Pride month is celebrated each June in recognition of the 1969 Stonewall riots, a pivotal moment in the fight for 2SLGBTQIA+ rights. This display highlights the stories of Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and other identities. Check out movies and ebooks following three general themes below that complement our physical display at the Nanaimo campus library.
For related works, see titles in our Trans Day of Visibility guide.
How does it work?
In the fifties and sixties, in the period leading up to the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality and the founding of the Gay Liberation movement, a group of gay men behind the scenes of rock’n’roll was changing pop, politics and society for good. Through a mix of new interviews and contemporary reports, Darryl W. Bullock shines a light on the lives of the so-called ‘Velvet Mafia’, including impresario Larry Parnes, Beatles manager Brian Epstein, songwriter Lionel Bart, record producer Joe Meek, and Bee Gees and Cream manager Robert Stigwood. Compelling and enlightening, The Velvet Mafia explores how the LGBT professionals at the heart of the music industry were working together and supporting each other at a time when being homosexual could mean the end of your career – or much worse.
The ultimate chronicler of New York's downtown scene, and therefore of a signal moment in gay culture, was Fred W. McDarrah, the first staff photographer and first picture editor of the legendary Village Voice. On the streets in the aftermath of Stonewall, at the first marches, and among the activists and artists who defined the movement through the 1990s, McDarrah's camera engaged with the period's chaos, anger, and intense optimism. As the critic Hilton Als puts in his foreword, McDarrah deserves a lasting place in New York's alternative history not only for his documentation of a world in transformation, but for his work as 'an agent of change himself.
Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.
On June 28, 1970, two thousand gay and lesbian activists in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago paraded down the streets of their cities in a new kind of social protest, one marked by celebration, fun, and unashamed declaration of a stigmatized identity. Forty-five years later, over six million people annually participate in 115 Pride parades across the United States. They march with church congregations and college gay-straight alliance groups, perform dance routines and marching band numbers, and gather with friends to cheer from the sidelines.With vivid imagery, and showcasing the voices of these participants, Pride Parades tells the story of Pride from its beginning in 1970 to 2010. Though often dismissed as frivolous spectacles, the author builds a convincing case for the importance of Pride parades as cultural protests at the heart of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community.
On the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, the most important moment in LGBTQ history-depicted by the people who influenced, recorded, and reacted to it. June 28, 1969, Greenwich Village: The New York City Police Department, fueled by bigoted liquor licensing practices and an omnipresent backdrop of homophobia and transphobia, raided the Stonewall Inn, a neighborhood gay bar, in the middle of the night. The raid was met with a series of responses that would go down in history as the most galvanizing period in this country's fight for sexual and gender liberation: a riotous reaction from the bar's patrons and surrounding community, followed by six days of protests.
The third edition of the iconic collection Making Space for Indigenous Feminism features feminist, queer and two-spirit voices from across generations and locations. Feminism has much to offer Indigenous women, and all Indigenous Peoples, in their struggles against oppression. Indigenous feminists in the first edition fought for feminism to be considered a valid and essential intellectual and activist position. The second edition animated Indigenous feminisms through real-world applications. This third edition, curated by award-wining scholar Gina Starblanket, reflects and celebrates Indigenous feminism's intergenerational longevity through the changing landscape of anti-colonial struggle and theory. Diverse contributors examine Indigenous feminism's ongoing relevance to contemporary contexts and debates, including queer and two-spirit approaches to decolonization, gendered and sexualized violence, storytelling and narrative, digital and land-based presence, Black and Indigenous relationalities and more. This book bridges generations of powerful Indigenous feminist thinking to demonstrate the movement's cruciality for today.
Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomic injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists' work throughout the black diaspora. GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces--specifically prisons and hospitals--and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.
Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality attends to the silence around asexuality in queer, feminist, and lesbian thinking from the late 1960s to the present. Drawing on the knowledge generated by asexual community, activism, and scholarship, Ela Przybylo gives us the first queer and feminist monograph on asexuality.
