Books About Queer History and LGBTQ+ Rights
Discover these nonfiction books about queer history that honor the history of the LGBTQ+ movement in the U.S. and point to a more liberated future. And to find even more literature from queer voices, check out our curated collection.
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Add to BookshelfA Last Supper of Queer Apostles
by Pedro Lemebel
“I speak from my difference,” wrote Pedro Lemebel, an openly queer writer and artist living through Chile’s AIDS epidemic and the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship. In brilliantly innovative essays — known as crónicas — that combine memoir, reportage, fiction, history, and poetry, he brought visibility and dignity to sexual minorities, the poor, and the powerless. This volume brings together the best of his work, introducing readers of English to the subversive genius of a literary activist and queer icon whose acrobatic explorations of the Santiago demimonde reverberate around the world.
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American Scare
by Robert W. Fieseler
In January 1959, Art Copleston was escorted out of his college accounting class by three police officers. In a motel room, blinds drawn, he sat in front of a state senator and the legal counsel for the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, nicknamed the “Johns Committee.” His crime? Being a suspected homosexual. Using a secret trove of primary source documents that have been decoded and de-censored for the first time in history, journalist Robert Fieseler unravels the mystery of what actually happened behind the closed doors of an inquisition that held ordinary citizens ransom to its extraordinary powers.
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$34.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Legendary Children
by Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez
From the singular voices behind Tom and Lorenzo comes the ultimate guide to all-things RuPaul’s Drag Race and its influence on modern LGBTQ culture. Legendary Children centers itself around the idea that not only is RuPaul’s Drag Race the queerest show in the history of television, but that RuPaul and company devised a show that serves as an actual museum of queer cultural and social history, drawing on queer traditions and the work of legendary figures going back nearly a century.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The LGBTQ + History Book
by DK
The LGBTQ+ History Book celebrates the victories and untold triumphs of LGBTQ+ people throughout history, such as the Stonewall Riots and first gender affirmation surgeries, as well as commemorating moments of tragedy and persecution, from the Renaissance Italian “Night Police” to the 20th century “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. The book also includes major cultural cornerstones – the secret language of polari, Black and Latine ballroom culture, and the many flags of the community – and the history of LGBTQ+ spaces, from 18th-century “molly houses” to modern “gaybourhoods.”
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$29.99Buy from Other Retailers:
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Come Out and Win
by Sue Hyde
Come Out and Win will educate, engage, and agitate LGBTQ+ and straight activists to become involved in the political movement to win full equality under the law and sexual/gender freedom. Spurring a new generation of activists to positive social action, it not only tells the history of gay liberation but, crucially, offers guidance and practical advice for building organizations and taking concrete action to eradicate homophobia.
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$16.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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We Are Everywhere
by Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown
A rich and sweeping photographic history of the Queer Liberation Movement, from the creators and curators of the massively popular Instagram account @lgbt_history, released in time for the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.
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$40.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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How to Survive a Plague
by David France
A definitive history of the successful battle to halt the AIDS epidemic, here is the incredible story of the grassroots activists whose work turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a manageable disease. How to Survive a Plague is an unparalleled insider’s account of a pivotal moment in the history of American civil rights.
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$21.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Making Room
by Carl Siciliano
From a pioneering advocate for LGBTQ youth, a gripping, impassioned account of how an unhoused queer youth’s murder compelled him to create the nation’s largest housing program for homeless LGBTQ teens. Written with heart and profound insight, Making Room is a landmark personal narrative, bringing to life an untold chapter of LGBTQ history and testifying to the power of community, solidarity, and the human spirit.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Refusing Compulsory Sexuality
by Sherronda J. Brown
In this exploration of what it means to be Black and asexual in America today, Sherronda J. Brown offers new perspectives on asexuality. She takes an incisive look at how anti-Blackness, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalism enact harm against asexual people, contextualizing acephobia within a racial framework in the first book of its kind. Brown advocates for the “A” in LGBTQIA+, affirming that to be asexual is to be queer — despite the gatekeeping and denial that often says otherwise.
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The Laramie Project and The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later
by Moises Kaufman, Tectonic Theater Project, Leigh Fondakowski, Greg Pierotti and Andy Paris
On October 7, 1998, a young gay man was discovered bound to a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming, savagely beaten and left to die in an act of brutality and hate that shocked the nation. Matthew Shepard’s death became a national symbol of intolerance, but for the people of the town, the event was deeply personal. In the aftermath, Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie and conducted more than 200 interviews with its citizens. From the transcripts, the playwrights constructed an extraordinary chronicle of life in the town after the murder.
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Sister Outsider
by Audre Lorde
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. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde’s philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published.
