I had never discovered a queer character who didn't die at the end. This book changed that.

Today we meet Gregory A. Kompes and we’re talking about the queer book that saved his life: Maurice by E.M. Forster

Gregory is founder of The Writer Workshop and an award winning, bestselling author of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. He’s the author of Shards, as well as the Broadway series that includes Flash Mob, The Middle Man, Tamburlaine, Obsequies, and Busker. Become a VIP Reader at https://kompes.com.

Maurice is set in the elegant Edwardian world of Cambridge undergraduate life and introduces us to Maurice Hall when he is fourteen. We follow him through public school, then Cambridge University, and finally into his father's firm. In a highly structured society, Maurice is a conventional young man in almost every way--except that he is homosexual. Maurice was ahead of its time in its theme and in its affirmation that love between men can be happy

E. M. Forster was one of the major novelists of the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in 1879 and educated at Cambridge. His other novels include A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India.

Connect with Gregory A. Kompes

website: kompes.com
bluesky: @gregoryakompes.bsky.social
instagram: @GregoryAKompes

Our Bookshop
Visit our Bookshop for new releases, current bestsellers, banned books, critically acclaimed LGBTQ books, or peruse the books featured on our podcasts: bookshop.org/shop/thisqueerbook

Buy your copy of Maurice: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9780393310320

Buy your copy of Shards: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9798995967408

Become an Associate Producer!
Become an Associate Producer of our podcast through a $20/month sponsorship on Patreon! A professionally recognized credit, you can gain access to Associate Producer meetings to help guide our podcast into the future! Get started today: patreon.com/thisqueerbook

Credits
Host/Founder: John Parker
Executive Producer: Jim Pounds
Associate Producers: Archie Arnold, K Jason Bryan and David Rephan, Bob Bush, Natalie Cruz, Troy Ford, Jonathan Fried, Joe Perazzo, Bill Shay, Sean Smith, and Karsten Vagner
Patreon Subscribers: Stephen D., Stephen Flamm, Ida Göteburg, Thomas Michna, Sofia Nerman, and Gary Nygaard.
Creative and Accounting support provided by: Gordy Erickson

Quatrefoil Library

Quatrefoil has created a curated lending library made up of the books featured on our podcast! If you can’t buy these books, then borrow them! Link: https://libbyapp.com/library/quatrefoil/curated-1404336/page-1

Real quick: yes, you too can be a guest on our podcast! If you have a queer book that had a life-saving impact for you, then please visit thisqueerbook.com and fill out the form on the homepage! Looking forward to hearing back from you!

Support the show

We know we promised a new episode today, but Pride month got the best of us with The Gaily Show and we're taking the week off to recuperate. So, our next episode of This Queer Book Saved My Life drops July 7th! In our off weeks we air episodes from The Gaily Show. It's the only daily LGBTQ news and talk show in the US! John hosts it and it airs on AM950-KTNF (Minneapolis), WCPT 820 AM (Chicago), 92.7 FM WMDX (Madison, WI), plus weekly on NewsTalk WHMP (Amherst, MA) and Alternative Talk 1150AM KKNW (Seattle).

In this episode, as Pride month winds down, we take a look at what does Pride month means these days? What do we need it to be? How different are the Prides we’re going to this year from the original ones? To unpack this for us, we’re joined by Dr. Brier is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and History at the University of Illinois – Chicago. She co-curated the award-winning exhibition “Out in Chicago” on LGBT history at the Chicago History Museum.

Get Dr. Brier’s book Infectious Ideas: US Political Response to the AIDS Crisis  here: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9780807872116 

Check out History Moves here: https://historymoves.org

Connect with Dr. Brier here: https://hist.uic.edu/profiles/brier-jennifer/

Watch on YouTube

We're in video too! You can watch this episode at youtube.com/@thegailyshow

Credits

Host/Founder: John Parker (learn more about my name change)
Executive Producer: Jim Pounds
Production and Distribution Support: Brett Johnson, AM950
Marketing/Advertising Support: Chad Larson, Laura Hedlund, Jennifer Ogren, AM950
Accounting and Creative Support: Gordy Erickson

Real quick: yes, you too can be a guest on our podcast! If you have a queer book that had a life-saving impact for you, then please visit thisqueerbook.com and fill out the form on the homepage! Looking forward to hearing back from you!

