Stonewall Book Awards @ Memorial Library

2022 Stonewall Honor Books in Literature
A literary coming-of-age poetry collection, an ode to the places we call home, and a piercingly intimate deconstruction of daughterhood, Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing. From spoken word poet Jasmine Mans comes an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity. With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, Mans writes to call herself - and us - home.

2021 Stonewall Barbara Gittings Literature Award
A moving and lyrical novel following three generations of Syrian Americans linked by the truths they carry close to their hearts. Five years after a suspicious fire killed his mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. Unable to paint since his mother's ghost has begun to visit him each evening, the only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria. One night, he finds the journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z. She mysteriously disappeared more than 60 years before, but her journal contains proof that her past is intimately tied to his mother's-and his grandmother's. Even more surprising, Laila Z's story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his community that he never knew. Following his mother's ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along.

2021 Stonewall Honor Book in Literature
What does it mean for a family to lose a child they never really knew? One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son's body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family's struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men. But Vivek's closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens--and Osita struggles to understand Vivek's escalating crisis--the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom.

2021 Stonewall Honor Book in Literature
A funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the limits of love. Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day care teacher, and they've been together for a few years--good years--but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other. But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike's immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it. Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they've ever known. And just maybe they'll all be okay in the end.

2021 Stonewall Honor Book in Literature
An anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz's brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages--bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers--be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: "Let me call my anxiety,desire, then. / Let me call it,a garden." In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: "I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging:Let me be lonely but not invisible."Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope--in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

1989 Stonewall Book Award
A new edition of Sarah Schulman's 1988 novel, about a no-nonsense coffee-shop waitress who is nursing a broken heart after her girlfriend Dolores leaves her. Her attempts to find love again are funny, sexy, and ultimately even violent. The novel is a fast-paced, electrifying chronicle of the Lower East Side's lesbian subculture in the 1980s.

1999 Stonewall Literature Finalist
A fantasy on a gay demigod in our time. He is Phyrrus, a beautiful strip dancer, and being a demigod he has an Olympian point of view on life. He finds the agitation of mortals on the subject of homosexuality rather amusing.

2014 Stonewall Barbara Gittings Literature Award
Art on Fire is the apparent biography of subversive painter Francesca deSilva, the founding foremother of "pseudorealism," who lived hard and died young. But in the tradition of Vladimir Nabokov's acclaimed novel Pale Fire, it's a fiction from start to finish. It opens with Francesca's early life. We learn about her childhood love, the chess genius Lisa Sinsong, as well as her rivalry with her brilliant sister Isabella, who publishes an acclaimed volume of poetry at the age of twelve. She compensates for the failings of her less than attentive parents by turning to her grandmother who is loyal and adoring until she learns Francesca is a lesbian, when she rejects her. Francesca flees to a ramshackle cabin in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, working weekends at the flea market. She breaks into the gloomy basement of a house, where she begins her life as a painter. Much to her confusion and even dismay, fame comes quickly. Interspersed with Francesca's narrative are thirteen critical "essays" on the paintings of Francesca deSilva by critics, academics, and psychologists: essays that are razor-sharp satires on art, lesbian life, and the academic world, puncturing pretentiousness with every paragraph. A darkly comic, pitch-perfect, and fearless satire on the very art of biography itself.

1992 Stonewall Literature Finalist
Throughout this book, a milestone in the poet's work and in the poetry of our time, Rich gathers images of our lives and focuses them blindingly in memory's "smoky mirror". As always, she maps out new territory, charting the landscapes of our lives amid the beauties and cruelties of a difficult world.

1991 Stonewall Literature Award
This beautifully crafted sequence of poems takes its title from language in the statute under which the author could have been prosecuted as a lesbian if she had sought legal custody of her children. These are poems of despair, self-doubt, sexual bliss, sexual shame, exhilaration, rage, hope, victory. In Crime Against Nature, Pratt breathes new life into the words lesbian, poet, mother. Without contradiction or self-denial, she holds herself, her loves, and her children in a world of passion, of power being realized, of wholeness.

2021 Stonewall Honor Book in Literature
What does it mean for a family to lose a child they never really knew? One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son's body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family's struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men. But Vivek's closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens--and Osita struggles to understand Vivek's escalating crisis--the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom.

2017 Stonewall Honor Books in Literature
Bryan Borland's third poetry collection examines what it means to dig--to undertake the intense labor of unearthing the personal/political/artistic self and embracing the consequences of that knowledge. These poems assert that to dig is to reveal the bedrock on which we may rebuild ourselves; to discover the beauty and reward of life buried deep within us--no matter how many layers of earth we need to overturn.

1997 Stonewall Literature Finalist
A coming-of-age novel by Canadian author Shyam Selvadurai. The second son of a privileged family in Sri Lanka, Arjie prefers staging make-believe weddings with his female cousins than batting balls with the other boys.

2016 StoneWall Barbara Gittings Literature Award
Arriving in Buenos Aires in 1913, with only a suitcase and her father's cherished violin to her name, seventeen-year-old Leda is shocked to find that the husband she has travelled across an ocean to reach is dead. Unable to return home, alone, and on the brink of destitution, she finds herself seduced by the tango, the dance that underscores every aspect of life in her new city. Knowing that she can never play in public as a woman, Leda disguises herself as a young man to join a troupe of musicians. In the illicit, scandalous world of brothels and cabarets, the line between Leda and her disguise begins to blur, and forbidden longings that she has long kept suppressed are realized for the first time. Powerfully sensual, The Gods of Tango is an erotically charged story of music, passion, and the quest for an authentic life against the odds.

2019 Stonewall Barbara Gittings Literature Award
In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

1992 Stonewall Literature Award
Centers around the story of thirty-four year old Tom Shaheen, an actor living with AIDS in southern California who has been forced to retire, because of his illness, to an isolated beach house. Tom's peaceful existence is shaken to the core when he receives a sudden and unexpected visit from his brother, Brian, a former high school football hero who, well-loved and athletic, was Tom's exact opposite while growing up. Brian's visit turns out to be more than Tom bargained for--Brian is seeking safety and sanctuary for himself and his family because of shady dealings in his contractor business back in Connecticut. In the midst of dealing with his brother's crisis, Tom begins to bond deeply with his landlord. Gray--a connection that evolves into a bittersweet love affair, inspiring hope that there can be a life after AIDS.

1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1999 Stonewall Literature Award
Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf's last days before her suicide early in World War II counterpoints the fictional stories of Samuel, a famous poet whose life has been shadowed by his talented and troubled mother, and his lifelong friend Clarissa, who strives to forge a balanced and rewarding life in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family.Passionate, profound, and deeply moving, this is Cunningham's most remarkable achievement to date.

2010 Stonewall Honor Books in Non-Fiction
Audre Lorde was not only a famous poet; she was also one of the most important radical black feminists of the past century. Her writings and speeches grappled with an impressive broad list of topics, including sexuality, race, gender, class, disease, the arts, parenting, and resistance, and they have served as a transformative and important foundation for theorists and activists in considering questions of power and social justice. Lorde embraced difference, and at each turn she emphasized the importance of using it to build shared strength among marginalized communities. I Am Your Sister is a collection of Lorde's non-fiction prose, written between 1976 and 1990, and it introduces new perspectives on the depth and range of Lorde's intellectual interests and her commitments to progressive social change. Presented here, for the first time in print, is a major body of Lorde's speeches and essays, along with the complete text of A Burst of Light and Lorde's landmark prose works Sister Outsider and The Cancer Journals. Together, these writings reveal Lorde's commitment to a radical course of thought and action, situating her works within the women's, gay andl esbian, and African American Civil Rights movements. They also place her within a continuum of black feminists, from Sojourner Truth, to Anna Julia Cooper, Amy Jacques Garvey, Lorraine Hansberry, and Patricia Hill Collins.

2002 Stonewall Barbara Gittings Literature Award
On October 7, 1998, a young gay man was discovered bound to a fence in the hills outside Laramie, Wyoming, savagely beaten and left to die in an act of hate that shocked the nation. Matthew Shepard's death became a national symbol of intolerance, but for the people of Laramie the event was deeply personal, and it's they we hear in this stunningly effective theater piece, a deeply complex portrait of a community.

2013 Stonewall Barbara Gittings Literature Award
Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash, financiers drape their mistresses in Chanel, while expatriates flock to the avant-garde bookshop Shakespeare and Company. One day in July, a young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a coolly dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. Struggling to halt a downward slide toward prostitution, Rafaela agrees to model for the artist, a dispossessed Saint Petersburg aristocrat with a murky past. The two become lovers, and Rafaela inspires Tamara's most iconic Jazz Age images, among them her most accomplished-and coveted-works of art. A season as the painter's muse teaches Rafaela some hard lessons: Tamara is a cocktail of raw hunger and glittering artifice. And all the while, their romantic idyll is threatened by history's darkening tide. Inspired by real events in de Lempicka's history, The Last Nude is a tour de force of historical imagination. Ellis Avery gives the reader a tantalizing window into a lost Paris, an age already vanishing as the inexorable forces of history close in on two tangled lives. Spellbinding and provocative, this is a novel about genius and craft, love and desire, regret and, most of all, hope that can transcend time and circumstance.

