Outhouse East Library 1 / 29
My Father and Myself When his father died, J. R. Ackerley was shocked to discover that he had led a secret life. And after Ackerley himself died, he left a surprise of his own—this coolly considered, unsparingly honest account of his quest to find out the whole truth about the man who had always eluded him in life. But Ackerley's pursuit of his father is also an exploration of the self, making My Father and Myself a pioneering record, at once sexually explicit and emotionally charged, of life as a gay man. This witty, sorrowful, and beautiful book is a classic of twentieth-century memoir.
J. R. Ackerley
Autobiography, Gay
Book#: ABIOC001
Tainted Life: The Autobiography Marc Almond's story features a larger than life cast of characters. It recounts his "de rigeur" plunge into drink, drugs, and debauchery as well as being an intimate portrait of the star-making personalities of the 1980s.
The Reverie Bubble Feeling confined by his conservative and religious Mid-western upbringing, closeted Jason, who has created a career of being a globe-trotting gypsy since graduating from college, prepares to fly away to a new life in The Reverie Bubble on the day the world changed forever, 9/11. While others scramble to the safety of home and family with this fateful and powerful event, Jason carries on to find his paradise, finally landing in a bohemian beach colony along the California coast. Certain that he is destined to dwell here for a period of time; Jason discovers a true home within this magical microcosm. As his desire to find a home in another man's heart begins competing with his longing to continue searching the cosmos, Jason vacillates between planting roots or moving on. In the winsome splendor of Laguna Beach, he is introduced to a cast of eccentric characters, the Lagunatics, who help him find acceptance with his sexuality while embracing him as a member of their universe. Potent...
Autobiography, Gay, Religion
An Immaculate Mistake: Scenes from Childhood and Beyond Paul Bailey's remarkable account of growing up working class and gay in south London just after the war. His father had come back from WWI to find that he'd been abandonned by his wife, and in early middle age, working as a road sweepeer, he married a young servant girl. Bailey was one of three children brought up in such poverty that up to the middle of his adolescence he slept in the same bed as his father because of lack of space in the house. Nevertheless it was a happy, secure home which he protrays with great affection. The second strand of the book is his discovery at grammar school (he was the brains of the family) that he's homosexual - a discovery which didn't go down well in rigidly conventional Battersea. The book is extremely funny in places, evocative, and particularly moving in its portrait of the author's mother.
My Animals and Other Family I had spent most of my childhood thinking I was a dog, and suspect I had aged in dog years. By the time I was ten I had discovered the pain of unbearable loss. I had felt joy and jealousy. Most important of all, I knew how to love and how to let myself be loved. All these things I learnt through animals. Horses and dogs were my family and my friends. This is their story as much as it is mine'. Clare Balding grew up in a rather unusual household. Her father a champion trainer, she shared her life with more than 100 thoroughbred racehorses, mares, foals and ponies, as well as an ever-present pack of boxers and lurchers. As a toddler she would happily ride the legendary Mill Reef and take breakfast with the Queen. She and her younger brother came very low down the pecking order. Left to their own devices, they had to learn life's toughest lessons through the animals, and through their adventures in the stables and the idyllic Hampshire Downs. From the protective Candy to the pot-bellied V...
Clare Balding
Anything Goes From his Glaswegian childhood and American adolescence to his starring role in the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood, this memoir traces the life and career of actor John Barrowman. John made a name for himself with remarkable West End achievements, including an Olivier Award nomination and success in the movies The Producers and De-Lovely. Television success was also assured when Torchwood won a Best Drama BAFTA. John also lays bare his personal life: his emigration as a child, coming out to his family, turning down a job at Disney, and his civil partnership with long-term partner Scott Gill. Revelatory and insightful, told with real heart and characteristic Barrowman charm, this is a wonderful tale of how one boy achieved his dreams.
John Barrowman, Carole E. Barrowman
Autobiography, Film/Cinema, Gay, Television
I Am What I Am Written with John's trademark style, I Am What I Am is filled with juicy titbits from behind the scenes of Doctor Who and Torchwood, alongside heartwarming family anecdotes and personal revelations, including John's perspective on fame and how it has affected him. Intimately exploring aspects of John's current life, this memoir gives fans the opportunity to get up close and personal with exclusive anecdotes from recent and ongoing projects, all told with John's trademark charm and humor—an unmissable treat for any fan.
Autobiography, Gay, Television
Just Take Your Frock Off: A Lesbian Life The daughter of a mill worker in Lancashire, Barbara Bell had her lesbian 'initiation' the year after Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness" (1928) Since then, she has never had the time to be lonely. Her Uncle Jack was the first in a long line of gay men who befriended her - one workmate even taught her about French kissing in the lunchbreaks. But always Barbara was on the look-out for women like herself. She found them in Girl Guide camps, Paris clubs, Park Lane tea rooms, Hitler's Germany, London in the blitz, a Watford approved school and a Nigerian village. She had two lesbian 'marriages' but also illicit and delicious little 'flutters'. She was butch in tailored suits and femme in crocheted lace. In a silent world she learned to be discreet but she never turned her back on love.
Living in Brighton in the early sixties, Barbara zoomed round the countryside in a sportscar, counselling heart-broken lesbians. Gay liberation ushered in a world of more freedoms than she could ever ...
Barbara Bell
Autobiography, Lesbian
Family Outing From Chastity Bono, daughter of Sonny & Cher, heroine of the gay community: the first comprehensive guide to the coming-out process from the perspective of both gays & lesbians & their parents.
Billie Fitzpatrick, Chastity Bono
Autobiography, Coming Out, Family, Gay, Lesbian
Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us I know I'¬m not a man . . . and I¬'ve come to the conclusion that I¬'m probably not a woman, either. . . . . The trouble is, we¬re living in a world that insists we be one or the other.¬ With these words, Kate Bornstein ushers readers on a funny, fearless, and wonderfully scenic journey across the terrains of gender and identity. On one level, Gender Outlaw details Bornstein¬s transformation from heterosexual male to lesbian woman, from a one-time IBM salesperson to a playwright and performance artist. But this particular coming-of-age story is also a provocative investigation into our notions of male and female, from a self-described nonbinary transfeminine diesel femme dyke who never stops questioning our cultural assumptions.
Gender Outlaw was decades ahead of its time when it was first published in 1994. Now, some twenty-odd years later, this book stands as both a classic and a still-revolutionary work-one that continues to push us gently but profoundly to the furthest borders of ...
Kate Bornstein
Autobiography, Gender, Lesbian, Non-Binary, Transgender
Free Spirit Now Angie Bowie tells her own extraordinary story: the strict upbringing; expulsion from college for an affair with another girl; the life with David; the strain his stardom had on their marriage; the struggle for an independent career.
With Angie's poems and sixteen pages of revealing photographs, Free Spirit is as outrageous, moving, funny and uninhibited as Angie Bowie herself.
Art/Photography, Autobiography, Bisexual, Poetry
Bowie A very readable biography of Bowie up to 1983. Hopkins' riveting study gets behind the many images that have concealed the elusive David Jones of Brixton, London. Drawing on interviews with family members, ex-lovers, friends and associates, he describes Bowie early struggle and eventual breakthrough, and his development as an artist: the albums, videos, films and tours. It is illustrated with rare black & white photographs and contains a discography, filmography and videography. The tone is informative throughout and much emphasis is placed on the music and Bowie's development as artist. Well-written, interesting without being gossipy, this book is thoroughly enjoyable and comprehensive as an early history of the artist and singer.
Biography, Music
Straight The autobiography of one of the UK's most flamboyant and charismatic stars, guaranteed to shock, amuse and tantalize.
In the thirteen years since the conclusion of the first part of his memoirs, Take It Like a Man, Boy George has reinvented himself. As that story closed, George was coming to terms with the fall-out from his drug addiction, the failure of his relationship with Jon Moss and the collapse of Culture Club. For lesser men this would have been the end, but for George it became the start of a period of startling personal and creative reinvention. Told with George's trademark biting wit, brutal honesty and sparkling insight, this new book will bring his remarkable story up to date: from his role as a world-class DJ spearheading the dance music revolution in clubs all over the world, to his cutting-edge record label, and his role in the theatrical sensation Taboo.
Tracing the momentous twists and turns of Boy George's personal and artistic life over the last decade-and-a-half,...