Support the show

Our next episode of This Queer Book Saved My Life drops June 30th! In our off weeks we air episodes from The Gaily Show. It's the only daily LGBTQ news and talk show in the US! John hosts it and it airs on AM950-KTNF (Minneapolis), WCPT 820 AM (Chicago), 92.7 FM WMDX (Madison, WI), plus weekly on NewsTalk WHMP (Amherst, MA) and Alternative Talk 1150AM KKNW (Seattle).

In this episode, it’s the third Friday of the month and every third Friday of the month John welcomes author and critic Ilana Masad for her reviews and recommendations!

Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, NPR, The Atlantic, StoryQuartlerly, Catapult, Buzzfeed, Joyland, The Account, and many more. She is the author of the novel All My Mother’s Lovers and the Lambda Literary Award winning novel Beings.

Masad holds a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has taught a wide variety of creative writing and literature courses, and also provides editorial services to authors.

Watch on YouTube

We're in video too! You can watch this episode at youtube.com/@thegailyshow

Credits

Host/Founder: John Parker (learn more about my name change)
Executive Producer: Jim Pounds
Production and Distribution Support: Brett Johnson, AM950
Marketing/Advertising Support: Chad Larson, Laura Hedlund, Jennifer Ogren, AM950
Accounting and Creative Support: Gordy Erickson

Real quick: yes, you too can be a guest on our podcast! If you have a queer book that had a life-saving impact for you, then please visit thisqueerbook.com and fill out the form on the homepage! Looking forward to hearing back from you!

Support the show

This book raised something that was running subterranean in my system back up to the surface again.

Today we meet J. Brooke and we’re talking about the queer book that saved their life: Transition: Becoming Who I Was Always Meant to Be by Chaz Bono.

J’s full-length poetry book, I Can Tell You The Version That Will Make You Take My Side won the Editor’s Choice Prize at Driftwood Press. It is now available everywhere you get your books. J has received two Pushcart nominations, a 2025 Best of The Net nomination, and there were a Finalist for the 2025 Iowa Review Nonfiction Prize. Their autobiographical essay “HYBRID” won Columbia Journal’s 2020 Special Issue Nonfiction Award. Their work appears in Electric Lit, The Rumpus, Harvard Review and elsewhere. J is the Prose Book Reviews Editor at The Rumpus, Poetry Editor at Trans Poetics Archive, former Nonfiction Editor at Stonecoast Review.

In Transition: Becoming Who I Was Always Meant to Be Chaz Bono shares his deeply moving and ultimately triumphant account of the physical and emotional process that brought him to a place of peace, and finally happiness. With a message to anyone who has ever felt that they couldn’t be who they really are, Transition is as inspirational as it is intimate.

Chaz Bono is an LGBTQ rights advocate, acclaimed author, and the only child of famed entertainers Sonny and Cher. He has written three books, including Transition, his groundbreaking account of a forty-year struggle to match his gender identity with his physical body and his transformation from female to male.

Connect with J. Brooke

website: jbrookewrites.com
bluesky: jbrookewrites.bsky.social
instagram: @jbrooke_writes

Our Bookshop
Visit our Bookshop for new releases, current bestsellers, banned books, critically acclaimed LGBTQ books, or peruse the books featured on our podcasts: bookshop.org/shop/thisqueerbook

Buy your copy of Transition: Becoming Who I Was Always Meant to Be https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9780452298002

Buy your copy of I Can Tell You the Version That Will Make You Take My Side: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9781949065435

Become an Associate Producer!
Become an Associate Producer of our podcast through a $20/month sponsorship on Patreon! A professionally recognized credit, you can gain access to Associate Producer meetings to help guide our podcast into the future! Get started today: patreon.com/thisqueerbook

Credits
Host/Founder: John Parker
Executive Producer: Jim Pounds
Associate Producers: Archie Arnold, K Jason Bryan and David Rephan, Bob Bush, Natalie Cruz, Troy Ford, Jonathan Fried, Joe Perazzo, Bill Shay, Sean Smith, and Karsten Vagner
Patreon Subscribers: Stephen D., Stephen Flamm, Ida Göteburg, Thomas Michna, Sofia Nerman, and Gary Nygaard.
Creative and Accounting support provided by: Gordy Erickson

Quatrefoil Library
Quatrefoil has created a curated lending library made up of the books featured on our podcast! If you can’t buy these books, then borrow them! Link: https://libbyapp.com/library/quatrefoil/curated-1404336/page-1

Real quick: yes, you too can be a guest on our podcast! If you have a queer book that had a life-saving impact for you, then please visit thisqueerbook.com and fill out the form on the homepage! Looking forward to hearing back from you!

