June marks the beginning of Pride Month in the US, a time when LGBTQ+ community members celebrate their identities as well as those that paved the way to increased visibility and acceptance of the LGBTQ experience. With June coming to an end, I want to encourage all allies and LGBTQ+ community members to remain bold and proud into July and beyond. These books will make you laugh, make you cry, and hopefully inspire you to be your best and most authentic self all year round! Written by Library Tech Ella.
Trixie and Katya’s Guide to Modern Womanhood by Trixie Mattel and Katya
This comical advice book contains tips about beauty and behavior from two of drag’s funniest performers. Trixie Mattel, now a YouTube star in her own right, tackles homemaking, beauty products, and alcohol. Katya handles self-love and all other mood-altering substances. There are also zany Q and A’s with the BFFs about subjects such as relationships, traveling, and even interior design, all to help you become the best woman you can be in the modern era.
The Book of Pride by Mason Funk
Calling all history buffs! This book features all the household names in gay history as well as new faces you’ve never seen before that got the LGBTQ community to where it is today. You’ll read about rural organizers, queer historians, exceptional allies, and radical activists who put their personal and professional lives on the line, in order to take even the tiniest step toward equality. Get inspired by the “LGBTQ heroes who changes the world”.
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
This book does so many great things, chief among portraying unequivocally the lesbian experience in the 50s. An autobiographical novel that chronicles Rita Mae Brown’s experience, in the form of main character Molly Bolt, as the adopted daughter of dirt-poor Floridians. She comes to terms with her sexuality through a variety of experiences in childhood and through college. This book also highlights the intersection of sexuality and class which adds a layer of suspense to Molly’s desire to remain on the more accepting (though still treacherous) campus of her university. I was captivated by this one when I read it a few years ago and was enormously appreciative of the way Molly saw her lesbianism one of the many parts of herself and not her whole identity.
All the Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks
“In 1986, 26-year old Ruth visits a friend at the hospital when she notices that the door to one of the hospital rooms is painted red. She witnesses nurses drawing straws to see who would tend to the patient inside, all of them reluctant to enter the room. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and immediately begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. Before she can even process what she’s done, word spreads in the community that Ruth is the only person willing to help these young men afflicted by AIDS, and is called upon to nurse them. As she forges deep friendships with the men she helps, she works tirelessly to find them housing and jobs, even searching for funeral homes willing to take their bodies – often in the middle of the night. She cooks meals for tens of people out of discarded food found in the dumpsters behind supermarkets, stores rare medications for her most urgent patients, teaches sex-ed to drag queens after hours at secret bars, and becomes a beacon of hope to an otherwise spurned group of ailing gay men on the fringes of a deeply conservative state.” -Quoted from the publisher.
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
“[An] utterly unique retelling of the legend of Achilles and the Trojan War. A tale of gods, kings, immortal fame, and the human heart, The Song of Achilles is a dazzling literary feat that brilliantly reimagines Homer’s enduring masterwork, The Iliad. An action-packed adventure, an epic love story, a marvelously conceived and executed page-turner, Miller’s monumental debut novel has already earned resounding acclaim from some of contemporary fiction’s brightest lights-and fans of Mary Renault, Bernard Cornwell, Steven Pressfield, and Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series will delight in this unforgettable journey back to ancient Greece in the Age of Heroes.” – quoted from the publisher. Essentially, this book is gay love story between Achilles, the most celebrated Greek solider and main character of Homer’s The Iliad, and Patroclus, his childhood friend and fellow soldier. It took 10 years for Madeline Miller to complete this tragically beautiful rendering of two men in love.
All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson
A memoir by writer and activist George M. Johnson about the challenges he faced growing up Black and queer. George reckons with things issues of gender identity, education, language, the n-word, Black joy (or the lack thereof), representation, visibility, family, sexual assault, religion, and much more. The activist touches on subject that many queer people struggle with even today as well as paints a vivid picture of a loving Black family with a noticeably queer son moving through the world the only way they know how: together.
