LGBTQ+ Heritage Month: Recommended Reading
October is LGBTQ+ History Month, and the Popular Reading Display in the Hill Library’s Learning Commons celebrates the heritage of queer and trans resistance and community building. Learn more about LGBTQ+ History Month and ways to celebrate with the campus community.
October 2023
Our Work Is Everywhere: an illustrated oral history of queer & trans resistance
Author: Syan Rose
Queer and trans organizers, artists, healers, comrades, and leaders speak honestly and authentically about their own experiences in this graphic non-fiction book underscoring the brilliance and passion of their resistance with power, love, pain, and magic to create a textured and nuanced portrait of LGBTQ+ realities in America.
Request Our Work is Everywhere
Every True Pleasure: LGBTQ tales of North Carolina
Author: Wilton Barnhardt
Some of North Carolina's finest fiction and nonfiction writers come together in Every True Pleasure. These stories and essays of contemporary life through an LGBTQ lens by writers who identify as gay, trans, bisexual, and straight show the multifaceted challenges and joys of queer life.
Pageboy: a memoir
Author: Elliot Page
In this evocative and lyrical debut, Oscar-nominated star Elliot Page shares intimate stories of chasing down secret love affairs, battling body image, struggling with familial strife, and the power of being seen.
Queer Threads: crafting identity and community
Authors: John Chaich and Todd Oldham
Queer Threads examines how queerness informs the work of thirty artists in fiber and textiles through artist interviews and conversations with makers and thinkers from the worlds of dance, design, fashion, media, music, museums, and scholarship.
Queer X Design: 50 years of signs, symbols, banners, logos, and graphic art of LGBTQ
Author: Andy Campbell
Beginning years before the Stonewall uprising and spanning through to the new millennium, Queer X Design celebrates the inventive and subversive designs that have powered the ever-evolving LGBTQ movement. More than just an accessible history book, it tells the story of queerness as something intangible, uplifting, and indestructible.
As the Crow Flies
Author: Melanie Gillman
Charlie is thirteen years old, queer, black, and questioning what was once a firm belief in God. This summer she's stuck spending a week of her vacation at Christian youth backpacking camp. Being the only black girl in the group, and being mistreated by the staff, makes this a very alienating experience until she befriends a trans camper named Sydney.
I Hope We Choose Love: a trans girl's notes from the end of the world
Author: Kai Cheng Thom
Summary: In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems blending the confessional, political, and literary, social work professor Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today.
Let the Record Show: a political history of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993
Author: Sarah Schulman
In just six years, ACT UP New York, a broad and unlikely coalition of activists from all races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, changed the world. Their activism transformed the lives of people with AIDS and the society that had abandoned them to create a livable future for generations of people across the world.
All Boys Aren't Blue: a memoir-manifesto
Author: George M. Johnson
Both a primer for eager allies, and a reassuring testimony for young queer men of color, All Boys Aren't Blue covers topics such as gender identity, toxic masculinity, brotherhood, family, structural marginalization, consent, and Black joy. Johnson's emotional memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.
By Way of Sorrow
Author: Robyn Gigl
The first part in a trilogy of gripping legal thrillers, By Way of Sorrow introduces trans attorney Erin McCabe as she begins the biggest case of her career. Defending her client accused of murdering the son of a corrupt state senator puts not only her career on the line, but also her life.
Fun Home: a family tragicomic
Author: Alison Bechdel
If you’re a cinephile, you may have heard of the “Bechdel Test” named for American cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Her father, an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, passed away only weeks after Alison came out as a lesbian and discovered that her father was also gay, leaving Alison with a legacy of mystery to resolve.
Request Fun Home (book of music and lyrics for the musical)
Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: an oral history
Author: E. Patrick Johnson
Black. Queer. Southern. Women. draws from the life narratives of over seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson's work brings to light the realities of the region's thriving black lesbian communities.
Request Black. Queer. Southern. Women.