Reading With Pride Books to Reaffirm Queer Community and Inspire a More Inclusive World By Danilo Machado
This June marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, a critical moment of LGBTQ activism against police brutality that took place in New York City.
While stories by and about queer and trans writers are essential all year around, here are just a few of the new LGBTQ books across genre which affirm and renew my commitment to queer community.
I was born in 1996, so I was lucky enough to be a kid during the Harry Potter craze — Deathly Hallows came out in July 2007, just months before I turned 11. The summer of ’07 was also, incidentally, the summer Stephenie Meyers’ Eclipse released; right smack in the middle of YA’s expansion, a subset of publishing that has only ballooned ever outward over the past decade-plus. Yet for all of the enthusiasm, for all of the hundreds of titles published — I didn’t get my hands on a single book with a queer protagonist until I was 12, when I stumbled on a copy of Hero by Perry Moore at the library.
What makes a good book group book choice? The answer isn’t intuitive. Far from searching for a book everyone will love, you should choose a book some people will almost assuredly hate.
