This chapter traces queer and trans North American memoir through the long twentieth century by engaging the reality that for the majority of people in the majority of that period sexual identities did not adhere in a straight/gay binary and gender identities did not adhere in a cis/trans binary. To answer the challenge posed by this historical reality, this chapter proposes a theory of queer and trans memoir rooted in the racializing and classed gendering regimes and sexual arrangements of the period. This theory then guides the chapter through its engagement with the minoritized works of queer and trans memoir, skirting the white bourgeois gay male genealogy from Oscar Wilde to Edmund White that has too often been proffered as the geneology of LGBT literature.