Collection: Shop Queer

Despite decades of medical and psychological research confirming that masturbation is healthy, the act remains shrouded in taboo and pseudoscience. In DIY, Dr. Eric Sprankle reveals the untold story of crusaders on a long campaign to suppress masturbation and the sex educators fighting back with science. He introduces readers to a colorful cast of characters: doctors advocat­ing for the use of chastity devices, wellness influencers who believe ejaculation depletes the body of vital nutrients, pastors who preach that masturbation creates mermaids, and vibrator aficionados who teach the curious how to come. DIY will challenge what you think you know about the very human need for self-pleasure.

An Indispensable Toolset for Same-Sex Parenthood

"An absolute 'must-have' for any LGBT couple engaged in family planning!" --Midwest Book Review

First published in 2016 and winner of four literary awards.* Now updated and packed with valuable information and more powerful stories of same-sex parents achieving and navigating parenthood.

Yes, you do have options. Same-sex couples (gay dads, lesbian moms, or other queer couples) are faced with many different options when choosing to have a family that includes beautiful children. In Journey to Parenthood, author, activist and father Eric Rosswood guides and helps prospective LGBTQIA parents explore adoption, foster care, assisted reproduction, surrogacy and co-parenting.

Create your own happy family unit. Each section includes a description of a specific family-building approach, followed by personal stories from same-sex couples and individuals who have chosen that particular path. Learn strategies for dealing with challenges you will encounter on this parenting journey.

Inside find:

• Strategies for successfully navigating same sex parenthood
• Firsthand accounts combined with critical tips and advice
• Updated information about adoption, foster care, assisted reproduction, surrogacy and co-parenting

If you benefited from Eric Rosswood's bestselling book We Make It Better or his Ultimate Guide for Gay Dads; or have read parenting books like Raised by Unicorns, Raising Good Humans, What to Expect When You're Expecting, or The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, you'll want to read Journey to Parenthood.

* Winner of the 2017 IAN Book of the Year Awards in the Parenting/Family/Relationships category; the 2017 Readers' Favorite International Book Awards in the Parenting category; the 2017 Best Book Awards in the LGBTQ, Non-Fiction category; and finalist in the 2017 International Book Awards.

From the celebrated author of feeld comes a formally commanding third collection, dexterously recounting the survival of a period suffused with mourning.

Jos Charles's poems communicate with one another as neurons do: sharp, charged, in language that predates language. "A scandal / three cartons red / in a hedge / in / each the thousand eye research of flies." With acute lyricism, she documents how a person endures seemingly relentless devastation--California wildfires, despotic legislation, housing insecurity--amid illusions of safety. "I wanted to believe," Charles declares, "a corner a print leaned to / a corner can save / a people." Still the house falls apart. Death visits and lingers. Belief proves, again and again, that belief alone is not enough.

Yet miraculously, one might still manage to seek--propelled by love, or hope, or sometimes only momentum--something better. There is a place where there are no futile longings, no persistent institutional threats to one's life. Poems might take us there; tenderness, too, as long as we can manage to keep moving. "A current / gives as much as it has," writes Charles--despite fire, despite loss.

Harrowing and gorgeous, a Year & other poems is an astonishing new collection from a poet of "unusual beauty and lyricism" (New Yorker).

"A lyrical and moving debut...A magical book that feels like your favorite song playing on the radio." -- Rachael Lippincott, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Five Feet Apart

A queer YA Mamma Mia! with a dash of Maureen Johnson, The Last Love Song celebrates the music of an uncertain heart--perfect for fans of Nina LaCour, Laura Taylor Namey, and Emma Lord.

After high school graduation, Mia Peters faces a summer full of painful goodbyes. Songwriting is her only solace. Everyone she knows is moving on, including Britt, her biggest supporter ... and kind-of-sort-of girlfriend. Britt keeps pushing Mia to go bigger and do better than their small town, but Mia can't imagine a life beyond Sunset Cove. Besides, she refuses to follow in the footsteps of her late mother--country music star Tori Rose--who abandoned her family to pursue her dream, leaving Mia and her two grandmothers alone.

Desperate for a sign of what might lie ahead, Mia finds the opposite--a mysterious letter from the past, addressed to her in her mother's handwriting. It turns out to be the first of many. One by one, they lead Mia on a wild scavenger hunt through a Sunset Cove she never knew, buried under the memorializing that has frozen her mother in time. Each new discovery brings Mia closer to the real Tori Rose, but with the clock ticking on Britt's departure, Mia knows she is running out of time.

