Research Guides: LGBTQ+ Pride: Readings and Resources

Online Resources

The Arquives
Digital archive and museum devoted to Canada's LGBTQ2+ communities. Features resources for integrating materials into classroom lessons for grades 9-12.
Digital Transgender Archive (DTA)
From the website: "The purpose of the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is to increase the accessibility of transgender history by providing an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world. Based in Boston, Massachusetts at Northeastern University, the DTA is an international collaboration among more than sixty colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, public libraries, and private collections. By digitally localizing a wide range of trans-related materials, the DTA expands access to trans history for academics and independent researchers alike in order to foster education and dialog concerning trans history." The archive focuses on materials created before the year 2000.
Gerber / Hart Library and Archives
Library, museum, and archive of Midwest LGBTQ history and culture in Chicago. Hosts a number of online exhibits and regular podcasts, interviews, and presentations.
KYKY Archives
Digital archive whose mission is to "collect, document, and preserve historical records of the Black Lesbian, Queer, Gender non-conforming, and trans community." Includes articles, magazine covers, personal ads, interviews, photographs, and a selection of ephemera.
LGBT+ Programming from KPFT-FM, Houston
Audio recordings of three long-running late-night radio programs created by and for the Houston LGBT+ community broadcast on KPFT-FM, Wilde 'n' Stein (1975-1992), Lesbian & Gay Voices (1993-2001), and After Hours (1987-2017). Select "Browse by" and then "Collection" to choose a particular show's archive.
LGBTQIA+ Periodical and Ephemera Collection
International collection of "periodicals, magazines, ephemera and monographs ... largely concentrated from the 1950's to the early 2000's. New materials are added to the collection on an ongoing basis." From Princeton University.
ONE Archives at the USC Libraries
"[T]he largest repository of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) materials in the world. Founded in 1952, ONE Archives houses millions of archival items including periodicals, books, films, videos, audio recordings, photographs, artworks, organizational records, and personal papers."
Queer Liberation Library on OverDrive
Offers free access to books on LGBTQ+ topics, featuring queer characters, and/or written by queer authors to anyone who signs up for a free account.
Seattle Gay News
Free digital versions of nearly all issues of the pioneering LGBTQ+ newspaper.published from 1977-2018. Note: some of the plain text transcriptions contain misspellings and other OCR errors. The scans themselves seem fine.
Transgender Histories of D.C.
Digitized video interviews. "This project documents the events of the final decades of the 20th century and first few of the 21st through the eyes of transgender elders, mostly Black women."
Washington Blade
Digitized editions of Washington, D.C.'s principal LGBT newspaper from the first issue in 1969 through 1989. Covers contemporary "events from an LGBT perspective as well as LGBT life in D.C. and the social and political progress of the gay rights movement."
Women in the Life
Digitized issues of pioneering magazine aimed at Black lesbians. Covers 1993-2022. "At its peak, Women in the Life Magazine reached hundreds of thousands of readers across over 40 cities, supporting and affirming queer communities of color during a crucial period in American history and the LGBTQIA+ movement for equal rights. The entire ten year run of Women in the Life Magazine was digitized in honor of the publication’s 25th Anniversary."

Non-fiction Suggestions

Feels Right by Adeyemi, Kemi
"Adeyemi's framework of "feeling right" instead offers a closer, kinesthetic look at how black queer women adroitly manage feeling itself as a complex right they should be afforded in cities that violently structure their movements and energies. What emerges in Feels Right is a sensorial portrait of the critical, black queer geographies and collectivities that emerge in social dance settings and in the broader neoliberal city."
Before Night Falls by Arenas, Reinaldo; Dolores M. Koch (Translator); Jaime Manrique (Foreword by)
"A memoir about being free—sexually, politically and artistically—chronicles the tumultuous yet luminary life of the author, from his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba to his imprisonment as a homosexual to the events leading to his death in New York."
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency by Chen, Chen
"In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic."
Queer Studies: Beyond Binaries by Henderson, Bruce
"The author uses the overarching concept of queering, drawn from queer theory, as a way of looking at the lives of queer people across a range of concepts drawn from different academic and scholarly disciplines. The intention is to survey these disciplines, beginning with the foundational study of language, and then to examine a variety of human experiences, including education, the rituals of marriage, and advocacy for justice."
Before We Were Trans by Heyam, Kit
"Explores the history of transgender and gender nonconforming people, with a focus on those who identified in other than a straightforward binary fashion; on communities in West Africa, Asia, and among Native Americans; and on cross-dressing in World War I prison camps and in entertainment."
Trans America by Reay, Barry
"Barry Reay explores this history: from a time before trans in the nineteenth century to the transsexual moment of the 1960s and 1970s, the transgender turn of the 1990s, and the so-called tipping point of current culture. It is a rich and varied history, where same-sex desires and identities, cross-dressing, and transsexual and transgender identities jostled for recognition. It is a history that is not at all flattering to US psychiatric and surgical practices."
Keeping It Unreal by Scott, Darieck
"... explores how fantasy-especially superhero comics, which are usually derided as naïve and childish-is a catalyst for engaging the black radical imagination. Such engagements prompt 'fantasy-acts' against antiblackness, a transgressive way of 'reading' beyond the comic-book page to envision and to experience alternate, and potentially more just, realities."
Making Love with the Land by Whitehead, Joshua
"In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Joshua Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. Intellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live and brilliantly-even joyfully--maps his experience on the land that has shaped stories, histories, and bodies from time immemorial."

Fiction Suggestions

Gods of Want by Chang, K-Ming
Call Number: Browsing Room: 1st floor; Fiction : Chang : 12/2022
"With each tale, K-Ming Chang gives us her own take on a surrealism that mixes myth and migration, corporeality and ghostliness, queerness and the quotidian. Stunningly told in her feminist fabulist style, these are uncanny stories peeling back greater questions of power and memory."
The Prophets by Jones, Robert Jr.
"Isaiah was Samuel's and Samuel was Isaiah's. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of sanctuary, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when a older man - a fellow slave - seeks to gain favor by preaching the master's gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own. Isaiah and Samuel's love, which was once so simple, is seen as sinful and a clear danger to the plantation's harmony."
Alive at the End of the World by Jones, Saeed
"Like his mentors, Patricia Smith and Rigoberto Gonzalez, Saeed writes poems that are lyrical, playful, musical, and political. It troubles expectations and asks the reader to challenge their assumptions about Blackness, sexuality, and socioeconomics. Saeed is responding here to white supremacy, heteronormativity, respectability politics, and the murders of Black people. In the service of equity and peace, Saeed elevates the matters that keep him up at night."
Couplets by Millner, Maggie
Call Number: Browsing Room, 1st Floor ; PS3613.I5662 C68 2023
"A dazzling, genre-bending debut about one woman's coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming undone."
My Government Means to Kill Me by Newson, Rasheed
"Vibrant, humorous, and fraught with entanglements, Rasheed Newson's My Government Means to Kill Me is an exhilarating, fast-paced, coming-of-age story that lends itself to a larger discussion about what it means for a young, gay, Black man in the mid-1980s to come to terms with his role in the midst of a political and social reckoning."
Greenland by Santos Donaldson, David
"A dazzling literary debut novel-within-a-novel, in the vein of The Prophets, about a young author writing about the forbidden love affair between E.M. Forster and Mohammed el Adl--in which Mohammed's story collides with his own, blending fact and fiction."
Young Mungo by Stuart, Douglas
"The story of the dangerous first love of two young men: Mungo and James. Born under different stars--Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic--they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Their environment is a hyper-masculine and sectarian one, for gangs of young men and the violence they might dole out dominate the Glaswegian estate where they live. And yet against all odds Mungo and James become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds."