There’s a Book for That: PRIDE

Happy Pride Month! June, 2026 marks the 56th annual LGBTQ+ Pride tradition. The first Pride march in New York City was held on June 28, 1970 on the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan – a tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States.

In celebration of Pride Month, we recommend the recent and acclaimed nonfiction, as well as queer classics, featured below. Please check out our Pride in Your Words website, an ever-expanding collection of books from queer authors, where you can also request a Pride in Your Words Zine digital issue. Enjoy!

A QUEER HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES: REVISED AND EXPANDED by Michael Bronski

In this revised and expanded 15th anniversary edition of A Queer History of the United States, Michael Bronski’s classic book now covers 500 years, bringing queer history into the 21st century.

It is the first comprehensive history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender America, from pre-1492 to the present, and this new edition further illuminates how profoundly the LGBTQ+ life and people have shaped America. This revised edition includes details on the evolution of the transgender liberation movement, the upsurge of vibrant queer movements of color, the groundbreaking emergence of new sexual and gender identities, and concludes by analyzing the current conservative backlash against LGBTQ rights, racial and social justice policies, and the drive to eradicate historical diversity.

THE LESBIAN BAR CHRONICLES: THE LIVING HISTORY AND HOPEFUL FUTURE OF AMERICA’S DYKE DIVES AND SAPPHIC SPACES by Rachel Karp

A grassroots tour of the nation’s lesbian bars that illuminates their past, present, and hopeful future, from the co-creator of the hit podcast Cruising

In The Lesbian Bar Chronicles, author and co-creator of the hit podcast Cruising Rachel Karp embarks across the country with her wife and best friend to chronicle the stories of the remaining US lesbian bars. Recent narratives have claimed lesbian bars are dying, but Karp’s group finds many of the places they visit to be thriving, their communities sustaining themselves over decades of change and challenges.

ALLIGATOR TEARS: A MEMOIR IN ESSAYS by Edgar Gomez

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST

A darkly comic memoir-in-essays about the scam of the American Dream and doing whatever it takes to survive in the Sunshine State—from the award-winning author of High-Risk Homosexual.

MARSHA: THE JOY AND DEIFANCE OF MARTHA P. JOHNSON by Tourmaline

Black transgender luminary Tourmaline brings to life the first definitive biography of the revolutionary activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the most important and remarkable figures in LGBTQIA+ history, revealing her story, her impact, and her legacy.

HOLLOW HALF: A MEMOIR OF BODIES AND BORDERS by Sarah Aziza

WINNER OF THE PALESTINE BOOK AWARD WINNER OF THE ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARD FOR MEMOIR Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Nonfiction

A brush with death. An ancestral haunting. A century of family secrets. Sarah Aziza’s searing, genre-bending memoir traces three generations of diasporic Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City—and back. Weaving timelines, languages, geographies, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create “nation” and “history.” Blazing with honesty, urgency, and poetry, this stunning debut memoir is a fearless call to imagine both the self and the world anew.

A QUEER AND PLEASANT DANGER: THE TRUE STORY OF A NICE JEWISH BOY WHO JOINS THE CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY, AND LEAVES TWELVE YEARS LATER TO BECOME THE LOVELY LADY SHE IS TODAY by Kate Bornstein

Part of the Beacon Classics series

In the early 1970s, a boy from a Conservative Jewish family joined the Church of Scientology. In 1981, that boy officially left the movement and ultimately transitioned into a woman. A few years later, she stopped calling herself a woman—and became a famous gender outlaw.

MIGHTY REAL: A HISTORY OF LGBTQ MUSIC, 1969-2000 by Barry Walters

Mighty Real is the definitive history of LGBTQ music, from Stonewall to RuPaul, and its impact on culture and American life. Drawing on his decades as a New York- and San Francisco-based music critic, Walters examines how LGBTQ musicians, music industry executives, and fans reshaped the mainstream. He connects the dots between David Bowie’s dazzling reinventions, Grace Jones’s androgynous glamor, Prince’s boundary-shattering sexuality, and the radical candor of the Indigo Girls to prove they’re all doing the same thing: fighting oppression. Mighty Real is a masterful love letter to the music that liberated generations, and it’s written in a page-turning, personal way that blurs distinctions between chronicle and memoir.

