By Justin Estoque
Some of my first stirrings of sexual awareness and curiosity sprouted in Boulder, Colorado, where my Dad had summertime meteorological research assignments. I must have been ten, maybe twelve years old.

By Winter Breedlove
If I had to trace my genesis as an asexual trans woman, I’d say that the Radical Faerie commune was my stomping ground.

By Mohamad Roshan
I WAS homophobic because the world of homosexuality was dark and unknown to me. I thought that people with such sexual orientations would degrade society as a whole. These kinds of relationships were unimaginable to me, and I couldn’t accept that someone had erotic attractions with the same sex.

By William Lawrence
MY FIRST CONNECTION with people and organizations that campaigned for gay rights was my introduction to the Albany Trust in the UK. I was a teenager at the time, when a well-meaning teacher of drama came to my rescue.

By Musbah Shaheen
My asylum case is still pending, so the future is still uncertain. Part of the healing process is acknowledging what happened, and today I’m taking another step toward healing. So. here’s to coming out for a second time: I am a survivor of sexual assault.

By Martina Ramirez
In fact, for me, happiness in this case is based on a mix of credits (good things) and debits (not-such-good things) that are associated with the surgery and other matters. And, as in the financial world, not all credits and debits have the same value.

By Robert Peach
On the verge of my 36th birthday I celebrate a little over three months of partnership with a man 27 years my senior.

By Allan Hunter
They ask me what my pronouns are. It’s a respectful and appropriate question. I have no easy answers. I was born with a physical configuration that was assigned the value ‘male’, and I’ve always been one of the girls from as far back as I can remember. I was pressured to adopt and embrace masculinity, to become one of the boys, all throughout childhood, but I wasn’t so inclined. …

By Martina Reaves
When I hear about my friends’ children organizing their elaborate weddings and see all the time and effort they spend picking the perfect venue and micro-managing every minor detail, I’m quietly amused. When you’re grappling with cancer, details like these simply don’t matter. What matters is gathering the people you love and the people who love you into a room …

By Randy Fair
THE TRAJECTORY of my life was changed because of a book written by a gay activist. It was 1986, and I had just moved from Weaver, Alabama, to Atlanta. In that time period, LGBT life was almost exclusively centered on bar culture…