With the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots coming up on June 28, it seems like the entire country is celebrating LGBTQ+ Pride. But what happens on July 1, when all the rainbow logos and flags get put away for the year? Don't worry—we've got a list of incredible books by LGBTQ+ authors to keep you occupied all year long. Like the queer community itself, this reading list is diverse and exciting, representing a wide variety of genres, time periods, and identities. Here are 26 great books to add to your bookshelf.
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The Queer History of the Women’s House of Detention
From this point on, the prevalence of queer sexuality in the House of Detention would be mentioned by nearly every author who spent time inside the prison, including Angela Davis, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Afeni Shakur, Andrea Dworkin, and Sara Harris, who worked as a social worker in the prison for a year while writing her 1967 tell-all expose, Hellhole: The Shocking Story of the Inmates and Life in the New York City House of Detention for Women.
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Dr. R. W. Shufeldt
How eugenics gave rise to modern homophobia
To Shufeldt, black people represented an external threat to whiteness, and queer people represented an internal one (the existence of black queer people seems never to have entered his mind). These were discrete issues, but they were both, at heart, about promoting white supremacy.
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The Stonewall Riots Weren’t New York City’s Only Queer Uprising
After protesting the prison, the march began to disperse – at which point, activists heard about what was happening at The Haven. Many believed the cops knew that most queer activists would be at the rally in Times Square that night, and had raided The Haven assuming there would be little opposition.
But the cops were wrong.
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Illustration by Nathan Kawanishi.
Crush Notes
I think of Nuwās as the incomparable soloist, the high, clear, castrati soprano rising above an innumerous chorus of Arab poets whose work touches on love or sex between men, dating from the dawn of Islam to the present.
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Read the original - with great photos from the archive! - here.
Themstory: How This Researcher Is Preserving Trans History Around the World
If you’re not familiar with the Digital Transgender Archive, it’s a portal to an incredible collection of trans materials from across the world, a great resource for researchers or any queer person who wants to spend an afternoon looking at amazing old photos, journals, flyers, newspaper reports, and more.
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Read the original here.
Themstory: The 1950s Government Witch Hunt That Exposed Closeted Queers
By this point, the line between homosexuals and communists had blurred almost to non-existence in the eyes of most Americans. Both were thought to be spies hiding in plain sight, associating in small cells, out to destroy the American way of life. If you were one, you were probably the other.
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Read the original, with more images, here.
Themstory: Susan Sontag Loved Her, Yet Time Has Overlooked This Brilliant Queer Playwright
If a queer Cuban-American woman wrote forty plays, was a finalist for the Pulitzer, and won nine Off-Broadway Obie Awards, over a career that spanned some forty years, you’d know her name, wouldn’t you?
Probably not.
What if that woman was also Susan Sontag’s lover, the “most intuitive playwright” Edward Albee had ever met, and the subject of an upcoming documentary premiering at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight Festival today?
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