Boy George, Paul Gorman
Autobiography, Music
Take it Like a Man: The Autobiography of Boy George When he was a little boy growing up in Woolwich, the 'pink sheep' of his working-class Irish family, George wanted to be like Shirley Bassey. As a man, famous for his gender-bending clothes and elaborate make up as much as for his success as the lead singer of Culture Club, he became a media darling and pop icon. And then came fame, and drugs, and a spectacular fall from grace ...Writing with complete honesty, and with his usual biting wit, Boy George chronicles his extraordinary life and times in this highly acclaimed autobiography.
Boy George, Spencer Bright
Marlon Brando The definitive account of this elusive actor, MARLON BRANDO offers a penetrating look at Brando's evolving persona and legendary roles: the volcanic Stanley Kowalski of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, the sensitive rebel of THE WILD ONES, and the iconic Don Corleone of THE GODFATHER, achieving unparalleled critical acclaim for his many memorable characters. Bosworth probes the influence of Brando's alcoholic parents on his acting, his decades of psychoanalysis, and his tumultuous personal relationships. Here, from rebellious unknown to reluctant idol to falling star, is the complex, charismatic genius who changed the face of acting.
Biography, Film/Cinema
This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death A noted author and novelist presents a selection of essays and journals that explore his sexuality, relationships, and the advance and effect of the AIDS virus within him from which he eventually died.
AIDS/HIV, Autobiography, Diary, Essays
Parallel Lives Involved in the gay press from Jeremy (1969) to Gay Times (1985), Peter Burton is uniquely qualified to survey twenty years of rapid change in the gay world. This witty and entertaining memoir covers a multitude of themes, including the mod clubs of the 1960s; a teenage literary apprenticeship; reminiscences of Gerald Hamilton and Michael Davidson; collaboration with Robin Maugham; touring with Rod Stewart; and the rise and fall of Gay News.
Peter Burton
Nineteen Seventy-Nine: A Big Year in a Small Town Nineteen Seventy-nine takes place in a small fishing town called Musselburgh, situated on the east coast of Scotland. It's about a young girl who is very naive yet incredibly self-aware in the year that changed her life forever - an evocative, moving and at times hilarious true-life story about growing up gay in a small town, finding out you're adopted, and losing your father at the age of 14. Always an outsider, the Rhona of 1979 was desperate to fit in at any cost, and here lies the bittersweet humour. At the heart of the book is the Clubhouse, a place that symbolises all that is normal, happy, and secure. Sons with their fathers; 15 year-old boys with their girlfriends for their first underage drink. Wives with their husbands for the Christmas disco. And behind the club, outside, Rhona and her friends are smoking, fighting, kissing and drinking. In this darkly funny and deeply biographical first book, Rhona Cameron takes us back to a year when everything seemed to change. A new Brit...
Rhona Cameron
Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love The gay socialist writer Edward Carpenter had an extraordinary impact on the cultural and political landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A mystic advocate of, among other causes, free love, recycling, nudism, women¬s suffrage and prison reform, his work anticipated the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Sheila Rowbotham¬s highly acclaimed biography situates Carpenter¬s life and thought in relation to the social, aesthetic and intellectual movements of his day, and explores his friendships with figures such as Walt Whitman, E.M. Forster, Isadora Duncan and Emma Goldman. Edward Carpenter is a compelling portrait of a man described by contemporaries as a ¬weather-vane¬ for his times.
Sheila Rowbotham
Biography, Gay
Look Who it is! My Story The brilliantly funny Sunday Times top ten bestseller. Alan Carr tells his life story in his own words, from growing up in a football-mad family in Northampton to his rise as one of Britain's best-loved comedians. 'Puberty had been unkind. Whereas it had come in the night and left the other boys with chiselled, stubbly chins and deep masculine voices, I'd been left with a huge pair of knockers and the voice of a pensioner.' Alan Carr Alan Carr grew up in one of the most boring towns in England - Northampton. A place known for making shoes. It was also known for its football club, Northampton Town FC. Alan's dad as manager of the club was a local hero. A dream come true for most lads, but not Alan. Alan wore glasses and had man boobs at 14. He did not like P.E. In his very first book, Alan tells his life story, ('oh and what a life') with his unique twist of natural, observational humour - 'I'm not saying I'm a fantasist but there have been times when things that I've seen on television...
Autobiography, Gay, Humour/Comedy, Television
A Young Man's Passage One of Britain's most loved comic entertainers; this is Julian Clary's story, in his own words — a touching, beautifully written and wryly-witty account of a unique progression from shy child to comedy icon.
Autobiography, Humour/Comedy
Noel Coward: A Biography To several generations, actor, playwright, songwriter, and filmmaker, Noël Coward (1899-1973) was the very personification of wit, glamour, and elegance. His biographer, Philip Hoare, given unprecedented access to the private papers and correspondence of Coward family members, compatriots, and numerous lovers, has produced the definitive biography of one of the twentieth century's most celebrated and controversial figures.
Philip Hoare
Biography, Film/Cinema, Music, Theatre/Play
The World, the Flesh and Myself Davidson's 1962 autobiography 'The world, the flesh and myself' begins: 'This is the life-history of a lover of boys.' In the book, he recalls not only his reporting from various war zones, but also his encounters with adolescent boys in those areas.
Michael Davidson
The Marquis de Sade De Sade has given his name to a perversion that is especially prevalent today. Simone de Beauvoir, in a shattering yet sober and supremely informed analysis of his work, insists that this strange man's imagination should become more widely known. Only by revealing and disseminating de Sade's long-banned words will the original ignorance that creates perversion be cleared.
This is a remarkable book by and about one of the most controversial figures in history.
Biography, Fiction
The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade This classic book is on the life and ideas of the Marquis De Sade, the notorious sexual libertine and controversial writer, and will make an excellent addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in the subject. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900's and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Geoffrey Gorer
James Dean: A Biography Five decades after the death of James Dean, he is still revered as a distant myth and remains an enigma to a generation that hardly knows him. Yet it is this generation that has made him the most idolized actor of all time. While his film career lasted only sixteen months, it produced three cinematic greats: "East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause" and "Giant." John Howlett has conducted extensive research and interviews with actors and directors who knew Dean, to produce a revealing portrait of a complex and tragic man - the perfect embodiment of an eternal struggle who was an inspiration to several generations of rebels without a cause. His anguish was exquisitely genuine on and off the screen, and his moments of joy are rare and precious. Here is James Dean from all sides: his talent for interpreting and expressing his role as an actor, his rebellious nature, his personal frankness, his ever-probing curiosity, his tenacious struggle for success, and his sadness and sensitivity.
John Howlett
James Dean: The Mutant King James Dean: The Mutant King is an exceptional biography. It presents the complete story of James Dean's life based on lengthy research and interviews with people he worked with, his family, friends and many lovers, as well as his work in television, the theatre and cinema, with particular emphasis on the filming of East of Eden, Rebel Without A Cause and Giant. But most of all it defines the way James Dean himself mutated from farmer's boy to star, creating his own myth and becoming one of the most enduring symbols of post-war youth culture. David Dalton's book has already achieved the status of cult. Not only is it an authoritative biography of the archetypal modern hero, but it is also a visionary, enigmatic insight to a figure whose early death ensured his durability in the minds of the young.
David Dalton
James Dean: Boulevard of Broken Dreams No more than a promising actor with a handful of films to his name when he died in 1955, James Dean has since been elevated to an iconic status surpassed only by Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. And his image - a blend of '50s cool and tough-guy charm - has been vigorously marketed in the race to cash in on a legend that, forty years later, shows no sign of abating. But until now, no serious biography has looked beyond the studio-manufactured cliches to the volatile polarities of this complex star. Was he bisexual or gay? A neurotic con-man or a lost boy trying to find himself? And to what extent did his sexuality fire his performances? Drawing on many new and documented sources, and featuring previously unpublished photographs, Paul Alexander's revisionist and passionate biography will explode many people's myths about a rare acting genius.
Paul Alexander
The Funny Thing Is... Ellen DeGeneres published her first book of comic essays, the #1 bestselling My Point...and I Do Have One, way back in 1996. Not one to rest on her laurels, the witty star of stage and screen has since dedicated her life to writing a hilarious new book. That book is this book. After years of painstaking, round-the-clock research, surviving on a mere twenty minutes of sleep a night, and collaborating with lexicographers, plumbers, and mathematicians, DeGeneres has crafted a book that is both easy to use and very funny. Along with her trademark ramblings, The Funny Thing Is...contains hundreds of succinct insights into her psyche, supplemented by easy-to-understand charts, graphs, and diagrams so that you'll never miss a joke. Overseeing all aspects of production, DeGeneres labored over details both significant and insignificant, including typefaces, page number placement, and which of the thousands of world languages to use. Ultimately she selected English, as it's her mother tongue,...
