Check out these stories of LGBTQ+ folks in times past, both historical fiction and nonfiction. Annotations from NoveList, unless otherwise attributed.
The World and All That It Holds
Rafael Pinto has returned to Sarajevo and his Sephardic Jewish family in 1914 after his glory days at college in Vienna. Enamored of other men, poetry, and altered states, he had hoped for a more exciting life than taking over his father’s apothecary, but that would have been heaven compared to the hell of being conscripted and sent to the front at the start of WWI. (Booklist)
Format: Book
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View The World and All That It HoldsNothing Ever Just Disappears
A personal and historical engagement with the places where queer art and culture have thrived.
Format: Book
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View Nothing Ever Just DisappearsBefore We Were Trans
This global history of gender nonconformity examines the stories of people from antiquity to the present who defied categorization and looks to the past to uncover new possibilities for possible trans futures.
Format: Book
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View Before We Were TransThe Prophets
Two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation find refuge in each other while transforming a quiet shed into a haven for their fellow slaves, before an enslaved preacher declares their bond sinful.
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View The ProphetsGay Bar : Why We Went Out
A writer’s intimate trans-Atlantic history of gay bars. (Kirkus)
Format: Book
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View Gay Bar : Why We Went OutIt Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful
By the late 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was deeply impacting gay and lesbian communities in America, and disinformation about the disease was running rampant. Out of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an art collective that called itself Gran Fury was formed, to create graphics and media that campaigned against corporate greed, government inaction, and public indifference to AIDS.
Format: Book
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View It Was Vulgar & It Was BeautifulWild and Wicked Things
In the aftermath of WWI, Annie, while on Crow Island -- a place rumored to be rife with magic -- to settle her father's estate, is drawn into a glittering, haunted world when she is tempted by her new neighbor, a woman surrounded by rumors of witchcraft.
Format: Book
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View Wild and Wicked ThingsThe Sleeping Car Porter
Mayr’s dazzling latest tells the story of Baxter, a queer Black train porter, during a trip from Montreal to Vancouver in 1929. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
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View The Sleeping Car PorterMy Government Means to Kill Me
A fierce queer coming-of-age story follows the personal and political awakening of a young gay black man in 1980s New York City, from the television drama writer and producer of Narcos.
Format: Book
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View My Government Means to Kill MeFire Island
A groundbreaking account of New York's Fire Island, chronicling its influence on art, literature, culture and queer liberation over the past century.
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Availability: Available
View Fire Island