A Pride Month 2026 Reading List
The University of Chicago Press invites everyone to celebrate Pride with a reading list of recent and forthcoming books from Chicago and our client publishers that help illuminate LGBTQIA2S+ lives. From political histories to original poetry collections and novels, art criticism, studies of queer representation in media, biographies of queer luminaries, and crucial reads on the history of the trans community, these stories honor the journeys of queer individuals and the larger movement for love, acceptance, and equality for all. At thirty-four titles strong, our 2026 reading list has a book for every day of Pride Month, and beyond.
All of these Pride Month books are available from our website. Use the code UCPNEW to take 30% off when you order directly from us.
From Chicago
Farid Matuk
“Matuk’s poems, not as the shape of pleasure or language-as-pleasure but as languaged pleasure, catch us unawares. They are ‘susceptible yet undivided,’ taking us to the toothed edge but, without sharpness, turning. We move, not sure where from, as a poem, so by the end of a verse, stanza, or book, we have been to places we can’t identify on any map, ‘turned away / From the heroics and capital of literature’ and undone in a sense in a glimmering ‘queer air.’ Moon Mirrored Indivisible bends, pushing past debris and dams when needed, forceful or stagnant depending on the wind, the pressure, and the height from which words fall.”—Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, author of Lo Terciario / The Tertiary • “Weaves a rich tapestry of human connection, meditating on sex, war, and ancestral inheritance. . . . Matuk writes with admirable confidence and skill.”—Publishers Weekly
Standardizing Sex: A History of Trans Medicine
Ketil Slagstad
“A landmark work showcasing the value of comprehensive research, [Slagstad’s book] has powerfully revised our understanding of transgender medicine’s history through the lens of Nordic welfare states. Standardizing Sex teaches us why medical transition is subject to such baroque and exceptional restriction: its fictitious value to society has overridden its life-giving significance to people who transition. This book is essential reading for everyone seeking to understand the politicization and practice of medical transition.”—Jules Gill-Peterson, author of A Short History of Trans Misogyny
This Is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement
Gayle F. Wald
“Wald brings Jenkins’ ‘iridescent genius and generous spirit’ alive in this revealing portrait of a self-determined, gay Black woman. Drawing on interviews and extensive personal papers, she tells Jenkins’ story in intimate, revealing detail, framed in the sweeping cultural and political changes of the post-war Civil Rights Movement. Jenkins’s music may not have changed the world, but her rhythms continue to model a much-needed ‘antidote to its cacophony.’“—Booklist (starred review)
Undertale: Can a Game Give Hope?
Anastasia Salter
“For game studies scholars and fans alike, Undertale offers an important new perspective on conversations about violence, choice, and design in games.”—Bo Ruberg, author of How to Queer the World: Radical Worldbuilding through Video Games • “In this beautifully concise book, Salter confirms both the importance of this ingeniously quirky game and the luminous potential of game criticism. Salter is a first-rate cultural commentator, and this book is one of Salter’s best.”—Stuart Moulthrop, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s
Marc Stein
“What do Americans want and need from the anniversary? And are historians able―or willing―to give it to them? . . . Who owns the American Revolution, and how to chronicle it, has been contested almost since it ended. . . . Stein, a professor at San Francisco State University and the author of a new book about the 1976 Bicentennial, noted that the anniversary had inspired many grass-roots ‘counter-bicentennials’ emphasizing Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ and other perspectives. Those efforts powerfully changed popular understandings of the Revolution. But the broadening of history―including who gets to write it―has also posed a challenge for the profession.”―Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times
How to Win a Culture War: LGBTQ+ Social Change Through Pop Culture
Lisa M. Stulberg
“In this impeccably researched, timely, and engaging book, Stulberg documents the extraordinary impact LGBTQ+ celebrities in the entertainment and sports industries had in winning visibility, acceptance, and change for LGBTQ+ people. By telling their stories in mainstream venues like television, LGBTQ+ activists fundamentally challenged dominant negative representations and public attitudes despite persistent opposition. In the face of the more extreme threat, repression, and backlash to LGBTQ+ civil rights by the current Trump administration, this book is essential reading for scholars and activists seeking to understand how to succeed in winning the culture war! This is the book we’ve been waiting for, and it is urgently needed!”—Verta Taylor, coauthor of Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret
Jake Rose
“What Rose does exceptionally well here is ground us in both Joan’s body and mind as they alchemize through the lyric. . . . As Rose eschews the easy spectacle of the stake, JOAN takes us to a point where identity, body, time, and narrative constraints have been exhausted. At the moment of maximum confinement, containment itself collapses. Joan approaches her boundlessness of being, where institutions (church, state, gender) fail to confine her. At last, we reach the ontological shift which Joan has already moved into: myth, symbol―banner and banner-wielder alike―a multiplicity of meanings.”―Zona Motel
Outed: LBJ’s Confidant and the Arrest That Transformed a Presidency
Timothy Stewart-Winter
“It was literally just a few minutes in a public bathroom. And yet, the aftermath of the arrest of President Lyndon Johnson’s top aide for engaging in sexual activity with another man in a YMCA bathroom was hugely significant: for the aide and his family, certainly; and for President Johnson as well. For straight Americans more broadly, the ‘Walter Jenkins affair’ likely exposed an until then mostly hidden world of the sexual lives of presumably straight married men, and the police who surveilled them and sometimes completely upended their lives. Stewart-Winter has engaged in masterful detective work to bring readers a detailed account of a once well-known incident that has somehow faded from our view. Outed is an utterly novel and very important book that is simultaneously quite hard to put down.”—Margot Canaday, author of Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America
Aja Couchois Duncan
“Few poets can write with such scope and specificity as Couchois Duncan, whose work offers a dynamic ecopoetics keen on Indigenous futures beyond survivance. Couchois Duncan’s work holds more than command of the erotic and more than the trope equating a femme body with the land; it has the complex associative logics of myth (and poetry for that matter). With The Intimacy Trials, Couchois Duncan asserts that there is complex comfort in tracking the disappearance of what we can inventory while ignoring what it means to outlive all but time. This is not the old language.”— Douglas Kearney, Phoenix Poets consulting editor and author of Optic Subwoof • “Camouflage, song, rebirth.”―Ms. Magazine, “The Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026”
The Tolerance Generation: Growing Up Online in the Anti-Bullying Era
Sarah Miller
“The Tolerance Generation is an urgent critique of the anti-bullying industry. Miller shows us that while adults were busy teaching ‘niceness,’ students were busy building digital counter-publics to survive a school culture that values the performance of tolerance over the pursuit of justice. It is a foundational text for understanding youth culture and schools today.”—Matt Rafalow, author of Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era
Touched by the Mother: Black Men, American Art, Feminist Horizons
Huey Copeland
“Authored by one of the leading voices in the field of art history and criticism, Touched by the Mother is a collection that exceeds expectations. The book is configured around two conceptual threads that have been central in Copeland’s scholarship: the animating condition of possibility of the black maternal and its role in understanding black masculinity. Copeland unpacks this compelling frame of reference with characteristic erudition by carefully walking readers through its genesis within his work and illuminating an array of conversations and collaborations with artists, curators, scholars, and thinkers who have shaped his conception of this crucial intellectual formation.”—Tina Campt, Princeton University
The Trans Midwest: Trans Feminist Coalition Building Since World War II
Joy Ellison
A revelatory regional history of trans feminist coalition-building between feminist, queer, and Black communities, The Trans Midwest contributes to our understanding of both trans history and the impact of intersectional organizing, presenting new possibilities and critical lessons for trans feminist movements today.
From ACMRS Press
Edited by Mira ’Assaf and Urvashi Chakravarty
Ranging across early modern drama, poetry, and prose by the likes of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Lucy Hutchinson, and Hester Pulter, this expansive volume examines the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and other formations of identity in early modern representations of queens.
