Melissa Lou Etheridge is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and guitarist. Her eponymous debut album was released in 1988 and became an underground success. It peaked at No. 22 on the Billboard 200 and its lead single, "Bring Me Some Water", garnered Etheridge her first Grammy Award nomination for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female in 1989. Her second album, Brave and Crazy, appeared that same year and earned Etheridge two more Grammy nominations. In 1992, Etheridge released her third album, Never Enough, and its lead single, "Ain't It Heavy", won Etheridge her first Grammy Award.
Rita Mae Brown is an American feminist writer, best known for her coming-of-age autobiographical novel, Rubyfruit Jungle. Brown was active in a number of civil rights campaigns and criticized the marginalization of lesbians within feminist groups. Brown received the Pioneer Award for lifetime achievement at the Lambda Literary Awards in 2015.
Chely Wright is an American activist, author, diversity officer and country music artist. She initially rose to fame as a commercial country recording artist with several charting singles, including the number one hit, "Single White Female." She later became known for her role in LGBT activism after publicly coming out as a gay woman in 2010. She has sold over 1,500,000 copies and 10,000,000 digital impressions to date in the United States.
Woman in the Moon is the debut studio album by American country music artist Chely Wright. The album was released on August 9, 1994, via Polydor Nashville and was produced by both Barry Beckett and Harold Shedd. It was one of two albums Wright would release under the label. Wright co-wrote five of the ten tracks on the record. The album contains the singles "He's a Good Ole Boy", "Till I Was Loved by You", and "Sea of Cowboy Hats". None of these singles reached top 40 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts. The album received mixed to positive critical reception for its lyrical content and sound.
Mary Wings was an American cartoonist, writer, and artist. She was known for highlighting lesbian themes in her work. In 1973, she made history by releasing Come Out Comix, the first lesbian comic book. She also wrote a series of detective novels featuring lesbian heroine Emma Victor. Divine Victim, Wings' only Gothic novel, won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Mystery in 1994.
Let Me In is the third studio album by American country music artist Chely Wright. The album was released on September 9, 1997 on MCA Nashville Records and was produced by Tony Brown. Let Me In was Wright's first album to chart on the Billboard Magazine album charts and also spawned her first Top 40 singles. It was also the first of three albums Wright recorded for the MCA Nashville label.
American country music artist Chely Wright has released eight studio albums, three compilation albums, one video album, four extended plays, 24 singles, 18 music videos, and appeared on six albums. Wright first issued two unsuccessful studio albums under Polydor Records: Woman in the Moon (1994) and Right in the Middle of It (1996). Both albums were critically acclaimed despite their lack of success. Her third studio album Let Me In (1997) reached number 25 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and spawned the hit single "Shut Up and Drive". It was Wright's fourth studio album that brought forth her biggest success, Single White Female. Released in May 1999, it reached number 15 on the country albums chart, number 124 on the Billboard 200, and certified gold from the Recording Industry Association of America. The title track reached the top of the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in 1999 and was followed by the top 20 hit "It Was".
Lifted Off the Ground is the seventh studio album from singer-songwriter Chely Wright. The album was released on April 30, 2010, and coincided with the release of her first memoir, Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer. Within two weeks of the album's release, it was estimated to have sold nearly 6,000 copies.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+(LGBTQ+)music is music that focuses on the experiences of gender and sexual minorities as a product of the broad gay liberation movement.
Wish Me Away is a 2011 documentary film directed by Bobbie Birleffi and Beverly Kopf. Winner of 12 film festival awards, it is about the coming out of the country music singer and gay rights activist Chely Wright. In May 2010, she had become the first major country music performer to publicly come out as gay.
Boyfriends with Girlfriends is a 2011 young adult novel by Alex Sánchez. The book was published by Simon & Schuster and deals with the pressures of teens coming to terms with their sexuality and of coming of age. Sanchez began working on the novel after receiving e-mails from teens who were being criticized by both their straight and homosexual peers for being bisexual. Boyfriends with Girlfriends has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and was a 2012 ALA Rainbow Bridge List novel.
Malinda Lo is an American writer of young adult novels including Ash, Huntress, Adaptation, Inheritance,A Line in the Dark, and Last Night at the Telegraph Club. She also does research on diversity in young adult literature and publishing.
Amanda Kyle Williams was an American crime writer best known for her Keye Street series of novels.
Men We Reaped is a memoir by the African-American writer Jesmyn Ward. The book was published by Bloomsbury in 2013. The memoir focuses on Ward's own personal history and the deaths of five Black men in her life over a four-year span between 2000 and 2004. Men We Reaped won the Heartland Prize for non-fiction, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction.
How We Fight for Our Lives is a coming-of-age memoir written by American author Saeed Jones and published by Simon & Schuster in 2019. The story follows Jones as a young, Black, gay man in 1990s Lewisville, Texas as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears.
Samra Habib is a Pakistani Canadian photographer, writer and activist. They are most noted for Just Me and Allah, a photography project they launched in 2014 to document the lives of LGBTQ Muslims, and We Have Always Been Here, a memoir of their experience as a queer-identified Muslim published in 2019 by Penguin Random House Canada.
Punch Me Up to the Gods is a memoir, written by Brian Broome and published May 18, 2021 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The book won the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction (2021), as well as the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir or Biography (2022).
Elissa Altman is an American food writer and author. She has written three memoirs: Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking, Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw, and Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing. Her blog "Poor Man's Feast" won a James Beard Foundation Award for Individual Food Blog in 2012.
