Service Alert
CD service concludes July 31, 2025
CELA's audiobooks and magazines are available in Direct to Player and downloadable formats. We no longer mail out CDs. Please contact us for more information.
CELA's audiobooks and magazines are available in Direct to Player and downloadable formats. We no longer mail out CDs. Please contact us for more information.
Showing 1 - 20 of 24 items
By Michael Waters. 2024
"Michael Waters performs an Olympian act of storytelling, using the stories of these extraordinary athletes to explore in brilliant detail…
the struggle for understanding and equality." —Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life The story of the early trans athletes and Olympic bureaucrats who lit the flame for today's culture wars. In December 1935, Zdenek Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women's sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes. In The Other Olympians , Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany's atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC's nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender. Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports. A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and GirouxBy CeCé Telfer. 2024
By turns harrowing and hopeful, MAKE IT COUNT is the inspiring story of the first openly transgender woman to win…
a NCAA title, following her traditional upbringing in Jamaica, her fight to become a US citizen, and her efforts to achieve her Olympic dreams. CeCé Telfer is a warrior. The first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA championship, she has contended with transphobia on and off the track since childhood. Now, she stands at the crossroads of a national and international conversation about equity in sports, forced to advocate for her personhood and rights at every turn. After spending years training for the 2024 Olympics, Telfer has been sidelined and silenced more times than she can count. But she's never been good at taking no for an answer. MAKE IT COUNT is Telfer's raw and inspiring story. From coming of age in Jamaica, where she grew up hearing a constant barrage of slurs, to beginning her new life in Toronto and then New Hampshire, where she realized what running could offer her, to living in the backseat of her car while searching for a coach, to Mexico, where she trained for the US Trials, this book follows the arc of Telfer's Olympic dream. This is the story of running on what feels like the edge of a knife, of what it means to compete when you're not just an athlete but treated like a walking controversy. But it's also the story of resilience and athleticism, of a runner who found a clarity in her sport that otherwise eluded her—a sense of being simply alive on this earth, a human moving through space. Finally, herselfBy Nikkya Hargrove. 2024
In this searing and uplifting memoir, a young Black queer woman fresh out of college adopts her baby brother after…
their incarcerated mother dies, determined to create the kind of family she never had. Growing up, Nikkya Hargrove's mother was in and out of prison. Hargrove, one of the 5 million children dealing with the effects of an incarcerated parent, spent a good portion of her childhood in prison visiting rooms. After her baby brother was born, Hargrove decided to fight for custody–even though she had only just graduated college. We see how she is subjected to preconceived notions that she, a Black, queer, young woman, cannot handle the responsibility. She shares about the shame she feels accepting food stamps, her family's reaction to her coming out, and the joy she experiences when she meets the woman who will become her wife. Whether she's clashing with her brother's biological father or battling for Jonathan's education rights after he's diagnosed with ADHD and autism, this is a woman who won't give up. Hargrove's memoir picks up where Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy left off, exploring generational trauma and pulling back the curtain on family court and poverty in America. Moving and inspiring, Mama is an ode to motherhood and identity, to never giving up, and to finding strength in family and communityBy Michael G Lee. 2024
Randy Shilts was the preeminent LGBTQ+ reporter of his generation. He was the first openly gay reporter assigned to a…
gay beat at a mainstream paper and one of the nation's most influential chroniclers of gay history, politics, and culture. Shilts wrote three seminal works on the community: The Mayor of Castro Street , on the life, assassination, and legacy of Harvey Milk; And the Band Played On , detailing the failure of politics as usual during the early AIDS epidemic; and Conduct Unbecoming , a history of the US military's mistreatment of LGBTQ service members. Yet the intimate life story of Randy Shilts has been left unwritten. When the Band Played On tells that story, recognizing his legacy as a trailblazing figure in gay activism, journalism, and public policy. The resulting narrative tells the tale of a singularly gifted voice, a talented yet insecure young man whose coming of age became intricately linked to the historic peaks and devastating perils of modern gay liberation. When the Band Played On is the authoritative account of Randy Shilts's trailblazing life, as well as his legacy of shaping the history-making events he coveredBy Phil Bildner. 2024