Autobiography, Humour/Comedy, Lesbian
Seriously...I'm Kidding I've experienced a whole lot the last few years and I have a lot to share. So I hope that you'll take a moment to sit back, relax and enjoy the words I've put together for you in this book. I think you'll find I've left no stone unturned, no door unopened, no window unbroken, no rug unvacuumed, no ivories untickled. What I'm saying is, let us begin, shall we?
Ellen: The Real Story of Ellen DeGeneres All Ellen DeGeneres wanted to be was funny. She kept her humor clean and steered clear of politics and social agendas, instead honing a quirky, off-center, mistrustful view of the world. I was coming home from kindergarten - well, they told me it was kindergarten. I found out later I had been working in a factory for ten years. It's good for a kid to know how to make gloves. If ever there was a more unlikely comic to become a symbol of controversy, it was Ellen DeGeneres. Throughout her career, she balanced her ever-growing success with her desire to keep her sexuality private. How that struggle affected her life and career and ultimately inspired her to come out of the closet, putting her life in the spotlight and her career at considerable risk, forms the emotional core of this biography. And in a broader sense, the controversy caused by Ellen's acknowledged sexuality is a reflection of America's own struggle with tolerance and acceptance. Ellen examines the repercussions still being...
Kathleen Tracy
Biography, Humour/Comedy, Lesbian
Tom Driberg: His Life and Indiscretions A mysterious, influential and often extremely dubious man of affairs, Tom Driberg embodied many of the contradictions and ambiguities of his time. At Oxford, he was the friend of Auden, Betjeman, Hugh Gaitskell and his old school-chum, Evelyn Waugh; working on Beaverbrook's Express in the Thirties, he invented the modern gossip column; a close friend of Burgess and Maclean, he was widely suspected of being a double-agent, working for both British Intelligence and the KGB. As Chairman of the Labour Party, he was closely involved with the Wilson government, and an intimate of Nye Bevan and Richard Crossman; a keen High churchman, he was even better known as a "cottaging" habitue of London lavatories; a stalwart socialist, on the far left of the Labour Party, he was also an ardent socialite with a Georgian mansion in Essex.
Francis Wheen
Ruling Passions "Driberg's posthumous autobiography is a classic of its kind: always, as far as I can judge, commendably frank, often highly readable and sometimes literally shocking, even to those normally neither squeamish nor censorious about sexual matters." - Alan Watkins, Spectator
Tom Driberg
The Sage of Sex: A Life of Havelock Ellis A comprehensive and revealing biography on the man who has had such enormous influence on the sexual attitudes of society in the twentieth century.
Arthur Calder-Marshall
All the Queen's Men This book is the result of my fourteen years as a bandsman in a British cavalry regiment, ending up as a Trumpet Major. Within a year of enlisting, I'd discovered a gay military world and experienced my first gay sex; many squaddies and bandsmen were partial to a bit of cock fun. I was out for most of my career and was at various times protected by both peers and senior ranks. There were no threats and rarely any hostility. I had numerous flirtations and love affairs, and when I got "engaged" to a 16-year-old civilian, my straight friends gave me a party. I learnt much in my army career, of which the most unlikely thing was pride in my sexuality.
Nick Elwood
Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins An element of drama has always attended Rupert Everett, even before he swept to fame with his outstanding performance in 'Another Country'. He has spent his life surrounded by extraordinary people, and witnessed extraordinary events. He was in Moscow during the fall of communism; in Berlin the night the wall came down; and in downtown Manhattan on September 11th. By the age of 17 he was friends with Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger, and since then he has been up close and personal with some of the most famous women in the world: Julia Roberts, Madonna, Sharon Stone and Donatella Versace. Whether sweeping the floor for the Royal Shakespeare Company or co-starring with Faye Dunaway and an orang-utan in 'Dunstan Checks In' (they both took ages to get ready), Rupert Everett always brings as much energy and talent to his life as he does to his career. A superb raconteur and a keen observer of human folly (especially his own), Rupert Everett turns his life into a captivating story of love, fame...
Autobiography, Film/Cinema
Reflections Of A Rock Lobster: A Story About Growing Up Gay Part coming-of-age story, part love story, part courtroom drama...and ALL TRUE! This is a moving account of what gay pride can really mean in a small New England town.
Aaron Fricke
Outhouse East Library 10 / 29
Moab is My Washpot Stepehn Fry was born in 1957, and after a year or so of comparative silence, began to talk coherently in 1960. His first written work 'Mummy' was awarded the Sunnyvale Primary School Gold Star for Neatness in 1961. There followed years of neglect from the literary establishment until the Stout's Hill Preparatory School Senior Greek Prize of 1969 of 1969. A play Latin! won the Edinburgh Fringe First Prize ten years later. Four years after this Fry wrote the script for the award-winning musical Me & My Girl. There followed some years of acting, Fry & Laurie, Blackadder, Jeeves and Wooster, some plays, some films, some books, a brief visit to bruges in 1995 and, this year Making History, this third novel. Stephen divides his time between Norfolk, London and New York City and has established something of a reputation as a knowledgeable colletor of late twentieth century parking tickets.
Autobiography, Gay, Humour/Comedy
The Fry Chronicles Spanning 1979-1987, The Fry Chronicles charts Stephen Fry's arrival at Cambridge up to his thirtieth birthday.
Stephen Gately and Boyzone: Blood Brothers Stephen Gately was a singer, songwriter and actor, who, alongside Ronan Keating, was one of two lead singers in one of the biggest pop bands in the world, Boyzone. With all of their albums reaching number one in the UK chart and a record-breaking sixteen consecutive singles in the top 5 UK Singles chart they were a huge pop phenomenon. After the initial break up of Boyzone in 2000 Stephen released a successful solo album which charted in the UK top ten and yielded three UK hit singles. He then went on to star in various successful television and stage productions including Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. In 2008 Stephen rejoined his friends as Boyzone reformed for a series of concerts and recordings. The first ever openly gay boy band member, Stephen married Andrew Cowles, first in a Las Vegas ceremony in 2003 and then in a civil partnership ceremony London in 2006. The discovery of Stephen's body, by Cowles, in their Spanish apartment on 10th October shocked the inte...
Emily Herbert
Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life Known primarily as a poet and dramatist, Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca published four books before his early death in the Spanish Civil War. This biography gives an account of his family, his homosexuality and his mysterious death, as well as tracing his literary development.
Federico Garcia Lorca, Ian Gibson
Trials of Radclyffe Hall This is a biography of Radclyffe Hall, one of England nost eccentric contemporaywomen. She is also the quintissential gay and lesbian icon. The book spans her whole life from her unhappy childhood to the contravercy of her most famous book" Well of Loneliness". Brilliantly written, witty and satirical, this major new biography brings a fresh and irreverent eye to the life of this fascinating eccentric.
Diana Souhami
Book#: ABIOC041.01
Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John Sally Cline uses new material to explore the connections between Hall's writings, life, and milieu, creating a biography that is both a signal contribution to women's studies and a marvelous read.
Sally Cline
Straight Face Having just completed his autobiography, Nigel Hawthorne died on Boxing Day 2001. His ambitions to be an actor when a young man in South Africa were strongly discouraged by his father. He came to England alone and struggled for many years to make his name - eventually joining the Royal Court, starring in the West End, and finally having his great television break as Sir Humphrey in "Yes, Minister". He won many awards for his role as King George III in Alan Bennett's play at the National Theatre and then in the film "The Madness of King George". His most recent major role was as King Lear in Japan and at the RSC in 1999. As well as the trials of his career as an actor, he also struggled with his sexuality. He found his life partner in production manager Trevor Bentham whom he met in 1977 but the relationship was kept strictly private. His media "outing" in the run-up to the Oscar ceremony for "The Madness of King George" was the source of much pain, although ultimately it became a liber...
Autobiography, Film/Cinema, Gay, Television, Theatre/Play
Commandant of Auschwitz Rudolph Hoess was Commandant of Auschwitz during the war. He was taken prisoner by the British. Between his trial and his execution he was ordered to write his autobiography. This is it.
Rudolf Hoess
John Hurt: An Actor's Progress Most actors, when offered the role of a grotesquely deformed fugitive from a Victorian freak show - with the added assurance that their own face would not once appear on the screen - would rapidly make their excuses and leave. But then John Hurt is not most actors. Such was the depth of humanity that he brought to his portrayal of The Elephant Man that he managed singlehandedly to transform what set out to be "just a good weepy" into a cinematic triumph.
This is the first ever study of a career that has been full of such triumphs, from Hurt's award-winning TV performance as Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, to his portrayal of Winston Smith in the film of Orwell's 1984. Based on conversations with Hurt's family, friends and colleagues, as well as extended interviews with Hurt himself, it is a revealing portrait of one of our most original and accomplished actors.
Biography, Film/Cinema, Television
Christopher and His Kind Originally published in 1976, Christopher and His Kind covers the most memorable ten years in the writer's life-from 1929, when Isherwood left England to spend a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to 1939, when he arrived in America. His friends and colleagues during this time included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and E. M. Forster, as well as colorful figures he met in Germany and later fictionalized in his two Berlin novels-who appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret. What most impressed the first readers of this memoir, however, was the candor with which he describes his life in gay Berlin of the 1930s and his struggles to save his companion, a German man named Heinz, from the Nazis. An engrossing and dramatic story and a fascinating glimpse into a little-known world, Christopher and His Kind remains one of Isherwood's greatest achievements. A major figure in twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement, C...
Lions and Shadows Lions and Shadows blends autobiography and fiction to describe the true education of a writer evolving from precocious schoolboy to dropoutatlarge in London's bohemia of the 1920s. Forced to withdraw from Cambridge University, "Christopher Isherwood" works as a tutor to the privileged, serves as the secretary to a busy string quartet, ill-fatedly attends medical school. Licensed by names he invents, he works up extravagant portraits of his brilliant contemporaries W. H. Auden, Edward Upward, and Stephen Spender, whose intimate friendships and cult of rebellion changed the literary identity of England in the 1930s.
Although the story is Isherwood's own life story, carrying him up to the age of twenty-five, he gives free rein to his remarkable powers of dramatization, improving on the facts here and there, to make a highly entertaining, sometimes hilarious book.
"Read it as a novel," says Isherwood. There is no difficulty taking his advice. But his characters were real people, and whe...
Autobiography, Fiction, Gay
Derek Jarman: A Portrait The power of Derek Jarman's visual imagination has touched every one of his projects. In the various roles of painter, stage designer, film-maker and gardener, his intensity forged a compelling view of the world in many different media. However, it was as a painter that he was trained, graduating from the Slade School of Art in the 1960s to almost immediate acclaim, and exhibiting widely both in London and abroad. His career as a film-maker never entirely exposed his importance as an artist. The book studies a selection of Jarman's work in a variety of visual media. The text explores the interconnecting aspects of Jarman's oeuvre, including the relationshp between the painting and the films, the stage designs, the late paintings and the garden - revealing common themes, ideas and influences to provide insight into Jarman's creative mind.
Roger Wollen
Art/Photography, Biography, Film/Cinema
Elton John He was born Reginald Kenneth White in 1947, and he began his career in his teens pounding the piano in a pub. The world, though, would know him as Elton John, the name that for the past three decades has epitomized rock-music superstardom. From blockbuster albums like Friends and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in the 1970s to award-winning scores in the nineties for the film and Broadway show The Lion King and the current stage hit Aida, Elton John has never failed to dazzle his audiencesand never more so than at the funeral of his close friend Diana, Princess of Wales, when he moved an entire nation with his poignant and powerful performance of "Candle in the Wind 1997" ("Goodbye England's Rose"). Epically conceived and masterfully told, Philip Norman's biography of the inimitable, legendary Elton John searches out the man behind the performer in glittering costumes and sky-high boots. Norman explores the draining addictions, the failed marriage, attempted suicides, a multimillionaire's su...
Biography, Gay, Music
Frankly Kellie: Becoming a Woman in a Man's World Not many people have had as unique a journey as Kellie Maloney. Born Frank Maloney into a tough working class family in the 1950s, the young man gravitated towards the world of boxing, where he became a very well respected boxing promoter and worked with the likes of undisputed heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis and European champion Tony Jeffries. Decades later, Frank decided the time was right to become the person he was always destined to become, and in this enthralling autobiography, recalls in great detail the unique instance where one life ends and one can begin. Packed with wonderful insight and anecdotes about herself and those she knew both inside and outside the world of boxing, Frankly Kellie is a story with another dimension-a tale of an identity kept hidden for decades and how the overcoming of a deep inner turmoil can propel anyone into a brand-new life. Insightful and astute, Kellie talks openly about the years of anguish and torment, recounting extracts from her diary an...
Kellie Maloney
Autobiography, Transgender
k.d. lang: Carrying the Torch Since the release of her first album, a truly western experience in 1984, k.d. lang has galvanized listeners with her amazing voice, while battling for a place in the music industry and fighting off prejudice against her appearance and attitude. This compelling biography explores everything from her tomboy girlhood in Consort, Alberta, through her entry into show business and the making of her first five albums and her first film, to her move away from country music to easy listening jazz and adult-oriented pop.
William B. Robertson
k. d. lang: All You Get Is Me Rare childhood photographs and behind-the-scenes interviews with family, friends, and industry peers give flesh to the first full-scale biography of the controversial performer-activist.
Victoria Starr
Living on the Edge: Experience of AIDS Written by a young Christian man who is open about having AIDS this book tackles the disease from an autobiographical and individual angle. From the original diagnosis, via the development of his illness, it tells of learning to live with the disease and of the value of the support he has received.
AIDS/HIV, Autobiography, Religion
The Only Child This unique autobiography covers the first six years in the life of a boy. James Kirkup today known as a poet of distinction, was born in South Shields, the son of a carpenter, and in this book he evokes in the most vivid and convincing manner the life he lived in that north-east town.
James Kirkup
I, of All People Bohemian bisexual, poet and pacifist, dedicated disturber of the status quo, Kirkup in his third autobiographical work provides plenty of material that is bound to outrage, stimulate--and, more often than not, delight--almost every reader. The only child of an English middle-class couple, Kirkup was an outsider from his earliest years. Rather than retiring from the conventional world surrounding him, the young man decided early on to confront what he saw as an all-pervasive hypocrisy with flamboyantly unfettered behavior. Facing military conscription during WW II, Kirkup opted for conscientious objector status rather than reveal the homosexuality that would have exempted him from service. His descriptions of life as a farm laborer by day, male hustler by night in blacked-out London reveal an aspect of wartime Britain undreamed of by Mrs. Miniver. In the latter role he envisioned himself infecting the entire Gestapo with syphilis should the country be invaded. The scheme came to naught-...
The Autobiography of Billie Jean King Billie Jean King's life has been as colourful and as determined as her performance on the tennis courts. Now she tells her own story in a forthright autobiography that is at once a moving personal history and a behind-the-scenes look at the world of women's sports.
Frank Deford, Billie Jean King
Autobiography, Sports
Charles Laughton Hailed as one of the great actors of the century, immortalised in such film classics as Mutiny on the Bounty, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Charles Laughton is a name remembered with affection by theatre and cinema goers all over the world.
But there was a dark and troubled side to the Loughton magic. Moody, irascible, prone to hopeless affairs with younger men, Laughton was a man at war with himself. Hating his own ugliness, he sought release in acting - but shone in roles with played up his ugliness still more.
Laughton's wife and friends knew his Jekyll-and-Hyde temperament only too well; but for those who never glimpsed the private pain behind Laughton's extraordinary career, Charles Higham's book will come as a revelation.
Charles Higham
Biography, Film/Cinema, Gay, Theatre/Play
The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia Apart from Winston Churchill, Lawrence of Arabia is probably the best known Englishman of the 20th century. Yet until recently it has been impossible to disentangle the reality from the Lawrence myth; in death as in life he has remained an enigma.
Was his reputation as a champion of Arab independence, acquired during the bloody desert fighting against the Turks during the Great War justified? When Lawrence was captured by the Turks did he really suffer the tortures and sexual assaults he later hinted at? Why did he seek obscurity in the ranks of the Air Force and Tank Corps after the war? What were the mysterious circumstances of his death in 1935?
The two authors of this exhaustive and controversial biography have made use of hitherto unavailable officical documents, private papers and letters, together with the revealing testimony of a man intimately involved with Lawrence's later masochistic practices.
Phillip Knightley, Colin Simpson
BDSM, Biography, Gay, History
A Product of the System: My Life in and Out of Prison The autobiography of a man who has been in and out of penal institutions since he was eight years old. He has won two Arthur Koestler awards for his plays, and writes for "The Guardian" on prison reform.
Mark Leech
The Worry Girl: Stories from a Childhood Part reconstructed autobiography, part truthful short story, part coming-of-age-coming-out novel, this is a poignant collection of related stories about a high-strung, assimilated Jewish childhood.
Andrea Freud Loewenstein
Autobiography, Religion
Breaking the Surface The champion diver presents a candid account of his life and sports career, detailing his troubled youth, the highs and lows of athletic competition, the need to conceal his homosexuality, life in a post-Olympics era, and his day-to-day battle with AIDS.
Greg Louganis, Eric Marcus
AIDS/HIV, Autobiography, Gay, Sports
Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite: Being Gay and Jewish in America This is a series of autobiographical essays which provide critical commentary on leading figures, personalities, events and issues in the worlds of identity politics, AIDS and the arts in post-World War II America. It probes the interconnectedness of gay, Jewish and musical subcultures. The book is set against the backdrop of AIDS, when every sexually-active gay man is forced to confront his own mortality. To understand the fear that the disease had touched, the author faces the reality that his own life had been dominated by internalized anti-Semitism. His is the story of confronting the hatred that can result from constant exposure to the hatred of others. Through examining relationships with other gay men, he argues that anti-Semitism, racism and misogyny are often proportional to the internalization of homophobia.
Lawrence D. Mass
AIDS/HIV, Autobiography, Gay, Religion
Mr. Madam: A Great Novel of the Gay Life Kenneth Marlowe's Mr. Madam is the famous story of a queen of slaves who rules over his/her subjects with erotic devotion.
This is a strartingly candid human document. Mr Madam started life as an unwanted child. In his teens he was kept by a sugar-daddy. In the Army he was used and abused by its personnel. In the strip clubs he became a female impersonator. In his adult years he was a brothel employee, keeper of a call-boy house, and a hair-stylist to some of the world's most celebrated women.
Kenneth Marlowe
Autobiography, Drag
Owning-up An account of the author's life from childhood in middle-class Liverpool in the thirties, through national service in the navy as an ordinary seaman to his emergence as a connoisseur of surrealist art and his career as a jazz singer.
Rum, Bum and Concertina Rum, Bum and Concertina is the outrageous new volume of autobiography by George Melly, ex-Able Seaman, sometime anarchist, connoisseur of Surrealist Art, spearhead of fringe Revivalist Jazz, blues vocalist, writer, pop, TV and film critic - and much else besides.
Freddie Mercury: The Biography This fascinating biography of Freddie Mercury which received outstanding acclaim from Queen and rock fans worldwide, has now been updated for reissue to coincide with the release of the film about his life. Laura Jackson addresses topics including:* The reality behind Queen's flamboyant front man and lead singer* Mercury the star of mystery - amusing, loyal and generous, yet revealing a dark side to his personality* His frequent use of cocaine and how it heightened his tendency to excess - both on and off stage* The women in his life - his bizarrely enduring relationships with his first love, Mary Austin, and his long-time confidante, Barbara Valentin, who speaks for the first time in this bookThe book also includes new and intimate stories by those who knew him well, such as Tim Rice, Richard Branson, Cliff Richard, Bruce Dickinson, Mike Moran, Wayne Eagling, Zandra Rhodes and Susannah York.
Older: Unauthorized Biography of George Michael The whole, complicated, troubled and triumphant story of a man who was once a Greek Cypriot fat boy, became an Eighties pin-up as the driving partner of WHAM!, danced with Princess Diana, perfected the art of designer stubble-culture and, incidentally, became a singer along the way. By painfully and expansively insisting upon his rights as a performer and taking Sony to and through the courts to establish this, Michael not only fought for his own artistic freedom but set an important precedent for every other recording artist in the world. His musical renaissance is a personal and cultural landmark. Always personally evasive, he has endured wilfully mischievous speculations about his private life. In this book the Wapshott brothers go far towards clarifying the importance of his relationship with mercurial South American playboy who died, after which Michael publicly supported AIDS charities. Private grief, coupled with professional frustrations has lead to both silences and scores of ...
Tim Wapshott, Nicholas Wapshott
The Mayor of Castro Street This is the definitive biography of Harvey Milk: an emotionally compelling story of the life and death of the first openly gay man to be elected to US political office. 'If a bullet should enter my brain, let it destroy every closet door'. This is the definitive biography of Harvey Milk, the man whose personal life, public career, and cold-blooded assassination mirrored the dramatic emergence of the gay community as a political power in 1970s America. It is an emotionally-charged story of personal tragedy and political intrigue, murder at City Hall and massive riots in the streets, the miscarriage of justice and the affirmation of human rights and gay hope.
Randy Shilts
Biography, Gay, Politics
Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More Welcomed into the world as her parents' firstborn son, Mock decided early on that she would be her own person—no matter what. She struggled as the smart, determined child in a deeply loving yet ill-equipped family that lacked the money, education, and resources necessary to help her thrive. Mock navigated her way through her teen years without parental guidance, but luckily, with the support of a few close friends and mentors, she emerged much stronger, ready to take on—and maybe even change—the world.
This powerful memoir follows Mock's quest for identity, from an early, unwavering conviction about her gender to a turbulent adolescence in Honolulu that saw her transitioning during the tender years of high school, self-medicating with hormones at fifteen, and flying across the world alone for sex reassignment surgery at just eighteen. With unflinching honesty, Mock uses her own experience to impart vital insight about the unique challenges and vulnerabilities of trans youth and brave...
Autobiography, Gender, Transgender
Sita Presents moment-by-moment record of the fading of love, with all of its agony and false-dawn respites. This book follows the disintegration of the author's love affair with a woman who is ten years her senior, a veteran of several marriages, and the mother of grown children.
Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story He grew up in a small town in New England in the 1950's, watching lassie, going to church, getting straight A's at school, a scholar destined for success. But he already had a secret, and his public life with family and friends was already a constant round of ventriloquism as he played the joker and pretended to be the same as everyone else. For Paul Monette was gay. BECOMING A MAN is about growing up gay, and about the tyranny and self denial of the closet - one man's struggle, for half his life, to come out. From the white-bread 1950's through the rebellious 1960's to the self-creating 1970's and beyond, it forms a passionately honest and unsparing account of the tortures of living a lie, a naked protrait of one man's fight for freedom in a time of ignorance and bigotry.
Paul Monette
Autobiography, Coming Out, Gay, Religion
Last Watch of the Night With Borrowed Time and Becoming a Man-the 1992 National Book Award winner for nonfiction-this collection completes Paul Monette's autobiographical writing. Brimming with outrage yet tender, this is a "remarkable book" (Philadelphia Inquirer).
Borrowed Time: An Aids Memoir For almost two years, day and night, Monette helped Roger Horwitz, his friend of twelve years, fight the AIDS calamity with courage and dignity. His is more than a testimony to the ravages of this plague, it is a love story - one that explores the fullness of human connection and the pain of separation.
AIDS/HIV, Autobiography, Death
Portrait of a Marriage One of the love stories of our century which has become a literary classic.
It tells the story of Harold Nicolson's forty-nine year marriage to Vita Sackville-West, a union based on mutual trust, shared interests, deepening love, total frankness and reciprocal infidelity. It is also the journal of Vita's love affair with Violet Trefusis, the crisis which nearly broke the Nicolsons' unconventional, but extraordinary successful marriage.
Nigel Nicolson
Biography, Diary, Lesbian, Relationships, Romance
So Me Hugely entertaining and refreshingly honest, So Me is the memoir everybody has been waiting for. Graham Norton, whose impish charm and quick wit has earned him a place in our hearts, looks back at his life so far, a personal journey that begins in a remote village in Ireland forty years ago. Packed with anecdotes about his time at Cork University before dropping out and joining a commune of hippies in San Francisco, about his disastrous attempts at becoming a serious actor and about the rise of his comedy career in London, this is a hilarious, insightful and at times moving account of a very colourful life. As Norton puts it himself, So Me is "a real romp through a journey from living in a cockroach-infested council flat in Hackney to buying Claudia Schiffer's townhouse in Manhattan, from my mother dragging me to school to me dragging her to Sharon Stone's house for New Year's brunch". Containing Graham Norton's trademark stamp of surreal humour and wry observation, So Me is a treat fo...
At My Mother's Knee . . .: and Other Low Joints In his own uniquely acid tongue, Paul O'Grady traces the hilarious tales of life in Irish Catholic Birkenhead that took him from a virtuous altar-boy ("my first drag") to Britain's best loved entertainer. It's a life that includes, varyingly, stints in an abbatoir, as a social worker, in a high-class Mayfair brothel, and traipsing down to London to chase his dreams. By 23, Paul O'Grady had been a father, husband, drag queen, gay lover, divorcee, and degenerate. He did it all with a smile on his face, making a mental note to register the whip-smart one-liners that would later inform his star-studded path from the fringes of comedy to the heart of the British establishment, first as his own brilliant comic creation Lily Savage, then, triumphantly, as himself. Paul's remarkable childhood and early life is littered with a dizzying cast-list of rogues, rascals, lovers, fighters, saints, and sinners. Oh, and one iconic bus conductress. Told with pathos, love, empathy, and naturally, biting h...
Autobiography, Drag, Humour/Comedy, Religion, Television
Prick Up Your Ears: Biography of Joe Orton Prick Up Your Ears is a watershed biography; it paved the way for Orton's revival and ensured his rightful place in the English repertoire.
John Lahr traces the career of Joe Orton, an extraordinary and anarchic playwright, whose plays scandalized and delighted the public and whose indecisive loyalty to a friend caused his tragic and untimely death.
John Lahr
Biography, Gay, Theatre/Play
Behind the Mask: My Double Life in Baseball Pallone's "double life"--a gay working as an umpire in the macho world of professional baseball--led to his release in 1988 by the National League, which claimed he had exhibited "unprofessional behavior." Pallone talks honestly about his controversial career, including his confrontation with Pete Rose during a 1988 Mets game, which cost Rose a 30-day suspension and a $10,000 fine; unfortunately, it cost Pallone his job. Pallone provides interesting comments about calling the pitches of such great pitchers as Steve Carlton and Nolan Ryan and theories on different aspects of the game, as well as revealing anecdotes about his gay love life. The book captures Pallone's torment: he wanted to admit his homosexuality publicly, but feared the consequences because of baseball's ingrained homophobia.
Alan Steinberg, David Pallone
Autobiography, Gay, Sports
Scottsboro' Boy You could say that what happened to Patterson was inevitable. The future hung like a millstone round his neck from the very day of his birth. Haywood Patterson was born in Alabama USA. He was born a black man. In Alabama USA, when any cheap slut of a white woman gets caught in ambiguous circumstances she has an easy out. She merely screams: "A n*****! A n***** assaulted me!" It could be this black man right here, or that one over there. It's of no account. In Alabama, any black person is expendable. In this particular case it was Haywood Patterson.
Patterson, whose personal courage was enormous, broke jail and while he was on the run made the facts of his case known to the author, Earl Conrad.
Haywood Patterson, Earl Conrad
Biography, History, Law
Spectacles Spectacles is the hilarious, creative and incredibly moving memoir from much loved comedian, writer and presenter Sue Perkins.
When I began writing this book, I went home to see if my mum had kept some of my stuff. What I found was that she hadn't kept some of it. She had kept all of it - every bus ticket, postcard, school report - from the moment I was born to the moment I finally had the confidence to turn round and say 'Why is our house full of this shit?'
Sadly, a recycling 'incident' destroyed the bulk of this archive. This has meant two things: firstly, Dear Reader, you will never get to see countless drawings of wizards, read a poem about corn on the cob, or marvel at the kilos of brown flowers I so lovingly pressed as a child. Secondly, it's left me with no choice but to actually write this thing myself.
This, my first ever book, will answer questions such as 'Is Mary Berry real?', 'Is it true you wear a surgical truss?' and 'Is a non-spherically symmetric gravitational pull...
Autobiography, Humour/Comedy, Lesbian, Television
Not for Your Hands: An Autobiography Not For Your Hands is a no-holds-barred autobiography by a gay man. It is David Rees own story: childhood during the Second World War, a Roman Catholic upbringing, marriage and children, coming out as a gay man, gay life, a writer's career, AIDS. It's an unusual tale, sometimes very amusing, always intelligent, and often painfully honest in his portrayal of himself and the men and women who have affected his life most deeply.
AIDS/HIV, Autobiography, Coming Out, Gay, Religion
Teardrops on My Drum Teardrops on My Drum is an autobiographical novel of Jack Robinson's boyhood in Liverpool, UK, in the 1930s. It is a story of the sexual adventures of a young gay boy growing up in poverty and with parental neglect.
Socrates, Plato, and Guys like Me: Confessions of a Gay Schoolteacher Eric Rofes is a gay school teacher - and openly so.
In Socrates, Plato and Guys Like Me Rofes tells the candid story of his life as a gay teacher in suburban Massachusetts. The American public has already heard a number of opinions on the issue of gay schoolteachers. From the Briggs initiative in California and Anita Bryant's national "Save Our Children" crusade, to recent US Supreme Court decisions, the topic has been highly controversial - and promises to remain so. We know what the legislators, justices, school boards and parents have to say about the matter. Now Eric Rofes provides an opportunity to consider the issue of gay teachers from the other side of the school desk.
Eric E. Rofes
Autobiography, Education, Gay
Secret Life: An Autobiography At the age of five, Michael Ryan was molested by a neighbor. Nearly 40 years later, he found himself methodically preparing to seduce a girl who was barely more than a child. As Ryan describes his free fall into sexual obsession, he creates an autobiography that is at once harrowing and redemptive, heartbreaking and profoundly moral.
Jail Diary Albie Sachs was arrested on 1st October 1963 under South Africa's Ninety Days Law. During the 168 days of his imprisonment he was kept in solitary confinement. This book is a study of the effect on a friendly young man of being deprived of all human contact and rational occupation.
Albie Sachs
Autobiography, Diary, Law
Second Son: Transitioning Toward My Destiny, Love and Life Second Son is a unique lens on life and love, intimately exploring the transition experience of Ryan Sallans - born Kimberly Ann Sallans. Ride alongside Ryan's transition from a child to a body-obsessed young woman with an eating disorder; from female to male, daughter to son, and finally a beloved partner to a cherished fiancee. Ryan candidly shares his struggle to find love and acceptance; a struggle that transcends through every layer of society. He nearly died from an extreme case of anorexia as an insecure female college student. The only thing that saved him was his inner spirit begging for a chance to live. Second Son chronicles Ryan's battle with his family, his romantic partner, and his body. It is an unblinking focus on self-empowerment tracing Ryan's evolution into manhood as he underwent gender reassignment surgeries. It took twenty-nine years for Ryan to find himself. Second Son is an intimate and honest autobiography that will educate and empower anyone journeying to find...
Ryan Sallans
Wrong Rooms: A Memoir In 1992 Mark Sanderson met the love of his life. A Lonely Hearts ad in Time Out may not have promised much, but a long and detailed letter from an Australian called Drew marked the beginning of a relationship Mark is still struggling to come to terms with. They moved in together in May 1993; in April 1994 Drew was diagnosed with skin cancer. He was told it would be a miracle if he were still alive in two years; three months later he was dead. "Wrong Rooms" is Mark and Drew's story: a love story, a ghost story, a confession and a lament.
Mark Sanderson
Autobiography, Death, Gay
The Sins of Jack Saul - The True Story of Dublin Jack and the Cleveland Street Scandal The true story of Dublin Jack and the Cleveland Street scandal. The Cleveland Street scandal, involving a homosexual brothel reputedly visited by the Queen's grandson, shocked Victorian Britain in 1889. This is the first full-length account of one of its key players, Jack Saul, a working class Irish Catholic rent boy who worked his way into the upper echelons of the aristocracy, and wrote the notorious pornographic memoir The Sins of the Cities of the Plain. Glenn Chandler, creator of Taggart, explores his colourful but tragic life and reveals for the first time the true story about what really went on behind the velvet curtains of Number 19 Cleveland Street.
Glen Chandler
Biography, History, Religion
Beside Myself Actor, author, artist, Antony Sher grew up with a profound sense of being an outsider, uncomfortable at home in South Africa, and totally out of place as Rifleman 65833329 during conscription in Namibia. Small, weedy, Jewish, painfully conscious of his unfulfilled homosexuality, Ant, as his mother called him, found refuge in art, later in theatre and escape to London. Initially turned down by RADA and Central, he went on to create a series of triumphant stage performances - including Richard III, Macbeth, Pam Gems' Stanley - and to become the first actor of his generation to be knighted. His novels have been acclaimed, as have his theatre-journals filled with his own illustrations. Creativity is Sher's rush, although there was a time when a cocaine habit threatened his survival. Whether describing the battle with this growing dependency, or the sinister paradise of white South Africa in the fifties, or his personal experiences of theatre figures as diverse as Olivier, Stoppard and Mike...