In Island Bodies, Rosamond King examines sexualities, violence, and repression in the Caribbean experience. She analyses the sexual norms and expectations portrayed in Caribbean and diaspora litera¬ture, music, film, and popular culture to show how many individuals contest traditional roles by manoeuvring within and/or trying to change their society's binary gender systems. She skilfully demon¬strates that these transgressions better represent Caribbean culture than the “official” representations perpetuated by governmental elites and often codified into laws that reinforce patriarchal, hetero¬sexual stereotypes. Unique in its breadth and its multilingual and multidisciplinary approach, Island Bodies addresses homosexuality, interracial rela¬tions, transgender people, and women's sexual agency in Dutch, Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone works of Caribbean literature. Ultimately King reveals that despite the varied national specificity, differing colonial legacies, and linguistic diversity across the islands, there are striking similarities in the ways Caribglobal cultures at¬tempt to restrict sexuality and in the ways individuals explore and transgress those boundaries.
Seeking Sanctuary brings together poignant life stories from fourteen lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) migrants, refugees and asylum seekers living in Johannesburg. The stories, diverse in scope, chronicle each narrator's arduous journey to South Africa, and their corresponding movement towards self-love and self-acceptance. The narrators reveal their personal battles to reconcile their faith with their sexuality and gender identity, often in the face of violent persecution, and how they have carved out spaces of hope and belonging in their new home country. In these intimate testimonies, the narrators' resilience in the midst of uncertain futures reveal the myriad ways in which LGBT Africans push back against unjust and unequal systems. Seeking Sanctuary makes a critical intervention by showing the complex interplay between homophobia and xenophobia in South Africa, and of the state of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) rights in Africa. By shedding light on the fraught connections between sexuality, faith and migration, this ground-breaking project also provides a model for religious communities who are working towards justice, diversity and inclusion.
Focused on understanding and analyzing LGBTQ activism and protest globally, this edited collection brings together voices from different parts of the world to examine LGBTQ protests and their impact.
As one of the first book-length collections of critical essays on the topic of asexuality, Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives became a foundational text in the burgeoning field of asexuality studies. This revised and expanded ten-year anniversary edition both celebrates the book’s impact and features new scholarship at the vanguard of the field. It brings in more global perspectives on asexualities, engages intersectionally with international formations of race and racialization, critiques global capital’s effects on identity and kinship, examines how digital worlds shape lived realities, considers posthuman becomings, experiments with the form of the manifesto, and imagines love and relation in ecologies that exceed and even supersede the human.
Evolving from a conversation between Joshua Whitehead and Angie Abdou, Indigiqueerness is part dialogue, part collage, and part memoir. Beginning with memories of his childhood poetry and prose and travelling through the library of his life, Whitehead contemplates the role of theory, Indigenous language, queerness, and fantastical worlds in all his artistic pursuits. This volume is imbued with Whitehead’s energy and celebrates Indigenous writers and creators who defy expectations and transcend genres.
Black and Queer on Campus is a ground-breaking account of queer Black experiences on college campuses, based on 65 interviews with Black LGTBQ students
Finalist, 2019 Locus Award for Nonfiction, presented by the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Traverses the history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature, film, and digital media Old Futures explores the social, political, and cultural forces feminists, queer people, and people of color invoke when they dream up alternative futures as a way to imagine transforming the present.
Small Town Pride offers an intimate look at the joys and challenges of being queer in a small town. Filmed in Alberta, Nova Scotia and the Northwest Territories, the film follows LGBTQ2S+ people and allies as they prepare for their local Pride celebrations. Organizing in church basements, classrooms and around kitchen tables, they take on a conservative town council that won't fly a rainbow flag and bend some rules to create a safe space for youth to come out. But despite experiences of isolation and discrimination, they love their communities and strive to make them places where everyone, no matter who and how they love, can live and thrive.
The narrative delves into an investigation of how intersex people have been treated and are still being regarded in today's society. Three individuals who have parallel histories of negativity caused by non-consensual surgeries, shame, and secrecy about their true selves share their journeys, as they are all actively working as advocates for the intersex community. Documentary from 2023.
