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LGBT Non-fiction Recommendations
This section aims to cover a range of our history represented in the novels below. Ranging from picture based stories to peer reviewed, the truth can be found in these pages.
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We Are Everywhere is a collaboration by Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown to bring together all known photographs of the history of LGBT activism. A visual novel, this is an absolute must have for one's coffee table to be picked up and perused through at one's leisure. This book dates from before Stonewall by several decades all the way to the modern age of LGBT activism. Find yourself in the pages of history through the people and protest signs. For one thing is sure; we have never truly gone away.
Richard Ellman pulls forth the summation of his career in order to give Oscar Wilde the due respect he has always deserved in this biography. Following Wilde from his youth to his trial and subsequent death, the gay poet is given new life in these pages. Everything is unearthed by Ellman, whether it be the negative aspects of Wilde's personality or the undeniable charm that the enthusiastic man carried with him always. Oscar Wilde is respectfully studied in this biography, where he is allowed to have a conversation with contemporary readers that does not ignore every shade that he carried in life.
The AIDS epidemic is just one portion of LGBT history, and yet it is one that is given a larger pedestal in some ways than others. In Randy Shilt's bestselling novel, And The Band Played On, the idea that the HIV virus was allowed to spread in the way it did because of a lack of concern on behalf of those who could act upon the epidemic earlier. Homophobia is a major influential point in why HIV was allowed to spread in the way it did, and Shilts spends the entirety of the book outlining the spread and detailing all the facts that reinforce the idea that apathy killed thousands upon thousands of gay men as a result.
Outlaw Marriages covers the time period before 2015 that gay marriage was illegal. This book covers the unions of prolific members of American society who shaped the American identity for better or for worse. Some couples that are featured within these pages are Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tucklass, as well as James Baldwin and Lucien Happersberger just to name a few.
This novel just goes to prove what everyone knows; that love is blind and any partnership that is worked on with vigor as well as faith can blossom into something that will last for centuries to come.
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