Support the show

Our next episode of This Queer Book Saved My Life drops June 16th! In our off weeks we air episodes from The Gaily Show. It's the only daily LGBTQ news and talk show in the US! John hosts it and it airs on AM950-KTNF, WCPT 820 AM, plus weekly on NewsTalk WHMP (Amherst, MA) and Alternative Talk 1150AM KKNW (Seattle).

In this episode, John sits down with award-winning author and queer historian Hugh Ryan to unpack the pre-internet landscape of LGBTQ+ life in the 1990s. They dive into everything from the wild mega-clubs of New York City and finding queer history using the library’s Dewey Decimal System to the terrifying reality of the “second silence” surrounding the AIDS epidemic. Get ready to explore the analog era of the queer community before Ryan’s new book, My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer 90s and Beyond, hits shelves on May 26th.

Watch on YouTube

We're in video too! You can watch this episode at youtube.com/@thegailyshow

Credits

Host/Founder: John Parker (learn more about my name change)
Executive Producer: Jim Pounds
Production and Distribution Support: Brett Johnson, AM950
Marketing/Advertising Support: Chad Larson, Laura Hedlund, Jennifer Ogren, AM950
Accounting and Creative Support: Gordy Erickson

Support the show

Why would I ever want to have a body and why should I allow it to want what it wants?

Today we meet Jill Rosenberg and we’re talking about the queer book that saved her life: Sea of Tranquility by Paul Elliott Russell. And Paul joins us for the conversation!

Jill is a graduate of Vassar College and the MFA Program at the University of Montana. Her fiction has been published by the Kenyon Review, Swamp Pink, Black Warrior Review, and other journals. Her collection of stories, Now I’m Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself won the St. Lawrence Book Prize and is out now!

Paul Elliott Russell is a four-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and two time winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction. He is the author of seven novels and his upcoming novel The Angels Came to Sodom in the Evening will be out this fall. His 1995 nonfiction book, The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present has been translated into ten languages. He taught at Vassar College for 38 years till retirement in 2021. The Library of Homosexual Congress will publish his short story collection titled Desire in the Fall of 2027.

Sea of Tranquility is the story of a splinted nuclear family - spanning from the optimistic time of the first moon shot to the bleak time of the early AIDS years.

Connect with Jill and Paul

Jill's website: jillrosenberg.me

Paul's website: paulrussellwriter.com

Our Bookshop
Visit our Bookshop for new releases, current bestsellers, banned books, critically acclaimed LGBTQ books, or peruse the books featured on our podcasts: bookshop.org/shop/thisqueerbook

Buy your copy of Sea of Tranquility here: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9780312303723

But your copy of Now I'm Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9781625572172

Pre-order The Angels Came To Sodom in the Evening: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9781917352161

Become an Associate Producer!
Become an Associate Producer of our podcast through a $20/month sponsorship on Patreon! A professionally recognized credit, you can gain access to Associate Producer meetings to help guide our podcast into the future! Get started today: patreon.com/thisqueerbook

Credits
Host/Founder: John Parker
Executive Producer: Jim Pounds
Associate Producers: Archie Arnold, K Jason Bryan and David Rephan, Bob Bush, Natalie Cruz, Troy Ford, Jonathan Fried, Joe Perazzo, Bill Shay, Sean Smith, and Karsten Vagner
Patreon Subscribers: Stephen D., Terry D., Stephen Flamm, Ida Göteburg, Thomas Michna, Sofia Nerman, and Gary Nygaard.
Creative and Accounting support provided by: Gordy Erickson

Quatrefoil Library

Quatrefoil has created a curated lending library made up of the books featured on our podcast! If you can’t buy these books, then borrow them! Link: https://libbyapp.com/library/quatrefoil/curated-1404336/page-1

Real quick: yes, you too can be a guest on our podcast! If you have a queer book that had a life-saving impact for you, then please visit thisqueerbook.com and fill out the form on the homepage! Looking forward to hearing back from you!

Support the show

Our next episode of This Queer Book Saved My Life drops June 2nd! In our off weeks we air episodes from The Gaily Show. It's the only daily LGBTQ news and talk show in the US! John hosts it and it airs on AM950-KTNF, WCPT 820 AM, and weekly on NewsTalk WHMP.

