12 Queer Memoirs for When You Feel Alone

I’ve talked about this book before, and it’s one I have to recommend again. With the content warnings of suicide mentions and transphobia, this collection of essays and poems by Kai Cheng Thom is heartfelt and honest and a book we need right now with anti-trans laws on the rise and being passed left and right. It asks, how do we move from here, how do we build in a community that hates us, how do you find nuance in a world that refuses to see in greys? If you’re queer or not, this is a necessary book to read for a bit of hope at the end of the world.

Yes, that Alison Bechdel. The Bechdel-Wallace Test Bechdel. I know of very few lesbians where if I say “ring of keys moment” they won’t know what I’m talking about. A lot of them want to be that moment for someone else. That comes from this book, as does the Tony award winning musical by the same name. In this graphic memoir, Bechdel talks about growing up with her father, who — not long after she came out as a lesbian — was discovered to be gay and died by suicide not long after.

This is a book I’m sure a lot of baby queers and eggs need. In it, Maia Kobabe writes eir story of growing up, dealing with crushes, one’s self-identity, and how to come out to those close to you, not to mention the trauma of dealing with medical tests that are for a gender that you don’t feel like. And what it’s like to not feel like any gender. If this book was around when I was younger, I know I may have figured some stuff out sooner. Despite being a personal memoir, it’s still one that will resonate with a lot of queer readers, especially trans ones.

Janet Mock came forward as a trans woman in 2011 via a profile in Marie Claire magazine. This book is a little about that. But it’s also about the lead up, growing up young and poor and multicultural and transgender in America. It’s an affirmative text to read, about one woman’s journey into becoming who she knew she could be, from a kid growing up in Honolulu to being the editor for People.com and every struggle and slur she faced along the way.

Terry Galloway started to go deaf at age 9, caused by an experimental antibiotic her mother took while pregnant. Life changed for her almost immediately, as well as how others treated her. She started going to camps for “special” kids like her, which inadvertently sparked her love for theatre and her eventual career in it. Galloway lays her struggles growing up deaf and queer in the South in the mid to late 20th century. She lived a life that could be seen as tragic, but with her classic performative way she makes it funny without missing any of the emotional beats.

Growing up queer in the south is a challenge. Being Black and queer in the south is so much harder. Saeed Jones’s book is a coming-of-age queer memoir told through vignettes. He tells the story of how he carved a place for himself in the world through various relationships — the strained ones with his single mother and grandmother, the flings, and the friendships, all of them affected in some way by his race and identity. It’s a gorgeous book full of beautiful prose and poetry about fighting for a place in the world and the right to be ourselves.

This queer memoir is more than just Cherríe Moraga’s story, it’s also the story of her mother, their experiences woven together. Moraga charts her mother’s story from being a child worker hired out to pick cotton in California to working in 1920s Tijuana as a cigarette girl to an old woman bearing the weight of Alzheimer’s while mapping her own path of self-discovery of her lesbianism and gender-queer body, along with her passion for Latina activism and Pueblo history.