By Chenoa Rai
A Black boy feeling like a woman and wanting to live as one: where was this acceptable? Definitely not in my world, and I didn’t have the language to properly express who I was. The only trans representation I had came from Jerry Springer, who did more to exploit trans women than to humanize them.

by Ty Bo Yule
I hadn’t planned on transitioning at Harvard. No one would choose to invite puberty to graduate school, but I probably wouldn’t have finished my degree if I hadn’t…

by Phil Tarley
In 1970, I met Michael Feigh in San Francisco and he quickly became my pimp. My English boyfriend introduced us when we were hippies living near Haight-Ashbury. I was nineteen…

by Terry Wolverton
It’s been said that a thing does not exist until you have a name for it. When I was growing up in Detroit in the ’60s, no one I knew was talking about lesbians…

by Walter Meyer
Suicide, rightly or wrongly, feels preventable. If I had listened better, been a better friend, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Bill’s death by suicide haunted me so badly that I couldn’t bear to think about him without it causing days of depression.

by Walter Holland
In 1996, I was on the beach at Fire Island Pines. It was an exquisite summer day, and the sea was dazzling. But the beauty of the day belied the reality underneath: The Pines had become one of the epicenters of the HIV/AIDS epidemic…

by Charlie Ceates
I technically have two coming out stories: coming out at school and coming out to my family. I’m grateful that I have more than one, because the former is a bitter memory…that I rarely revisit, even though it taught me a valuable lesson regarding trust. Luckily, I also have the memory of what it was like coming out to my family…

by Emily L. Quint Freeman
One May night in 1969, along with seventeen others, I broke into the Selective Service office in Chicago’s South Side. We stuffed over 40,000 draft records into sacks, dragged them to the adjacent parking lot and set them on fire…

by Jennifer Perrine
The Ramblers’ square dance lessons began with a question that might have proved daunting in another environment: Boy or Girl? Despite being nonbinary, I almost always default to “girl” when these are the only two options presented, a defensive habit meant to put other people at ease, but the other dancers made it clear my answer would in no way reflect on my gender…

by Scott Remer
I FIRST QUESTIONED my sexuality in tenth grade. I found myself liking a friend more than straight people tend to like their same-sex friends. It came as an unpleasant surprise. Adolescence is normally a time for doubt and reevaluation, but I wasn’t expecting to have to grapple with such a fundamental aspect of my identity…