Illinois as an LGBTQ historian, a position that was unimaginable at the start of his career. At the same time, he narrates his own coming out, his successes and struggles with LGBTQ advocacy, and the loves and losses faced throughout his adult life, telling an intertwined personal and national history of queer hearts and minds.
Man Made
Searching for Dads, Daddies, Father Figures, and FatherhoodSteve Majors
University of Wisconsin Press, 2025
In this poignant and provocative memoir, Steve Majors takes us on a journey of his own self-discovery as he grows from a gay boy in search of a father figure to a gay man grappling with what it means to be a father himself. In doing so, Majors creates various snapshots of time in which his—and the world’s—understanding of what it means to be a gay man changes.
Manfred Macmillan
Book One of the Three Magicians TrilogyBy Jirí Karásek ze Lvovic, translated from the Czech and annotated by Carleton Bulkin with an introduction co-authored by Brian James Baer
Amherst College Press, 2024
Karasék rejected Czech translations of ancient Greek writers that bowdlerized gay themes, and he personally and vigorously defended Oscar Wilde in print, both on the grounds of artistic freedom and of private morality. He also published a cycle of homoerotic poems under the title Sodom, confiscated by the Austrian authorities but republished in 1905 and repeatedly afterward. A colonized subject, a literary decadent, and a sexual outlaw, Karasék’s complex responses to his own marginalization can be traced through his fantastically strange novel trilogy Three Magicians. As the first volume in that series, Manfred Macmillan is a gorgeous, compelling, and important addition to expanding canons of LGBTQI+ literature.
Marcus Aurelius in Love
Marcus Aurelius and Marcus Cornelius Fronto
University of Chicago Press, 2007
In 1815 a manuscript containing one of the long-lost treasures of antiquity was discovered—the letters of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, reputed to have been one of the greatest Roman orators. But this find disappointed many nineteenth-century readers, who had hoped for the letters to convey all of the political drama of Cicero’s. That the collection included passionate love letters between Fronto and the future emperor Marcus Aurelius was politely ignored—or concealed. And for almost two hundred years these letters have lain hidden in plain sight.
Marcus Aurelius in Love rescues these letters from obscurity and returns them to the public eye. The story of Marcus and Fronto began in 139 CE, when Fronto was selected to instruct Marcus in rhetoric. Marcus was eighteen then and by all appearances the pupil and teacher fell in love. Spanning the years in which the relationship flowered and died, these are the only love letters to survive from antiquity—homoerotic or otherwise. With a translation that reproduces the effusive, slangy style of the young prince and the rhetorical flourishes of his master, the letters between Marcus and Fronto will rightfully be reconsidered as key documents in the study of the history of sexuality and classics.
Marie Equi
Radical Politics and Outlaw PassionsMichael Helquist
Oregon State University Press, 2015
Equi self-studied her way into a San Francisco medical school and then obtained her license in Portland to become one of the first practicing woman physicians in the Pacific Northwest. From Pendleton, Portland, Seattle and beyond to Boston and San Francisco, she leveraged her professional status to fight for woman suffrage, labor rights, and reproductive freedom. She mounted soapboxes, fought with police, and spent a night in jail with birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. Equi marched so often with unemployed men that the media referred to them as her army. She battled for economic justice at every turn and protested the U.S. entry into World War I, leading to a conviction for sedition and a three-year sentence in San Quentin. Breaking boundaries in all facets of life, she became the first well-known lesbian in Oregon, and her same-sex affairs figured prominently in two U.S. Supreme Court cases.
Marie Equi is a finely written, rigorously researched account of a woman of consequence, who one fellow-activist considered “the most interesting woman that ever lived in this state, certainly the most fascinating, colorful, and flamboyant.” This much anticipated biography will engage anyone interested in Pacific Northwest history, women’s studies, the history of lesbian and gay rights, and the personal demands of political activism. It is the inspiring story of a singular woman who was not afraid to take risks, who refused to compromise her principles in the face of enormous opposition and adversity, and who paid a steep personal price for living by her convictions.
