Memoirs of Sex and Self

I’m at an age when writers are supposed to say finally what mattered most to them-for me it would be thousands of sex partners The 85-year-old “paterfamilias of queer literature” ( New York Times ) recounts the sixty-plus years of sexual escapades that have inspired his many masterpieces. He explores the sex he had with other closeted boys of the 50s Midwest, with women as a young man trying to be straight, the sex he’s paid for and been paid for, sex during the Stonewall and HIV eras, and in the age of the apps. Through tales of transactional sex, mutual admiration, open relationships, domination, submission, love, and loss, he paints an indelible portrait of queer history in America and abroad in a way only someone who has lived through it can.

In the before, Jesse James Rose is happy. She has a beautiful boyfriend with melty glacier eyes, she’s on a euphoric journey of gender exploration, and New York City is perfect. In the after, she’s single, making dinner for her grandfather, and wondering if he’s going to forget her name today. Except, in the before, her first-grade music teacher led her into a dark room to show her something he shouldn’t have. And in the after, she’s finding healing and comfort in coming into her own, even as her grandfather declines. Following the aftermath of an assault, and the heartache of caring for a grandfather with Alzheimer’s, ‘Sorry I Keep Crying During Sex’tells a captivating story of identity, recovery, grief, survivorship, and transness.

Molly Roden Winter was a mom of two young children in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with a husband, Stewart, who often worked late. One night when Stewart missed the kids’ bedtime, again. She stormed out of the house to clear her head. At impromptu drinks with a friend, she met Matt, an unbelievably hot younger man. When Molly told her husband that Matt had asked her out, she was surprised that he encouraged her to accept. So begins Molly’s unexpected open marriage, and with it a life-changing journey of self-discovery. Molly and Stewart, who also begins to see other people, set ground rules to start: Don’t date an ex. Don’t date someone you work with. Don’t go to anyone’s house. And above all, don’t fall in love. Spoiler alert: They end up breaking most of their rules, even the most important one.

Annie Liontas suffered multiple concussions in her thirties. In ‘Sex with a Brain Injury,’ she writes about what it means to be one of the “walking wounded,” facing her fear, her rage, her physical suffering, and the effects of head trauma on her marriage and other relationships. Forced to reckon with her own queer mother’s battle with addiction, Liontas finds echoes in their pain. Liontas weaves history, philosophy, and personal accounts to interrogate and expand representations of mental health, ability, and disability–particularly in relation to women and the LGBT community.

What do you do when you’re too gay for Pakistan, too Pakistani to be gay in America, and you’re ashamed of your body everywhere? As a young child in Lahore, Pakistan, Komail Aijazuddin knew he was different. Aijazuddin began to believe his only chance at a happy, meaningful life would be in America–the land of the free, the home of the gays. But the hostility of a post-9/11 world and society’s rejection of his art, his desires, and his body caused him to reexamine his idea of the American Dream. ‘Manboobs’ is Aijazuddin’s memoir of searching for love and his place in between two worlds.

A taboo-bursting, personal and cultural tour through different sexual fetishes that asks: Do we have the courage to look at our desires directly, and express them unapologetically?

In these confessional pages, women control their own bodies and desires, work toward healing their painful pasts, and learn to assert their sexual power. Weaving a rich tapestry of experiences with a sex positive outlook, ‘The Sex Lives of African Women’ is an empowering, subversive book that celebrates the liberation, individuality, and joy of African women’s multifaceted sexuality. From a queer community in Egypt, to polyamorous life in Senegal, and a reflection on the intersection of religion and pleasure in Cameroon, feminist author Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah explores the many layers of love and desire, its expression, and how it defines who we are.

A queer teen rebel escapes small-town Appalachia and becomes Los Angeles’s Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix in this searing and darkly funny memoir that upends our ideas about desire, class, and power. The dominatrix is the id of American femininity. She says the words that we all wish we could say when we find ourselves frozen in the presence of men. No is principal among them. So writes Chris Belcher, who appeared destined for a life of conventional femininity after she took first place in an infant beauty contest–a minor glory that followed her around a working-class town of 1,600 people in rural West Virginia. But when she came out as queer, the conservative community that had once celebrated its prettiest baby turned on her.

