Here's My Story: Personal Essays from The Gay & Lesbian Review - Paperback

Excerpt of Foreward

The inspiration for "Here's My Story" (HMS) as a feature on The G&LR website was the realization, some years ago, that we receive more personal histories and memoirs than anything else in our submissions box. As a general rule, we don't publish first-person pieces in the magazine, but clearly many readers were clamoring to tell the world about their experiences as LGBTQ people. So the demand was there, but it took a while for us to realize that The G&LR blog was an ideal outlet for such a forum of disparate voices from our community. The first stories began to appear in 2019, and hundreds have been published to date.

For the first few years, HMS was edited in-house and published sporadically. It was Allison Armijo who moved the column forward starting in early 2023. During their tenure as The G&LR's web editor, Alli turned HMS into a popular weekly forum, curating the stories and proposals, selecting those that showed promise, and working with writers as needed to help them find their voice. The result has been a steady stream of fascinating personal vignettes in which writers talk about everything from their coming-out experiences and first loves to political involvements and spiritual journeys.

These stories are all available on our website (at GLReview.org). So why publish them as a book? Some of these accounts are just so good that we felt they deserve a second look and a new readership. In addition to selecting the "best of" the many stories we've run, Alli has organized them into a set of chapters that highlight common themes, such as "Pivoting" and "Protecting," providing a kind of dialog among the writers. That said, this is the kind of book that allows you to shop around, perhaps in search of a story that resonates with your own. ...

Here's My Story is meant to appeal to a wide readership, but our special hope is that these firsthand accounts of the LGBTQ experience will be read by those who may be in the early stages of exploring their gender or sexuality, or looking for voices that speak to their personal situation. Whoever you are, we hope you will enjoy these wonderful accounts from a wide spectrum of writers from around the U.S. and the world.

Richard Schneider Jr.

Editor-in-Chief, The G&LR