Art/Photography, Autobiography, Gay, Religion, Theatre/Play
Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger TOAST is top food writer Nigel Slater's eat-and-tell autobiography. Detailing all the food, recipes and cooking that have marked his passage from greedy schoolboy to great food writer. In December 2010 the BBC will bring out a film of Toast starring Helena Bonham-Carter and directed by Lee Hall, who won an oscar nomination for Billy Elliot. Britain's most popular cook describes his personal culinary odyssey, from dangerous encounters with his mother's weevil-seasoned cakes to being harangued by readers who think he deliberately styles Yorkshire puddings to look like a woman's private parts. Hilarious, irreverent and mouthwatering, TOAST captures thirty years of British cooking and the recipes that we have grown up with since the days when a grilled grapefruit was the last word in dinner party chic. Everyone has gorged on cake mix, endured disastrous dinner parties, and put up with the loved one who can only ever produce burnt toast. Nigel Slater is no different. Hair-raising accounts o...
Under a Crescent Moon Written in jail, Under a Crescent Moon presents characters and situations as varied as life outside prison. Here the famous and infamous, Turk and foreigner, mass-murderer and petty crook rub shoulders and in some strange, if improbable way, get on. Readers expecting a book-of-the-film Midnight will be disappointed, for the author's vision of a country, a jail and its inmates is both heartfelt and richly empathetic. In this, his first published work, Daniel de Souza experiences and transcends prison life - his voice is rich and original.
Daniel de Souza
Autobiography, Law
Wonder Bread & Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano Drugs, Sex, and Unbridled Ambition: These were the main ingredients in the lethal cocktail that killed gay porn's brightest star, Joey Stefano. As pornography's marketable gay face and body, he was filmed having sex in more than 35 hard-core videos, danced an unforgettable striptease in clubs across America and Europe, and hustled his way through thousands of dollars paid to him by clients around the globe. But none of this filled the void inside Nicholas Iacona, a.k.a. Joey Stefano. From his childhood in the country's heartland to his tragic rise and fall in Los Angeles's dark and dangerous world of gay porn, Wonder Bread and Ecstasy paints a grim portrait of American life gone berserk.
Charles Isherwood
Biography, Gay, Pornography
Jeremy Thorpe: A Secret Life The trial of Jeremy Thorpe on charges of incitement to murder and conspiracy to murder was the climax of a political scandal that contained all the classical elements: sex, money, power, violence. Thorpe was acquitted, yet the Old Bailey verdict left many disturbing aspects of the story unresolved, raised many questions that remained unanswered.
This book is an account of the real conflicts in Thorpe's life, of the private struggle to survive, of the sacrifices and betrayals along the way. It also raises wider issues, showing the pressures that can be brought to bear when the repetition of a man in public life is threatened, and provides an alarming insight into political life in Britain today.
The authors investigate the roots of the case to explain how acts of loyalty designed to protect the Liberal leader's career could lead to a scandal concerning police, lawyers, the press, senior ministers. Their deep inquiry into the events, personalities and issues of the Thorpe affair shows ...
Lewis Chester, Magnus Linklater, David May
Biography, Law, Politics
Straight Jacket: How to Be Gay and Happy Straight Jacket is a revolutionary clarion call for gay men, the wider LGBT community, their friends and family. Part memoir, part ground-breaking polemic, it looks beneath the shiny facade of contemporary gay culture and asks if gay people are as happy as they could be – and if not, why not?
Meticulously researched, courageous and life-affirming, Straight Jacket offers invaluable practical advice on how to overcome a range of difficult issues. It also recognizes that this is a watershed moment, a piercing wake-up-call-to-arms for the gay and wider community to acknowledge the importance of supporting all young people – and helping older people to transform their experience and finally get the lives they really want.
Autobiography, Coming Out, Gay, Homophobia, Queer, Relationships, Self-help
Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton For 50 years the world - and three wives - believed that Billy Tipton, professional jazz musician, was a man. Writer Diane Wood Middlebrook lifts the lid on jazz's greatest cross-dresser in her biography that covers the musician's early years in Oklahoma, the nights playing with Louis Armstrong's partner and his/her extraordinary relationships.
Biography, Transgender
Tom of Finland: His Life and Times Traces the life history of the influential gay artist whose illustrations of gay men became a shaping influence on the homoerotic imagination of our time, while also examining the impact of his art on the world at large.
F. Valentine Hooven
Art/Photography, Biography, Gay
Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley
Alan Turing was the mathematician whose cipher-cracking transformed the Second World War. Taken on by British Intelligence in 1938, as a shy young Cambridge don, he combined brilliant logic with a flair for engineering. In 1940 his machines were breaking the Enigma-enciphered messages of Nazi Germany's air force. He then headed the penetration of the super-secure U-boat communications.
But his vision went far beyond this achievement. Before the war he had invented the concept of the universal machine, and in 1945 he turned this into the first design for a digital computer.
Turing's far-sighted plans for the digital era forged ahead into a vision for Artificial Intelligence. However, in 1952 his homosexuality rendered him a criminal and he was subjected to humiliating treatment. In 1954, aged 41, Alan Turing took his own life.
Andrew Hodges
Through Thick and Thin: My Autobiography Inspirational autobiography by every woman's favourite, Gok Wan. With his infectious energy and charisma, Gok Wan has an incredible gift of making women feel more confident within themselves -- but it's not until you read his own inspirational story that you find out where he got that gift from.
Gok grew up on a Leicester housing estate, with a loving family who ran a Chinese restaurant. For his parents, food meant love -- and Gok was so well loved that by the time he was a teenager he weighed 21 stone. Being Asian and gay as well, Gok felt lonely and out of place. He was an easy target for bullies and suffered terribly at their hands.
In a moment of inspiration, he decided to reinvent himself with his first style makeover and a larger-than-life personality to go with it. But his next move was to lose a devastating ten stone in nine months. In Through Thick and Thin, for the first time, Gok reveals all about that life changing period.
The lessons Gok learnt during this time helped ...
Autobiography, BEM, Gay
Gypsy Boy on the Run The incredible sequel to Gypsy Boy GYPSY BOY: ON THE RUN picks up from where Gypsy Boy left off, and tells the gripping, page-turning story of Mikey's battle to escape the Romany gypsy camp he grew up on. After centuries of persecution Gypsies are wary of outsiders and if you choose to leave, you can never come back. Torn between his family and his heart, Mikey struggles to come to terms with his ancient inheritance and dreams of finding a place where he can really belong. He eventually finds the courage to run away from the camp and from all he knows, and quickly discovers life on the outside world isn't all he expected. After learning his father had put a contract out on his life and that he was now being hunted down by gangs of gypsy thugs determined to claim their reward, Mikey realises that his life will never be the same again. ON THE RUN is a coming-of-age story that sees Mikey come to terms with his sexuality and his past and start to build a new life for himself and find a pla...
Mikey Walsh
Autobiography, Culture, Gay
Out in the Army: My Life as a Gay Soldier Seeking escape from the quiet Welsh countryside, James Wharton joined the British Army. Along the way, he faced a battle of his own: finding the courage to tell his fellow soldiers he is gay.
Written with searing honesty, James charts his incredible journey from punch bag to poster boy, along the way describing the tribulations of coming to terms with his sexuality. Late nights in the clubs of Soho to early mornings guarding the Queen; rocket attacks in Iraq to tank rides with Prince Harry on the plains of Canada—this is James's life out in the army.
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult. Combining the no-holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy's Own Story with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur, this is the story of White's years in 1970s New York, bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. It's a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons.
The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde said of himself, "I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my work." Now, for the first time, Neil McKenna focuses on the tormented genius of Wilde's personal life, reproducing remarkable love letters and detailing Wilde's until-now unknown relationships with other men. McKenna has spent years researching Wilde's life, drawing on extensive new material, including never-before published poems as well as recently discovered trial statements made by male prostitutes and blackmailers about Wilde. McKenna provides explosive evidence of the political machinations behind Wilde's trials for sodomy, as well as his central role in the burgeoning gay world of Victorian London. Dazzlingly written and meticulously researched, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde fully charts Wilde's astonishing odyssey through London's sexual underworld and paints a frank and vivid psychological portrait of a troubled genius.