‘Thank you, John’ is Michelle Gurule’s debut memoir: a heartfelt, laugh-out-loud tragi-comedy of errors based on her time spent as an inexperienced sugarbaby in 2010s Denver. Left to her own devices and barely making ends meet, she turns to the world of stripping until her chance for financial freedom arrives in the form of John, a lonely older man who offers her a weekly pile of cash for lively conversation and sex. Looking back at her time as a 24-year-old stripper and sugarbaby, struggling to pull herself–and her entire family–out of poverty, Gurule grins and bears it all in a tragi-comedy of errors: heartbreak, complete social isolation and self-denial, glares at The Cheesecake Factory, cringey sex, and scheme after scheme for a better life with everything money can buy.

In a memoir that celebrates the creative possibilities of intimate relationships, writer and psychotherapist Wayne Scott’s ‘The Maps They Gave Us’ is an unlikely love story: a distraught couple with three school-aged children, on their way to get a divorce, are surprised when they fall in love again. In a voice at once vulnerable, tender, lucid, and funny, Wayne Scott offers the perspective of a queer (bisexual) man in a mixed-orientation marriage. After the couple separate, stunned and careening toward divorce—the expected outcome—they find themselves in a tiny room with a quirky and compassionate relationship therapist who offers them a challenge: find a ‘common story’ about what brought them together to help them navigate the next iteration of their relationship.

‘Boyslut’ is a series of personal and tantalizing essays that articulate how our society still shames people for the sex that they have and the sexualities that they inhabit. Through the lens of his bisexuality and much self-described sluttiness, Zane breaks down exactly how this sexual shame negatively impacts the sex and relationships in our lives, and through personal experience, shares how we can unlearn the harmful, entrenched messages that society imparts to us. From stories of drug-fueled threesomes and risqué Grindr hookups to insights on dealing with rejection and living with his boyfriend and his wife, ‘Boyslut’ is reassuring and often painfully funny–but is most potently a testimony that we can all learn to live healthier lives unburdened by stigma.

A provocative, moving, kinky, and often absurdly funny memoir about Shakespeare, love, obsession, and spanking. ‘Sex with Shakespeare’ tells the story of how the Bard’s plays helped Keenan embrace her unusual sexual identity and find a love story of her own. With fourteen of his plays as a springboard, Keenan explores the many facets of love and sexuality–from desire and communication to fetish and fantasy. In ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ Keenan unmasks Helena as a sexual masochist–like Jillian herself. In ‘Macbeth,’ she examines criminalized sexual identities and the dark side of “privacy.” ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ goes inside the secret world of bondage, domination, and sadomasochism, while ‘King Lear’ exposes the ill-fated king as a possible sexual predator. Moving through the canon, Keenan makes it abundantly clear that literature is a conversation.

A wise and transformative look at relationships and self-knowledge In the wake of a disastrous two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break–for three months she would abstain from dating, from relationships, even from casual sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship or another. As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances” from then to now, in her mid-thirties. It was time to focus on herself and examine the lifelong patterns that had produced her midlife disaster.

In this wryly humorous and innovative look at a marriage gone wrong, Hannah Pittard recalls a decade’s worth of unforgettable conversations, beginning with the one in which she discovers her husband has been having sex with her charismatic best friend, Trish. These time-jumping exchanges are fast-paced, intimate, and often jaw-dropping in their willingness to reveal the vulnerabilities inherent in any friendship or marriage. Blending fact and fiction, sometimes re-creating exchanges with extreme accuracy and sometimes diving headlong into pure speculation, Pittard takes stock not only of her own past and future but also of the larger, more universal experiences they connect with–from the depths of female rage to the heartbreaking ways we inevitably outgrow certain people.