Glenn Burke, Game Changer features sound design and special effects to enhance your listening enjoyment. Listen out for the sounds…
of Major League Baseball and cheers from the crowds. An inspiring audiobook biography about Glenn Burke, the first Major League Baseball player to come out as gay, and the story of how he created the world's most recognizable handshake, the high five. Playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Glenn Burke could do it all—hit, throw, run, field. He was the heart of the clubhouse who energized his teammates with his enthusiasm and love for the game. It was that energy that led Glenn to invent the high five one October day back in 1977—a spontaneous gesture after a home run that has since evolved into our universal celebratory greeting. But despite creating this joyful symbol, Glenn Burke, a gay Black man, wasn't always given support and shown acceptance in return. From acclaimed author Phil Bildner, this moving audiobook biography recognizes the challenges Burke faced while celebrating how his bravery and his now-famous handshake helped pave the way for others to live openly and freeBy Komail Aijazuddin. 2024
A blazing new talent's hilarious memoir about coming of age and coming out in Pakistan, moving to America, looking for…
love, and falling in love with himself along the way What do you do when you're too gay for Pakistan, too Pakistani to be gay in America, and ashamed of your body everywhere? How can you find happiness despite years of humiliation, physical danger, and a legion of Brooklyn hipsters who know you only as a queer from Whereveristan? How do you summon the courage to be yourself no matter where you are? Even as a young child in Lahore, Komail Aijazuddin knew he was different—no one else at his all-boys prep school was pirouetting off their desks, or being bullied for their "manboobs," or spontaneously bursting into songs from The Little Mermaid. Aijazuddin began to believe his only chance at a happy, meaningful life would be found elsewhere: America, the land of the free, the home of the gays. But the hostility of a post–9/11 world and society's rejection of his art, his desires, and his body would soon teach him that finding happiness takes a lot more than a plane ticket. Searching for his place between two worlds while navigating a minefield of expectations, prejudice, and self-doubt, Aijazuddin discovered—sometimes painfully, sometimes hilariously—that there are people and places he'd need to let go of to move forward. Manboobs is a riotously funny memoir of searching for love, seamlessly blending humor, politics, pop culture, and the bravery required to be yourself. Aijazuddin confidently announces himself as an exciting new voice in humor with his moving and charming reexamination of the American dream and our search for homeBy Kb Brookins. 2024
By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.…
Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective—the tropes, the presumptions— Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change. “I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,” Brookins writes. “Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I’m perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can’t change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says ‘female,’ and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean—to be a girl-turned-man when you’re something else entirely?” Informed by KB Brookins’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency—whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as “other”By Brad Gooch. 2024
A stunning life of the iconic American artist, Keith Haring, by the acclaimed biographer Brad Gooch. In the 1980s, the…
subways of New York City were covered with art. In the stations, black matte sheets were pasted over outdated ads, and unsigned chalk drawings often popped up on these blank spaces. These temporary chalk drawings numbered in the thousands and became synonymous with a city as diverse as it was at war with itself, beset with poverty and crime but alive with art and creative energy. And every single one of these drawings was done by Keith Haring. Keith Haring was one of the most emblematic artists of the 1980s, a figure described by his contemporaries as "a prophet in his life, his person, and his work." Part of an iconic cultural crowd that included Andy Warhol, Madonna, and Basquiat, Haring broke down the barriers between high art and popular culture, creating work that was accessible for all and using it as a means to provoke and inspire radical social change. Haring died of AIDS in 1990. To this day, his influence on our culture remains incontrovertible, and his glamorous, tragically short life has a unique aura of mystery and power. Brad Gooch, noted biographer of Flannery O'Connor and Frank O'Hara, was granted access to Haring's extensive archive. He has written a biography that will become the authoritative work on the artist. Based on interviews with those who knew Haring best and drawing from the rich archival history, Brad Gooch sets out to capture the magic of Keith Haring: a visionary and timeless iconBy Phil Bildner. 2024
