There's a Book for That: Pride Month!
Happy Pride Month! June, 2025 marks the 55th 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 following recent and acclaimed biographies and memoirs featured below. We’d also like to draw your attention to the 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!
From Melissa Febos, the national bestselling author of Girlhood, comes an examination of the solitude, freedoms, and feminist heroes she discovered during a year of celibacy and a wise and transformative look at relationships and self-knowledge. Bringing her own experiences into conversation with those of women throughout history—from eleventh-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia Butler to the Shakers and Sappho—Febos situates her story within a newfound lineage of role models who unapologetically pursued their ambitions and ideals.
Black trans 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 LGBTQ+ history, revealing her story, her impact, and her legacy.
LOVE: THE HEROIC STORIES OF MARRIAGE EQUALITY by Frankie Frankeny, John Casey, Jim Obergefell, Evan Wolfson
Celebrating the history of the LGBTQ+ community’s marriage equality movement from the 1950s until today, this triumphant journey is presented in compelling stories of the pioneering couples, along with winning photographs. These moving profiles, along with archival images, feature couples from major court cases, such as Jim Obergefell and John Arthur, along with well-known personalities whose narratives helped draw attention to marriage equality, including Cynthia Nixon and Christine Marinoni, George and Brad Takei, and Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi.
The author of the award-winning memoir Red Paint returns with a razor-sharp, clear-eyed collection of essays on what it means to be a proudly queer indigenous woman in the United States today. Drawing on a rich family archive as well as the anthropological work of her late great-grandmother, Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe explores themes ranging from indigenous identity and stereotypes to cultural displacement and environmental degradation to understand what our experiences teach us about the power of community, commitment, and conscientious honesty.
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.
When Tree Abraham falls in love with her housemate who does not reciprocate the feeling, instead of breaking up, they keep going. This story begins where most end. elseship deftly and courageously recounts the starts and stops of a transitioning relationship. Having recorded the experience in real time, Abraham combines personal entries with illustrations, photos, and mind maps all organized within eight ancient Greek categories of love.
An iconic writer’s lapidary memoir of a life spent pursuing a dream of artistic truth while evading the truth of her own gender identity, until, finally, she turned to face who she really was. Sante’s memoir braids together two threads of personal narrative: the arc of her life, and her recent step-by-step transition to a place of inner and outer alignment. A marvel of grace and empathy, I Heard Her Call My Name parses with great sensitivity many issues that touch our lives deeply, of gender identity and far beyond.
A Colombian-Cuban daughter’s story of becoming her own person, finding herself in community, and building a new queer life. Hernández celebrates the 10th anniversary of the book’s first publication with a new preface. She reflects on the book’s impact and on how we can lean into love and into each other, even when each morning’s news cycle is saturated with heartbreak and pain. In three parts, the author explores the facets of her childhood and culture that define who she is as a bisexual, first-generation Latina.
A fiery, heartbreaking memoir that follows one New Hampshire family over the course of three years, unspooling a riveting story of gender identity, class, trans youth, and a child caught in the riptide of America’s culture wars,
A debut book from Entertainment Weekly writer and former Out magazine editor Lester Fabian Brathwaite, Rage is a darkly comedic exploration of Blackness, queerness, and the American Dream, at a time when creative anger feels like the best response to inequality. One part memoir, one part cultural critique, one part live grenade, Rage dives deep into representations of queer life from Ru Paul’s Drag Race to The Birdcage (Robin Williams was a snack in Versace), and explores our cultural understanding of Black genius through stories of Lauryn Hill and Nina Simone. Lester’s razor sharp voice, coupled with his searing social commentary on topics such as dating, rejection, racism, sexuality, identity, and more, offers an increasingly divided world an engaging and original read.
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.
THE LITTLE BOOK OF PRIDE HEROES: ICONS OF THE LGBTQIA+ COMMUNITY by Jared Richards, Phil Constantinesco
This book is a celebration of LGBTQIA+ activists, artists, comedians, writers, musicians, and pop-culture giants who have shaped our worlds, expanded our horizons, and radically increased queer visibility. Featuring trailblazing queer icons such as James Baldwin, George Michael, Frida Kahlo, George Takei, Elliot Page, Virginia Woolf, Leigh Bowery, and Divine, The Little Book of Pride Heroes is a colorfully illustrated homage to the power of pride and the enduring legacy of those who have fought for LGBTQIA+ rights.
For more information on these and related titles visit the collection Pride Month
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