LGBTQ+ Heritage Month at the Libraries: Recommended Reading
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Pride Month is celebrated annually in June to to honor the 1969 Stonewall riots, and works to achieve equal justice and equal opportunity for LGBTQ Americans. The list features books and films that explore the LGBTQ experience and promote understanding of LGBTQ history, culture, and arts in all their diversity.
Published October 2022
Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability
Author: Robert McRuer
Summary: A bold and contemporary discourse of the intersection of disability studies and queer studies.
Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over.
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Author: Christopher Bram
Summary: Eminent Outlaws is an inspiring, illuminating tale: one that reveals how the lives of these men are crucial to understanding the social and cultural history of the American twentieth century.
"Fascinating...fun to read and will be the standard text of the defining era of gay literature." - Philadelphia Inquirer
How to Survive a Plague (2012) (film)
Director: David France
Summary: This film documents the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) organization, which made a successful push for more aggressive drug trials during the height of the AIDS epidemic.
Lover
Summary: "A landmark work of lesbian literature with a reflective introduction written by the author twenty years later. One of the finest examples of early post-Stonewall lesbian fiction, Lover paints a fascinating mural of one of the most significant times in LGBTQ history." - NYU Press
Red, White & Royal Blue
Author: Casey McQuiston
Summary: What happens when America's First Son falls in love with the Prince of Wales?
"Red, White & Royal Blue is outrageously fun. It is romantic, sexy, witty and thrilling. I loved every second." - Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & The Six
The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. The United States of America
Author: Eric Cervini
Summary: Based on firsthand accounts, recently declassified FBI records, and forty thousand personal documents.
Eric Cervini's The Deviant's War unfolds over the course of the 1960s, as the Mattachine Society of Washingtons became the first organization to protest the systematic persecution of gay federal employees.
The Men With The Pink Triangle
Author: Heinz Heger
Summary: The first, and still the best known, testimony by a gay survivor of the Nazi concentration camps translated into English, this harrowing autobiography opened new doors onto the understanding of homosexuality and the Holocaust when it was first published in 1980 by Gay Men's Press.
Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation
Author: Robert W. Fieseler
Summary: Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory detail, Robert W. Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of thirty-one men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar.