8 Books About LGBTQ Pride, Politics, and Pleasure
Pride flag designed by Gilbert Baker, image from Making Queer History
In honor of Pride Month, the books on this list celebrate the freedom and new challenges that come with embracing our truest selves. They encourage us to reject the rules, regulations, and restrictions that accompany societal pressures to conform to heterosexual and cisgender identities.
Original Plumbing edited by Amos Mac and Rocco Kayiatos
This collection compiles the best of all twenty issues of Original Plumbing, a nationally acclaimed print quarterly dedicated to trans men. Running from 2009 to 2019, the magazine explored playful and political topics, featured interviews with queer icons, and published visual art, photography, and short fiction.
Fat Off, Fat On by Clarkisha Kent
With supreme humor and wit, Clarkisha Kent dissects the ways in which Black women have been, and continue to be, harmed and punished by a society that worships those who are white, thin, and explicitly heterosexual. While critiquing the pervasive nature of systemic fatphobia and the way this bias intensifies racism and sexism, this debut memoir directly rejects respectability politics and embraces self-love, joy, and freedom.
Give It to Me by Ana Castillo
Ana Castillo’s Give It to Me features Palma Piedras—a recently divorced and exceedingly memorable Latina character looking for love in all the wrong places. Cheryl Clarke writes that this hilarious and entertaining novel “gives us a post-9/11, post-Bush, fast-talking, fast-walking multicultural, multiracial, multisexual panoply of characters.”
Maggie Terry by Sarah Schulman
Called a “strikingly rich portrait of lesbian identity” by Lambda Literary, Maggie Terry follows Maggie Terry as she slowly attempts to rebuild her life and reunite with her daughter after attending rehab. When her job as a private investigator embroils her in the case of a strangled actress, Maggie is forced to keep a clear head to solve the mystery.
A Body Made Home by Kai Marshall Green
A biomythography continuing in the literary tradition of Audre Lorde, A Body Made Home meditates on the process of cultivating safety and finding home. Kai Marshall Green personalizes theory in this poignant, insightful exploration of the paths that exist for Black queer people in America.
Skye Papers by Jamika Ajalon
Skye Papers follows Skye, Scottie, and Pieces—Black artists whose way of life is threatened by a rise in CCTV and policing. A portrait of a revolutionary art scene with people of color at the front, this imaginative novel investigates the process of coming to terms with queerness and points out the fraught, dystopian reality of increasing state surveillance.
La Bastarda by Trifonia Melibea Obono
The first novel by an Equatorial Guinean woman to be translated into English, La Bastarda is about Okomo, an orphaned teen who dreams of finding her father. Forbidden to look for him, Okomo finds herself rebelling against societal norms while falling in love with the leader of a girl gang she’s enlisted to help with her search.
Queer Ideas by CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies
Urvashi Vaid writes that the essays in Queer Ideas “explore how LGBTQ people at once belong and transform, how we are both central to and distinct from the mainstream in US society.” This essential collection documents the foundation and rise of queer studies as an integral and influential part of LGBTQ life, community, and politics.
