Your Essential Pride Month Reading List #LGBTQIA+
Happy Pride! From old classics to current bestsellers, we’ve curated a list of #LGBTQIA+ reads to last you through Pride Month and the rest of the year.
PRIDE: A CELEBRATION IN QUOTES
Editor: Caitlyn McNeil
ABOUT
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Pride Parade, this book offers inspiring words of wisdom on loving yourself as you truly are.
These thoughtfully selected quotations are the perfect way to honor the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and the first Pride parade. Taken from throughout history and from a variety of voices, they celebrate everything the LGBT community has achieved, looking at inclusivity across the board and reminding us that love is one of the world’s greatest powers.
Quotes include:
“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.” —Barack Obama
"I've never been interested in being invisible and erased." —Laverne Cox
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." —Ralph Waldo Emerson
THE QUEERIODIC TABLE: A CELEBRATION OF LGBTQ+ CULTURE
by Harriet Dyer
ABOUT
As featured in The New York Times
A cleverly designed gift book playing on the 'periodic table' to celebrate all aspects of LGBTQ+ culture, in small, easy-to-digest sections.
Celebrate the richness of modern queer culture and its vast history with this fascinating introduction to all the essential elements that helped sculpt the LGBTQ+ community up to the present day, including:
· the fascinating stories of queer pioneers like Marsha P. Johnson, celebrities, game-changers and unsung heroes alike
· the essential LGBTQ+ timeline of queer world history
· the biggest queer culture festivals and events in the world
· classic works of queer art, literature, music, TV and film.
This fabulous collection shines a light on the rich variety of elements to cheer about that form The Queeriodic Table.
PRIDE: FIFTY YEARS OF PARADES AND PROTESTS FROM THE PHOTO ARCHIVES...
by The New York Times
ABOUT
It began in New York City on June 28, 1969.
When police raided the Stonewall Inn—a bar in the Greenwich Village neighborhood, known as a safe haven for gay men—violent demonstrations and protests broke out in response. The Stonewall Riots, as they would come to be known, were the first spark in the wildfire that would become the LGBTQ rights revolution. Fifty years later, the LGBTQ community and its supporters continue to gather every June to commemorate this historic event.
Here, collected for the first time by The New York Times, is a powerful visual history of five decades of parades and protests of the LGBTQ rights movement. These photos, paired with descriptions of major events from each decade as well as selected reporting from The Times, showcase the victories, setbacks, and ongoing struggles for the LGBTQ community.
YAY! YOU'RE GAY! NOW WHAT?: A GAY BOY'S GUIDE TO LIFE
by Riyadh Khalaf
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Riyadh Khalafis a presenter and YouTube creator and one of the internet generation's most prominent LGBT faces. His media career began at age 16 when he launched a pirate radio station from his bedroom. Since then he has presented and produced award-winning radio in Ireland and Australia. His BBC series Queer Britain aired on BBC1 and he has presented original online content for MTV UK, The Guardian, and RTÉ. Riyadh's YouTube channel has amassed over 350,000 subscribers. Originally from Dublin, he now lives in London.
FIERCE FEMMES AND NOTORIOUS LIARS: A DANGEROUS TRANS GIRL'S...
by Kai Cheng Thom
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At once a love letter and challenge to the traditional transgender memoir, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a playful, surrealist dance through queer coming of age.
A haunted young girl (who happens to be a kung-fu expert and pathological liar) runsaway from an oppressive city, where the sky is always grey, in search of love and sisterhood--and finds herself in a magical place known only as the Street of Miracles.There, she is quickly adopted into a vigilante gang of glamorous warrior femmes called the Lipstick Lacerators, whose mission is to scour the Street of violent men and avenge murdered trans women everywhere. But when disaster strikes, can our intrepid heroine find the truth within herself in order to protect her new family and heal her broken heart?
NÎTISÂNAK
by Lindsay Nixon
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lindsay Nixon is a Cree-Métis-Saulteaux curator, award-nominated editor, award-nominated writer, and McGill Art History PhD student. They currently hold the position of Editor-at-Large for Canadian Art. Nixon has previously edited mâmawi-âcimowak, an independent art, art criticism, and literature journal, and their writing has appeared in Malahat Review, Room, GUTS, MICE, esse, Inuit Art Quarterly, Teen Vogue, and other publications. nîtisânak is their first book.
LESS (WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE): A NOVEL
by Andrew Sean Greer
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A struggling novelist travels the world to avoid an awkward wedding in this hilarious Pulitzer Prize-winning novel full of "arresting lyricism and beauty" (The New York Times Book Review).
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
National Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book of 2017
A Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2017
A San Francisco Chronicle Top Ten Book of 2017
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Lambda Award, and the California Book Award
Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.
QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?
