Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Pride Month is currently celebrated each year in the month of June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan, which was a tipping point for the gay liberation movement in the United States
Everyone’s story deserves to be told — and read. One way to show support for the LGBTQ community is to pay attention to their stories and experiences.
So, why not pick up a great LGBTQ book to learn about the struggles and celebrations of the community?
These tomes by LGBTQ authors and with LGBTQ characters take us into their world, and include romance, humor, classics and memoir, with stories that are as diverse as the rainbow.
Available as ebooks or audiobooks on Overdrive, they demonstrate the enormous range of the LGBTQ experience.
All My Mother’s Lovers by Ilana Masad
Told over the course of a funeral and shiva, and written with enormous wit and warmth, this debut novel is a unique meditation on the universality and particularity of family ties and grief, and a tender and biting portrait of sex, gender, and identity, and challenges us to question the nature of fulfilling relationships.
Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family by Amy Ellis Nutt
The inspiring true story of a transgender girl, her identical twin brother, and an ordinary American family’s extraordinary journey to understand, nurture, and celebrate the uniqueness in us all.
Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens by Eddie Izzard
Writing with the same candor and insight evident in his comedy, Eddie reflects on a childhood marked by the loss of his mother, boarding school, and alternative sexuality, as well as a life in comedy, film, politics, running and philanthropy.
Boy Erased: A Memoir by Garrard Conley
A beautiful, raw and compassionate memoir about identity, love and understanding.The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small town Arkansas, as a young man Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality. As a nineteen-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to “cure” him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life. The memoir shows how he found the strength and understanding to break out in search of his true self and forgiveness.
Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman
This is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. Each is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when, during the restless summer weeks, unrelenting currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion and test the charged ground between them. Recklessly, the two verge toward the one thing both fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.
Fairest: A Memoir by Meredith Talusan
A singular, beautifully written coming-of-age memoir of a Filipino boy with albinism whose story travels from an immigrant childhood to Harvard to a gender transition and illuminates the illusions of race, disability, and gender
Here for It Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays by R. Eric Thomas
A heartfelt and hilarious memoir-in-essays about growing up seeing the world differently, finding unexpected hope, and experiencing every awkward, extraordinary stumble along the way.
Mama’s Boy: A Story from Our Americas by Dustin Lance Black
This heartfelt, deeply personal memoir explores how a celebrated filmmaker and activist and his conservative Mormon mother built bridges across today’s great divides—and how our stories hold the power to heal.
Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives by Walt Odets
A moving exploration of how gay men construct their identities, fight to be themselves, and live authentically
The Price of Salt Or Carol by Patricia Highsmith
A chance encounter between two lonely women leads to a passionate romance in this lesbian cult classic. Therese, a struggling young sales clerk, and Carol, a homemaker in the midst of a bitter divorce, abandon their oppressive daily routines for the freedom of the open road, where their love can blossom. But their newly discovered bliss is shattered when Carol is forced to choose between her child and her lover.
A Queer and Pleasant Danger by Kate Bornstein
The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology, and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She is Today
This is gender theorist, performance artist, and author Bornstein’s wickedly funny and disarmingly honest memoir, encompassing her early childhood and adolescence, college at Brown, a life in the theater, three marriages and fatherhood, the Scientology hierarchy, transsexual life, LGBTQ politics, and life on the road as a sought-after speaker.
Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States by Samantha Allen
A transgender reporter’s “powerful, profoundly moving” narrative tour through the surprisingly vibrant queer communities sprouting up in red states, offering a vision of a stronger, more humane America.
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
This novel remains a transformative work more than forty years after its original publication. In bawdy, moving prose, Brown tells the story of Molly Bolt, the adoptive daughter of a dirt-poor Southern couple who boldly forges her own path in America. With her startling beauty and crackling wit, Molly finds that women are drawn to her wherever she goes—and she refuses to apologize for loving them back.
Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story by Jacob Tobia
A heart-wrenching, eye-opening, and giggle-inducing memoir about what it’s like to grow up not sure if you’re (a) a boy, (b) a girl, (c) something in between, or (d) all of the above. Following Jacob through bullying and beauty contests, from Duke University to the United Nations to the podiums of the Methodist church—not to mention the parlors of the White House—this unforgettable memoir contains multitudes. A deeply personal story of trauma and healing, and a powerful reflection on gender and self-acceptance.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde & Cheryl Clarke
Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change.
The Stonewall Reader by New York Public Library & Edmund White | AUDIOBOOK (Includes supplementary content)
For the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, an anthology chronicling the tumultuous fight for LGBTQ rights in the 1960s and the activists who spearheaded it. Includes first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots.
Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality by Sarah McBride & Joe Biden
McBride was the first transgender person to speak at a national political convention when she was 26 and she eventually became the first openly transgender state senator in U.S. history. Informative, heartbreaking, and profoundly empowering, this is McBride’s story of love and loss and a powerful entry point into the LGBTQ community’s battle for equal rights and what it means to be openly transgender. From issues like bathroom access to health care to gender in America, McBride weaves the important political and cultural milestones into a personal journey that will open hearts and change minds.
Untamed by Glennon Doyle
For many years, Glennon Doyle denied her own discontent. Then, while speaking at a conference, she looked at a woman across the room and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There She Is. At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high. But she soon realized they had come to her from within. This was her own voice—the one she had buried beneath decades of numbing addictions, cultural conditioning, and institutional allegiances. This was the voice of the girl she had been before the world told her who to be. Glennon decided to quit abandoning herself and to instead abandon the world’s expectations of her. She quit being good so she could be free. She quit pleasing and started living.
A search under the keyword LGBTQ in Hoopla brings up hundreds of ebooks, audiobooks and movies.
-Archana, Adult Services & Acquisitions Librarian