2020 Stonewall Honor Books in Literature
In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys. Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra. Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, raw power, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

2021 Stonewall Honor Book in Literature
A funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the limits of love. Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day care teacher, and they've been together for a few years--good years--but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other. But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike's immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it. Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they've ever known. And just maybe they'll all be okay in the end.

2003 Stonewall Honor Books in Literature
A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides - the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl. In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all. The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite. Spanning eight decades - and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides'snovel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.

2007 Stonewall Honor Books in Literature
Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit partying, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of four Londoners - three women and a young man with a past - whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in tragedy, stunning surprise and exquisite turns, only to change irreversibly in the shadow of a grand historical event.

2020 Stonewall Honor Books in Literature
Poet Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born -- a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam -- and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

1969 Stonewall Book Award
Set in the 19th century, Isabel Miller's classic lesbian novel traces the relationship between Patience White, an educated painter, and Sarah Dowling, a farmer, whose romantic bond does not sit well with the puritanical New England farming community in which they live. Ultimately, they are forced to make life-changing decisions that depend on their courage and their commitment to one another. First self-published in 1969 in an edition of 1,000 copies. Patience & Sarah is a historical romance that was a touchstone for the burgeoning gay and women's activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s; it celebrates the joys of an uninhibited love between two strong women with a confident defiance that remains relevant today.

2020 Stonewall Honor Books in Literature
Nicole Dennis-Benn introduces readers to an unforgettable heroine for our times: the eponymous Patsy, who leaves her young daughter behind in Jamaica to follow Cicely, her oldest friend, to New York. Beating with the pulse of a long-withheld confession and peppered with lilting patois, Patsy gives voice to a woman who looks to America for the opportunity to love whomever she chooses, bravely putting herself first. But to survive as an undocumented immigrant, Patsy is forced to work as a nanny, while back in Jamaica her daughter, Tru, ironically struggles to understand why she was left behind.

2018 Stonewall Honor Books in Literature
This powerful poetry collection seeks to map the emotional and spiritual territory of diaspora, violence, abuse, and exile. Kai Cheng incorporates autobiographical details from her own childhood and adult life with the rhythms of the oral storytelling tradition and fairytale motifs, poignantly depicting the plight of trans women of color.

2000 Stonewall Literature Award
After sustaining a serious injury during an S/M scene, Po Childs checks herself into a psychiatric hospital where she recalls her life's most memorable incidents and unconventional relatives. After a poignant exploration of her family's curses and blessings, Po allows the healing process to begin.

2021 Stonewall Honor Book in Literature
An anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz's brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages--bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers--be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: "Let me call my anxiety,desire, then. / Let me call it,a garden." In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: "I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging:Let me be lonely but not invisible."Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope--in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

2015 Stonewall Barbara Gittings Literature Award
With rootless cosmopolitanism, formal rigor, and the fluidity of slam, Jones explores questions of sexuality, race, and shifting identity.

1996 Stonewall Literature Finalists
In the spring of 1993, after nine years as an architect in New York City, Wade Mayfield returns to North Carolina. This is no ordinary move; for Wade, at the age of thirty-three, has come back to his father's house to die of AIDS. Against the backdrop of the ongoing AIDS pandemic, The Promise of Rest explores such timeless matters as love, family loyalty and suffering, race, freedom, and duty. Wade's parents, Hutch and Ann, have recently separated; but for the remaining months of their only child's life, they and their friends come together in steady care for Wade and in the knowledge and sustenance they gain from his patience and his undaunted determination to die as himself. When death comes, they are slowly amazed to learn of the ongoing mystery Wade has arranged to reveal after his departure - a mystery that not only initiates a possible reunion for his parents but also promises to continue the proud vitality of a complex, multiracial family that had seemed destined for extinction.

2014 Stonewall Honor Books in Literature
One day in 1855 Lucy Lobdell cut her hair, changed clothes, and went off to live her life as a man. By the time it was over, she was notorious. The New York Times thought her worthy of a lengthy obituary that began "Death of a Modern Diana . . . Dressed in Man's Clothing She Win's a Girl's Love." The obit detailed what the Times knew of Lucy's life, from her backwoods upbringing to the dance school she ran disguised as a man, "where she won the love of a young lady scholar." But that was just the start of the trouble; the Times did not know about Lucy's arrest and trial for the crime of wearing men's clothes or her jailbreak engineered by her wife, Marie Perry, to whom she had been married by an unsuspecting judge. Lucy lived at a time when women did not commonly travel unescorted, carry a rifle, sit down in bars, or have romantic liaisons with other women. Lucy did these things in a personal quest to work and be paid, to wear what she wanted, and to love whomever she cared to. But to gain those freedoms she had to endure public scorn and wrestle with a sexual identity whose vocabulary had yet to be invented.