Today:

Ilana Masad and Stevie K. Seibert Desjarlais join us to talk about their new book: Here For All The Reasons Why We Watch The Bachelor.

Then: Dr. Samuel Clowes Huneke joins us to talk about Texas Tech University banning LGBTQ research. Plus, MAGA is using federal funds to promote MAGA think tanks in Europe. And, the Virginia congressional map debacle: the State Supreme Court tossed out both the new voter approved map. Now what?

Get Here For All The Reasons here: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9781684426126

Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism whose work has been widely published. She holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and is the author of the novels All My Mother’s Lovers and Beings.

Stevie K. Seibert Desjarlais is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. Her writing appears in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and Pedagogy.

Dr. Samuel Clowes Huneke is an award-winning associate professor of history at George Mason University. A historian of modern Germany, he is the author of numerous books and articles, including States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany and A Queer Theory of the State. His new book I Will Not Abandon You Queer Women in Nazi Germany is out now.

You can buy his books and learn more about his research at his website: samuelcloweshuneke.com.

Buy A Queer Theory of State: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9783982389462
Buy States of Liberation: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9781487542146
Buy I Will Not Abandon You: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9781487554347

Watch on YouTube

We're in video too! You can watch this episode at youtube.com/@thegailyshow

Credits

Host/Founder: John Parker (learn more about my name change)
Executive Producer: Jim Pounds
Production and Distribution Support: Brett Johnson, AM950
Marketing/Advertising Support: Chad Larson, Laura Hedlund, Jennifer Ogren, AM950
Accounting and Creative Support: Gordy Erickson

Support the show

I came out and needed to understand: what kind of gay am I?

Today we meet Dr. Perry Zurn and we’re talking about the queer book that saved his life: Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg.

Dr. Zurn is Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University. He researches primarily in political philosophy, critical theory, and LGBTQ+ studies and has collaborated in psychology and network neuroscience. Dr. Zurn is the author or coauthor of 100+ additional publications in philosophy, political theory, LGBTQ+ studies, and network science and has given 250+ talks at local, national, and international venues. His work has been featured in over 50 media outlets, ranging from podcasts, to radio, television, and mainstream news outlets. His newest book Cisgender: Disorienting a Category comes out this July.

Stone Butch Blues was Leslie Feinberg’s first novel published in 1993. The novel won the 1994 American Library Association Stonewall Book Award and 1994 Lambda Literary Award. Groundbreaking in its time for its exploration of gender, the novel established Feinberg as the first author to put forward a Marxist version of “transgender liberation.” The novel has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and has even been passed hand-to-hand inside prisons. The earnings from a translated version went to ASWAT Palestinian Gay Women.

Leslie Feinberg identified as an anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist. Feinberg was a journalist for Workers World and edited the "Political Prisoners" page for 15 years, ultimately serving as managing editor. Feinberg also wrote "Lavender & Red" for Workers World which was a 120-part series exploring the links between socialism and LGBT history. They also authored: Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba, Transgender Warriors: Making History and Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, and the novel Drag King Dreams. Feinberg died on November 15, 2014 and hir last words were: “Remember me as a revolutionary communist.”

Connect with Perry

website: perryzurn.com
bluesky: @perryzurn.bsky.social

Our Bookshop
Visit our Bookshop for new releases, current bestsellers, banned books, critically acclaimed LGBTQ books, or peruse the books featured on our podcasts: bookshop.org/shop/thisqueerbook

How to get your copy of Stone Butch Blues:

• Print on Demand Paperback through Lulu
• Get a free PDF copy of Stone Butch Blues here: https://www.lesliefeinberg.net
• Ask your local library or independent bookstore!

Buy your copy of Cisgender: Disorienting a Category here: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9781478038771

Become an Associate Producer!
Become an Associate Producer of our podcast through a $20/month sponsorship on Patreon! A professionally recognized credit, you can gain access to Associate Producer meetings to help guide our podcast into the future! Get started today: patreon.com/thisqueerbook

Credits
Host/Founder: John Parker
Executive Producer: Jim Pounds
Associate Producers: Archie Arnold, K Jason Bryan and David Rephan, Bob Bush, Natalie Cruz, Troy Ford, Jonathan Fried, Joe Perazzo, Bill Shay, Sean Smith, and Karsten Vagner
Patreon Subscribers: Stephen D., Stephen Flamm, Ida Göteburg, Thomas Michna, Sofia Nerman, and Gary Nygaard.
Creative and Accounting support provided by: Gordy Erickson

Quatrefoil Library
Quatrefoil has created a curated lending library made up of the books featured on our podcast! If you can’t buy these books, then borrow them! Link: https://libbyapp.com/library/quatrefoil/curated-1404336/page-1

Real quick: yes, you too can be a guest on our podcast! If you have a queer book that had a life-saving impact for you, then please visit thisqueerbook.com and fill out the form on the homepage! Looking forward to hearing back from you!

