Gain insight into the LGBTQ experience with these readings
While Pride Month was founded to commemorate the June 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, the roots of the gay rights movement reach back at least two years prior and extend 3,000 miles west, to the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silverlake. There, at The Black Cat bar, one of the first protests against police harassment of LGBTQ people took place in 1967, marking USC’s home of L.A. as an early point of ignition in the movement for equality.
To celebrate Pride Month, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences faculty recommend books written by LGBTQ people or that discuss the LGBTQ community.
“It’s not only crucial to study the ‘history’ of the LGBTQ community more broadly, but also to understand how the queer and trans of color origins of our political resistance and emergence are absorbed into mainstream, ‘whitewashed’ histories of the movement,” says Karen Tongson, professor of English, American studies and ethnicity and gender and sexuality studies.
Christopher Freeman, professor (teaching) of English. Freeman’s research concentrates on gay and lesbian studies of the 20th century. He is working on a book project about the life and work of gay writer Paul Monette.
The Berlin Stories (New Directions, 1945) by Christopher Isherwood
“He’s most known for his Berlin Stories, which were adapted into the musical and film Cabaret. That work is timely as it documents the rise of the Nazis in the Weimar era in Germany.”
Christopher and His Kind (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976) by Christopher Isherwood
“Isherwood’s mid-1970s nonfiction retelling of his life during the 1930s in Germany and around Europe is candid, a breezy read and historically fascinating. And for a second Isherwood work, his classic novel A Single Man (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964) follows a gay man through his day in early 1960s Los Angeles.
“You can skip Tom Ford’s adaptation of it, though.”
Karen Tongson, professor of English, gender and sexuality studies, and American studies and ethnicity. Tongson’s research includes queer and gender studies, and popular culture.
“Essential reading for anyone who wants to comprehend the promises and problems within certain coalitional approaches to LGBTQ, politics, scholarship and organizing. For non-academic audiences, it demonstrates how one undertakes an intersectional analysis of power, even as it explores more complex arguments within LGBTQ studies about the field’s relationship to academic institutions, and the political limits of remaining bound to that framework. Though (spoiler alert) Cohen herself apologizes for not providing concrete solutions ‘toward a transformational coalition politics,’ the essay, and the important questions it raises, paves the way for movements like Black Lives Matter, which is led and founded by queer/women of color, Patrisse Cullors-Brignac, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, who bring their experiences organizing across and within their various communities to bear in their important work, much as Cohen’s essay hoped would be possible.”
How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 2019) by Saeed Jones
“As important as it is to understand our collective past, it’s also vital for us to remain connected to stories forged in our contemporary moment, that share with us what it’s like to have experienced the last 20 or so years in America as a young, queer person of color. Saeed Jones, who is also a poet and journalist, has written this beautiful, award-winning memoir in a style that is, at once, down-to-earth and soaringly lyrical. Jones writes about coming of age as a young, Black, gay person in the south with the kind of raw honesty and searing observation that will make you laugh, fall apart, feel alone, feel close.”
Joseph Boone, Gender Studies Professor in Media and Gender and professor of English, comparative literature and gender studies. Boone’s research centers on the novel as genre, narrative theory, modernism and queer studies.
The Night Watch (Riverhead Books, 2006) by Sarah Waters
“It’s set in London during World War II and one major plot involves lesbian women who run the ambulances, etc., during the blitz; another, a gay youth who’s a pacifist. Beautifully written, atmospheric, moving.”
The Book of Salt (First Mariner Books, 2004) by Monique Truong
“Set in Paris in the 1920s, focused on the gay Vietnamese chef that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas have hired. So interesting. An intersection of colonist/gay/expatriate themes. And delicious food descriptions!!”
Boone also recommends the following works of fiction with strong gay themes by USC English faculty members:
Prudence (Riverhead Books, 2015) by David Treuer
“An intersection of gay and Native American themes in postwar Minnesota.”
Wounded (Graywolf Press, 2005) by Percival Everett
“A Wyoming horse ranch and the murder of a gay youth that unravels a community.”
The Shadow-Catcher (Simon & Schuster, 2007) by Marianne Wiggins
“A very po-mo [post-modern] juxtaposition of the quest of a woman named ‘Marianne’ for her father with the story of Edward Curtis, the famous photographer of the ‘vanishing Americans’ (Native American tribes) — with a surprise gay revelation as its climax.”
Joseph Hawkins, lecturer in gender and sexuality studies and director of USC Libraries’ ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. Hawkins interests lie with issues of social equality as they relate to homosexuality in the United States and Japan, historical issues of discrimination and discrimination in the California restaurant industry, and the preservation of historical documents.
With an acknowledgment of the current political and social circumstances, Hawkins suggests “we might want to revisit anything by African American writer James Baldwin:
Giovanni’s Room, and The Fire Next Time, might be great reads.”
Hawkins also recommends any other of Baldwin’s works as well as the following nonfiction reads:
What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She (Liveright, 2020) by Dennis E. Baron
What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life (W.W. Norton Company, 2020) by Mark Doty
The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (Simon & Schuster, 2015) by Lillian Faderman
Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement (Columbia University Press, 2019) by David K. Johnson
Gender Queer: A Memoir (Lion Forge, 2019) by Maia Kobabe
Who Killed My Father (Vintage, 2020) by Edouard Louis
In the Dream House: A Memoir (Graywolf Press, 2019) Carmen Maria Machado
On Being Different: What It Means to Be Homosexual (Penguin Books, 2013) by Merle Miller
I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019) by Kai Cheng Thom