If you'd like to receive our monthly newsletter, send us an email and we'll add you: I Want To Know About Fun Stuff at Fabulosa!

Beloved Disciples
Mario Elías
​in conversation with KM Soehnlein

Tuesday, May 26th at 7pm

A dazzling gay love story where devotion sparkles in memory, obsession dances on the edge of reality, and a young man discovers the power of first love.

Simón fell in love the first night he stepped into the only gay club in his unnamed coastal hometown. Albi fell too, despite Simón’s quirks—the way he blinks to capture a memory, the way his hands fly when he talks, his inescapable toomuchness. Their first kiss comes on the beach, beneath mango trees. Blink. A season on their secret shore. Blink. The hidden garden Albi tends behind the rectory. Blink. Candles on a coconut cake for his twenty-sixth birthday. Blink. Blink. Blink.

But when Albi dies unexpectedly, Simón is left wandering in memories that feel more alive than the present. Friends and family—his Tía Cachita, best friend Lenita, and estranged mother—come to pull him back. He must choose: remain faithful to a love that haunts him, or rebuild a world without Albi.

With prose “that reverberates with heartfelt intensity, blurring the line between the erotic and the tender, the dreamlike and the real” (Saleem Haddad, Guapa), Elías’ debut novel celebrates the intensity of first love, the endurance of devotion, and the search for found family.

Mario Elías is a multidisciplinary artist of Cuban and Syrian descent based in Chicago. His work spans fiction, nonfiction, photography, painting, and printmaking, often exploring themes of identity, memory, and cultural inheritance. His book Queering the Male Gaze reimagined masterpieces of the classical and modern canon through essays and self-portraiture, giving voice to the often-overlooked queer and female figures who shaped them. His visual work has been featured in Vogue, San Francisco Magazine, and Dazed, among others. His portrait collection, Perennial Beauty, was the inaugural show for Golden Gate University’s Social Impact Artist Series. He is the founder of The KindaSuper Project, a philanthropic initiative offering free photography and video services to underserved communities. The project has partnered with wildfire survivors, immigrant families, women-of-color-led small businesses, and wildlife rescue organizations.

K.M. Soehnlein has been honored with the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from Lambda Literary. His published novels are Army of Lovers, recognized by the Independent Publisher Book Awards for the best LGBTQ Fiction; The World of Normal Boys, winner of the Lambda Award for Gay Fiction; You Can Say You Knew Me When; and Robin and Ruby. He teaches in the MFA In Writing Program at University of San Francisco.

Conversion Therapy Dropout
Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez
in conversation with Matt Nightengale

​Sunday, May 31st at 7pm

A gay Christian's behind-the-scenes account of evangelical megachurches and eight years in conversion therapy before finding wholeness and authenticity.

Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez was an invisible architect behind evangelical Christianity's digital empire, crafting messages of belonging for some of the most influential megachurches--Hillsong Church, Elevation Church, Willow Creek--all while secretly questioning his own place within the faith.

In a desperate attempt to "fix" himself, he turned to conversion therapy, spending eight years trying to pray the gay away. And he wasn't alone. More than 700,000 people in the US have undergone some form of conversion therapy. Even though Exodus International, the largest ex-gay organization, closed in 2013, the practice still thrives in many conservative religious communities. After years of this harmful "therapy," Schraeder Rodriguez's sexuality never changed. But his faith did.The more time he spent in evangelical Christianity, the more he witnessed the hypocrisy of institutions that claimed to love everyone while quietly pushing people like him into silence. But Schraeder Rodriguez wouldn't remain silent. Instead, he forged a new path, discovering a vibrant faith beyond the constraints of non-affirming theology and finding a community that embraced his whole self.
​
Conversion Therapy Dropout is a behind-the-scenes look at megachurch culture, the hidden harm of non-affirming Christian spaces, and the ongoing impact of conversion therapy on gay Christians. This isn't just a coming-out story--it's about what happens after. About rebuilding a life outside the only world you've ever known. And the radical act of stepping into the light after being told your whole life to stay in the shadows. Sometimes, the greatest act of faith isn't holding on--it's letting go.

