10 Books to Celebrate Pride
Happy Pride Month! Below is a roundup of 10 favorite books (and verrry short synopses) with LGBTQ+ characters and authors engaged in both celebration and protest. What are your favorites? Always looking for recommendations, please comment or reply to this email!
Non-Fiction, Memoirs, & Essays:
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
A graphic novel memoir of Bechdel’s childhood and relationship with her father.
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
In this “biomythography” Lorde explains that “Zami” is a Caribbean word for “women who work together as friends and lovers.”
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya Hartman
A fascinating read about young Black women in New York and Philadelphia in the early 1900s challenging expectations of relationships and experimenting with new ways to live.
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree Brown
Brown and other collected writers on both activism around pleasure, and the pleasure that can be found in any activism.
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
Another graphic novel memoir, this gives a great overview of ideas around gender as well as the author’s own experience.
Fiction:
Yerba Buena by Nina LaCour
A gorgeous novel of two young women figuring out how their pasts shape who they are now, and who they can be to each other.
We Deserve Monuments by Jas Hammonds
In my year-end favorites list, I went with the description: Gorgeous, traumatic, mysterious, and at the same time the relationships between the core characters are jokingly described by the author as “‘Gilmore Girls,’ but make it Black and gay.”
Dangerous Angels (the Weetzie Bat series) by Francesca Lia Block
A formative book of my early teen years, this modern magical realism series centers around the love of a unique found family.
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
In this novel the title character lives for centuries and changes sex from man to woman while partnering with people of varying genders throughout. Woolf based the character of Orlando on her own (female) romantic partner and satirizes English literature throughout. So fun to read such disregard for (and exploration of) boundaries that was published in 1928.
Lillith’s Brood by Octavia Butler
One of the weirdest books (actually a collection of three) I’ve ever read, and I mean that in a good way. This is deep sci-fi, with fascinating, completely unfamiliar ideas of gender and sex.
Which of these are making it onto your want to read list? What queer-centered books need to make it onto mine?