Memorable coming-out stories such as Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet, Tucker Shaw’s When You Call My Name, and Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars are a beloved subset of the coming-of-age tale; they capture the ways that queer identity emerges, sometimes with a bang (or a Madonna banger). But what happens to our hero afterward? In these LGBTQ+ memoirs, we get the coming-out tale, and then we learn what happens next.
Melissa Carter was Atlanta’s first out lesbian on a morning radio show (the popular, long-running The Bert Show). In Facing Inward, she dishes about guests RuPaul, David Byrne, Pink (whom she fake kissed), and others. The celeb goss adds some comic relief to her account of growing up queer in the South while living with a chronic illness and, as an adult, facing kidney failure and getting a kidney transplant. Our reviewer says, “Carter’s prose throughout is clear and well-balanced between moments of levity and sincerity. (A scene in which the author comes out to her father underneath the glow of a Wendy’s sign is particularly poignant.)” The reviewer adds that “the work is valuable as a piece of well-wrought introspection and as a look at queer life in the 1990s and 2000s.”
Lisa K. Richter, a classical pianist, documents her late-in-life coming out as a lesbian in the starred Fly, My Darling. The author was a financially comfortable, middle-aged mom who wasn’t fulfilled in her heterosexual marriage and didn’t know why. Based in Southern California, she began taking piano lessons with Lynda Roth, a well-known performer and composer who lived in Laguna Beach. The women connected over music, especially jazz, and the author soon left her husband. When Roth was diagnosed with lung cancer, Richter and Roth’s friends cared for her until her death, which the author documents in her memoir. Fly, My Darling “eschews autobiographical conventions—there are few name-drops of musical cohorts or cultural touchpoints (the Barack Obama presidential election receives scant acknowledgment); this is a remembrance shorn of unnecessary baggage or repetition, reduced to brief scenes and lyrical impressions,” notes our reviewer. “A graceful and spare memoir of personal transformation and loss.”
When Gil Z. Hochberg, a professor of Hebrew and visual studies, comparative literature, and Middle East studies at Columbia University, came out to her father, also a scholar, he was understanding. He had news for her, too. They were in Tel Aviv, where her father lived and taught; he told her,“I am the Messiah…Your father was chosen…I am the real Messiah.” Yosef Hochberg was a prominent statistician who’d made significant advancements in his field and was also a loving father. In My Father, The Messiah, Hochberg writes movingly about how Yosef’s and her own mental health struggles affected their tightly knit relationship. Our starred review says, “In this deeply insightful book about memory and discovery, Hochberg ruminates on her father’s final days and deteriorating health in a manner that many readers will find relatable. Over the course of the book, the interplay of various elements of Hochberg’s and her dad’s lives yields a compelling portrait of someone slowly coming to terms with the death of a loved one.”
Chaya Schechner is the president of Kirkus Indie.
