Surviving Queer: A Memoir

by Rian Kochel

A beautiful, blistering, and fiercely funny testament to surviving the closet, reclaiming your history, and breaking the cycles of family trauma. Surviving Queer is an unforgettable, raw, and poetic memoir—a love letter to every lost, lonely queer kid who has been forced to hide from their truth in order to feel safe. It carries an urgent message of indelible hope—a plea for them to hold onto their truth, carry it forward, and use it as the foundation for their future.

114 pages, Paperback

Published September 10, 2026

About the author

Rian Kochel is a writer who has never stayed anywhere long enough to call it home. He's currently parked in Missoula, Montana, against his better judgment. His work has appeared in The Sun and HuffPost, and he's spent more than two decades writing professionally, from radio promotion and museum campaigns to arts nonprofit communications and digital content. These days he works in communications and marketing.

Surviving Queer is a memoir-in-essays: 27 stories, told the way you'd tell them across a bar, for the lost and lonely queer kid who just wants out. It isn't a manual for healing. It's company from someone who's still working it out too, with enough hope to hold onto your truth and build on it. Deadpan, long-breathed, and profane when earned, it takes on the closet, inherited family trauma, and the work of reclaiming your own history in a way that makes it's funnier than any of that has a right to be.

Reviews

[Tsara Shelton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this memoir. Each chapter is a story of its own, and each story reveals insights, vulnerabilities, and introduces interesting characters. Though it is specifically written from the perspective of a queer boy it invites all outliers to recognize themselves, to identify the elements that shaped them, and to ultimately forgive and shed their shame.

It's a short book so you can devour it in one or two sittings. And because each chapter works as a stand alone essay it is the sort of book that, even if you devour it the first time, you can easily return to it and nibble as often as you want, or need. I was lucky to be gifted this one!

[Raven Digitalis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant memoir that is informative, engaging, and highly entertaining. It is sure to speak to the aching hearts of those readers whose queer identities have ever been sabotaged, degraded, or dismissed. This is a book of healing, and I can't recommend it highly enough.