Your Favorite Exemplary and/or Coming-Out Stories

I don't want to limit this to coming-out stories, as in "this is my character, this is my character before ze came out, this is how ze came out, this is what happened". But I'm looking for stories that do a good job of illustrating "this is what it is like to be {G, L, B, T, I, Q, etc}


I'll insert my own faves:

For "lesbian" the first one for me was Rubyfruit Jungle. Rita Mae Brown.

For gay guys, I guess Andrew Tobias' The Best Little Boy in the World although there were some less explicit less "out" books I liked better.

For trans male-to-female, the one that changed my life was Conundrum by Jan Morris.

I had to use inter-library loan to get my hands on a female-to-male story, and the one I found was Emergence by Mario Martino.

Those are sort of the classics from my list. (and they give you a clue about how old I am, I guess )

Ordered Whipping Girl after reading the descrip, thanks

I'll add a couple that are ostensibly aimed at children / middle-school readers but make a wonderful pared-down simplified version for obstinate or concept-opaque adults:

Gracefully Grayson by Amy Polonsky and Red: A Crayon's Story by Michael Hall.

God I love Allison Bechdel, for Dykes to Watch Out For even if she'd never written anything else.

* places order for The Boys on the Rock *