Marriage to the Sea
Linked NovellasSarah Stone
Four Way Books, 2026
Masculinity in Transition
K. Allison Hammer
University of Minnesota Press, 2023
Locating the roots of toxic masculinity and finding its displacement in unruly culture
Masculinity in Transition analyzes shifting relationships to masculinity in canonical works of twentieth-century literature and film, as well as in twenty-first-century media, performance, and transgender poetics. Focusing on “toxic masculinity,” which has assumed new valence since 2016, K. Allison Hammer traces its roots to a complex set of ideologies embedded in the histories of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and political fraternity, and finds that while toxic strains of masculinity are mainly associated with straight, white men, trans and queer masculinities can be implicated in these systems of power.
Hammer argues, however, that these malignant forms of masculinity are not fixed and can be displaced by “unruly alliances”—texts and relationships that reject the nationalisms and gender politics of white male hegemony and perform an urgently needed reimagining of what it means to be masculine. Locating these unruly alliances in the writings, performances, and films of butch lesbians, gay men, cisgender femmes, and trans and nonbinary individuals, Masculinity in Transition works through an archive of works of performance art, trans poetics, Western films and streaming media, global creative responses to HIV/AIDS, and working-class and “white trash” fictions about labor and unionization.
Masculinity in Transition moves the study of masculinity away from an overriding preoccupation with cisnormativity, whiteness, and heteronormativity, and toward a wider and more generative range of embodiments, identifications, and ideologies. Hammer’s bold rethinking of masculinity and its potentially toxic effects lays bare the underlying fragility of normative masculinity.
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Maxanax Chempapísi / Bloodwriting
Deborah A. Miranda
University of Arizona Press, 2027
In Maxanax Chempapísi / Bloodwriting lyric poems exploring Esselen words and concepts traverse a supporting cast of prose poems about contemporary life as a queer, Indigenous recovering academic. Deborah A. Miranda witnesses the lives of women who are lovers, mothers, daughters, sisters, and grandmothers caught in a chain of ongoing apocalypse that stretches from the colonization of North America to the current Anthropocene.
These poems are small but potent ceremonies that center relationship as medicinal. They speak of the ugliness of genocide, substance abuse, environmental destruction, and homophobia with searing fury. They linger on the sacred powers found within a river—“A web of fireflies weaving constellations in the alder’s branches”—or the wonder of “The first woman / who stole my heart / rose up / from the earth / like a creation story.” Throughout this collection, images weave connections between women’s bodies and the moon, bodies and earth, bodies and constellations that surround us. Esselen, Miranda’s Indigenous language, acts as a bridge that translates some of these ancient struggles and insights into contemporary images.
This collection resists the separation of the body, the spirit, and the sacred. It seeks a reunion of true relationship in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. Miranda balances praise for the burning—but still beautiful and holy—world and grief for the loss of beings and places that cannot be recovered.
Melodrama
An Aesthetics of ImpossibilityJonathan Goldberg
Duke University Press, 2016
Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood
Coming of Age in the SixtiesJohn D'Emilio
Duke University Press, 2022
Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood is D’Emilio’s coming-of-age story in which he takes readers from his working-class Bronx neighborhood to an elite Jesuit high school in Manhattan to Columbia University and the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s. He shares his personal experiences of growing up in a conservative, tight-knit, multigenerational family, how he went from considering entering the priesthood to losing his faith and coming to terms with his same-sex desires. Throughout, D’Emilio outlines his complicated relationship with his family while showing how his passion for activism influenced his decision to use research, writing, and teaching to build a strong LGBTQ movement.
This is not just John D’Emilio’s personal story; it opens a window into how the conformist baby boom decade of the 1950s transformed into the tumultuous years of radical social movements and widespread protest during the 1960s. It is the story of what happens when different cultures and values collide and the tensions and possibilities for personal discovery and growth that emerge. Intimate and honest, D’Emilio’s story will resonate with anyone who has had to chart their own path in a world they did not expect to find.
Men I Hate
A Memoir in EssaysLynette D'Amico
The Ohio State University Press, 2026
Can a lesbian who loves a trans man still call herself a lesbian? Against the backdrop of a traditional Sicilian American upbringing, Lynette D’Amico identified as a lesbian despite the expectation that her future hinged on the man she married. As a teenager, she fled her St. Louis home in the dark of night to escape her fate. No boys allowed, until one day D’Amico’s life was completely upended when her lover and spouse of twenty years—P. Carl, the acclaimed author of Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition—told her he was a man.
