Adam Zmith – författare

An intimate history of LGBTQ+ life over four decades, discovered in a stash of forgotten, handwritten notes.'A fantastic journey through an overlooked archive bursting with humanity and real life on every page.' DAN SNOW'Among the most vivid social histories I've read about contemporary queer life in Britain.'OISÍN MCKENNA, author of Evenings and Weekends'Illuminating.' FINANCIAL TIMES'Timely and moving.' HISTORY TODAY'Profound.' AnOTHER MAGAZINEIn a crawlspace at the offices of Switchboard, a queer helpline in operation since 1974, lies dozens of log books kept by volunteers describing the phone calls they had taken: a teenager whose parents had kicked them out of home for dressing as the wrong gender; a lesbian terrified of having her baby taken away from her; a man arrested for chatting up another man in a public toilet; a young person wanting to know how to come out.These logs were traces of tens of thousands of queer lives, a bridge to a past hidden from people like Tash Walker and Adam Zmith in their youth, captured by people who lent an ear to those in need. Walker and Zmith came of age in the time of Section 28, a law which banned councils and schools 'promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship'. In recovering these logs, they encountered people grappling with feelings, questions and problems both familiar and different, and set out to learn from - and sometimes speak to - those on both sides of the calls.Charged with joy, gossip, sensuality, humour and sometimes fear, and with a potent relevancy to the world today, these stories are brought together in The Log Books. Walker and Zmith capture queer lives in stunning detail, embarking on a journey of both collective history and self-discovery and propelling it into the very foreground of our national history.'In opening the Switchboard archive, and all the vulnerability and thrill contained within its pages, this book manages to capture something of the essence of what it means to be alive.'AMELIA ABRAHAM, author of Queer Intentions

3, 2, 1... inhale, deep. From the Victorian infirmary and the sex clubs of the 1970s, poppers vapour has released the queer potential inside us all.This is the intriguing story of how poppers wafted out of the lab and into gay bars, corner shops, bedrooms and porn supercuts. Blending historical research with wry observation, Adam Zmith explores the cultural forces and improbable connections behind the power of poppers. What emerges is not just a history of pub raids, viral panics and pecs the size of dinner plates. It is a collection of fresh and provocative ideas about identity, sex, utopia, capitalism, law, freedom and the bodies that we use to experience the world.In Deep Sniff, what starts as a thoughtful enquiry into poppers becomes a manifesto for pleasure.

Welcome to your new favourite genre: the fucking fantastic. In these ten stories, everything is sex: walls, wax, the past, your future, your neighbours, hankies, candles, circuit boards, petri dishes, scrap metal – and language itself. Conjuring experiences for which there are no words, our amazing queer authors generate new tongues from the heat of their communing with a wild variety of lifeforms. From Diriye Osman’s spiritualised Peckham to Jem Nash’s time-travelling trans multiverse, these stories transport you to new ways of being and feeling. In a word, it’s CruiserShimmeringLipophilicNeckingerCircuitGirlboss. Whether you get horny from aliens, ghosts, robots, utopia, possession, ritual, or the completely surreal, there’s a story here for you. But why stop at one when you can taste pleasure in each and every one?

A candid and confessional cultural investigation into the kinky world of the foot fetish.According to recent research, 1 in 7 people have fantasised about feet at some point in their lives, so why is this kink still often considered taboo? Queer writer and podcaster Adam Zmith dips a toe into the cultural and sexual history of the foot fetish—taking readers from medieval poetry to Renaissance paintings, OnlyFans to Fellow Travelers. Enlightening, erotic, and refreshingly nonjudgmental, Solemates is the rich, messy tale of our obsession with everything below the ankle—and a fascinating expose into what our desires reveal about how we view our bodies and our sexuality.