An inspiring picture book biography about Glenn Burke, the first Major League Baseball player to come out as gay, and…
the story of how he created the world’s most recognizable handshake, the high five.Playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Glenn Burke could do it all—hit, throw, run, field. He was the heart of the clubhouse who energized his teammates with his enthusiasm and love for the game. It was that energy that led Glenn to invent the high five one October day back in 1977—a spontaneous gesture after a home run that has since evolved into our universal celebratory greeting.But despite creating this joyful symbol, Glenn Burke, a gay Black man, wasn’t always given support and shown acceptance in return.From acclaimed author Phil Bildner, with illustrations from Daniel J. O'Brien, this moving picture book biography recognizes the challenges Burke faced while celebrating how his bravery and his now-famous handshake helped pave the way for others to live openly and free.By Matthew H. Sommer. 2024
In imperial China, people moved away from the gender they were assigned at birth in different ways and for many…
reasons. Eunuchs, boy actresses, and clergy left behind normative gender roles defined by family and procreation. “Stone maidens”—women deemed physically incapable of vaginal intercourse—might depart from families or marriages to become Buddhist or Daoist nuns. Anatomical males who presented as women sometimes took a conventionally female occupation such as midwife, faith healer, or even medium to a fox spirit. Yet they were often punished harshly for the crime of “masquerading in women’s attire,” suspected of sexual predation, even when they had lived peacefully in their communities for many years.Exploring these histories and many more, this book is a groundbreaking study of transgender lives and practices in late imperial China. Through close readings of court cases, as well as Ming and Qing fiction and nineteenth-century newspaper accounts, Matthew H. Sommer examines the social, legal, and cultural histories of gender crossing. He considers a range of transgender experiences, illuminating how certain forms of gender transgression were sanctioned in particular social contexts and penalized in others. Sommer scrutinizes the ways Qing legal authorities and literati writers represented and understood gender-nonconforming people and practices, contrasting official ideology with popular mentalities. An unprecedented account of China’s transgender histories, this book also sheds new light on a range of themes in Ming and Qing law, religion, medicine, literature, and culture.By Amin Ghaziani. 2024
It&’s closing time for an alarming number of gay bars in cities around the globe—but it&’s definitely not the last…
danceIn this exhilarating journey into underground parties, pulsating with life and limitless possibility, acclaimed author Amin Ghaziani unveils the unexpected revolution revitalizing urban nightlife.Far from the gay bar with its largely white, gay male clientele, here is a dazzling scene of secret parties—club nights—wherein culture creatives, many of whom are queer, trans, and racial minorities, reclaim the night in the name of those too long left out. Episodic, nomadic, and radically inclusive, club nights are refashioning queer nightlife in boundlessly imaginative and powerfully defiant ways.Drawing on Ghaziani&’s immersive encounters at underground parties in London and more than one hundred riveting interviews with everyone from bar owners to party producers, revelers to rabble-rousers, Long Live Queer Nightlife showcases a spectacular, if seldom-seen, vision of a queer world shimmering with self-empowerment, inventiveness, and joy.By Lilly Dancyger. 2024
A bold, poignant essay collection that treats women&’s friendships as the love stories they truly are, from the critically acclaimed…
author of Negative Space&“Fiercely felt and finely etched.&”—Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy ExamsLilly Dancyger always thought of her closest friendships as great loves, complex and profound as any romance. When her beloved cousin was murdered just as both girls were entering adulthood, Dancyger&’s devotion to the women in her life took on a new urgency—a desire to hold her friends close while she still could. In First Love, this urgency runs through a striking exploration of the bonds between women, from the intensity of adolescent best friendship and fluid sexuality to mothering and chosen family.Each essay in this incisive collection is grounded in a close female friendship in Dancyger&’s life, reaching outward to dissect cultural assumptions about identity and desire, and the many ways women create space for each other in a world that wants us small. Seamlessly weaving personal experience with literature and pop culture—ranging from fairy tales to true crime, from Anaïs Nin and Sylvia Plath to Heavenly Creatures and the &“sad girls&” of Tumblr—Dancyger&’s essays form a kaleidoscopic story of a life told through friendships, and an expansive interrogation of what it means to love each other.Though friendship will never be enough to keep us safe from the dangers of the world, Dancyger reminds us that love is always worth the risk, and that when tragedy strikes, it&’s our friends who will help us survive. In First Love, these essential bonds get their due.By Kb Brookins. 2024