Seemingly overnight, D’Amico no longer recognized her spouse in photos of past vacations or of the couple celebrating their legal gay marriage. In Men I Hate, she asks: What happens when the people we are closest to change? As D’Amico tries to engage more deeply with the man she is married to, she looks at all the men—historical figures, politicians, men in her family—in search of clear dividing lines between good men and bad, between the men she loves and the men she hates. These lines dissolve as she writes her way toward an understanding of the words marriage,husband, and home—and how we reconcile who we are with who we become.
Men I've Never Been
Michael Sadowski
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
Through wrenching tragedy and tense, life-threatening challenges, Sadowski learns to find love, purpose, and healthy self-regard. In coming to understand his identity and his place within his family, he meditates on the power of real human connection and comes to grasp the damage of his troubled upbringing and the traumas caused by toxic masculinity. By turns comic and tragic, this nuanced memoir uncovers the false selves we create to get along in the world and the price we pay to maintain them.
Men Like That
A Southern Queer HistoryJohn Howard
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Spanning four decades, Men Like That complicates traditional notions of a post-WWII conformist wave in America. Howard argues that the 1950s, for example, were a period of vibrant queer networking in Mississippi, while during the so-called "free love" 1960s homosexuals faced aggressive oppression. When queer sex was linked to racial agitation and when key civil rights leaders were implicated in homosexual acts, authorities cracked down and literally ran the accused out of town.
In addition to firsthand accounts, Men Like That finds representations of homosexuality in regional pulp fiction and artwork, as well as in the number one pop song about a suicidal youth who jumps off the Tallahatchie Bridge. And Howard offers frank, unprecedented assessments of outrageous public scandals: a conservative U.S. congressman caught in the act in Washington, and a white candidate for governor accused of patronizing black transgender sex workers.
The first book-length history of the queer South, Men Like That completely reorients our presuppositions about gay identity and about the dynamics of country life.
"Men Like That goes a long way towards redressing the urban bias in American lesbian and gay-history writing. . . . Howard's rigorous scholarship, which is based both on oral history and traditional historical documents . . . is enhanced by a disarmingly personal touch. . . . His insights into queerness and the mentality of the American South should be of great interest both to the professional gay historian and the general reader."—Madeleine Minson, Times Higher Education Supplement
"Howard creates a history remarkable in its complexity yet intimate in its portraiture. At long last an intimate and full vision of queer lives in America that did not unfold in San Francisco's discos."—Kirkus Reviews
"In this groundbreaking and engrossing analysis of gay male life in postwar Mississippi, Howard . . . boldly demonstrates that gay culture and sex not only existed but flourished in small towns."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Middlebrow Queer
Christopher Isherwood in AmericaJaime Harker
University of Minnesota Press, 2013
How could one write about gay life for the mainstream public in Cold War America? Many midcentury gay American writers, hampered by external and internal censors, never managed to do it. But Christopher Isherwood did, and what makes his accomplishment more remarkable is that while he was negotiating his identity as a gay writer, he was reinventing himself as an American one. Jaime Harker shows that Isherwood refashioned himself as an American writer following his emigration from England by immersing himself in the gay reading, writing, and publishing communities in Cold War America.
Drawing extensively on Isherwood’s archives, including manuscript drafts and unpublished correspondence with readers, publishers, and other writers, Middlebrow Queer demonstrates how Isherwood mainstreamed gay content for heterosexual readers in his postwar novels while also covertly writing for gay audiences and encouraging a symbiotic relationship between writer and reader. The result—in such novels as The World in the Evening, Down There on a Visit, A Single Man, and A Meeting by the River—was a complex, layered form of writing that Harker calls “middlebrow camp,” a mode that extended the boundaries of both gay and middlebrow fiction.
Weaving together biography, history, and literary criticism, Middlebrow Queer traces the continuous evolution of Isherwood’s simultaneously queer and American postwar authorial identity. In doing so, the book illuminates many aspects of Cold War America’s gay print cultures, from gay protest novels to “out” pulp fiction.
