What a momentous day! America couldn't be more proud to have the Supreme Court legalize gay marriage nationwide. This year's Pride celebrations will reach fever pitch with our country's step towards "making our union a little more perfect," as President Obama said in his address. The fight for LGBT rights has been a long and arduous one—and it isn't over yet. For Pride month, we have a short list of recommended readings to sink your eyes into, a list that outlines some of the complex issues at large in the LGBT community throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We thank Ann Pellegrini for suggesting this eclectic mix of classics and brand-spanking new titles.

James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

Before it was published in 1956, Baldwin’s publisher told him to “burn” the novel. Its theme of homosexuality would purportedly alienate him from his black readers. We’re thankful that Baldwin did not heed these words. The story of an American expatriate whose life changes dramatically after he begins an affair with an Italian bartender speaks to the broader issues of social alienation—Baldwin had recently emigrated to Europe—as well as homosexuality and bisexuality. 

Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Lorde’s collection of fifteen essays and speeches takes on racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and class disparity from her unique black lesbian feminist perspective. In her unflinching, lyrical, and trenchant prose, Lorde proposes social difference as the mechanism for action and change. Her messages of struggle and hope are still relevant more than twenty years after they were first published.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet

Sedgwick argues that our standard gender binary, limiting sexuality to homosexuality and heterosexuality, limits freedom and understanding. It is also just too simplistic. Focusing largely on language’s impact on sexuality, her book propounds queer sexuality, the “third sex”, to attack the binary system set up by society. This is one of the inaugurating texts in what is now LGBT studies. Especially wonderful is her introductory chapter “Axiomatic,” where she provides a deceptively simple list of axioms for thinking about sex and sexuality, beginning with Axiom 1: “People are different from each other.” 

Anthony M. Petro’s After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion

Hot off the presses, Petro’s book is the first to chart the history of religion and the AIDS crisis in the United States. He draws from a broad gamut of religious people, not just the religious right, to reveal the origins of the rhetoric, both secular and religious, that fuels the debates over public health, birth control, and gay marriage. 

Jane Ward’s Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men

Can straight white men be just as sexually fluid as straight white women? Ward explores the social spaces—fraternity and military hazing rituals, online personals ads—where heterosexual man-on-man action isn’t indicative of going gay, but rather it reasserts their racial and gender identity. Indeed, as time goes on, notions of heterosexuality become increasingly complex. This hotter than hot book will be published on July 10.