Clack That Fan for These Pride Month Reads!
June 21, 2024
Rainbow season is in full, fierce bloom, honeys! Take to the streets with your most fabulous fans and clack them with pride! Clack them to reflect, empower, and unite for queerness in all its joys and liberation! Clack back to the haters intimidated by queerness! Because this is your month. They all are, really.
As you’re living it up at the block parties, parades, and gatherings, clack your fans for this handful of titles by our queer authors! Their books will make you reflect on the history of our queer ancestors, on how male body image determines what masculinity is (or isn’t), on what it means to be Black in the US. They will empower you with stories of women embracing their bisexuality, of House mothers and fathers taking in disowned queer youth, with truth bombs about what to do about our “national conversation about race.” They’ll embolden you to unite for queer and trans resistance on all fronts.
These books are for us. For everyone. Clack away, honeys, and happy Pride Month!
And the Category Is . . . : Inside New York’s Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community
“[F]inding a family like the folks in Ballroom, hand-picked and talented, a flamboyance of family, can be the precious gift that fills seemingly unfillable voids like homelessness, alienation, sorrow, the hunger to be seen—a sense of purpose. The supplemental nature of house-Ballroom parents adopting LGBTQ homeless youth could be and often is discounted in terms of its legitimacy, perhaps because it points out through its deep intimacy, fierce support, and unconditional love for tossed-aside children, the rich cruelty, ineptitudes, and toxicity of heteronormative biological families.”
—Ricky Tucker
A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir
“Generally speaking, gay people come out of the closet, straight people walk around the closet, and bisexuals have to be told to look for the closet. We are too preoccupied with shifting. There isn’t a good verb for what begins happening to me in college. Yes, I am meeting lesbians, but I am not one of them. I still find men attractive; it is that I am thinking of women in a new way. It is as if I am learning that I can shift my weight from one leg to the other, that I have a second leg. Kissing women is like discovering a new limb.”
—Daisy Hernández
Everybody’s Protest Novel: Essays
“One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. The difficulty then, for me, of being a Negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from examining my own experience too closely by the tremendous demands and the very real dangers of my social situation.”
—James Baldwin
Homeland of My Body: New & Selected Poems
Become the salt of my blood, my veins’
abating pulse. Become the soft alabaster
of my softening bones, the stale marrow
of this aging life. Become my dull teeth,
and faded lips, still glossing a smile when
you smile into my dimming eyes. Become
my eyes that’ve studied the anatomy of
our love: my arms in the arc of your arms,
my thighs knotted with yours, our fingers
woven into each other. Become my lungs,
their last gasp, my nerves firing through
every scene of our loving. Become the soil
of my soul. There’s nothing more blessed
than taking you with me into the ground.
—Richard Blanco, “Become Me” (for my husband)
How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide
“I hate to be the one to break it to you, but we’re not going to end white supremacy by ‘hugging it out.’ And we’re certainly not going to fuck our way out of racial oppression. That’s not how power works. In the interest of science, I just took a break from writing this chapter to enjoy a roll in the hay with my half-white, half-Japanese girlfriend. Despite our best efforts, our interracial, interethnic lovemaking was surprisingly unable to usher in the Age of Aquarius. Maybe if we just keep trying, we’ll eliminate the racial wealth gap through the sheer power of our orgasms and loving-kindness. Or maybe not. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
—Crystal M. Fleming
A Queer History of the United States
“Perhaps the most startling revelation, which did not occur to me until I had finished writing, was that many of the most important changes for LGBT people in the past five hundred years have been a result of war. From the American Revolution to the war in Vietnam, wars have radically affected LGBT people and lives. These wars have had an enormous impact on all Americans, but their effects on LGBT people have been particularly pronounced, in part because the social violence of war affects sexuality and gender.”
—Michael Bronski
The Queering of Corporate America: How Big Business Went from LGBTQ Adversary to Ally
“The fact that a growing number of large corporations were willing initially to embrace LGBTQ equality measures internally, and later to advocate externally on behalf of public policies that promoted LGBTQ rights, went a long way toward normalizing and mainstreaming LGBTQ equality claims. After all, how radical or destabilizing could equal treatment of queer people and relationships actually be if such treatment had been publicly embraced by blue chip corporations such as Apple, General Mills, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Procter & Gamble?”
—Carlos A. Ball
Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle
“[L]ifting weights has given me a greater sense of physical stability and personal security. For a gay guy, muscles function as both attractant and repellant, as armor and invitation. (For many of us, muscle embodies this duality—a feedback loop of defense and desire.) But there’s more to it than that.”
—Michael Andor Brodeur
Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and Beyond
“As trans people, we have a history of resistance of which we should be proud. Trans warriors stood up to the slave-owners, the feudal landlords, and the capitalist bosses. Today, as trans warriors we are joining the movement for a just society in greater and greater numbers. By raising the demands of our trans movements within the larger struggle for change, we are educating people about our oppression, winning allies, and shaping the society we’re trying to bring into being.”
—Leslie Feinberg
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
“Understanding and expressing what it means when one’s race, class, gender, and sexuality simultaneously shape one’s political values is part of a long tradition of being a Black woman who is queer or transgender or both. While the language has evolved over the years (from the likes of ‘Negro’ and ‘transsexual’), the conditions and systems of oppression have been consistently violent.”
—Charlene A. Carruthers
About the Author
Christian Coleman is the digital marketing manager at Beacon Press and editor of Beacon Broadside. Before joining Beacon, he worked in writing, copy editing, and marketing positions at Sustainable Silicon Valley and Trikone. He graduated from Boston College and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Follow him on Twitter at @coleman_II and on Bluesky at @colemanthe2nd.bsky.social.