Recommended Readings to Celebrate Pride
It’s June and LTBTQ Pride is in the air. Whether you’re waving a rainbow flag parade-side or pausing to honor the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, there is much progress to celebrate. We’ve put together a little summer reading list of books that are out and proud and give a sense of this shared history and the distance yet to go.
“An absorbing, funny, and astonishing memoir of a man with many talents and many identities: Samuel Steward, university professor; Phil Sparrow, tattoo artist; Ward Stames, John McAndrews, and Donald Bishop, writing ground-breaking essays in the first European gay magazines; Phil Andros, explicit novelist; and a man who lived life to its fullest.” 2019 Over the Rainbow Recommended Book List | American Library Association
“The Book of Minor Perverts remakes the history of sexuality. Kahan illuminates what is missing: the stories told since the eighteenth century, and peaking during the Modernist period, about how people become homosexual. This is brilliant, upending, field-changing work, which will take its place beside groundbreaking projects from major historians of sexuality such as Michel Foucault and David Halperin, and leading LGBTQ literary critics such as Eve Sedgwick and Valerie Traub.”
Elizabeth Freeman, author of Time Binds
“A deep thinker and a lovely writer, John Ibson is unique in the field. . . . He develops a convincing and sympathetic portrayal of the crushing cost that boys and men—gay, queer, nonqueer alike—pay for narrow constructions of masculinity. . . . Ibson’s work is a treasure that should be explored by all scholars.” Men and Masculinities
“Intimate Matters, was cited by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy when, writing for a majority of court on July 26, he and his colleagues struck down a Texas law criminalizing sodomy. The decision was widely hailed as a victory for gay rights—and it derived in part, according to Kennedy’s written comments, from the information he gleaned from this book.” Chicago Tribune
“Brown-Saracino’s work certainly fills an important need in that while studies examining LGBTQ experiences and identity negotiation in large cities and rural areas are abundant, small cities are often overlooked.” Sexualities
Find out more about these and other books
More Gender & Sexuality Studies
Our friends at Critical Inquiry have made a number of fantastic articles free and open for all of June to celebrate Pride month reading. Read essays by Leo Bersani, David M. Halperin, and more.