What to Read for Pride Month
To celebrate Pride Month, we’ve curated a vibrant reading list that captures the diverse experiences and profound contributions of the LGBTQ+ community. This selection delves into themes of love, identity, activism, and resilience, offering a rich tapestry of perspectives. Join us in embracing these powerful stories that illuminate the richness of LGBTQ+ lives and histories—spanning poetic meditations, metafictional narratives, and critical examinations—and provide both enlightenment and inspiration during Pride Month.
Take 30% off the books below with code PRIDEMONTH30 on our website throughout June.
By Cyril Wong
From Seagull Books
A profound poem on the mystical and the ecstatic and about our connection with nature.
The Worst Thing of All Is the Light
By José Luis Serrano (Translated by Lawrence Schimel)
From Seagull Books
A metafictional novel about two intertwined stories of love that seek to perpetuate themselves in history.
Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement
By Joanna Wuest
“Addressing crucial questions that are both timely and timeless, this powerful, persuasive, nuanced book is a conversation-changing account of the sources and consequences of scientific authority in the struggles over LGBTQ+ rights and politics in the United States.”—Dara Strolovitch, Yale University
By Omar Youssef Souleimane (Translated by Ghada Mourad)
From Seagull Books
A rare narrative of gay love in the Arab world that travels into the lives of a group of spirited youth during the Syrian Revolution.
Pathologies: The Downfall of Johan van Vere de With
By Jacob Isräel de Haan (With an Afterword by Wim J. Simons; Translated by Brian Doyle–Du Breuil)
From Seagull Books
One of the first novels to openly explore gay love and eroticism, Pathologies is a lost classic that is now translated into English for the first time.
By Kathy Kremins (With a Foreword by Ysabel Y. Gonzalez)
From CavanKerry Press
“Kathy Kremins’ debut full-length poetry collection leaves me wet. Wet in my longing to discover all the places and things—’a new moon, an old wooden barrel, your hands cupped,’ wet for what we didn’t know before we knew ‘the sculptor’s fingers’ and ‘the spotted salamander,’ wet for all the geographies the speaker crosses and caresses with unabashed gratitude and grace, wet in my daydreaming of all the ways lovers and family and friends break and bloom in each other’s company like a ‘blue morning off the foothills/before the sun rises.’ Never linear and always loud in its wanderlust, The Curve of Things is a manual for living truth. an unapologetic how-to on loving humanity in all its delicate, delicious, and dissettled forms.”—Marina Carreira, author of Tanto Tanto and Desgraçada
Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator
By Heather O. Petrocelli
From University of Wales Press
“Queer for Fear is the first major empirical study of queer horror spectators, their diversity and lived experiences. It offers a new understanding of camp, queer community, queer trauma, queer live cinema, the importance of drag and camp laughter. Queer for Fear is an original, intelligent, and thought-provoking study of the complex relationship between queerness, horror, and the cinema. A must-have book for queer lovers of horror—and everyone else!”—Barbara Creed, author of Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema
Gay Aliens and Queer Folk: How Russell T Davies Changed TV
By Emily Garside
From Calon
“A thoughtful, loving look at Davies’s landscape-altering career. Garside brings a sharp critical eye to this appraisal, but it’s her impassioned understanding of how queer depiction works as both a personal tool for self-acceptance and a public tool for social change that makes this an empowering, joyful read.”—Cody Daigle-Orians, creator of Ace Dad Advice
The Regulation of Desire: Queer Histories, Queer Struggles (Third Edition, Revised)
By Gary Kinsman
From Concordia University Press
The third edition of this revolutionary text includes new chapters and an introduction from the author himself that contextualizes the work within today’s fight for liberation and equality in Canada.
Fighting Feelings: Lessons in Gendered Racism and Queer Life
By Gulzar R. Charania
From the University of British Columbia Press
“This enlightening and affirming text investigates the memories women of color have of racialized violence and how differing narratives and emotions about white supremacy should be seen and encouraged instead of dismissed. On page 6, Charania literally says it’s ‘a book about race for the rest of us.’ It will provide deep relief and brilliant insights for many.”—Ms. Magazine
By Tracy Fuad
“In these precise, measured poems, Fuad brushes up against the (imagined, imposed) limitations of a life that is lived, and observed, and exhausted—and a conduit for more life still. . . . Evocative and probing, Portal is a collection I will return to for its music and wisdom.”—Electric Lit
By Amie Whittemore
From Autumn House Press
“Hypnagogic and thirsty, Whittemore’s poems ache with desire particular to the queer body, which is to say that, yes, her lines are erotically charged, but what they seek is not always the arms of another but something more difficult to hold, such as an understanding of what it means to be good or the unstoppable slippage of time. As such, the poems orbit the moon and her many cycles, conjure ancestors now gone, and they are always rooted in language that is creaturely, pulsing with crows and foxes, minnows and green corn, allowing entrance to ‘the unabashed / territories of longing—violets, / mornings, meadows, tongues— / and the world is delicious again.’ As the title implies, Nest of Matches is home for the body of an animal but a highly flammable one. A sensuous and sumptuous read.”—Nickole Brown, author of The Donkey Elegies
You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis
By Kelly Weber
From Omnidawn Publishing, Inc.