From Acre Books
CD Eskilson
“Scream / Queen interrogates monstrosity and the monsterification of trans, queer, and disabled/mentally ill bodies through the lens of pop culture, particularly horror films. . . . By radically re-envisioning familiar characters and tropes, Eskilson breathes new life into their stories, granting them agency and also allowing readers who have been marginalized or flattened by harmful language and representation to see themselves reflected, perhaps for the first time. Scream / Queen is a testament to the liberatory power of queer imagination, creating ‘Not simply / a new ending, an entirely new script.’“—Electric Literature
From Brandeis University Press
Lessons in Drag: A Queer Manual for Academics, Artists, and Aunties
Kareem Khubchandani with LaWhore Vagistan
“Shrewdly defying the conventions that often keep academic texts dry and sequestered . . . Khubchandani and Vagistan model a way to integrate research and performance.”—Hyperallergic • “Specific in its analyses of drag performance through a South Asian lens, Lessons in Drag showcases the art form as an academic medium for the study of culture, performance, and identity creation.”—Foreword Reviews
From CavanKerry Press
Noel Quiñones, With a Foreword by Julian Randall
“A joyful, heart-thumping, grief-slick, language-sparkling romp through memory and becoming. Every page is humming with the music of what it means to be alive and brown and queer and brilliant in a world that too often forgets to see you whole. Structured around color theory and anchored in a bold love letter to the body’s brightness, these poems navigate family ruptures, first loves, and the ache of moving towards a future full of rowdy song.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Oceanic
When You Read a Novel the Dead Would Like
Benjamin S. Grossberg
“Fiction and poetry Lambda Literary Award winner Grossberg blends whip-smart storytelling and an alert, ‘Alex in Wonderland’ attention to revealing everyday and natural details. In tackling, with unfailing frankness and apt humor at times demanding subjects, such as queer loneliness, the AIDS pandemic, Jewish legacy, and a mother’s death, he proves himself a resourceful literary athlete with a marathon runner’s all-systems-go air of dedication. Rooted in free-flowing compassion, relatable suffering, and resilient love, it’s hard to imagine a more dynamic, compelling, and deeply alive book of poems.”—Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Texas Poet Laureate and author of Lorca to the Umpteenth Power
From DIAPHANES
Radical Desires: French Gay Liberation and Anticolonial Critique
Edited by Hauke Branding and Julian Volz
Taking an intersectional approach to the radicality of desire, this book seeks to emphasize the anti-identitarian character of the French gay liberation movement, as well as its implicit and explicit critique of gender and sexual binaries. At the same time, the volume is also interested in expanding this critique by confronting it with anticolonial and queer of color perspectives. To explore the multiplicity of forms with or in which these critiques were expressed, this volume places theoretical perspectives in conversation with artistic perspectives on queer liberation in a transnational context.
From DISTANZ Verlag GmbH
Queer Art in the GDR? Biographies Between Underground and Propaganda
Edited by Stephan Koal, With Essays by Birgit Bosold, Dorothee Brill, Maria Bühner, Christine Heidemann, Christoph Tannert, and Raimund Wolfert
As the first comprehensive exploration of queer art in East Germany, this volume challenges simplified narratives of decriminalization to examine the creation of art under political and sexual repression. Retracing the lives and oeuvres of the artists Toni Ebel, Andreas Fux, Harry Hachmeister, Jochen Hass, Dorothea von Philipsborn, Erika Stürmer-Alex, Rita Thomas, Jürgen Wittdorf, and Egon Wrobel, the book illustrates the widely different ways in which they handled the political and social constraints of their time.
From Intellect Ltd
New Queer Television: From Marginalization to Mainstreamification
Edited by Thomas Brassington, Debra Ferreday, and Dany Girard
Though queer critics and queer theory tend to frame queer identities as marginal, this edited volume draws attention to a dynamic field in which a wide variety of queer identities can be put on display and consumed by audiences. Cementing a foundational understanding of queerness that is at odds with current shifts in media production, contributors present a broad variety of queer identities from across a range of televisual shows and genres to reconsider the marginalization of queerness in the twenty-first century.
From Omnidawn Publishing, Inc.
