Today I found out my book The Invisible Orientation is a finalist for this year’s Lambda Literary Award! I’m one of eight in the LGBT Nonfiction category:
- An American Queer: The Amazon Trail by Lee Lynch
- Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS by Martin Duberman
- The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality by Julie Sondra Decker
- Nevirapine and the Quest to End Pediatric AIDS by Rebecca J. Anderson
- Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor by Hilton Als, Ann Temkin, Claudia Carson, Robert Gober, Paulina Pobocha, Christian Scheidemann, and the Museum of Modern Art
- Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange, How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos by Robert Hofler
- The Transgender Archives: Foundations for the Future by Aaron H Devor
- The Up Stairs Lounge Arson: Thirty-Two Deaths in a New Orleans Gay Bar, June 24, 1973 by Clayton Delery-Edwards
I’m especially excited to be listed here because I entered in the category of LGBT Nonfiction due to having nothing more appropriate to choose–and my getting shortlisted shows that my choice was the right one. I was a little worried that I would be thought unwelcome or even that my applying would be deemed offensive by the judges, being that the book’s content isn’t centrally focused on any content that is L, G, B, or T (though there is of course discussion of where people who do identify as LGBT intersect with and overlap with asexual identities). Even if I’m not chosen as a winner, being listed as a finalist does feel a little bit like my community is getting closer to being broadly accepted under this umbrella, and that is an incredible feeling.
The winners will be announced in a ceremony on June 1, 2015. I have to decide whether I’m going to attend. 🙂