By Nimisha Bhat, Assistant Librarian for History, Anthropology, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
With the start of summer and Pride month, it’s a great time to check out some highlights from UC’s library & consortium collections to celebrate trans history, queer culture and LGBTQIA liberation! Here are a few titles to learn from and enjoy:
Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993
Activist and historian Sarah Schulman gives a rich history of ACT UP’s New York chapter, a grassroots political coalition working to end the AIDS epidemic. This book draws from interviews, stories, and advice from prominent ACT UP members and the actions taken to fight for awareness and government intervention during the height of queer communities experiencing massive loss from HIV/AIDS in the 80s and 90s. Not only is it important to learn about this piece of history, Let the Record Show is a fantastic guide on how to organize and protest while including the most marginalized in order to make the world a better and safer place for our communities that are still being politically targeted today.
Poet, artist, and advocate Alok Vaid-Menon provides a wonderful primer on gender nonconformity accessible for all types of readers and audiences that encourages us to expand the limits of our imagination as a society to celebrate all gender expressions.
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
This collection of essays by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha highlights the lived experiences and work of disabled, chronically ill, and queer people of color to create shared power and community spaces to care for each other – an important learning opportunity and call to action for all.
Alive At the End of the World: Poems
Columbus, OH-based poet Saeed Jones writes a beautiful and powerful collection of poems touching on Blackness, sexuality, violence, loss, and hope that will have you chuckling on one page right before tears flow on the very next page.
Black On Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
An award-winning history of the intersections between Blackness and transness, drawing on a rich archive of materials to unpack how the influences of colonialism manifest in our understanding of gender today.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Vietnamese American author and poet Ocean Vuong writes a stunning book drawing from his own experiences of race and sexuality, his family’s lives in the aftermath of war, and his relationship to his mother.
Since horror often hinges on a fear of the “other” and of the unknown, queer horror is such a brilliant genre since it exists as both an art form and social commentary. A reinterpretation of an Edgar Allen Poe tale, T. Kingfisher writes this spooky Gothic tale that is both extremely fun and haunting.