ANSWER: You accept them all.
What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last.
Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story.
A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York Times has hailed as "inspired, lyrical," "elegiac," "ingenious," as well as "too sappy by half," Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.
"I could not love LESS more."--Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"Andrew Sean Greer's Less is excellent company. It's no less than bedazzling, bewitching and be-wonderful."--Christopher Buckley, The New York Times Book Review
WILLA & HESPER
by Amy Feltman
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For fans ofWhat Belongs to Youby Garth Greenwell andThe Futuresby Anna Pitoniak, a soul-piercing debut that explores the intertwining of past and present, queerness, and coming of age in uncertain times.
Willa's darkness enters Hesper's light late one night in Brooklyn. Theirs is a whirlwind romance until Willa starts to know Hesper too well, to crawl into her hidden spaces, and Hesper shuts her out. She runs, following her fractured family back to her grandfather's hometown of Tbilisi, Georgia, looking for the origin story that he is no longer able to tell. But once in Tbilisi, cracks appear in her grandfather's history-and a massive flood is heading toward Georgia, threatening any hope for repair.
Meanwhile, heartbroken Willa is so desperate to leave New York that she joins a group trip for Jewish twentysomethings to visit Holocaust sites in Germany and Poland, hoping to override her emotional state. When it proves to be more fraught than home, she must come to terms with her past-the ancestral past, her romantic past, and the past that can lead her forward.
Told from alternating perspectives, and ending in the shadow of Trump's presidency, WILLA & HESPER is a deeply moving, cerebral, and timely debut.
THE ART OF FIELDING: A NOVEL
by Chad Harbach
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At Westish College, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league until a routine throw goes disastrously off course. In the aftermath of his error, the fates of five people are upended. Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life.
As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, "The Art of Fieldingis mere baseball fiction the wayMoby Dickis just a fish story" (Nicholas Dawidoff). Itis an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment--to oneself and to others.
OUT EAST: MEMOIR OF A MONTAUK SUMMER
by John Glynn
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An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of May 2019
A TIME Magazine Best Book of May 2019
A Cosmopolitan Best Book of May 2019
An Oprah Magazine Best LGBTQ Book of 2019
A gripping portrait of life in a Montauk summer house--a debut memoir of first love, identity and self-discovery among a group of friends who became family.
They call Montauk the end of the world, a spit of land jutting into the Atlantic. The house was a ramshackle split-level set on a hill, and each summer thirty one people would sleep between its thin walls and shag carpets. Against the moonlight the house's octagonal roof resembled a bee's nest. It was dubbed The Hive.
In 2013, John Glynn joined the share house. Packing his duffel for that first Memorial Day Weekend, he prayed for clarity. At 27, he was crippled by an all-encompassing loneliness, a feeling he had carried in his heart for as long as he could remember. John didn't understand the loneliness. He just knew it was there. Like the moon gone dark.
OUT EAST is the portrait of a summer, of the Hive and the people who lived in it, and John's own reckoning with a half-formed sense of self. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, The Hive was a center of gravity, a port of call, a home. Friendships, conflicts, secrets and epiphanies blossomed within this tightly woven friend group and came to define how they would live out the rest of their twenties and beyond.
Blending the sand-strewn milieu of George Howe Colt's The Big House, the radiant aching of Olivia Liang's The Lonely City, OUT EAST is a keenly wrought story of love and transformation, longing and escape in our own contemporary moment.
"An unforgettable story told with feeling and humor and above all with the razor-sharp skill of a delicate and highly gifted writer." --Andre Aciman, New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name
"Out East is full of intimacy and hope and frustration and joy, an extraordinary tale of emotional awakening and lacerating ambivalence, a confession of self-doubt that becomes self-knowledge." --Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winner
BIGGER LOVE
by Rick R. Reed
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Truman Reid is Summitville High’s most out-and-proud senior. He can't wait to take his fierce, uncompromising self away from his small Ohio River hometown, where he’s suffered more than his share of bullying. He’s looking forward to bright lights and a big city. Maybe he’ll be the first gender-fluid star to ever win an Academy Award. But all that changes on the first day of school when he locks eyes with the most gorgeous hunk he’s ever seen. Mike Stewart, big, dark-haired, and with the most amazing blue eyes, is new to town. He's quiet, manly, and has the sexy air of a lost soul. It’s almost love at first sight for Truman. He thinks that love could deepen when Mike becomes part of the stage crew for Harvey, the senior class play Truman's directing. But is Mike even gay? And how will it work when Truman's mother is falling for Mike’s dad? Plus Truman, never the norm, makes a daring and controversial choice for the production that has the whole town up in arms. See how it all plays out on a stage of love, laughter, tears, and sticking up for one’s essential self.