By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.Even…
as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective—the tropes, the presumptions—Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change. &“I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,&” Brookins writes. &“Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I&’m perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can&’t change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says &‘female,&’ and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean—to be a girl-turned-man when you&’re something else entirely?&” Informed by KB Brookins&’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency—whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as &“other&”By Diane Ehrensaft, Michelle Jurkiewicz. 2024
A world-leading expert and clinical psychologist team up to explain everything you may not know about gender: what it is,…
where it came from, and why it’s changing. Gender is everywhere. Politicians argue over it, educational systems struggle to define it, and our friends, neighbors, and children explore it. More than ever before, young people are questioning their gender identities and redefining the role of gender in their lives. How should our society—and we as individuals (parents, teachers, friends)—respond? In Gender Explained, Diane Ehrensaft, PhD, and Michelle Jurkiewicz, PsyD, separate medical fact from fear-mongering falsehoods and answer these questions: What should parents do when their child starts experiencing gender dysphoria? Which sports teams should transgender youth play on? How should schools teach young people about gender? And most important: What is gender-affirming care, and when should an individual have access to it? With clear, expert guidance, this book is a safeguard against political vitriol, and it offers urgent protection for those among us who are transgender and/or nonbinary. Far more than an introduction to gender creativity, it is an invitation to develop compassion for everyone along the gender continuum.By Rebecca L. Davis. 2024
From an esteemed scholar, a richly textured, authoritative history of sex and sexuality in America—the first major account in three…
decades. Our era is one of sexual upheaval. Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022, school systems across the country are banning books with LGBTQ+ themes, and the notion of a “tradwife” is gaining adherents on the right while polyamory wins converts on the left. It may seem as though debates over sex are more intense than ever, but as acclaimed historian Rebecca L. Davis demonstrates in Fierce Desires, we should not be too surprised, because Americans have been arguing over which kinds of sex are “acceptable”—and which are not—since before the founding itself. From the public floggings of fornicators in early New England to passionate same-sex love affairs in the 1800s and the crackdown on abortion providers in the 1870s, and from the movements for sexual liberation to the recent restrictions on access to gender affirming care, Davis presents a sweeping, engrossing, illuminating four-hundred-year account of this nation’s sexual past. Drawing on a wealth of sources, including legal records, erotica, and eighteenth-century romance novels, she recasts important episodes—Anthony Comstock’s crusade against smut among them—and, at the same time, unearths stories of little-remembered pioneers and iconoclasts, such as an indentured servant in colonial Virginia named Thomas/Thomasine Hall, Gay Liberation Front cofounder Kiyoshi Kuromiya, and postwar female pleasure activist Betty Dodson. At the heart of the book is Davis’s argument that the concept of sexual identity is relatively novel, first appearing in the nineteenth century. Over the centuries, Americans have shifted from understanding sexual behaviors as reflections of personal preferences or values, such as those rooted in faith or culture, to defining sexuality as an essential part of what makes a person who they are. And at every step, legislators, police, activists, and bureaucrats attempted to regulate new sexual behaviors, transforming government in the process. The most comprehensive account of America’s sexual past since John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s 1988 classic, Intimate Matters, Davis’s magisterial work seeks to help us understand the turmoil of the present. It demonstrates how fiercely we have always valued our desires, and how far we are willing to go to defend them.By Michael G. Lee. 2025
Randy Shilts was the preeminent LGBTQ+ reporter of his generation. He was the first openly gay reporter assigned to a…