With the summer winding down, Mia must decide if she is ready to face the present, confront her feelings, and forge the destiny she truly wants. A dazzlingly soulful debut, The Last Love Song is perfect for anyone who's ever tried to decode the clues in the lead-up to a new Taylor Swift album.

An illuminating exploration of the surprisingly familiar sex lives of ordinary medieval people.

The medieval humoral system of medicine suggested that it was possible to die from having too much--or too little--sex, while the Roman Catholic Church taught that virginity was the ideal state. Holy men and women committed themselves to lifelong abstinence in the name of religion. Everyone was forced to conform to restrictive rules about who they could have sex with, in what way, how often, and even when, and could be harshly punished for getting it wrong. Other experiences are more familiar. Like us, medieval people faced challenges in finding a suitable partner or trying to get pregnant (or trying not to). They also struggled with many of the same social issues, such as whether prostitution should be legalized. Above all, they shared our fondness for dirty jokes and erotic images. By exploring their sex lives, the book brings ordinary medieval people to life and reveals details of their most personal thoughts and experiences. Ultimately, it provides us with an important and intimate connection to the past.

A meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity.

When you turn the music off, and suddenly you feel an unbearable sadness, that means turn the music back on, right? When you still feel the sadness, even with the music, that means there's something wrong with this music. Sometimes I feel like sex without context isn't sex at all. And sometimes I feel like sex without context is what sex should always be.
--The Freezer Door

The Freezer Door records the ebb and flow of desire in daily life. Crossing through loneliness in search of communal pleasure in Seattle, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore exposes the failure and persistence of queer dreams, the hypocritical allure of gay male sexual culture, and the stranglehold of the suburban imagination over city life.

Ferocious and tender, The Freezer Door offers a complex meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that relentlessly enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity while claiming to celebrate diversity.

Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Rajiv Mohabir's Antiman is an impassioned, genre-blending memoir that navigates the fraught constellations of race, sexuality, and cultural heritage that have shaped his experiences as an Indo-Guyanese queer poet and immigrant to the United States.

Growing up a Guyanese Indian immigrant in Central Florida, Rajiv Mohabir is fascinated by his family's abandoned Hindu history and the legacy of his ancestors, who were indentured laborers on British sugarcane plantations. In Toronto he sits at the feet of Aji, his grandmother, listening to her stories and songs in her Caribbean Bhojpuri. By now Aji's eleven children have immigrated to North America and busied themselves with ascension, Christianity, and the erasure of their heritage and Caribbean accents. But Rajiv wants to know more: where did he come from, and why does he feel so out of place?

Embarking on a journey of discovery, he lives for a year in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges, perfecting his Hindi and Bhojpuri and tracing the lineage of his Aji's music. Returning to Florida, the cognitive dissonance of confederate flags, Islamophobia, and his father's disapproval sends him to New York, where finds community among like-minded brown activists, work as an ESL teacher, and intoxication in the queer nightlife scene. But even in the South Asian paradise of Jackson Heights, Rajiv feels like an outsider: "Coolie" rather than Desi. And then the final hammer of estrangement falls when his cousin outs him as an "antiman"--a Caribbean slur for men who love men--and his father and aunts disown him.

But Aji has taught Rajiv resilience. Emerging from the chrysalis of his ancestral poetics into a new life, he embraces his identity as a poet and reclaims his status as an antiman--forging a new way of being entirely his own. Rapturous, inventive, and devastating in its critique of our own failures of inclusion, Antiman is a hybrid memoir that helps us see ourselves and relationships anew, and announces an exciting new talent in Rajiv Mohabir.

Learn all about important leaders who represent, empower, and support the LGBTQIA+ community in this engaging board book perfect for proud leaders-in-training!

Now even the youngest readers can learn all about important people who are from or helped support the LGBTQIA+ community! Highlighting ten memorable people who paved the way, parents and little ones alike will love this discovery primer full of fun, age-appropriate facts and bold illustrations.

"Distressingly smart, wickedly sly, and side-clutchingly hilarious."
--Vanessa Chan, author of The Storm We Made

"If you want a book that perfectly evokes millennial sexual politics under late-stage capitalism, and in which all of us--gay, straight, cis, and trans alike--are read for absolute filth, then look no further than Trust and Safety."
--Rafael Frumkin, author of Confidence and Bugsy

A wry yet tenderhearted novel about a couple who attempt to buy their way into a "wild and precious" existence in the Hudson Valley, where they quickly become entangled with a queer couple living the dream analog life

Newlywed Rosie has grown disenchanted with NYC. Inspired by Instagram ads, she starts thirsting for a rural life upstate--one full of beauty and authenticity. She just needs to convince her tech-bro husband, Jordan, of her vision for the future. Willing to do anything for Rosie's happiness, Jordan signs on, and they offer--well above asking price--on a beautiful, historic fixer-upper in the Hudson Valley.