Support the show

Our next episode of This Queer Book Saved My Life drops May 19th! In our off weeks we air episodes from The Gaily Show. It's the only daily LGBTQ news and talk show in the US! John hosts it and it airs on AM950-KTNF, WCPT 820 AM, and weekly on NewsTalk WHMP.

Today: How can states fight back against fascism and Trump? Turns out there is a taxonomy of five tiers of resistance that States can do right now. It has been developed and researched by Christopher Armitage and he joins us to discuss.

Christopher Armitage is an Air Force veteran, journalist, former law enforcement officer, and author of Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder and the Substack The Existentialist Republic. You can hear him regularly on the Thom Hartmann show. Read The Existentialist Republic here: https://cmarmitage.substack.com

Watch on YouTube

We're in video too! You can watch this episode at youtube.com/@thegailyshow

Credits

Host/Founder: John Parker (learn more about my name change)
Executive Producer: Jim Pounds
Production and Distribution Support: Brett Johnson, AM950
Marketing/Advertising Support: Chad Larson, Laura Hedlund, Jennifer Ogren, AM950
Accounting and Creative Support: Gordy Erickson

Support the show

This book was a vivid portrayal of queer desire. It didn't have a happy ending, but it had a positive ending.

Today we meet Lynette D'Amico and we’re talking about the queer book that saved her life: Carol by Patricia Highsmith.

Lynette D'Amico is an essayist and fiction writer whose work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Ocean State Review and at Brevity, Slag Glass City, Short Reads, and Guernica. Her memoir in essays Men I Hate, won the Gournay Nonfiction Prize and was published by Mad Creek Books in 2026. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She makes her home in Rhode Island, but she has a prairie eye.

Originally published as The Price of Salt, Carol is based on a true story plucked from Highsmith's own life. It tells the riveting drama of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose routine is forever shattered by a gorgeous epiphany--the appearance of Carol Aird, a customer who comes in to buy her daughter a Christmas toy. They fall in love and set out across the United States, ensnared by society's confines and the imminent disapproval of others, yet propelled by their infatuation.

Patricia Highsmith was the author of more than twenty novels, including Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as numerous short stories.

Connect with Lynette

website: lynettedamico.com
instagram: @sicilianblade2
substack: substack.com/@lynettedamico

Our Bookshop
Visit our Bookshop for new releases, current bestsellers, banned books, critically acclaimed LGBTQ books, or peruse the books featured on our podcasts: bookshop.org/shop/thisqueerbook

Buy your copy of Carol here: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9780393325997

Buy your copy of Men I Hate: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9780814259696

Become an Associate Producer!
Become an Associate Producer of our podcast through a $20/month sponsorship on Patreon! A professionally recognized credit, you can gain access to Associate Producer meetings to help guide our podcast into the future! Get started today: patreon.com/thisqueerbook

Credits
Host/Founder: John Parker
Executive Producer: Jim Pounds
Associate Producers: Archie Arnold, K Jason Bryan and David Rephan, Bob Bush, Natalie Cruz, Troy Ford, Jonathan Fried, Joe Perazzo, Bill Shay, Sean Smith, and Karsten Vagner
Patreon Subscribers: Stephen D., Stephen Flamm, Ida Göteburg, Thomas Michna, Sofia Nerman, and Gary Nygaard.
Creative and Accounting support provided by: Gordy Erickson
Quatrefoil Library
Quatrefoil has created a curated lending library made up of the books featured on our podcast! If you can’t buy these books, then borrow them! Link: https://libbyapp.com/library/quatrefoil/curated-1404336/page-1

Real quick: yes, you too can be a guest on our podcast! If you have a queer book that had a life-saving impact for you, then please visit thisqueerbook.com and fill out the form on the homepage! Looking forward to hearing back from you!

Support the show