Reading List: Pride Month

As part of of our calendar celebrating national heritage months and observances, explore these selected works that speak to the month of Pride.

The oil painting "Girlfriends" by Edouard Zelenine. This expressionist painting shows a woman in a red dress sitting on another woman's lap. The two figures take up most of the frame, and the background is black with faint dashes of color.

Edouard Zelenine, Girlfriends, 1984. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.

Poetry

Hendri Yulius Wijaya’s poems, “Evolution of a Sissy” and “Why Not Married Yet?” (trans. Edward Gunawan) respond to rising anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments in Indonesia.
Gray Davidson Carroll captures the excitement of a dared first kiss in their poem, “Truth or Dare.” Find it in the July 2025 Poetry Feature.
“Dive” by Jennifer Perrine discusses the hidden spaces that queer people used to have to occupy and the joys/challenges of saying goodbye to such places.
“Silence of The Lambs: A Starling Is Born” by Reilly D. Cox, from Issue 19, is a poem of birth and becoming, beauty and violence.
“Choosing a Transitional Object” (Issue 18) by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett is a short but powerful poem about childhood crushes as a queer woman and the struggles of coming out to oneself.
Alison Prine’s poem “Loss and Its Antonym” (Issue 14) reflects on cherished memories of queer community.
“We Two Women Can Father A Child” (Issue 15) by Linda Ashok brings to life tender moments of a relationship between two women thinking about parenthood.
“Twenty Minutes at the Clam Shack” (Issue 13) by Cassie Pruyn captures visceral feelings of young lust and love.

Fiction

Jade Song’s “Rabbit” (Issue 27) tells the story of two young boys kept apart as kids who reunite and find love as adults.
Two women unravel their relationship tensions and the prospect of having a baby during a vacation trip in Amy Stuber’s “Day Hike.”
Sebastian Romero’s “Transgressions” (Issue 26) uses the reunion of a group of friends at a bathhouse to explore the different shapes and labels queer relationships take.
In “The Rediscovery of Bodies,” Ammi Keller’s protagonist attempts to understand how she and her wife are being perceived by two strangers based on the symbolism of their tattooed bodies.
In “Home” by Celeste Mohammed (Issue 21), two young women in Barbados navigate an increasingly complicated romantic and sexual relationship against a backdrop of family conflict and trauma.
Lyuba Boys by Sophie Crocker follows a young trans man and his best friend as they go to Alaska to dive for mammoth bones. It is a commentary on young love, masculinity, and gender relations.
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 “Forty-Four Thousand Pounds” (Issue 15), a young Appalachian woman remembers a home—and a love—she left behind.
In “Anguilla Rostrata: American Eel” Callum Angus writes the story of the last eel of the Rio Grande.

Essays

In her essay, “Jamali Kamali Airborne in History,” Karen Chase is inspired to write a poem retelling the story of two sixteenth-century gay lovers in Delhi after visiting their tombs.
During a visit to the Interfaith AIDS Memorial Chapel, Lily Lucas Hodges’s “Genealogies” reflects on the loss of their Uncle Barry, a gay man who lived through the AIDS epidemic.
Afton Montgomery narrates her experiences with homophobia and acts of aggression in a small Idahoan town in her “Dispatch from Moscow.”
In “Cadenza,” Isabel Meyers explores family history, the publishing industry, and bringing queer stories to the page.
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 essay “Linnahall” recounts a day tour of Tallinn, Estonia that spurs reflections on loneliness and wandering.

Burning Language is a special portfolio highlighting new and queer voices from China. Consisting of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art, this collection offers a broad survey of Chinese literature from younger generations.