But when Jordan suddenly loses his job, the couple is forced to rent out the property's dilapidated outbuilding. There's no heat, it's overrun with mold, and nothing works.

Enter Dylan and Lark: an incredibly attractive and handy queer couple who offer to rent the outbuilding and help Rosie and Jordan with repairs. They also happen to be living the life Rosie had envisioned for herself: hand-built furniture, herbal tinctures, guinea hens, and hand-dyed linens. Rosie grows increasingly infatuated with their new tenants, especially with model-esque, charismatic Dylan--to Jordan's increasing distress.

Whip-smart and wickedly funny, Trust and Safety examines questions of authenticity, betrayal, belonging, and entitlement, while poking fun at contemporary fear of the "gay agenda."

An energetic, interactive YA novel about five solo pop artists navigating drama, finding their sound, and discovering what it truly takes to chase their dreams of music stardom after being forced into a pop group together.

Everly Brooks knows she has what it takes to be the next big singer-songwriter. At least, that's if she could get her onstage presence to stop feeling so wooden and blossom like her rich, moving lyrics. The reality signing competition, SO YOU WANNA BE A POP STAR? is her chance at proving to the world--and herself--that her talent and artistry can mean something more than just live streams and online videos.

Vinny Vecchi thought he was heading toward a life full of makeup, wigs, and werking it on the drag stages of NYC. But a powerful diva voice is a precious thing to waste and, in need of money to make his drag dreams come true, SO YOU WANNA BE A POP STAR? is the next best thing. However, surrounded by competitors with clear brands and sharpened musical identities, he wonders if he can break through while still discovering himself.

When a group performance on the show goes viral overnight, Everly and Vinny find their careers unexpectedly tied together. Along with their competitors--influencer Dea Seo, pop-punk CeCe Winnifred, and heartthrob Stern Green--these five artists are forced to become the newest pop super group: Jeweltones.

You, the reader, get to make choices that will make or break Everly, Vinny, and the group's meteoric rise in this interactive novel. Will you mend the cracks to help Jeweltones shine bright, or will they burn out under pressure? The choices are yours to make!

A moving and provocative graphic memoir exploring inherited trauma, family history, and the ever-shifting understanding of our own identities, for readers of Gender Queer and I Was Their American Dream.

Solomon Brager grew up with accounts of their great-grandparents' escape from Nazi Germany, told over and over until their understanding of self was bound up with the heroic details of their ancestors' exploits. Their great-grandmother related how her husband, a boxing champion, thrashed Joseph Goebbels and cleared beer halls of Nazis with his fists, how she broke him out of an internment camp and carried their children over the Pyrenees mountains. But that story was never the whole picture; zooming out, everything becomes more complicated.

Alongside the Levis' propulsive journey across Europe and to the United States, Brager distills fascinating research about the Holocaust and connected periods of colonial history. Heavyweight asks us to consider how the patterns of history emerge and reverberate, not as a simple chain of events but in haunting layers. Confronting the specters of violence as both historian and descendent, this book is an exploration of family mythology, intergenerational memory, and the mark the past makes on the present.

In conversation with works by Rebecca Hall, Nora Krug, Rutu Modan, and Leela Corman, Heavyweight will contribute to the collective work of Holocaust studies and the chronicle of woven human stories.

Born in the rural south in the late 1950's, Midge Noble was raised in a household with strict parents and fundamentalist religious beliefs. Attending parties or movies was not allowed. Her paternal grandfather, Paw Paw, a fire and brimstone Advent Christian preacher, believed the Bible was the literal word of God and condemned homosexuals to hell. As a teen, Noble felt a calling for missionary work but grew up with a conflicted view of God and the Church. She always felt that somehow she was different, but couldn't quite put her finger on why. In this frank and heartfelt memoir, Noble recounts her childhood years and her struggles as a young adult with her faith and true identity. Doubting herself and her choices, her inner turmoil manifested itself as bulimia and anorexia, and denial and harsh judgment of her feelings. She didn't come out to herself as gay until she was thirty years old. Noble's poignant journey to reclaim her Christian faith shows that a relationship with the God of your understanding is possible, no matter what you've been taught to the contrary. Honesty and learning to trust your inner guidance are critical for healthy emotional and social development. For anyone questioning how they can reconcile their faith and their sexual identity, Noble's inspiring book is a light to shine the way.

Dive into the grand adventure of two young royals seeking to end the war between their two kingdoms in what Kirkus calls, "A Sapphic fantasy romance series-opener brimming with blood and longing."