gay beat at a mainstream paper and one of the nation's most influential chroniclers of gay history, politics, and culture. Shilts wrote three seminal works on the community: The Mayor of Castro Street, on the life, assassination, and legacy of Harvey Milk; And the Band Played On, detailing the failure of politics as usual during the early AIDS epidemic; and Conduct Unbecoming, a history of the US military's mistreatment of LGBTQ servicemembers. Yet the intimate life story of Randy Shilts has been left unwritten. When the Band Played On tells that story, recognizing his legacy as a trailblazing figure in gay activism, journalism, and public policy. Author Michael G. Lee conducted interviews with Shilts's family, friends, college professors, colleagues, informants, lovers, and critics. The resulting narrative tells the tale of a singularly gifted voice, a talented yet insecure young man whose coming of age became intricately linked to the historic peaks and devastating perils of modern gay liberation. When the Band Played On is the authoritative account of Randy Shilts's trailblazing life, as well as his legacy of shaping the history-making events he covered.By Nikkya Hargrove. 2024
In this searing and uplifting memoir, a young Black queer woman fresh out of college adopts her baby brother after…
their incarcerated mother dies, determined to create the kind of family she never had. Nikkya Hargrove spent a good portion of her childhood in prison visiting rooms. When her mother—addicted to cocaine and just out of prison—had a son and then died only a few months later, Nikkya was faced with an impossible choice. Although she had just graduated from college, she decided to fight for custody of her half brother, Jonathan. And fight she did. Nikkya vividly recounts how she is subjected to preconceived notions that she, a Black queer young woman, cannot be given such responsibility. Her honest portrayal of the shame she feels accepting food stamps, her family&’s reaction to her coming out, and the joy she experiences when she meets the woman who will become her wife reveal her sheer determination. And whether she&’s clashing with Jonathan&’s biological father or battling for Jonathan&’s education rights after he&’s diagnosed with ADHD and autism, this is a woman who won&’t give up. Nikkya&’s moving story picks up where Bryan Stevenson&’s Just Mercy left off, exploring generational trauma and pulling back the curtain on family court and poverty in America. Mama is an ode to motherhood and identity, and to finding strength in family and community, for readers of memoirs by Ashley C. Ford, Natasha Tretheway, and Dawn Turner.By Clare Croft. 2024
Performer, activist, and writer Jill Johnston was a major queer presence in the history of dance and 1970s feminism. She…
was the first critic to identify postmodernism’s arrival in American dance and was a fierce advocate for the importance of lesbians within feminism. In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks Johnston’s entwined innovations and contributions to dance and art criticism and activism. She examines Johnston’s journalism and criticism—in particular her Village Voice columns published between 1960 and 1980—and her books of memoir and biography. At the same time, Croft attends to Johnston’s appearances as both dancer and audience member and her physical and often spectacular participation at feminist protests. By bringing together Johnston’s criticism and activism, her writing and her physicality, Croft emphasizes the effect that the arts, particularly dance, had on Johnston’s feminist thinking in the 1970s and traces lesbian feminism’s roots in avant-garde art practice.By Darius Stewart. 2024
A poet&’s &“dazzlingly propulsive&” memoir of growing up Black and gay in Knoxville, Tennessee (Kaveh Akbar, New York Times–bestselling author…
of Martyr!). Darius Stewart spent his childhood in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and his own family life in a context that often felt perilous. As we learn about his life in Tennessee—and eventually in Texas and Iowa, where he studies to become a poet—he details the obstacles to his most crucial desires: hiding his earliest attraction to boys in his neighborhood, predatory stalkers, doomed affairs, his struggles with alcohol addiction, and his eventual diagnosis with HIV. Through a mix of straightforward memoir, brilliantly surreal reveries, and moments of startling imagery and insight, Stewart&’s explorations of love, illness, chemical dependency, desire, family, joy, shame, loneliness, and beauty coalesce into a wrenching, musical whole. Be Not Afraid of My Body stands as a compelling testament to growing up Black and gay in America, and to the drive in all of us to collect the fragments of our own experience and transform them into a story that does justice to all the multitudes we contain. &“A memorable portrait of Black gay life, from poverty and adversity to accomplishment and poetry.&” —Kirkus Reviews &“A mammoth creation . . . Just unbelievably rich art right here.&” —Kiese Laymon, New York Times–bestselling author of HeavyBy Vera Blossom. 2024
A cheeky how-to guide, as raunchy as it is heartfelt, from a bright new literary voice.A bold and vulnerable collection…
from a new, young voice, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a daring mash-up of pillow book, grimoire, and manifesto by writer Vera Blossom. From hooking up to trans witchcraft, petty crime, capitalism, friendships, divorce, and survival, Blossom brings wit and melancholy, grandeur and smarts, debuting a bright literary voice as raunchy as it is heartfelt. A cheeky how-to guide that earnestly asks if it is possible to fuck oneself into girlhood, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a cult classic in the making.