Broadleaf Books is committed to celebrating and uplifting queer voices and stories not just during Pride Month but all year round. These stories provide the representation and visibility essential in creating a more inclusive and accepting society. The list below highlights books on a wide range of topics and experiences, all of which contribute to the wider collective of the LGBTQIA+ community and celebrate the diversity and beauty of queer literature. Whether you are in, out, an ally, or somewhere in between, we want you to know that you are loved, valued, and worthy.
Family & Relationships
Nia Chiaramonte, Katie J. Chiaramonte
When Nia Chiaramonte came out as a trans woman to her wife Katie, she knew she would be met with a loving response. But she was less sure what would happen when they began to bring their community alongside them on their journey of identify formation as a Queer family. Embracing Queer Family is a guidebook with tools for learning and reflection for Queer families on how to live into your true selves and strengthen your communities through radical love, acceptance, and mutual healing.
Raising Kids beyond the Binary
The debate around transgender children rages, with some Christians being the loudest voices against supporting these young people. So, now more than ever, people of faith need to be grounded in God's call to love and affirm young people in who God created them to be. Drawing on the author's experience as the mother of a transgender child and her years of advocacy work, Raising Kids beyond the Binary helps Christian parents navigate the emotional, spiritual, and logistical landscape of raising a gender-diverse child. It paints a picture of who transgender, nonbinary, and gender-diverse young people are and what they need to thrive.
For decades, our cultural discourse around trans and gender-diverse people has been viewed through a medical lens or a political lens. But those who claim non-binary gender identity deserve their own discourse. In tracing the history and theory of non-binary identity, and telling of their own coming out, non-binary writer Dianna E. Anderson answers questions about what being non-binary might mean, but also about where non-binary people fit in the trans and queer communities. In Transit looks forward to a world where being who we are, whatever that looks like, is met with acceptance and love. Being non-binary is about finding home in the in-between places.
When Christian singer and speaker Staci Frenes learned her teenage daughter was gay, she found her dreams for the future—along with her lifelong faith—collapsing around her. Coming to terms with a new reality offered an invitation to make room for many things: the inevitability of uncertainty, hope in the midst of loss, awkward and tough conversations, an expanding faith, and a greater understanding of how people are more the same than different.
Spiritual Wholeness
The world of contemplative Christianity has yielded to the same voices for too long, most from centuries before our time with lives unlike ours and experiences disconnected from marginalization and oppression. In Queering Contemplation, Cassidy Hall flings the doors wide open for all seeking an inclusive, authentic, and definitely more queer contemplative experience.
We all carry sexual shame. Whether we grew up in the repressive purity culture of American Evangelical Christianity or not, we've all been taught in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that sex (outside of very specific contexts) is taboo. Psychotherapist Matthias Roberts helps readers overcome their shame and determine their own definition of healthy sex. Define your sexual values on your own terms, overcome your shame, and start having great, healthy sex.
In the past decade, church attendance among US adults has decreased by more than 25 percent. Americans report leaving religious communities because of the institutions' hypocrisy and resistance to change or because of trauma they have experienced in those spaces. In Holy Runaways, Matthias Roberts reaches out to those who, like him, want to understand the religion they've run from and erect a new faith on firmer foundations. He suggests ways we can all contribute to a new system built on love—and a new home we can inhabit together.
As a queer woman in the church, Emmy Kegler knows too well how Scripture can be used to wound and exclude. And yet, the stories of Scripture continued to captivate her. So she set out to fall in love with the Bible, wrestling with the stories inside. Kegler shows us that even when we feel like lost and dusty coins, God picks up a broom and sweeps every corner of creation to find us.