“Weber’s extraordinary work is a remarkable testament to the power of language and of vulnerability. Lush and sensual, You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis is an essential addition to aspec literature. Weber presents asexuality and queerness as a continual journey of exploration both of the self and of the self’s relationships to the body and to the wider community. It is particularly illuminating that this is a journey with ‘no easy articulation;’ rather, it is ‘always a poem in the gap between leap and arrival, exhale.’ In these luminous poems, Weber leads the reader to seek ‘permission for a more honest language’ to know themselves, celebrating the beauty of those who know themselves best in ‘a language made of everything that doesn’t fit.’”—Emma Bolden, author of The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis
By Jennifer Conlon
From Autumn House Press
“Conlon’s Taking to Water is the most transformative collection of poems I’ve read. When Conlon’s speaker says ‘let there be life in me / in my own beginning’ we are given a home in this affirmation of queer resilience, where self-fulfillment can stretch the landscape until the landscape agrees. Taking to Water captures the search for the ways the world could make room for us, ‘make room / for my body & all / that comes with it.’ Conlon has given us a sharper, better lyric to inhabit and demand the world with.”—C.T. Salazar, author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking
Indigiqueerness: A Conversation about Storytelling
By Joshua Whitehead (With Contributions by Angie Abdou)
From Athabasca University Press
“This is a short book (under 100 pages), and yet somehow, Whitehead packs in about 20 different genres. At times it feels like a mini-biography of his own books and publishing history. At other times, it’s more like an expansive lecture on creative writing. But, it’s also a book about Indigenous language, translation, and storytelling. Blending interview, memoir, photography, collage, and the words of other writers and thinkers, it’s a little book that will leave you with a lot to think about.”—Book Riot
Queer TV China: Televisual and Fannish Imaginaries of Gender, Sexuality, and Chineseness
Edited by Jamie J. Zhao
From Hong Kong University Press
“This cornucopia of fresh and original essays opens our eyes to the burgeoning queer television culture thriving beneath official media crackdowns in China. As diverse as the phenomenon it analyses, Queer TV China is the spark that will ignite a prairie fire of future scholarship.”—Chris Berry, Professor of Film Studies, King’s College London
Edited by David Evans Frantz, Christina Linden, and Chris E. Vargas
From Hirmer Publishers
“This star-studded collection of essays is quite simply the best work of transgender art history in the history of art history to date.”—Susan Stryker, Dornsife Dean’s Professor in Residence of Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Southern California
Crafted With Pride: Queer Craft and Activism in Contemporary Britain
Edited by Daniel Fountain
From Intellect Ltd
“Fountain’s book fills a gap that has been left unfilled for far too long. Through sharing previously unheard histories of activism – given from a wide range of perspectives—Crafted with Pride is sure to spark debate, discussion and, well, pride. . . . This book shows how LGBTQ+ activists have long harnessed the power of craft to protest and tell their stories, creating objects that come alive through collective making and use.”—Crafts Magazine
By Emma Binder
From Tupelo Press
“In Country Songs for Alice, the author has woven a collection that marries music and love poems. These pieces are ferocious with love, ablaze with it, invoking a world of deserts and horses, rodeos and sunsets, lizards and open roads. With no one around / you can be anything: animal, mineral, / cloud pattern, blade. The same can be said of these poems: whittled with love, transforming from song to stanza to memory across the page. If you want to come to my house, I’ll let you in, the chapbook begins. I’m glad to have been invited.”—from the Judge’s Citation by Hala Alyan
A Little Queer Natural History
By Josh L. Davis
“A very welcome slap on the wrist for those who so ignorantly claim that same-sex love, intimacy, and bonding are ‘unnatural.’ Davis’s splendid book is a most useful settler of arguments and silencer of bigots.”—Stephen Fry
In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life
By Regina Kunzel
“In this fascinating book, Kunzel shows us not only how psychiatry shaped queer and trans identities in fundamental ways, but how queer activism adapted itself to resist psychiatric power by imagining new subjectivities and developing new forms of knowledge. This book challenges us to think about queer history and disability history together and to reexamine psychiatry’s relation to non-normative sexualities in a refreshingly new light.”—Camille Robcis, Columbia University
On Christopher Street: Life, Sex, and Death after Stonewall
By Michael Denneny
“If you love reading about gay life, you owe a debt to Michael Denneny.”—Passport
Queer Objects to the Rescue: Intimacy and Citizenship in Kenya
By George Paul Meiu
“Queer Objects to the Rescue is brilliantly written, and it provides us with a resilient scaffolding for theorizing queer valance in Africa.”—Charles Piot, Duke University
Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right
By Neil J. Young Publication
“Coming Out Republican is an incredible achievement: an astonishing work of history that makes a deeply compelling argument for the ways in which ‘gay Republicans’ have wielded power to serve white male interests. If you’ve ever wondered why, or how, a gay person could be a Republican—this book has the complicated answers.”—Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
These books and more on LGBTQ+ topics are available on our website.