Summer Reading List: Pride Reads

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It’s National Pride Month! Celebrated in June to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots, which marked a significant turning point in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights, Pride Month is dedicated to uplifting and spotlighting queer voices and history. We’ve prepared a reading list to celebrate the vibrant and diverse community.

Maricas

JAVIER FERNÁNDEZ-GALEANO

In Maricas Javier Fernández-Galeano traces the erotic lives and legal battles of Argentine and Spanish gender- and sexually nonconforming people who carved out their own spaces in metropolitan and rural cultures between the 1940s and the 1980s. In both countries, agents of the state, judiciary, and medical communities employed “social danger” theory to measure individuals’ latent criminality, conflating sexual and gender nonconformity with legal transgression.

Island in the City

MICAH MCCRARY

In Island in the City Micah McCrary considers three places he has called home (Normal, Illinois; Chicago; and Prague) and reflects on how these surroundings have shaped him. His sharp-eyed, charming memoir-in-essays contemplates how aspects of his identity, such as being black, male, middle-class, queer, and American, have developed and been influenced by where he hangs his hat.

A Certain Loneliness

SANDRA GAIL LAMBERT

After contracting polio as a child, Sandra Gail Lambert progressed from braces and crutches to a manual wheelchair to a power wheelchair—but loneliness has remained a constant, from the wild claustrophobia of a child in body casts to just yesterday, trapped at home, gasping from pain. A Certain Loneliness is a meditative and engaging memoir-in-essays that explores the intersection of disability, queerness, and female desire with frankness and humor.

It’s the new millennium and the anxiety of midlife is creeping up on Sam Singer, a thirty-seven-year-old art advisor. Fed up with his partner and his life in New York, Sam flies to Berlin to attend a gallery opening. There he finds a once-divided city facing an identity crisis of its own. In Berlin the past is everywhere: the graffiti-stained streets, the candlelit cafés and techno clubs, the astonishing mash-up of architecture, monuments, and memorials.

Gothic Queer Culture

LAURA WESTENGARD

Gothic Queer Culture examines the material effects of marginalization, exclusion, and violence and explains why discourse around the complexities of genders and sexualities repeatedly returns to the gothic. Westengard places this queer knowledge production within a larger framework of gothic queer culture, which inherently includes theoretical texts, art, literature, performance, and popular culture.

Shift

PENNY GUISINGER

Shift examines sexual and romantic fluidity while wrestling with the ways past and present mingle rather than staying in linear narratives. Under scrutiny, Guisinger’s sense of her own identity becomes like a Mobius strip or Penrose triangle—an optical illusion that challenges the dimensions and possibilities of the world.

The Umpire Is Out

DALE SCOTT with ROB NEYER

Dale Scott’s career as a professional baseball umpire spanned nearly forty years, including thirty-three in the Major Leagues, from 1985 to 2017. But what makes Scott’s book truly different is his unique perspective as the only umpire in the history of professional baseball to come out as gay during his career.

Transmovimientos

Edited by ELLIE D. HERNÁNDEZ, EDDY FRANCISCO ALVAREZ JR., and MAGDA GARCÍA

This collection forms a nuanced conversation between scholarship and social activism that speaks in concrete ways about diasporic and migratory LGBTQ communities who suffer from immoral immigration policies and political discourses that produce untenable living situations. The focal point of analysis throughout Transmovimientos examines migratory movements and anti-immigrant sentiment, homophobia, and stigma toward people who are transgender, immigrants, and refugees.

Queer Embodiment

HIL MALATINO

Merging critical theory, autobiography, and sexological archival research, Queer Embodiment provides insight into what it means to have a legible body in the West. Hil Malatino explores how intersexuality became an anomalous embodiment assumed to require correction and how contesting this pathologization can promote medical reform and human rights for intersex and trans people.

Amy Black, a queer single mother and an aspiring artist in love with calligraphy, dreams of a coveted artist’s residency at the world’s largest social media company, Q. One ink-black October night, when the power is out, a stranger asks Amy to transcribe a love letter for him. When the stranger suddenly disappears, Amy’s search for the letter’s recipient leads her straight to Q and the most beautiful illuminated manuscript she has ever seen—and to a group of data privacy vigilantes who want her to burn Q to the ground.


For further reading, check out our Zero Street Fiction and Expanding Frontiers series.

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