Liza Flum
“Here, the hummingbird serves as a metaphoric emblem for the intricacies of queer, polyamorous relationships, much in the way mermaids have served as an emblem for portions of the trans community. Flum returns again and again to the iridescence and actions of the hummingbird (and other avian symbols), exploring a kind of prismatic partnership with a lover, her lover’s husband, and the speaker’s other lovers. . . . Flum manages to make the reader an intimate outsider, rather than simply a voyeur, to relationships that do not fit the hegemonic definitions our heteronormative society puts forward. . . . It is the book’s soulfulness that I admire. This is a collection about the soul-work of making a family, and how we can choose delight even when we’re not fully seen, fully recognized.”―Washington Independent Review of Books
Maria Nazos
“A seismic, incandescent tribute to life. It is devotional with a ferocious tenderness. Here is a poet who can and has resurrected ghosts in our veins—the parents destined to drown in quiet despair, and the lovers who linger like bruises. This collection doesn’t flinch from darkness or the suffocating weight of grief. Yet Nazos transforms pain into a strange, stubborn grace. From the cliffs of Delphi to the cornfields of Nebraska, she maps a world where history bleeds into the present. Her voice is both elegy and rebellion, hymn and rhyme. To read PULSE is to touch the ‘dirty human sweetness’ of existence itself: flawed, forgiving, and furiously alive.” —Saddiq Dzukogi, author of Your Crib, My Qibla
From Reaktion Books
Berghain Nights: A Journey through Techno and Berlin Club Culture
Liam Cagney
“A trip in every sense . . . Berghain Nights reminds us that in times of ugly hegemony, beautiful subcultures thrive in the shadows. It’s a fascinating descent into psychic and physical underworld, and Cagney is a worthy Virgil. This is a visionary book.”―The Irish Times • “Fascinated by Berghain’s strange techno and stranger goings-on, Cagney explores Berlin club culture in all its colour and intensity. A story of the most notorious club in the world that feeds millions into Berlin’s economy, and feeling at home in the most alien of environments.”―The Bookseller: LGBTQ+ Spotlight
Jake Poller
“This is the Christopher Isherwood biography we have been missing: informative, readable, and concise. Poller covers both Isherwood’s ‘monumental life’ and his considerable work without producing a doorstop. Poller understands and appreciates both the English and the American Isherwood. He provides enough analysis of the major works to inspire readers to go to (or go back to) the source, without overwhelming them or imposing his interpretation on the audience. Poller provides fresh insight without being dogmatic, offering alternate readings of events and works. This is a book Isherwood fans will learn from and enjoy reading.”—James J. Berg, editor of Isherwood on Writing
Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life
Gerri Kimber
“A sensitive and scholarly account of the fiercely independent life of the modernist writer whose talent was the envy of Virginia Woolf.”―The Guardian, “Best Memoirs and Biographies of 2025” • “Mansfield emerges from this book as a tortured, gifted, and spirited woman who was restless to the core, rarely able to spend any length of time in one place or with one person. The only constant was her overriding desire to write. . . . An important and absorbing book.”―Times Literary Supplement
Open Play: The Case for Feminist Sport
Sheree Bekker and Stephen Mumford
“Imagine a world where anyone was free to reach their full potential playing the sport they love; where open competition replaced discrimination and exclusion, and where athletes were judged by their performances on the field rather than their conformity with gender norms. Bekker and Mumford show us how to get there, and how far we have to go. This courageous book should spark a revolution in sport.”—Caster Semenya • “A trenchant, provocative take on a hot-button issue.”—Publishers Weekly
A Home in Space: Selected Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry
Edwin Morgan, Edited by Greg Thomas and Julie Johnstone
“Edwin Morgan’s is the kind of poetry I want. A Home in Space is a multiverse chock full of concrete word-patterning, sound-ups and cut-ups, galaxies and constellations, collages, overlays, typographic arrays, acoustic riffs, lettrist elations and nonsensical confabulations, graphic designs, ur-computer inventions, and iconoclastic ads and icons. Thomas and Johnstone’s detailed, historically informative, and discerning introduction sets the stage for Morgan’s verbo-visual-vocal―patalexical! polychromatic!―lollapalooza of a book.”―Charles Bernstein
Peter Ackroyd
“[Auden’s] singular commitment to his art, systematic ethics, limpid clarity, virtuosic technique, and credible goodness all distinguish Auden’s oeuvre. Yet not one of those qualities is to be found in his person. . . . Ackroyd’s biography opens a wide gulf between the poet’s life and his extraordinary work that, water-lily-like, arose from filth and bloomed.”―Booklist • “Ackroyd’s intriguing biography tracks the great poet from his earliest years to his harrowing physical transformation. . . . Ackroyd paints Auden as a poet with hawk’s vision and a masochistic streak, full of moral certitude but just as prone to weep at Garbo films or be overtaken by swamps of self-torment.”―The Daily Telegraph
Kathleen Antonioli
“With extensive research and fresh insights, Antonioli tackles some of the less-explored aspects of Colette’s complex life, work, and legacy, offering a nuanced portrait of Colette as the astute steward of her own literary reputation and persona, in all her fascinating contradictions.”―Rachel Careau, translator of Colette’s The Pure and the Impure, Chéri, and The End of Chéri • “This slender volume delivers, ounce for ounce, a powerful companion for both scholars and young contemporary readers who are just discovering the works of Colette.”―Library Journal
From Seagull Books
Mireille Best, Translated by Stephanie Schechner
“Sharp-edged yet poignant, the historical novel Hymn to Moray Eels contrasts queer coming-of-age emotions with the pressures of postwar conformity.”―Foreword Reviews • “This new English translation of Hymn to Moray Eels recreates Best’s elliptical lyricism and will dazzle readers who continue to strain against the strictures of gender essentialism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy.”―Full Stop
Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal: The Life and Times of a Female Impersonator
Sandip Roy
“Roy traces Bhaduri’s journey from stardom to obscurity—and, in doing so, captures a vanishing world where gender itself was an act. . . . Today, as conversations around gender and identity gain visibility worldwide, Bhaduri’s story offers a different lens. It points to histories of performance where gender was fluid in practice, if not always in name.”―BBC • “Roy’s introduction warns against reading Chapal’s life as queer in contemporary terms. Yet the narrative that follows does the heavy lifting, drawing undeniable queer meaning from the lived contradictions of a true icon.”―The Hindu
Odette Alonso, Translated by Liz Rose
A translated collection from one of the defining poetic voices in Cuban and Mexican literature, Old Music Island transforms exile, desire, and memory into sites of lyrical and emotional intensity. The collection is a somatic encounter of tastes, touch, comings and goings, surprise, and seduction.
From the University of Wales Press
Beyond the Lesbian Vampire: Reclaiming the Violent Lesbian in Contemporary Queer Horror
Sam Tabet
“This volume is a lively and thoughtful analysis of recent horror films including The Neon Demon (2016), Knife + Heart (2018), and Lizzie (2018). Exploring these films within the contexts of New Queer Horror, Tabet shows how they rescript the ‘violent lesbian’ to explore concerns specifically related to LGBTQ+ audiences, including assimilation, family and race. Filled with brilliant insights and detailed analyses, Beyond the Lesbian Vampire is an important contribution to the ever-growing field of queer horror scholarship.”―Harry M. Benshoff, University of North Texas
Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator
Heather O. Petrocelli
“Petrocelli is a master of the interdisciplinary, genre-defying queer theoretical framework and applies it expertly to the analysis of the Queer for Fear Oral History. This volume is essential for anyone hoping to learn more about the horror audience, particularly the queer audience who has for too long been understudied and underrepresented by the academic side of horror studies.”―Supernatural Studies
From the University of Wales Press, Calon
Rainbow Wales: Queer Icons Past and Present
Emily Garside
“After centuries of having a forbidden, or hidden, history, it is a joy to see so many iconic LGBTQ+ people in one book. It shows clearly that we have always been here, always will be, and we have made huge contributions to both Welsh and worldwide history.”―Norena Shopland