LGBTQ+ History Month: Fiction and Nonfiction
Check out these stories of LGBTQ+ folks in times past, both historical fiction and nonfiction. Annotations from NoveList, unless otherwise attributed.
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The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes
This life story of an aristocratic trans man whose secret 1968 legal case, which forced him to defend his male status, had a profound impact on trans rights for decades is a singular contribution to trans history and the ongoing struggle for trans rights.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Lesbian Love Story
Sharing her journey to recover the personal histories of lesbians in the 20th century: who they were, how they loved, why their stories were destroyed and where their memories echo and live on, the author, along the way, discovers her own love and adds her record to the archive.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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On A Woman's Madness
Nine days after getting married, Noenka leaves her abusive husband, shocking her family and community. As a queer Black woman striking out on her own, her path to freedom is constricted by the unwritten laws of tropical Suriname—and lined with hidden beasts and delicate flowers.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Our Work Is Everywhere
Over the past ten years, we have witnessed the rise of queer and trans communities that have defied and challenged those who have historically opposed them. Through bold, symbolic imagery and surrealist, overlapping landscapes, queer illustrator and curator Syan Rose shines a light on the faces and voices of these diverse, amorphous, messy, real and imagined queer and trans communities.
Format: Graphic Novel
Availability: Available
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The Women's House of Detention
In this singular history of a prison that once stood in NYC's Greenwich Village, a noted historian explores the roots of the queer and trans incarceration crisis, connecting misogyny, racism, state-sanctioned sexual violence, colonialism, sex work and the failures of prison reform.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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We Set the Night on Fire
The story of Martha Shelley’s roots as the daughter of refugees and undocumented immigrants in New York in the 1940s and '50s, and her development as a political activist and a central figure in the intersection of the gay and women’s movements of the 1960s and '70s.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Solomon's Crown
Two destined rivals fall desperately in love—but the fate of medieval Europe hangs in the balance.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Stonewall Reader
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. (Publisher description)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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We Both Laughed in Pleasure
We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan narrates the inner life of a gay man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century. Sullivan kept comprehensive journals from age 11 until his AIDS-related death at 39. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives. (Publisher description)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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The House of Doors
Broke, floundering creatively, and miserable in a marriage of convenience meant to hide his homosexuality, Somerset Maugham traveled to Malaya after World War I, where he met Lesley Hamlyn and her lawyer husband, Robert. Tan takes this real-life event and stitches together a narrative featuring Maugham's bonding with Lesley and a secret she shares about events during the Chinese Revolution. (Library Journal)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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