Reading List: LGBTQIA+ History Month

As part of our calendar celebrating national heritage months and observances, explore these selected works that speak to LGBTQIA+  history.

 

Sign with red light reading The Stonewall Inn, against a backdrop of darkness.

 

Fiction

  • Ben Shattuck’s Pushcart Prize-winning story “The History of Sound” (Issue 16) tells of the love between two young musicians in early twentieth century New England.
  • In Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Issue 15 story “Forty-Four Thousand Pounds,” a young Appalachian woman remembers a home—and a love—she left behind.

 

Essays

  • In “Fragments of Shame and Pride” Raed Rafei explores queerness and chronicles the recent history of the LGBTQIA+ movement in Lebanon through personal reflections.
  • David Weinstein’s “Linnahall” recounts a day tour of Tallinn, Estonia that spurs reflections on loneliness and wandering, companionship and Grindr.
  • In “Not a Word Among Us,” David Meischen traces the lineage of silence within his family, both around his grandfather’s suicide and his own gay identity. 

 

Poetry

  • “Twenty Minutes at the Clam Shack” by Cassie Pruyn viscerally captures young lust and love.
  • Alison Prine’s “Loss and Its Antonym” reflects on cherished memories of queer community.
  • “Dive” by Jennifer Perrine discusses hidden queer spaces and the joys and challenges of saying goodbye to such places.
  • “We Two Women Can Father A Child” by Linda Ashok brings to life tender moments of a relationship as two women consider parenthood.
  • Peter Laberge’s “Berlin (Eulogy 1)” grieves for the queer boys who have died as a result of prejudice and for the queerness that dies when identity must be repressed in exchange for safety.
  • “The Rower of the Maré” by Eliane Marques is a protest poem honoring Marielle Franco, city councillor, sociologist, and activist in Brazil’s Black and LGBTQIA+ movements, who was assassinated in 2018.

 

Photo by Flickr user yosoynuts.

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Reading List: LGBTQIA+ History Month