CARMILLA
Adapter Kim Turrisi
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An adaptation of Shaftesbury's award-winning, groundbreaking queer vampire web series of the same name, Carmilla mixes the camp of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the snark of Veronica Mars, and the mysterious atmosphere of Welcome to Nightvale.
Newly escaped from the stifling boredom of a small town, college freshman Laura is ready to make the most of her first year at Silas University. But when her roommate, Betty, vanishes and a sarcastic, nocturnal philosophy student named Carmilla moves into Betty's side of the room, Laura decides to play detective. Turns out Betty isn't the first girl to go missing ? she's just the first girl not to come back.
All over campus, girls have been vanishing, and they are completely changed when (or if) they return. Even more disturbing are the strange dreams they recount: smothering darkness, and a strange pale figure haunting their rooms. Dreams that Laura is starting to have herself.
As Laura closes in on the answers, tensions rise with Carmilla. Is this just a roommate relationship that isn't working out, or does Carmilla know more than she's letting on about the disappearances?
What will Laura do if it turns out her roommate isn't just selfish and insensitive, but completely inhuman? And what will she do with the feelings she's starting to have for Carmilla?
Produced by Shaftesbury, and available on the YouTube channel KindaTV, Carmilla is a global sensation. A scripted transmedia series that puts a modern spin on the cult-classic gothic vampire novella by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Carmilla has generated over 71 million views and 245 million minutes of watch time across three seasons since its launch in 2014. It has been translated into more than 20 languages and also been made into a feature film.
Author Kim Turrisi brings her trademark humor and sensitivity to an adaptation that offers a deep dive for existing fans and a portal for new fans around the world.
HONEYBEE
by Trista Mateer
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You will meet people in your lifetime who demand to have poems written about them. It’s not something they say. It’s something about their hands, the shape of their mouths, the way they look walking away from you. Honeybee is an honest take on walking away and still feeling like you were walked away from. It’s about cutting love loose like a kite string and praying the wind has the decency to carry it away from you. It’s an ode to the back and forth, the process of letting something go but not knowing where to put it down. Honeybee is putting it down. It’s small town girls and plane tickets, a taste of tenderness and honey, the bandage on the bee sting. It’s a reminder that you are not defined by the people you walk away from or the people who walk away from you. Consider Honeybee a memoir in verse, or at the very least, a story written by one of today's most confessional poets.
THE NEW NEGRO: THE LIFE OF ALAIN LOCKE
by Jeffrey C. Stewart
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Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro - the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness.In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. Locke also received a cosmopolitan, aesthetic education through his travels in continental Europe, where he came to appreciate the beauty of art and experienced a freedom unknown to him in the United States. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America and his promotion of the literary and artistic work of African Americans as the quintessential creations of American modernism. In the process he looked to Africa to find the proud and beautiful roots of the race. Shifting the discussion of race from politics and economics to the arts, he helped establish the idea that Black urban communities could be crucibles of creativity. Stewart explores both Locke's professional and private life,including his relationships with his mother, his friends, and his white patrons, as well as his lifelong search for love as a gay man.Stewart's thought-provoking biography recreates the worlds of this illustrious, enigmatic man who, in promoting the cultural heritage of Black people, became - in the process - a New Negro himself.
THE NEW GIRL: A TRANS GIRL TELLS IT LIKE IT IS
by Rhyannon Styles
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'Inspiring and heart-wrenching'Paloma Faith
'Love Rhyannon. Love this book'Grace Dent
The remarkable transgender memoir you won't stop hearing about. Rhyannon Styles will do for transgender what Matt Haig did for mental health.Ellecolumnist Rhyannon Styles tells her unforgettable life story in THE NEW GIRL, reflecting on her past and charting her incredible journey from male to female. A raw, frank and utterly moving celebration of life.
Imagine feeling lost in your own body. Imagine spending years living a lie, denying what makes you 'you'. This was Ryan's reality. He had to choose: die as a man or live as a woman.
In 2012, Ryan chose Rhyannon. At the age of thirty she began her transition, taking the first steps on the long road to her true self.
Rhyannon holds nothing back in THE NEW GIRL, a heartbreakingly honest telling of her life. Through her catastrophic lows and incredible highs, she paints a glorious technicolour picture of what it's like to be transgender. From cabaret drag acts, brushes with celebrity and Parisian clown school, to struggles with addiction and crippling depression, Rhyannon's story is like nothing you've read before.
Narrated with searing honesty, humour and poignancy, THE NEW GIRL is a powerful book about being true to ourselves, for anyone who's ever felt a little lost.