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Galileo’s Middle Finger
by Alice Dreger
Galileo’s Middle Finger is an eye-opening story of life in the trenches of scientific controversy. This illuminating chronicle begins with historian Alice Dreger’s own research into the treatment of people born intersex. Realization of the shocking surgical and ethical abuses conducted in the name of “normalizing” intersex children’s gender identities moved Dreger to become an internationally recognized patient rights activist. But even as the intersex rights movement succeeded, Dreger began to realize how some fellow progressive activists were employing lies and personal attacks to silence scientists whose data revealed uncomfortable truths about humans.
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From the Closet to the Courtroom
by Michael Bronski and Carlos A. Ball
Engaging and largely untold, From the Closet to the Courtroom explores how five pivotal lawsuits have altered LGBTQ history. Law professor Carlos Ball traces the parties from their communities to the courtroom, while deftly weaving in rich sociohistorical context and analyzing the lasting legal and political impact of each judicial outcome.
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The Black Period
by Hafizah Augustus Geter
An acclaimed poet reclaims her origin story as the queer daughter of a Muslim Nigerian immigrant and a Black American visual artist in this groundbreaking memoir, combining lyrical prose, biting criticism, and haunting visuals. A unique combination of gripping memoir and Afrofuturist thought, in The Black Period, Hafizah manages to sidestep shame, confront disability, embrace forgiveness, and emerge from the erasures America imposes to exist proudly and unabashedly as herself.
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Stonewall
by Martin Duberman
In Stonewall, renowned historian and activist Martin Duberman tells the full story of this pivotal moment in history. With riveting narrative skill, he re-creates those revolutionary, sweltering nights in vivid detail through the lives of six people who were drawn into the struggle for LGBTQ rights. Their stories combine to form an unforgettable portrait of the repression that led up to the riots, which culminates when they triumphantly participate in the first gay rights march of 1970, the roots of today’s pride marches.
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$20.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Queer (Words of Change series)
by Coco Romack
Compiled by journalist Coco Romack, this collection of stirring words is intended to enlighten, prompt change, provide encouragement, and deepen readers’ commitment to the movement. Celebrating activism, focusing on solutions, and avoiding apathy and pessimism, this book is an inspiration and a call to action. The back matter includes a brief bio for each person quoted to provide context for their life and work.
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Speak Now
by Kenji Yoshino
Kenji Yoshino, a renowned legal scholar, tells the definitive story of Hollingsworth v. Perry, the groundbreaking federal lawsuit against Proposition 8, that stands as the most potent argument for marriage equality.
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Ace
by Angela Chen
Journalist Angela Chen creates her path to understanding her own asexuality with the perspectives of a diverse group of asexual people. Disabled aces, aces of color, gender-nonconforming aces, and aces who both do and don’t want romantic relationships all share their experiences navigating a society in which a lack of sexual attraction is considered abnormal. Chen’s careful cultural analysis explores how societal norms limit understanding of sex and relationships and celebrates the breadth of sexuality and queerness.
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The Engagement
by Sasha Issenberg
On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional, making same-sex unions legal across the United States. But the road to that momentous decision was much longer than many know. In this definitive account, Sasha Issenberg vividly guides us through same-sex marriage’s unexpected path from the unimaginable to the inevitable. Following a cast of characters that includes those who sought their own right to wed, those who fought to protect the traditional definition of marriage, and those who changed their minds about it, The Engagement is certain to become a seminal book on the modern culture wars.
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$23.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The Stonewall Reader
edited by New York Public Library and Jason Baumann
The Stonewall Reader is a collection of 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. Most importantly the anthology spotlights both iconic activists who were pivotal in the movement, such as Sylvia Rivera, co-founder of Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR), as well as forgotten figures like Ernestine Eckstein, one of the few out, African American, lesbian activists in the 1960s.
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Forcing the Spring
by Jo Becker
A groundbreaking work of reportage by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jo Becker, Forcing the Spring is the definitive account of five remarkable years in American civil rights history, when the United States experienced a tectonic shift on the issue of marriage equality.
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Transgender Warriors
by Leslie Feinberg
“[Transgender Warriors] leaves us with a sense that a transgendered concept of what it is to be fully human and psychologically whole is both valid and nothing new. A brief review cannot do justice to this amazing resource, not only for our communities, but for the world.” –Lambda Book Report
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Hidden from History
by Various Authors
This richly revealing anthology brings together for the first time the vital new scholarly studies now lifting the veil from the gay and lesbian past. Such notable researchers as John Boswell, Shari Benstock, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Jeffrey Weeks and John D’Emilio illuminate gay and lesbian life as it evolved in places as diverse as the Athens of Plato, Renaissance Italy, Victorian London, jazz Age Harlem, Revolutionary Russia, Nazi Germany, Castro’s Cuba, post-World War II San Francisco.
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$43.00Buy from Other Retailers:
