LGBTQIA+ Nonfiction bestsellers

Love in a F*cked-Up World

How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell, Together

By: Dean Spade
Narrated by: Dean Spade
Length: 7 hours 15 minutes

In this inspiring self-help handbook, a trans activist dares us to be the change we want to see—both out in the world, and amongst our closest connections.

Lifelong activist and educator Dean Spade dares us to decide that our interpersonal actions are not separate from our politics of liberation and resistance. Many activist projects 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

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

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

“I was expecting an in depth history on all the lesbian bars in the US, or maybe a travel guide with menus and reviews, but what I got was a delightful travel memoir full of queer joy and community. This book made me cry more than once, especially as our 'Dyke-ass Mother', Krista, spoke about her struggles to be loved and accepted by her family.... 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

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

He/She/They

How We Talk About Gender and Why It Matters

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

From a trans rights activist and athlete, an urgent guide that changes the conversation about gender identity.

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 curriculum, bathrooms, bars, and nearly every walk of... 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

“There is tangible power in knowing your history and feeling the love of those who came before you. If you're intimidated by tomes of queer nonfiction or jaded by corporate pride parades this is the perfect book for you. 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

All Boys Aren't Blue

A Memoir-Manifesto

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

“After listening to this book, I was outraged to learn how widely banned it is across the country - This story needs to be told and shared. 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

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

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

American Teenager

How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era

By: Nico Lang
Narrated by: Vico Ortiz
Length: 8 hours 57 minutes

From an award-winning journalist comes a vivid and moving portrait of eight trans and nonbinary teenagers across the country, following their daily triumphs, struggles, and all that encompasses growing up trans in America today.Media coverage tends to sensationalize the fight over how trans kids should be allowed to live, but what is incredibly... Read more

Queer Villains of Myth and Legend

A Revelry of Queer Rogues and Outlaws Through the Ages

By: Dan Jones
Narrated by: Dan Jones
Length: 4 hours 52 minutes

Hidden in the margins of history books, classical literature, and thousands of years of stories, myths and legends, through to contemporary literature, TV and film, there is a diverse and other-worldly super community of queer heroes to discover, learn from, and celebrate.

Be captivated by stories of forbidden love like Patroclus & Achilles... Read more

V

An empowering celebration of the vulva and vagina

By: Florence Schechter
Narrated by: Florence Schechter
Length: 6 hours 55 minutes

Brought to you by Penguin.

The journey towards celebrating your vagina can be a long one. But once you set off, you'll never look back.

Are you ready to begin this all-important adventure, and reach a place of confidence and admiration for your vagina, vulva and incredible body? By the end of this book, you will be ready to talk about the vulva... 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

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

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

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

“Refusing Compulsory Sexuality is such an insightful read for those looking to better understand asexuality and acephobia through a Black Feminist lens. Brown takes readers through social, medical, and cultural applications of how our world functions around sex and heterosexuality and liberatory approaches to decentering both. This book can help... 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

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

Flamboyants

The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I'd Known

By: George M. Johnson
Narrated by: George M. Johnson
Length: 2 hours 23 minutes

“Should be in every high school. All I can think of is how many young lives can be saved by listening to this book. Knowing your art, your race AND your queerness should be celebrated, not hidden. 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

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

The LGBTQ + History Book

DK Big Ideas

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

“What do you know about lgbtq history? Probably not as much as you want. This book is a great starting point to get a bigger picture understanding of lgbtq history. Read more

The Sacred Band

Three Hundred Theban Lovers Fighting to Save Greek Freedom

By: James Romm
Narrated by: Vivienne Leheny
Length: 9 hours 5 minutes

From classicist James Romm comes a “striking…fascinating” (Booklist) deep dive into the last decades of ancient Greek freedom leading up to Alexander the Great’s destruction of Thebes—and the saga of the greatest military corps of the time, the Theban Sacred Band, a unit composed of 150 pairs of male lovers.

The story of the Sacred Band, an elite... 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful

How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic

By: Jack Lowery
Narrated by: Vikas Adam
Length: 14 hours 9 minutes

The story of art collective Gran Fury—which fought back during the AIDS crisis through direct action and community-made propaganda—offers lessons in love and grief.

In the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was annihilating queer people, intravenous drug users, and communities of color in America, and disinformation about the disease ran rampant. Out... Read more

A Place of Our Own

Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women's Culture

By: June Thomas
Narrated by: June Thomas
Length: 6 hours 52 minutes

A deeply researched and highly readable cultural history of queer women’s lives in the second half of the twentieth century, told through six iconic spaces. For as long as queer women have existed, they’ve created gathering grounds where they can be themselves. From the intimate darkness of the lesbian bar to the sweaty camaraderie of the... Read more

Radical Tarot

By: Charlie Claire Burgess
Narrated by: Charlie Claire Burgess
Length: 10 hours

Radical Tarot meets the tarot in a space of evolution, deconstruction, and creation, using the historical and common meanings of the cards as a launchpad for digging into limiting beliefs and societal conditioning and unlocking the personal truths beneath. The Fool's Journey is re-envisioned as a journey to non-binary thinking, the gender... 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

How You Get Famous

Ten Years of Drag Madness in Brooklyn

By: Nicole Pasulka
Narrated by: Nicky Endres
Length: 10 hours 24 minutes

A “funny, poignant, dishy, and even enlightening” adventure through a tight-knit world of drag performers making art, mayhem, and dreaming of making it big, this book is “the story of America now” (Alexander Chee, The New York Times).

In How You Get Famous, journalist Nicole Pasulka raucously documents the rebirth of the New York drag scene,... 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

The T in LGBT

Everything you need to know about being trans

By: Jamie Raines
Narrated by: Jamie Raines & Shaaba Lotun
Length: 5 hours 14 minutes

Brought to you by Penguin.

Hey, I'm Jamie, a 29-year-old trans guy from the UK. I've been transitioning for 12 years now after realising I was trans (by accident!) at sixteen years old. I knew I was a boy since the age of four, but realised whilst growing up that I was different. It was only in my teens that I found the words to express who I was... Read more

The Velvet Rage

Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man's World

By: Alan Downs, PhD
Narrated by: Alan Downs
Length: 7 hours 14 minutes

The most important issue in a gay man’s life is not “coming out,” but coming to terms with the invalidating past. Despite the progress made in recent years, many gay men still wonder, “Are we better off?” The byproduct of growing up gay in a straight world continues to be the internalization of shame, rejection, and anger—a toxic cocktail that... 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

Transland

Consent, Kink, and Pleasure

By: Mx. Sly
Narrated by: Sebastian Marziali
Length: 8 hours 30 minutes

A memoir of transformation and self-discovery that explores fetish communities from a gender diverse perspective. Transland is a fiery and revealing memoir that delves into what happens when a non-binary person goes looking for self-worth and a sense of belonging in fetish subculture, only to find that fetish communities come with just as... Read more

None of the Above

Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary

By: Travis Alabanza
Narrated by: Travis Alabanza
Length: 6 hours 44 minutes

In None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary, Travis Alabanza considers seven phrases people have directed at them throughout their life. These phrases—some deceptively innocuous, some deliberately loaded or violent, some celebratory—have fundamentally shaped Alabanza, both for better and for worse. But these phrases also... 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

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

The Transgender Issue

Trans Justice Is Justice for All

By: Shon Faye
Narrated by: Shon Faye
Length: 9 hours 58 minutes

An incisive case for trans justice from a powerful new voice



In this brilliant introduction to trans politics, journalist Shon Faye gives an incisive overview of systemic transphobia and argues that the struggle for trans rights is necessary to any struggle for social justice.



So often, Faye argues, trans people are understood as a "side issue,"... Read more