A random collection of over 1994 books and audiobooks authored by or about my transgender, intersex sisters, and gender-nonconforming persons all over the world. I read some of them, and I was inspired by some of them. I met some of the authors and heroines, some of them are my best friends, and I had the pleasure and honor of interviewing some of them. If you know of any transgender biography that I have not covered yet, please let me know.
Full title: "Venus Rising: The Unfinished Life of a Ballroom Icon Venus Xtravaganza" by Eleanor Hystoré.
Eleanor Hystoré’s Venus Rising: The Unfinished Life of a Ballroom Icon Venus Xtravaganza is a work of deep tenderness and fierce illumination. It reaches beyond the glitter of the ballroom floor to reveal the woman behind one of the most unforgettable faces of queer history. Through graceful prose and unflinching honesty, Hystoré brings Venus Pellagatti Xtravaganza back to life, tracing her journey from a teenage dreamer in Jersey City to a radiant symbol of self-creation and resilience in 1980s New York.
The book opens in the small, crowded home where Venus was born on May 5, 1965, the youngest of several siblings in an Italian-Puerto Rican family. Hystoré paints these early years with sensitivity, showing a child already attuned to beauty, movement, and performance. Venus’s first steps toward becoming herself were met with the kind of confusion and rejection familiar to many transgender people of her era. She left home young, seeking a world where her reflection would match her spirit. That world, she soon discovered, existed in the shadowy brilliance of the Harlem ballrooms.
It is here that Hystoré’s storytelling truly begins to shimmer.
2025,
Eleanor Hystoré,
English,
Venus Xtravaganza,
Original title: "Cinema Queerité: Gêneros e Identidades no Documentário "Paris is Burning"" (Cinema Queerité: Genders and Identities in the Documentary "Paris is Burning") by Ademir Corrêa.
Ademir Corrêa’s Cinema Queerité: Gêneros e Identidades no Documentário “Paris is Burning” is an insightful exploration of one of the most powerful and culturally charged documentaries of the late twentieth century. Corrêa’s book takes Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris is Burning as both a cinematic and social landmark, dissecting its layers of meaning to reveal how film can function as a living archive of marginalized lives. The documentary, filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, captures the dazzling yet precarious world of New York City’s ballroom scene, a world built and sustained by Black and Latino gay men, transgender women, and drag performers who found in it a stage for self-definition and survival. Corrêa’s analysis situates this film not merely as a record of a vanished era but as a complex commentary on gender, identity, and resistance.
2021,
Ademir Corrêa,
Paris Is Burning,
Portuguese,
Venus Xtravaganza,