KEEP THIS TO YOURSELF
by Tom Ryan
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"Breathtakingly chilling...eerie and wholly immersive...A tightly plotted mystery.” Kirkus Reviews starred review
It's been a year since the Catalog Killer terrorized the sleepy seaside town of Camera Cove, killing four people before disappearing without a trace. Like everyone else in town, eighteen-year-old Mac Bell is trying to put that horrible summer behind him—easier said than done since Mac's best friend Connor was the murderer's final victim. But when he finds a cryptic message from Connor, he's drawn back into the search for the killer—who might not have been a random drifter after all. Now nobody—friends, neighbors, or even the sexy stranger with his own connection to the case—is beyond suspicion. Sensing that someone is following his every move, Mac struggles to come to terms with his true feelings towards Connor while scrambling to uncover the truth.
DEPOSING NATHAN
by Zack Smedley
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Heartbreaking but ultimately empowering, Deposing Nathan is a stunning story of a toxic friendship-turned-relationship that explores the layers and complexity of the coming out experience.The summer after eleventh grade, Nate was stabbed in his front yard. The attacker: his best friend, Cameron. Now, Nate is being called to deliver a sworn statement that will get Cam convicted. But the problem is, the real story isn?t that easy or convenient?just like Nate and Cam?s relationship.During the deposition, Nate is forced to come clean about all of the things he?s kept bottled up?like how his aunt isn?t as supportive and friendly as she seems to outsiders, how he cheated on his girlfriend, and how he and Cam are so much more than friends.
THE HEART BEGINS HERE
by Jacqueline Dumas
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The Heart Begins Here is the story of the ever-optimistic, earnest Sara Requier and her disintegrating seven-year relationship with the cynical Wanda Wysoka. Along with her relationship struggles, Sara must contend with the drastic changes in the book industry that threaten her feminist bookstore, as well as a mother who refuses to accept her daughter's lesbianism. Then, just as Wanda decides to leave Sara, Wanda's new young lover, Cindy, is murdered. The story takes place in a western Canadian city in 2001 -- much of it in Sara's bookstore, Common Reader Books -- in the shadow of the disturbing political climate that followed the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. This is a transitional point in the Canadian book industry: the proliferation of big box stores, the expansion of the Internet -- and Sara is caught up in the concomitant changes in her community. The book explores themes of love and loss, of the lingering effects of a dysfunctional childhood, of misogyny, of personal and societal homophobia, and especially the challenge of integrating the personal with the political.
HEADCASE: LGBTQ WRITERS & ARTISTS ON MENTAL HEALTH AND WELLNESS
by Stephanie Schroeder, Teresa Theophano
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Headcase is a groundbreaking collection of personal reflections and artistic representations illustrating the intersection of mental wellness, mental illness, and LGBTQ identity, as well as the lasting impact of historical views equating queer and trans identity with mental illness. The featured pieces offer personal views from both providers and clients, often one and the same, about their experiences. In the anthology, readers will access the inner thoughts of contributors who collectively document the difficulty of navigating flawed healthcare systems that limit affordable access to genuinely affirming, effective services. Traversing boundaries of race and ethnic identity, age, gender identity, and socioeconomic status, Headcase appeals to LGBTQ communities and, specifically, LGBTQ mental health consumers and their friends, families, and comrades.
STEEL ANIMALS
by Sk Dyment
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Hilarity and queer magic realism twist the throttle when Jackie, a loner with a secret bank-robbing persona, meets Vespa: sexy, sculpture-welding artist and collector of vintage motorbikes. Still planning elaborate revenge on a New York ex-lover, Jackie tests both her new relationship and the loyalties of her friends, a rag-tag gang of post-punk eccentrics, realizing how love changes hatred only after her scheme runs out of control. An innocent misstep and an encrypted mystery swings the romance into the dangerous orbit of a construction mogul intent on subverting corporate money at any cost.
BINGO LOVE VOLUME 1
by Tee Franklin
By (artist)Jenn St. Onge, Joy San
ABOUT
2019, Texas Library Association's MaverickGraphic Novel Reading List
Amazon Book Review's BestComics & Graphic Novels of2018
NPR's Best Books of2018
Newsweek's Best ComicBooks of 2018
TheAdvocate's Best LGBTQ Graphic Novels of2018
Book Riot's BestComics of2018
Autostraddle's 50 ofthe Best LGBT Books of 2018
WhenHazel Johnson and Mari McCray met at church bingo in 1963, it was love at firstsight. Forced apart by their families and society, Hazel and Mari both marriedyoung men and had families. Decades later, now in their mid-'60s, Hazel and Marireunite again at a church bingo hall. Realizing their love for each other isstill alive, what these grandmothers do next takes absolute strength andcourage.
From TEE FRANKLIN(NAILBITER's "THE OUTFIT," Love is Love) and JENN ST-ONGE (Jem & theMisfits), BINGO LOVE is a touching story of love, family, and resiliency thatspans over 60 years.