2020 Stonewall Honor Books in Non-Fiction
If you've ever questioned the logic of basing an entire identity around what you have between your legs, it's time to embark on a daring escape outside of the binary box ... Open your eyes to what it means to be a boy or a girl - and above and beyond! Within these pages, you get to choose which path to forge. Explore over one hundred different scenarios that embrace nearly every definition across the world, over history, and in the ever-widening realms of our imagination! What if your journey leads you into a world with several genders, or simply one' Do you live in a matriarchal society, or as a sworn virgin in the Balkans' How does gender (or the lack thereof) change the way we approach sex and love, life or death' Jump headfirst into this refreshingly creative exploration of the ways gender colors every shade and shape of our world. Above all, it's more important than ever for us to celebrate the fact that there are infinite gender paths - and each of them is beautiful.

2013 Stonewall Honor Books in Literature
Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the kingdom of Phthia to be raised in the shadow of King Peleus and his golden son, Achilles. "The best of all the Greeks"--strong, beautiful, and the child of a goddess--Achilles is everything the shamed Patroclus is not. Yet despite their differences, the boys become steadfast companions. Their bond deepens as they grow into young men and become skilled in the arts of war and medicine--much to the displeasure and the fury of Achilles' mother, Thetis, a cruel sea goddess with a hatred of mortals. When word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, the men of Greece, bound by blood and oath, must lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.

2019 Stonewall Honor Books in Literature
A revelation shared between two privileged teenagers from very different backgrounds sets off a chain of events with devastating consequences. On the surface, Niru leads a charmed life. Raised by two attentive parents in Washington, D.C., he's a top student and a track star at his prestigious private high school. Bound for Harvard in the fall, his prospects are bright. But Niru has a painful secret: he is queer--an abominable sin to his conservative Nigerian parents. No one knows except Meredith, his best friend, the daughter of prominent Washington insiders--and the one person who seems not to judge him. When his father accidentally discovers Niru is gay, the fallout is brutal and swift. Coping with troubles of her own, however, Meredith finds that she has little left emotionally to offer him. As the two friends struggle to reconcile their desires against the expectations and institutions that seek to define them, they find themselves speeding toward a future more violent and senseless than they can imagine. Neither will escape unscathed. Speak No Evil explores what it means to be different in a fundamentally conformist society and how that difference plays out in our inner and outer struggles.

1994 Stonewall Literature Award
This brave, original novel is considered to be the finest account ever written of the complexities of a transgendered existence. Woman or man? That's the question that rages like a storm around Jess Goldberg, clouding her life and her identity. Growing up differently gendered in a blue--collar town in the 1950's, coming out as a butch in the bars and factories of the prefeminist '60s, deciding to pass as a man in order to survive when she is left without work or a community in the early '70s. This powerful, provocative and deeply moving novel sees Jess coming full circle, she learns to accept the complexities of being a transgendered person in a world demanding simple explanations: a he-she emerging whole, weathering the turbulence.

1996 Stonewall Literature Finalist
As Toland Polk, a citizen of the small southern town of Clayfield in the 1960s, fights for civil rights, he begins to realize that he has another, more personal, battle to wage--that of accepting that he is gay.

2021 Stonewall Barbara Gittings Literature Award
A moving and lyrical novel following three generations of Syrian Americans linked by the truths they carry close to their hearts. Five years after a suspicious fire killed his mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. Unable to paint since his mother's ghost has begun to visit him each evening, the only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria. One night, he finds the journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z. She mysteriously disappeared more than 60 years before, but her journal contains proof that her past is intimately tied to his mother's-and his grandmother's. Even more surprising, Laila Z's story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his community that he never knew. Following his mother's ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along.

2020 Stonewall Honor Books in Literature
Hasan Namir's debut collection of poetry, War / Torn, is a brazen and lyrical interrogation of religion and masculinity-the performance and sense of belonging they delineate and draw together. Namir summons prayer, violence, and the sensuality of love, revisiting tenets of Islam and dictates of war to break the barriers between the profane and the sacred.

2018 Stonewall Honor Books in Literature
In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family--the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes--all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one's own path in identity, life, and love.