The cartoons of David Hayward, the artist behind @NakedPastor, are graffiti on the walls of the contemporary church. He sketches the ridiculous, the appalling, and the damaging aspects of the church as we know it—as well as Jesus erasing lines, embracing the excluded, and standing outside the church's walls. In this collection, which includes Hayward's most beloved comics as well as never-before-seen cartoons, we find more of the whimsy, impertinence, and tenderness that we didn't even know we needed. Upending notions of who's in and who's out, Hayward's comic vision overturns false pieties and harmful dogmas in one fell swoop.
Society & Culture
Human beings are not trash, and the system that enables humans to imagine each other as such needs to end. Daily, 66 million poor white people pay the price for failing whiteness. In Trash, activist and chaplain Cedar Monroe introduces us to the poor residents of a small town in Washington who grapple with a collapsing economy and their own racism. Trash asks us to see the peril in which poor white people live and the choices we all must make.
If you want to understand the Black experience in the US, you have to understand hip-hop. In Psalms of My People, artist, scholar, and activist lenny duncan treats the work of hip-hop artists from the last several decades—from N.W.A, Tupac, and Biggie to Lauryn Hill, Jay-Z, and Kendrick Lamar—like sacred scripture. Their songs and lyrics are given full exegetical treatment—a critical and contextual interpretation of text—and are beautifully illustrated, with a blend of ancient and modern art styles illuminating every page.
The height of the AIDS crisis in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s left many profound stories that remained untold. In Hidden Mercy, gay Catholic journalist Michael O'Loughlin uncovers the stories of Catholics who at great personal cost chose compassion. A compelling picture of those who responded to human suffering with mercy, offering insights for LGBTQ and other people of faith struggling to find a home in religious communities today.
Sexual abuse is utterly rampant in Christian churches in America. And the reasons are somewhat different than those you might find in the #MeToo stories coming out of Hollywood or Washington. #ChurchToo turns over the rocks of the church's sexual dysfunction, revealing just what makes sexualized violence in religious contexts both ubiquitous and uniquely traumatizing. Emily Joy Allison lays the groundwork for survivors of abuse to live full, free, healthy lives.
One of our most private acts, weeping can forge connection. But many of us have been taught to suppress our emotions and hide our tears. When writer Benjamin Perry realized he hadn't cried in more than ten years, he undertook an experiment: to cry every day. But he didn't anticipate how tears would bring him into deeper relationship with a world that's breaking. Cry, Baby explores humans' rich legacy of weeping—and why some of us stopped. As we reclaim our crying as a central part of being human, we not only care for ourselves and relearn how to express our vulnerable emotions; we also prophetically reimagine the future.
It's reflexive and common to view our online presence as fake; to see the internet as a space we enter when we aren't living our real, offline lives. But ever since a pandemic pushed more and more of our work, relationships, and even leisure into digital space, the internet doesn't feel so fake anymore. Every day, the lines between digital and "real" space blur even further. In IRL, activist and writer Chris Stedman explores authenticity in the digital age, shining a light into and beyond age-old notions of realness—who we are and where we fit in the world—to bring fresh understanding for our increasingly online lives.
Personal Transformation
In a series of tender narrative essays written to his daughter, activist and author Brian C. Johnson shares what he's learned from his struggles, victories, and defeats over twenty-five years of advocacy work. The Work Is the Work is an inspiring collection of field notes that is perfect for new or seasoned activists who want to lead well in the work for transformational change.
So many of us are leaving conservative faith traditions behind, rightly saying goodbye to toxic theology, bigotry, and harm. With wit and practical guidance, What Makes You Bloom helps us create a new spiritual practice after our faith has fallen apart. Spiritual coach Kevin Miguel Garcia shows us how we can connect with the Divine already inside us and cultivate meaningful spiritual practices that help us heal from the past, tap into the present, and imagine a delicious future.
Too many of us are living disconnected from our bodies, chasing a constantly moving target of "ideal," and accepting the societal narrative about which bodies are deserving of safety and protection. Your Body Is a Revolution is an invitation to reclaim what has been stolen from us, to embrace the wisdom our bodies long to share, and to fully inhabit our lives—perhaps for the first time.
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