Neil McKenna
Wilde Century For 15 years in Victorian England, Oscar Wilde was able to carry on like the famous camp queen of our imaginings - effete, leisured, aesthetic, amoral, decadent, dandified. This work explores how Wilde was seen before the trials that ended his career and made him the most famous queer man since Socrates. In particular, it examines the concept of effeminacy and asks how Wilde's effeminacy was perceived. In examining these points, Sinfield ranges over issues of identity, subculture, race, style, masculinity, homophobia, genetics and gender-bending. He broaches the thesis that the Wilde trials bring into focus a particular image of the queer man which has extended into the 20th century, and that our stereotypical notion of male homosexuality derives from Wilde and our ideas about him. Sinfield assesses the strategic options for lesbian and gay subcultures today. This provocative book aspires to set the agenda for a gay cultural politics - a hundred years after the Wilde trials, on the thr...
Alan Sinfield
Biography, Culture, Gay, Gender, History, Lesbian
Oscar Wilde: A Biography In this long-awaited biography, Wilde the legendary Victorian - brilliant writer and conversationalist, reckless flouter of social and sexual conventions - is brought to life. More astute and forbearing, yet more fallible than legend has allowed, Wilde is given here the dimensions of a modern hero. Based on fresh material from many hitherto-untapped sources, Ellmann depicts Wilde's comet-like ascent on the Victorian scene and his equally dramatic sudden eclipse. His Irish background, the actresses to whom he paid court, his unfortunate wife and lovers, his clothes, coiffures, and the decor of his rooms - all are presented here in vivid detail. The saga of his 1882 American tour is recounted with a wealth of new details; also his later impact on the bastions of the French literary establishment. The London of the Nineties, of Whistler and the Pre-Raphaelites, Lillie Langtry and the Prince of Wales, is evoked alongside Paris of the "belle epoque" and the Greece, Italy and North Africa of...
Richard Ellmann
Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde The original transcript of the famous Wilde vs Queensberry trial, containing previously unseen details and exchanges. With extensive footnotes and a new introduction, this definitive account is a dramatic read that will delight Wilde enthusiasts and the general reader.
One of the most famous love affairs in literary history is that of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas. When it became public, it cost Wilde everything. Merlin Holland has discovered the original courtroom transcript of the trial which led to his grandfather's tragedy. Here at last is the true record, without the distortions of previous accounts.
On 18 February 1895 Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, delivered a note to the Albemarle Club addressed to 'Oscar Wilde posing as somdomite [sic]'. With Bosie's encouragement, Wilde decided to sue the Marquess for libel. As soon as the trial opened London's literary darling was at the centre of the greatest scandal of his time.
Wilde's fall from grace was sw...
Merlin Holland
Biography, Gay, Law
Oscar Wilde A biography of Oscar Wilde describing is life. Philippe Jullian tells with joy and passion the business, love, success and failure of the author of the Portrait of Dorian Gray. Jullian is able to return the brilliant ingenuity, the scandalous and irreverent poses, the restless feeling that made Wilde one of the most important personalities of a whole age.
Philippe Jullian
The Truth About Oscar Wilde In the closing decades of the last century Victorian England was convulsed by a scandal that shook it to its foundations and which has been a matter of fierce controversy and speculation to this day. From the height of his success and popularity as the country's most brilliant playwright, conversationalist and wit, Oscar Wilde was reduced in a week to ignominy and degradation. As a result of his notorious friendship with Lord Alfred Doulas, younger son of the Marquis of Queensberry, and of his feud with the old Marquis, Wilde found himself at the Old Bailey facing a future of imprisonment, ostracism and poverty. With a frankness impossible to previous writers Lewis Broad tells the whole absorbing story of Oscar Wilde's brilliant and tragic life with special emphasis on his psychological make-up and the conduct which led to his ultimate disgrace.
Lewis Broad
The Life of Oscar Wilde The remarkable and tragic story of Oscar Wilde, legendary wit and conversationalist, author of perhaps the most perfect comedy in the English language, yet seemingly doomed by his own flawed temperament.
Hesketh Pearson
Famous Trials: Oscar Wilde Four days after the opening of Oscar Wilde's most popular and witty play "The Importance of Being Earnest", the Marquess of Queensberry threw down a gauntlet to the playwright in the form of a card - the catalyst for one of the most bizarre contests ever staged at the Old Bailey. Wilde's prosecution for libel and his own subsequent prosecution by the Crown for gross indecency showed a man completely at odds with a class-ridden society that was rife with snobbery and narrow-mindedness. This book describes the case.
H. Montgomery Hyde
The Trials of Oscar Wilde A fictionalised account of the trial of Oscar Wilde, in the form of a play.
John Furnell
Biography, Fiction, Gay, Law
A Way Of Life Peter Wildeblood shares his story as a gay man in Britain.
Against the Law A riveting account of what it meant to be a homosexual in 1950s Britain, by a central figure in the celebrated Montagu Case.
In March 1954 Peter Wildeblood, a London journalist, was one of five men charged with homosexual acts in the notorious Montagu Case, as it came to be known. Wildeblood was sentenced to eighteen months for homosexual offences, along with Lord Montagu and Major Michael Pitt-Rivers. The other two men were set free after turning Queen's Evidence.
In this book, first published in 1955, Peter Wildeblood tells the story of his childhood and schooldays, his war service and university days, his life as a journalist, his arrest, trial and imprisonment, and finally his return to freedom. In its honesty and restraint it is eloquent testimony to the inhumanity of the treatment of homosexuals in Britain only a generation ago.
Probably the first book on homosexuality to reach a mass audience in Britain, Against the Law had a direct influence on the Wolfenden Committee, whose...
Autobiography, Gay, Law
Born Brilliant: The Life of Kenneth Williams Kenneth Williams was the stand-out comic actor of his generation. Beloved as the manic star of Carry On films and as a peerless raconteur on TV chat shows, he was also acclaimed for serious stage roles.
Born Brilliant will include much previously unseen material from Williams's candid daily journal and also draw on rare in-depth interviews with friends and colleagues. Since the publication of edited extracts from his diaries, much controversy has surrounded Williams's personal and professional lives. This biography traces the complex contradictions that characterised an extraordinary life and presents the first full portrait of a star who was born brilliant.
Christopher Stevens
Biography, Diary, Film/Cinema, Humour/Comedy, Television
Memoirs For the "old crocodile," as Williams called himself late in life, the past was always present, and so it is with his continual shifting and intermingling of times, places, and memories as he weaves this story.
When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media. Though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candor about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest living playwright were called "a raw display of private life" by The New York Times Book Review. As it turns out, thirty years later, Williams' look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed; he recalls his childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, his prolonged struggle as a "starving artist," the "overnight" success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, the death of his long-time companion Frank Merlo in 1962, and his confinement to a psychiatric ward in 1969 and subsequent recovery fr...
Autobiography, Gay, Theatre/Play
George: An Early Autobiography In this early autobiography, Emlyn Williams chronicles his childhood and early life being educated in Fance and at Oxford, leading up to his career as an actor and writer.
Autobiography, Theatre/Play
Emlyn: A Sequel to George The further autobiography of Emlyn Williams, picking up where "George" left off.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson's novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. She has written some of the most admired books of the past few decades, including her internationally bestselling first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents that is now often required reading in contemporary fiction.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a memoir about a life's work to find happiness. It's a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the Universe as Cosmic Dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past that Jeanette thought she'd written over and repainted rose to haunt her, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biolo...
Autobiography, Family
Anything is Possible The final of the Pop Idol show was the most anticipated TV event of the year.
Over 13 million people tuned in to see Will Young win the show with over 4.6 million votes - Will Young the middle-class University graduate with the looks of Robbie Williams and the voice of Sinatra consistently turned in a professional performance week after week and was finally crowned Pop Idol 2002.
Viewers only saw a fraction of Will on the show and this book completes the picture - detailing all the moments from the time he filled in that all important application form up until the winning moment and beyond.
Including 4 colour plate sections featuring photographs of Will from childhood through to Pop stardom.
Will Young: The Biography In February 2002, a star was born. Will Young was crowned the first ever Pop Idol, voted for by 4.6 million people and watched by nearly 10 million more. It was the start of a music career which has since been astonishing, both in its critical acclaim and consistent popular appeal. Will is not only successful because of his unique and outstanding voice—it is also the charisma and elegance of the man which has captivated his millions of fans worldwide. His inimitable sound, an extraordinary mix of soul, blues, jazz, and pop, has forged him a reputation as one of the most talented and original mainstream British artists for decades, and cemented his position at the top of the music industry.
Erica McPhee