Adult Non-Fiction

On the Christopher Street Pier in New York City, homeless queer and trans youth of color forge friendships and chosen families, withstanding tremendous amounts of abuse while working to carve out autonomy and security in their lives. With intimate access to three fearless young persons -- Krystal, Desean and Casper -- Pier Kids highlights the resilience of a community many choose to ignore.

Beam, Cris. Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teens. Mariner Books, 2008.
When Beam moved to Los Angeles, she was drawn deeply into the pained and powerful group of transgirls she discovered. This work shows readers their world--a dizzying mix of familiar teenage cliques and crushes with far less familiar challenges like how to morph one's body on a few dollars a day.

Berg, Ryan. No House To Call My Home: Love, Family and Other Transgressions. Nation Books, 2016.
A deep and intimate look at the lives of LGBTQ youth in foster care, vividly chronicling their struggles, fears and hardships, and revealing the force that allows them to carry on: the irrepressible power of hope.

Davis, Heath Fogg. Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?NYU Press, 2017.
Beyond Trans pushes the conversation on gender identity to its limits: questioning the need for gender categories in the first place. Whether on birth certificates or college admissions applications or on bathroom doors, why do we need to mark people and places with sex categories? Do they serve a real purpose or are these places and forms just mechanisms of exclusion? Heath Fogg Davis offers an impassioned call to rethink the usefulness of dividing the world into not just Male and Female categories but even additional categories of Transgender and gender fluid. Davis, himself a transgender man, explores the underlying gender-enforcing policies and customs in American life that have led to transgender bathroom bills, college admissions controversies, and more, arguing that it is necessary for our society to take real steps to challenge the assumption that gender matters.

Eichinger, Marilynne. Over the Peanut Fence: Scaling Barriers for Runaway and Homeless Youths. MEZR Press, 2019.
When a 20-year-old street youth came to live with the author, it initiated a five-year struggle to help the youth scale a wall of hopelessness to attain a future of possibilities. His journey along with others' illustrate what it takes to overcome early trauma. Part memoir, storybook, and analysis, the book provides a path forward.

Ho, Vivian. Those Who Wander: America’s Lost Street Kids. Little A, 2019.
In 2015, the senseless Bay Area murders of twenty-three-year-old Audrey Carey and sixty-seven-year-old Steve Carter were personal tragedies for the victims' families. But they also shed light on a more complex issue. The killers were three drifters scrounging for a living among a burgeoning counterculture population. Soon this community of runaways and transients became vulnerable scapegoats of a modern witch hunt. The supposedly progressive residents of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, only two generations removed from the Summer of Love, now feared all of society's outcasts as threats. In Those Who Wander, Vivian Ho delves deep into a rising subculture that's changing the very fabric of her city and all of urban America. Moving beyond the disheartening statistics, she gives voices to these young people--victims of abuse, failed foster care, mental illness, and drug addiction. She also doesn't ignore the threat they pose to themselves and to others as a dangerous dark side emerges. With alarming urgency, she asks what can be done to save the next generation of America's vagabond youth.

Lowrey, Sassafras; Burke, Jennifer Clare; Shepard, Judy Peck. Kicked Out. Homofactus Press, 2010.
This volume is collection of essays written by young people who were kicked out of their homes as minors for identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), as well as a few policy essays from service providers. Diverse contributors ranging in age, experience, and current living situation share stories of perseverance and abuse with poignant accounts of survival. The editors point out that very few urban areas have recognized the need to serve dispossessed LGBT youth by establishing shelters or safe houses; money is tight and public support is often hard to muster. They feel that homelessness of these kids is but a symptom of a larger and more pervasive cultural problem: we are a society that does not value all people, and somehow there seems to be a tacit belief that parents of LGBT youth are entitled to abdicate their responsibility to love and protect the children they have created. They feel that such a mindset is due to a homophobic and transphobic culture. This anthology intends to present the points-of-view of the voiceless and also to challenge the stereotypical face of homelessness.

Robinson, Brandon Andrew. Coming Out to the Streets: The Lives of LGBTQ Youth Experiencing Homelessness. University of California Press, 2020.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth are disproportionately represented in the U.S. youth homelessness population. In Coming Out to the Streets, Brandon Andrew Robinson examines their lives. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in central Texas, Coming Out to the Streets maps the LGBTQ youth's lives prior to experiencing homelessness-within their families, schools, and other institutions-and while they live on the streets, deal with police, and navigate shelters and services for people experiencing homelessness. Through this documentation, Robinson shows how poverty and racial inequality shape how LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness negotiate their gender and sexuality. Robinson contends that solutions to addressing LGBTQ youth homelessness need to move beyond blaming families for rejecting their child. By highlighting youth's voices, Robinson calls for queer and trans liberation through systemic change.

Smith, Martin J. Going to Trinidad : a Doctor, a Colorado Town, and Stories from an Unlikely Gender Crossroads. Bower House, 2021.
For more than four decades, between 1969 and 2010, the remote former mining town of Trinidad, Colorado was the unlikely crossroads for approximately six thousand medical pilgrims who came looking for relief from the pain of gender dysphoria. The surgical skill and nonjudgmental compassion of surgeons Stanley Biber and his transgender protege Marci Bowers not only made the phrase "Going to Trinidad" a euphemism for gender confirmation surgery in the worldwide transgender community, but also turned the small outpost near the New Mexico border into what The New York Times once called "the sex-change capital of the world.” More than six thousand transgender men and women left Trinidad hoping that hormone therapy and surgical relief was the right prescription for their pain. For most it was, but not for all, and their experiences offer important and timely insights for those struggling to understand this sometimes confounding human condition.