Spawning Season
Joseph Osmundson

Tuesday, June 2nd at 7pm

From the author of National Book Critics Circle Award and Lambda Literary Award finalist VIROLOGY comes an intimate chronicle of queer family-making.

Since grade school, Joseph Osmundson dreamed of being pregnant. As he grew into the queer scientist he is today, the economic precarity of academia and the warming planet led to his decision not to reproduce. That is, until a lesbian couple he had known since college came to him with a proposition: would Joe be a bio-dad and would he co-parent alongside them?

​Soon everything was falling into place. But when the two partners communicated their need for a child to reflect their own racial backgrounds, Joe's whiteness exposed fault lines in their parenting journey. Spawning Season is a genre-bending memoir that treats the scientific as integral to the personal and that builds an entire species of the grief we carry in our bodies. In exploratory prose that builds on the work of Donna Haraway and José Esteban Muñoz, Osmundson considers the ethics of child-rearing in the 21st century, the brutal wonder of caregiving, and the joys and intricacies of building family beyond biology.

Orange
Noel Quiñones

Sunday, June 7th at 2pm

A bold and tender portrait of family, identity, and truth in the North Bronx.
​
Through narrative poems and innovative forms inspired by color theory and elementary school, Orange explores the ripple effects of queerness, lies, and finding yourself in a family. In this visceral new collection, however, the scope of "family" expands well beyond the nuclear unit; Noel Quiñones's poems center relationships between friends, cousins, partners, and many other family members. Painting a vivid and fraught portrait of the North Bronx, Quiñones unflinchingly confronts the contradictions at the heart of love, divorce, gender, religion, and community, unpacking the complexities of coming out, divorced parents, and generational trauma. Orange ultimately argues that truth resembles color: something real, yet elusive, and impossible to prove.

Mighty Real
Barry Walters
in conversation with Joshua Gamson

Tuesday, June 9th at 7pm

The definitive history of LGBTQ music, from Stonewall to RuPaul, and its impact on culture and American life

From the underground dancefloors of the Seventies to the global charts of the Nineties, LGBTQ artists and audiences shaped music's sound, style, and spirit. In Mighty Real, veteran journalist Barry Walters chronicles its LGBTQ history from the Velvet Underground to the 21st century's dawn as he honors the artists who redefined gender, defied tradition, and dared to challenge sexual norms with the help of a record business that wasn't as straight as commonly believed.

Drawing on his decades as a New York- and San Francisco-based music critic, Walters examines how LGBTQ musicians, music industry executives, and fans reshaped the mainstream. He connects the dots between David Bowie's dazzling reinventions, Grace Jones's androgynous glamor, Prince's boundary-shattering sexuality, and the radical candor of the Indigo Girls to prove they're all doing the same thing: fighting oppression.
​
With exuberance, insight, and encyclopedic knowledge, Walters brings to life the songs and society that filled dancefloors, bedrooms, and streets as he uncovers yesteryear's coded LGBTQ messages that paved the way for today's unabashedly queer hits. Mighty Real is a masterful love letter to the music that liberated generations, and it's written in a page-turning, personal way that blurs distinctions between chronicle and memoir. This is the rare and revolutionary music history told to help you laugh, cry, and then rally against lingering inequality.
If you want to schedule a reading or book release party, please fill out our event request form. 

Please note: we concentrate on LGBTQ+ titles, but do occasionally make exceptions. However, we do not do events for self-help books, academic titles or business books. All events must be scheduled at least 6 weeks in advance and (since we do not have a public restroom) readings should last no longer than 90 minutes.

We truly wish we could host everyone who wants to hold an event here. Alas, there are simply too many wonderful authors with wonderful books for us to accommodate all the requests we receive. Thanks for understanding!
Proudly powered by Weebly