An irresistible anthology of ancient Greek writings that explore queer desire and love Eros, limb-loosening, whirls me about again, that bittersweet, implacable creature. - Sappho The idea of sexual fluidity may seem new, but it is at least as old as the ancient Greeks, who wrote about queer experiences with remarkable frankness, wit, and insight. How to Be Queer is an infatuating collection of these writings about desire, love, and lust between men, between women, and between humans and gods, in lucid and lively new translations. It features both beautiful poetry and thought-provoking prose, emotional outpourings and humorous anecdotes. Complete with brief introductions to the selections, and with the original Greek on facing pages, How to Be Queer reveals what the Greeks knew long ago-that the erotic and queer are a source of life and a cause for celebration.
To fight the gods-you must first become a slave. Our universe is dead. All that's left are memories. But the powers indigenous to the new world are fighting back. Alexander, a handsome immigrant fleeing trouble in his poor native land, doesn't even have a claim to his own name in the magic-rich city of Norio, where they call him Aleixo. But his name may be the least of what the sorcerers of Norio take from him, when a seemingly random invitation to cater-waiter at a party of the wealthy and famous sweeps Aleixo up into a maelstrom of imperial politics and a millennia-long war between humans and gods.
When her parents suspect that she's a lesbian, a high-school student (Natasha Lyonne) is sent to a sexual-rehabilitation camp.
Written in the 1840s and published here for the first time, Julia Ward Howe's novel about a hermaphrodite is unlike anything of its time--or, in truth, of our own. Narrated by Laurence, who is raised and lives as a man, is loved by men and women alike, and can respond to neither, this unconventional story explores the understanding "that fervent hearts must borrow the disguise of art, if they would win the right to express, in any outward form, the internal fire that consumes them." Laurence describes his repudiation by his family, his involvement with an attractive widow, his subsequent wanderings and eventual attachment to a sixteen-year-old boy, his own tutelage by a Roman nobleman and his sisters, and his ultimate reunion with his early love. His is a story unique in nineteenth-century American letters, at once a remarkable reflection of a largely hidden inner life and a richly imagined tale of coming of age at odds with one's culture. Howe wrote The Hermaphrodite when her own marriage was challenged by her husband's affection for another man--and when prevailing notions regarding a woman's appropriate role in patriarchal structures threatened Howe's intellectual and emotional survival. The novel allowed Howe, and will now allow her readers, to occupy a speculative realm otherwise inaccessible in her historical moment.
Blake Edwards' VICTOR/VICTORIA sparkles with the style and glamour of Paris in the 1930s. It is the story of an employed singer (Andrews). a charming and gay Cabaret performer (Preston) and King Marchan (Garner), a tough Chicago nightclub owner. A dizzying and dazzling musical farce of confusing sex roles (and role plays). VICTOR/VICTORIA also features exciting work from Lesley Ann Warner as the Jean Harlow like, Platinum-blonde mistress of Marchan, and from Alex Karras as his rugged bodyguard with a secret.
Hilarity and queer magic realism twist the throttle when Jackie, a loner with a secret bank-robbing persona, meets Vespa: sexy, sculpture-welding artist and collector of vintage motorbikes. Still planning elaborate revenge on a New York ex-lover, Jackie tests both her new relationship and the loyalties of her friends, a rag-tag gang of post-punk eccentrics, realizing how love changes hatred only after her scheme runs out of control. An innocent misstep and an encrypted mystery swings the romance into the dangerous orbit of a construction mogul intent on subverting corporate money at any cost.
A ranch hand and a rodeo cowboy meet on a herding gig and unwittingly fall in love; they separate at the end of the job, but keep in touch and have a long-running affair, while each maintains a heterosexual lifestyle.
Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. During the restless summer weeks, unrelenting but buried currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them and verge toward the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.
Robin Williams and Nathan Lane play long-time companions forced to play it straight in this remake of the farce "La Cage aux Folles."
This display was created in consultation with university groups such as the Positive Space Alliance, and continues to be updated from year to year. If you have suggestions or comments about the display, please email library@viu.ca
VIU Library | email:library@viu.ca | Nanaimo: 250.740.6330 | Cowichan: 250.746.3517 | tiwšɛmawtxʷ: 1.888.920.2221 ext.6330 |
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