Miracle Fever
PoemsMark Anthony Cayanan
Northwestern University Press, 2027
Poetically delving into the spectacle and incredulity of a real-life religious controversy
In the early 1990s, a small town in the Philippines became the epicenter of religious controversy when a teenager claimed to be visited by the Virgin Mary. News of these visions, broadcast over national media, would prompt over a million to flock to the town, hoping to catch a glimpse of the teenager and witness inexplicable events: a statue of the Virgin weeping blood, the sun dancing and throbbing into various fantastic colors, or a bevy of doves appearing overhead during Mass.
Miracle Fever, chronicling the life of this town, is a poetry sequence revolving around these apparitions. Documentary in its scrutiny and distortion of real-life events, novelistic in its plot trajectory, and lyric in its imagistic intensity, Miracle Fever offers a fabulist model of reality, built through poems delivered in the form of dramaticules, timelines, and photo captions. These fugitive presences, bearing out and unsettling the complex ethics of representation that the sequence cleaves to, foreground the element of spectacle surrounding the apparitions and bring new light to the ever-shifting antecedents bound by shared history.
Miss Southeast
EssaysElizabeth Lindsey Rogers
Northwestern University Press, 2024
A collection of narrative essays on femininity, sexuality, community, and belonging
Miss Southeast explores the strange, often contradictory cultural circumstances of being queer and female in the American South and beyond. Born and raised in North Carolina, the youngest in a family of precocious daughters, Rogers spends her teenage years as a half-closeted lesbian desperate to escape the South, convinced the rest of the United States must be “more enlightened than our cow-dotted corner of the county.”
Adulthood takes Rogers to Ohio, New York, Louisiana, Arkansas, Washington, DC, and China, but each essay finds her reckoning with participation in and resistance to rigid cultural institutions—whether a coming-out story set at a high school beauty pageant or a meditation on swimming pools as emblems of racial divides across the South. In lyric prose enlivened by a poet’s sense of musicality, Miss Southeast considers how both place and our layered identities shape our sense of belonging.
Moon Mirrored Indivisible
Farid Matuk
University of Chicago Press, 2025
An inheritor of lineages marked by colonial and gendered violence, Farid Matuk approaches the musical capacities of verse not as mere excitation or decoration, but as forms that reclaim pleasure and presence. Entering the sonic constellations of Moon Mirrored Indivisible, the reader finds relief from nesting layers of containment that systems of power impose on our bodies and imaginations. In this hall of historical mirrors, fictions of identity are refracted, reflected, and multiplied into a vast field of possibilities. Matuk’s meditations on place and power offer experiments in self-understanding, moving through expansive conversations between a lyric “I” and others, including poets, the speaker’s partner, ancestors, and the reader, and creating spaces for strange intimacy. Each of the book’s four sections of poems builds on the other to ask how we might form a collective—a people—not founded in orthodoxies of originality but in the mutual work of mirroring one another.
Mourning Light
Richard Goodkin
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
Told in a series of flashbacks and remembrances, the novel concludes with a whirlwind of revelations that both complicate and resolve Reb’s view of his world and his lover.
Mud in Our Mouths
PoemsLuiza Flynn-Goodlett
Northwestern University Press, 2025
An award-winning poet writing through violence, solace, and hope
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett’s Mud in Our Mouths illuminates how we are all enmeshed in a web of violence and love. As the speaker of the collection drives cross-country to visit her family of origin in Tennessee, she reckons with the tensions between her current and past selves and the many ways violence—interpersonal, societal, and environmental—has shaped her life. She struggles to find meaning, questioning the ethics of locating faith in a natural world she is unintentionally destroying, and grapples with her complicity in systems of power and oppression as a white Southern woman. Ultimately, she rejects the idea of genetic family as a place of solace; instead, she cleaves to the liberation and joy of connections forged outside those strictures, where intimacy is freely chosen rather than preordained.
