This book offers an extraordinary new record of māhū and LGBTQIA+ life in West Maui, bringing into view stories that have long been present in the community but too rarely preserved in the historical record. Through a moving collection of oral histories, residents of Lahaina, Kāʻanapali, Honokōwai, Mahinahina, and Nāpili speak about family, work, faith, friendship, loss, survival, and belonging in their own voices. Some narrators speak directly about sexuality or gender; others reveal these histories through memory, silence, implication, and the social worlds they inhabited. Together, their testimonies create an intimate portrait of lives too often excluded from official accounts.
But this is more than a collection of personal narratives. The book’s second half offers a wide-ranging historical analysis of how intimacy, gender, and desire have been shaped in Hawaiʻi over centuries, from precolonial relational worlds to the transformations wrought by Christianity, law, plantation capitalism, migration, tourism, and contemporary political conflict. Grounded in West Maui yet attentive to island-wide and global forces, it shows how private life is never separate from the larger structures that govern memory, visibility, and belonging.
Especially urgent in the aftermath of the August 2023 Lahaina fires and at a moment when LGBTQIA+ rights and visibility remain newly vulnerable, this book preserves voices, relationships, and community knowledge that might otherwise be lost. It is at once a work of oral history, a major contribution to Hawaiian and queer studies, and an act of cultural care. By bringing lived testimony and structural history into conversation, it offers readers a groundbreaking account of West Maui and a powerful meditation on what it means to be seen, remembered, and carried forward.