Karen Iris Tucker

Along with the ascension and ebbing of Carlos’s career, Sewell conveys the more intimate aspects of the composer’s life. Carlos, who “was assigned the male sex at birth [in 1939] and given the name Walter,” was one of the first public figures to disclose having undergone sex reassignment surgery. Sewell shares such details without allowing them to overwhelm the multidimensional, complicated truths of her subject.

Kolker’s telling of the Galvin trials is at once deeply compassionate and chilling. He gives as much voice to the schizophrenic siblings — who, one after another, had psychotic breaks, were heavily medicated with debilitating drugs, and were in and out of largely unsuccessful inpatient treatment — as he does to their relatives, many of whom suffered tremendous psychological and sexual abuse from being in their orbit.

Equal parts espionage-romance thriller and historical narrative, “D-Day Girls” traces the lives and secret activities of the 39 women who answered the call to infiltrate France. All were vetted; they had to hold British citizenship and speak French like a native to elude the Nazis in the lead-up to D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944.

She was lured by but never signed with major labels, opting instead for the grueling yet freeing path of remaining independent on her own imprint, Righteous Babe Records, which she started in 1990. She is a folk singer, in some ways akin to the classic mold of her late friend Pete Seeger. Yet she also melds into her mix African rhythms, jazz and funk. Her baldfaced feminism, bisexuality, furious guitar-picking and gorgeous acoustic melodies have inspired many a young woman to go shirtless at ...

In between these four personal stories, Richtel weaves in intricate, sometimes obscure details on the origins of and advances in immunology, the science of the human immune system. He also explores a relatively new mode of treatment, immunotherapy, which helps the immune system fight cancer and other debilitating diseases. In doing all this, Richtel brilliantly blurs the lines between biology primer, medical historical text and the traditional first-person patient story.

Mizrahi begins in his tight-knit childhood neighborhood, a place where reverence for traditional gender norms and ostentatious wealth, combined with what Mizrahi describes as a hypocritical dedication to the appearance of religiosity, made life difficult for him. “I stuck out like a chubby gay thumb,” he says.

Long before most of us understood the full meaning of the terms such as social justice and human dignity, Rabbi Ira Sanders of Arkansas was translating those ideas into action.

While “Bad Advice” is a quick read, its goal is weighty: to defend science as a vital beacon in the public sphere. Offit lays a compelling — and sometimes disturbing — foundation for why we need to protect its honor, and he calls for scientists to “become an army of science advocates out to educate the country. Because science is losing its rightful status as a source of truth, now is the time.”er pervasiv...

Having periodically voiced the premonition that his life would be violently cut short, Milk was on a mission to improve the welfare of gay people, as well as all others who were disenfranchised or in the underclass. As Faderman points out, “He was very aware of himself as part of an ultraliberal Jewish tradition that fought for the oppressed of all stripes.”

While the GOP celebrates its recent political victory of passing its massive tax code overhaul, the most vulnerable among us, especially LGBTQ youth of color living with HIV/AIDS, are at significant risk as a result of the new legislation—among other recent policies—according to advocates and researchers in the health care realm.
In particular, the tax bill’s repeal of the Affordable C...

Growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s in North Carolina, the novelist Armistead Maupin was a gentle, fanciful child who feared the mandatory dodge ball game at recess and convinced his parents to outfit his bedroom with a stained-glass window. His father, a lawyer who romanced racism and was prone to bouts of unexplained rage, assumed his son would grow out of his delicate constitution.

Long aware of his status, Roe was calm. He recalls the doctor saying, “I get the sense that you already know that you’re HIV positive.” When Roe nodded, the doctor dropped a bomb. “Well, the Atlanta Police Department is not hiring HIV-positive police officers, so your hiring process is basically over.”

As Senate Republicans are tying a bow on their health-care bill, the text of which they will reportedly release this week, advocates of people living with HIV and AIDS—among the country’s most reliant on access to affordable care—are ramping up efforts to resist what they fear will be damaging changes in the proposed legislation.

Being “in between” was both a curse and blessing for Pauli Murray, born Anna Pauline Murray, in 1910. Growing up in a segregated North Carolina, Murray displayed at an early age an artistic mind and a preference for the boys’ section of the clothing store. Variously tormented and buoyed in her life by her status as a woman, being of mixed race, and as a self-professed “boy-girl” who believed in her bones that she was really a man, Murray endured to become a journalist, an activist, a professor, a priest, and a lawyer who made monumental contributions to civil rights and women’s rights.

Glaser admits he’s been stung by stigma. He recalls one sunny day he and friends were filming fellow skateboarders in Venice Beach, California. Someone in the pack, who didn’t know Glaser, suddenly became standoffish toward him. “He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t want to film with you anymore because I’ve just learned you have HIV.’”