Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction

The Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction is an annual literary award, presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation, that awards LGBT-themed nonfiction books whose intended audience is "general readers, as opposed to those targeted primarily to scholarly audiences."^[1] Anthologies and memoirs are not included as they have their own categories (i.e., Anthology, Gay Memoir, Lesbian Memoir, Bisexual Literature, and Transgender Literature).

Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction
Awarded for	LGBTQ+ Nonfiction Books
Sponsored by	Lambda Literary Foundation
Date	Annual
Website	lambdaliterary.org/awards/
Lambda Literary Award

Recipients

Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction winners and finalists

Year	Contributor(s)	Title	Result	Ref.
2006	Thomas Glave	Words to Our Now	Winner
	Keith Boykin	Beyond the Down Low	Finalist
	Dennis Altman	Gore Vidal’s America
	Peggy Drexler	Raising Boys without Men
	Tirza True Latimer	Women Together/Women Apart
2007	Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons	GAY L.A.	Winner	[2]
	James T. Sears	Behind the Mask of the Mattachine	Finalist	[2]
	Marcia Gallo	Different Daughters
	Kate Bornstein	Hello, Cruel World
	Brian Whitaker	Unspeakable Love
2008	Michael S. Sherry	Gay Artists in Modern American Culture	Winner	[3][4]
	Sharon Marcus	Between Women	Finalist	[4]
	David Valentine	Imagining Transgender
	Michael Rowe	Other Men’s Sons
	Toni Mirosevich	Pink Harvest
2009	Jane Rule	Loving The Difficult	Winner	[5]
	Nancy Polikoff	Beyond (Straight & Gay Marriage)	Finalist	[5]
	William N. Eskridge, Jr.	Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America 1861-2003
	Kai Wright	Drifting Toward Love
	Michelle Cliff	If I Could Write This in Fire
	Nancy Agabian	Me as Her Again
2010	James Davidson	The Greeks and Greek Love	Winner	[6]
	Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Eds.)	I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde	Finalist	[6]
	Drewey Wayne Gunn (Ed.)	The Golden Age of Gay Fiction
	Sarah Schulman	Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences
	Nathaniel Frank	Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America
2011	Virginie Despentes	King Kong Theory	Winner	[7]
	Noach Dzmura (Ed.)	Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community	Finalist	[8]
	Jallen Rix, Ed.D.	Ex-Gay No Way: Survival and Recovery from Sexual Abuse
	Emma Donoghue	Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature
	Stuart Biegel	The Right to Be Out: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in America’s Public Schools
2012	Michael Bronski	A Queer History of the United States	Winner	[9]
	Scott Pasfield	Gay in America: Portraits by Scott Pasfield	Finalist
	Jay Michaelson	God vs. Gay?: The Religious Case for Equality
	Wanda M. Corn and Tirza True Latimer	Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories
	Robert Duncan	The H.D. Book
2013	Dale Carpenter	Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas	Winner	[10]
	Stacy Braukman	Communists and Perverts under the Palms: The Johns Committee in Florida, 1956-1965	Finalist	[10]
	Christopher Bram	Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
	Andrew Solomon	Far From The Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity
	Michael G. Long (Ed.)	I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters
	Sarah Schulman	Israel/Palestine and the Queer International
	Jeffrey Schwarz, Mark Thompson, and Bo Young	Out Spoken: A Vito Russo Reader Reel One and Reel Two
	T Cooper	Real Man Stories
2014	Hilton Als	White Girls	Winner	[11][12]
	Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle	Living Out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims	Finalist	[11]
	Jamie Woo	Meet Grindr: How One App Changed The Way We Connect
	Phil Tiemeyer	Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants
	Daniel Winunwe Rivers	Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States since World War II
	Matt Richardson	The Queer Limit of Black Memory Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution
	Ben Smales, Tom Bianchi, and Edmund White	Tom Bianchi: Fire Island Pines. Polaroids 1975-1983
	Michael Bronski, Ann Pellegrini, and Michael Amico	You Can Tell Just By Looking: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People
2015	Lee Lynch	An American Queer: The Amazon Trail	Winner
	Martin Duberman	Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS	Finalist	[13]
	Rebecca J. Anderson	Nevirapine and the Quest to End Pediatric AIDS
	Hilton Als, Ann Temkin, Claudia Carson, Robert Gober, Paulina Pobocha, and Christian Scheidemann	Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor
	Robert Hofler	Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange, How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos
	Julie Sondra Decker	The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality
	Aaron H. Devor	The Transgender Archives: Foundations for the Future
	Clayton Delery-Edwards	The Up Stairs Lounge Arson: Thirty-Two Deaths in a New Orleans Gay Bar, June 24, 1973
2016	Marcia M. Gallo	No One Helped: Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy	Winner	[14][15]
	Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski	Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics	Finalist	[16]
	Corbett Joan O'Toole	Fading Scars: My Queer Disability History
	Joshua Gamson	Modern Families: Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship
	Robert Lorway	Namibia’s Rainbow Project
	Lillian Faderman	The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle
	Jarrett Neal	What Color Is Your Hoodie? Essays on Black Gay Identity
2017	David France	How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS	Winner	[17]
	Sarah Schulman	Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair	Finalist	[18]
	Donald Albrecht with Stephen Vider	Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York
	David Greven	Ghost Faces: Hollywood and Post-Millennial Masculinity
	Jurek Wajdowicz	Pride & Joy: Taking the Streets of New York City
	Alexis Pauline Gumbs	Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity
	Ariel Goldberg	The Estrangement Principle
	Kristen Hogan	The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability
2018	Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor	How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective	Winner	[19][20]
	Avram Finkelstein	After Silence	Finalist	[21]
	Malik Gaines	Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible
	Anne Elizabeth Moore	Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes
	Hida Viloria	Born Both: An Intersex Life
	Myriam Gurba	Mean
	Clayton Delery	Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice
	John Chaich and Todd Oldham	Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community
2019	Imani Maria Perry	Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry	Winner	[22]
	Ria Brodell	Butch Heroes	Finalist	[23]
	Martin Duberman	Has the Gay Movement Failed?
	Piper J. Daniels	Ladies Lazarus
	C.J. Janovy	No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas
	Avery Cassell	Resistance: The LGBT Fight Against Fascism in WWII
	Jim Elledge	The Boys of Fairy Town: Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third-Sexers, Pansies, Queers, and Sex Morons in Chicago’s First Century
	Charlene A. Carruthers	Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
2020	Carmen Maria Machado	In the Dream House	Winner	[24][25]
	Cyrus Grace Dunham	A Year Without a Name	Finalist	[26][27]
	W. Ian Bourland	Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s
	Brett Krutzsch	Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics
	E. Patrick Johnson	Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women
	Selby Wynn Schwartz	The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives
	Hugh Ryan	When Brooklyn Was Queer: A History
	Karen Tongson	Why Karen Carpenter Matters
2021	Ashon Crawley	The Lonely Letters	Winner	[28][29][30]
	Ruth Coker Burks	All the Young Men	Finalist	[31]
	Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué and Erich Kessel, Jr.	An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979–1989
	Marty Fink	Forget Burial: HIV Kinship, Disability, and Queer/Trans Narratives of Care
	Josephine Donovan	The Lexington Six: Lesbian and Gay Resistance in 1970s America
2022	Sarah Schulman	Let the Record Show	Winner	[32][33]
	Melissa Febos	Girlhood	Finalist	[34][35]
	Akwaeke Emezi	Dear Senthuran
	Adam Zmith	Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures		[35]
	Kazim Ali	Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water
2023	Hafizah Augustus Geter	The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin	Winner	[36]
	Sabrina Imbler	How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures	Finalist	[37]
	Joseph Osmundson	Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between
	Ricky Tucker	And the Category Is…: Inside New York’s Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community
	Hugh Ryan	The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison
2024	Matt Baume	Hi Honey, I'm Homo	Winner	[38]
	Daniel Black	Black on Black: On Our Resilience and Brilliance in America	Finalist	[39]
	Elyssa Maxx Goodman	Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City
	Julie Marie Wade	Otherwise
	John Sovec, LMFT	Out: A Parent's Guide to Supporting your LGBTQIA+ Kid Through Coming Out and Beyond