Murder Most Queer
The Homicidal Homosexual in the American TheaterJordan Schildcrout
University of Michigan Press, 2014
Murder Most Queer
The Homicidal Homosexual in the American TheaterJordan Schildcrout
University of Michigan Press, 2014
My Butch Career
A MemoirEsther Newton
Duke University Press, 2018
My Father’s Closet
Karen McClintock
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
“Karen McClintock reconstructs the details of her father’s double life with novelistic flair, keen psychological insight, and graceful compassion.” —Alison Bechdel
Thirty years after her father’s death, Karen McClintock sets out to find the gay father she never really knew. As we follow the unraveling family secret, we find ourselves drawn into her story as they stumble into infidelity, grieve heartbreaking losses, and remain loyal in love.
Set in Columbus, Ohio, My Father’s Closet tells the story of how just before the war, McClintock’s parents fell in love and married, while overseas in Germany the man whom she believes became her father’s lover was concealing his Jewish and gay identities in order to escape to America. A set of her father’s journals, letters her parents sent to each other during the Second World War, and a mysterious painting all lead her toward the truth about her gay father. McClintock weaves a complex secret into the fabric of lives we truly care about. And in the process, she leads us out of her father’s closet.
This gripping memoir captures the longing children feel for a distant or hidden parent and taps into the complexity of human connection and abandonment. The characters are resilient and vibrant. The hidden lovers, the nosey neighbors, and surprise lovers all show up. In the end, this extraordinary family finds ways to connect and freedom to love. Anyone who grew up with a family secret will appreciate the dynamics afoot in this fast-paced and compelling story.
My Sister's Continent
A NovelGina Frangello, Lidia Yuknavitch
Northwestern University Press, 2026
Kirby is a young woman attempting to come to terms with a failed bout of therapy and the truth about her identical twin, Kendra. Since girlhood, Kirby both idolized and envied Kendra, a fearless and charismatic ballet dancer who commanded the attention of everyone in their orbit. In the aftermath of tragedy, Kirby is sent a case study by a former psychiatrist intent on publishing a distorted version of her family’s secrets. She responds by using Kendra’s private and revealing journals to reconstruct their final months together, as well as her own “disastrous” time in therapy, to voice her own truth.
Freud’s “Dora,” a young woman whose mysterious symptoms he contentiously chalked up to “hysteria,” appears at turns in the faces of each twin as they navigate a world of sexuality, familial dysfunction, and possibly-psychosomatic ailments. Reissued with a new foreword by Lidia Yuknavitch, Frangello’s groundbreaking early novel brings “Dora” into a new era.
My Son Wears Heels
One Mom's Journey from Clueless to KickassJulie Tarney, Foreword by Diane Ehrensaft
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
Julie had no idea what that meant. She felt disoriented. Wasn’t it her role to encourage and support her child? Surely she had to set some limits to his self-expression—or did she? Would he be bullied? Could she do the right thing? What was the right thing?
The internet was no help, because there was no internet. And there were zero books for a mom scrambling to understand a toddler who had definite ideas about his gender, regardless of how Nature had endowed him. Terms such as transgender, gender nonconforming, and gender creative were rare or nonexistent.
There were, however, mainstream experts who theorized that a “sissy” boy was the result of a domineering mother. Julie couldn’t believe it. She didn’t want to care what her neighbors thought, but she did care. “Domineering mother” meant controlling mother. It meant bad mother. It meant her mother.
Lacking a positive role model of her own, and fearful of being judged as a mom who was making her son “too feminine,” Julie embarked on an unexpected parenting path. Despite some missteps, and with no map to guide her, she learned to rely on her instincts. She listened carefully, kept an open mind, and as long as Harry was happy, she let him lead the way. Julie eventually realized that Harry knew who he was all along. Her job was simply to love and support him unconditionally, allowing him to be his authentic self. This story of a mother embracing her child’s uniqueness and her own will resonate with all families.
Winner, inaugural BeOUT Award for LGBTQ Visibility, awarded by Milwaukee Pride
My Studio Is a Dungeon Is the Studio
Writings and Interviews, 1983–2024Nayland Blake. Edited and with an Introduction by Jarrett Earnest.
Duke University Press, 2025
mPalermu, Dancers, and Other Plays
Emma Dante
Swan Isle Press, 2019
This exquisite first English translation of Emma Dante’s work enables English-speaking readers, theatre scholars, and directors alike to encounter character-driven “civic theatre” with its portraits of individuals existing at the fringes of Italy. Ultimately, it allows us to “listen” to those who are not given a voice anywhere else.