PRETTY: A MEMOIR by KB Brookins

Winner of the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction

“I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,” Brookins writes. “Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I’m perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can’t change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says ‘female,’ and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean—to be a girl-turned-man when you’re something else entirely?”

Informed by KB Brookins’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency—whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people.

HELLO STRANGER: MUSINGS ON MODERN INTIMACIES by Manuel Betancourt

Hello Stranger is a book about chance encounters—at a bar, through social media, in a bathhouse—and what a stranger can reveal about who we are and who we could still yet be. As Manuel Betancourt looks back on his past relationships, he turns to characters and narratives that helped him question notions of what monogamy and coupledom (and relationships and marriage) can and should look like. From films like Before Sunrise and Cruising to the poetry of Frank O’Hara and the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, Betancourt uses pop culture to make sense of the alluring prospect of forging intimacies with strangers—even, or especially, the strangers within ourselves.

ORLANDO: A BIOGRAPHY by Virginia Woolf, Carmen Maria Machado

The long-lived protagonist of Orlando begins as a passionate teenage aristocrat, whose days are spent in rowdy revelry at the colorful Tudor court of Queen Elizabeth and his nights in writing earnest poetry. A favorite of the elderly queen, he falls in love with and is jilted by a wayward Russian princess. Two kings later, now in his thirties, Orlando is sent to serve as ambassador to Constantinople, where he awakens one day to find himself in the body of a woman. The Lady Orlando takes this circumstance in stride. She returns to England, engages in love affairs with both men and women, consorts with the famous poets of each age, finds happiness with a gender-nonconforming husband, and at last achieves publication of her own epic poem in the year 1928.

STUNG WITH LOVE: POEMS AND FRAGMENTS by Sappho, edited by Carol Ann Duffy, translated by Aaron Poochigian

More or less 150 years after Homer’s Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is present Turkey. Little remains today of her writings, which are said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry—among them poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation and remembrance—that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse. This is a new translation of her surviving poetry.

GIOVANNI’S ROOM (DELUXE EDITION): A NOVEL by James Baldwin, introduction by Kevin Young

A striking deluxe edition of James Baldwin’s groundbreaking novel that was decades ahead of its time with its frank exploration of sexuality and self-acceptance. Includes a new introduction by award-winning poet Kevin Young and special cover art featuring a portrait of James Baldwin by his friend and contemporary Beauford Delaney.

In 1950s Paris, a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin’s classic novel delves into the mysteries of love and tells a deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE: A NOVEL by Rita Mae Brown

Winner of the Lambda Literary Pioneer Award Winner of the Lee Lynch Classic Book Award

A landmark coming-of-age novel that launched the career of one of this country’s most distinctive voices, Rubyfruit Jungle remains a transformative work more than forty years after its original publication. In bawdy, moving prose, Rita Mae Brown tells the story of Molly Bolt, the adoptive daughter of a dirt-poor Southern couple who boldly forges her own path in America. With her startling beauty and crackling wit, Molly finds that women are drawn to her wherever she goes—and she refuses to apologize for loving them back. This literary milestone continues to resonate with its message about being true to yourself and, against the odds, living happily ever after.

A BOY’S OWN STORY: A NOVEL by Edmund White

Ridiculed by his classmates and beset by aloof parents and a cruel sister, the unnamed narrator of Edmund White’s first autobiographical novel finds solace in literature, works of art, and his own fantastic imagination. But as he strives to forge new friendships, his yearning to be loved by the men in his life evokes a crushing sense of shame and a struggle to accept who he is. Lyrical and poignant, A Boy’s Own Story—the first of a trilogy, followed by The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony—is an American literary treasure that became an instant classic upon publication for its pioneering portrayal of homosexuality.

A LAST SUPPER OF QUEER APOSTLES: SELECTED ESSAYS by Pedro Lemebel, Gwendolyn Harper, Idra Novey

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Translation Prize

“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. Touching on everything from Che Guevara to Elizabeth Taylor, from the aftermath of authoritarian rule to the daily lives of Chile’s locas—a slur for trans women and effeminate gay men that he boldly reclaims—his writing infuses political urgency with playfulness, realism with absurdism, and resistance with camp, and his AIDS crónicas immortalize a generation of Chileans doubly “disappeared” by casting each loca, as she falls sick, in the starring role of her own private tragedy. 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.

For more information on these and related titles visit the collection Pride Month

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