Climb the tower. Kill the princess.

Evhen, princess--no, queen--of Vodaeard, is on a revenge mission. After witnessing her parents' brutal murder by the king of Marama and the horror of his undead army, she's vowed to kill his daughter. It'll be poetic justice and also take away his supernatural edge in the war. But when she realizes the princess might be an ignorant pawn, she changes course and hides her royal identity--after all, she can't trust an enemy, no matter how beautiful she is.

Stay alive. Break the curse.

Princess Kalei of Marama is moon-blessed, allowing her to resurrect her kingdom's loyal subjects. But when she's attacked in her safe lighthouse by a fiery pirate, her worldview is shattered once she learns what her power is really being used for. Determined to prove her innocence and willingness to stop her father, she has no choice but to trust her would-be killer to safely deliver her to the Vodaeardean princess. But who can she trust in when it seems Captain Evhen is not the only one who wants her dead?

A memoir of poems and art, Coming Out Party chronicles poet and author Rebecca Bendheim's queer coming of age journey -- from first crushes and toxic homo-erotic friendships, to coming out and secret flings, to finding queer community and falling in love for the first time. Coming Out Party is a fierce, funny, and deeply personal celebration of the strength it takes to break down the protective walls we've built-and embrace our truest selves.

This illustrated compendium celebrates LGBTQIA+ history and culture, written by and according to culture icon Justin Elizabeth Sayre!

Based on Sayre's five-part show in New York City, From Gay to Z is a humorous collection of the rich legacy of gay culture, told through the letters of the alphabet. From ABBA to addiction, hair and makeup to HIV, Fannie Flagg to fierce, Sayre offers their own perspective on the things that have influenced gay culture today, including iconic figures, historical moments, ongoing issues in the LGBTQIA+ community, and everything in between. As gay culture is always evolving and different for everyone, this book does not serve as a definitive guide--instead, Sayre encourages readers to use this knowledge to reflect on the things that have informed their personal identities. Engagingly written and beautifully designed, From Gay to Z is a distinctive and dynamic look at gay culture for LGBTQIA+ readers everywhere.

STRONG VOICE AND ENGAGING CONTENT: Sayre's writing is lively, engaging, and rich. The entries have their own style and contain humorous anecdotes, facts, commentary, and more--all told through Sayre's animated yet authoritative voice.

BELOVED, WELL-KNOWN AUTHOR: Sayre is active and well-known in the LGBTQIA+ community and beyond. They've been recognized as one of "LA's 16 Most Talented LGBT Comics" by Frontiers Magazine, and their debut comedy album, The Gay Agenda, was named one of 2016's "Best Things in Comedy" by The Comedy Bureau. They host their own podcast, Sparkle & Circulate, where they interview performers, writers, and other creative minds of the LGBTQIA+ community. As an activist, Justin's charity benefit show, "Night of a Thousand Judys," raises money for the Ali Forney Center for Homeless LGBTQIA+ youth and is now in its 7th year.

Perfect for:

- LGBTQIA+ people of all ages
- Fans of Trixie and Katya's Guide to Modern Womanhood
- Those looking for a birthday or holiday gift for their LGBTQIA+ friends and family

In PORN AGAIN: A MEMOIR, Josh Sabarra throws open the proverbial closet -- and bedroom --doors, taking readers on a Hollywood thrill-ride through growing up, coming out, coming of age and finally finding himself at 40. Despite being a high-level entertainment executive, Josh was still a virgin at 31. Uncomfortable in his own skin, haunted by painful childhood memories, he kept laser-focused on building an unparalleled career trajectory at the expense of his personal life.

Tormented by schoolmates for being "different," Josh clung to his aberrantly close relationships with a small circle of adult females. But, even with that support, the shame and contempt that grew from his sexuality locked him in a prison of self-hate that robbed him of an emotional and sexual identity for more than three decades. Movie studio jobs, through which he met celebrity idols, led to friendships and relationships with some of the industry's most notable characters. Those intimacies created a false sense of acceptance and approval, requiring that he continue to up the stakes - celebrity lovers, the crazy world of online dating, sexual fetishists and porn stars-for-hire.

The gay best friend you always wanted, Josh Sabarra delivers a whip-smart, poignant memoir set against a glittering backdrop that is at once heartbreaking, glamorous, sexy and hilariously honest.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Josh Sabarra is a veteran marketing executive and television producer who has held positions at The Walt Disney Company, Warner Bros. Studios, Miramax Films, New Line Cinema and Lifetime Networks. He resides in Los Angeles, California, where he is the president and CEO of his own public relations firm, Breaking News PR. This is his first book.