LGBTQIA+ History Month

An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights

Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like “manifest destiny” and “Jacksonian democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism.

Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers’ Day, when migrant laborers—Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth—united in resistance on the first “Day Without Immigrants.” As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of “America First” rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas.

Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights.

2018 Winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award

“This is the history of the gay and lesbian movement that we’ve been waiting for.” —The Washington Post

The sweeping story of the struggle for gay and lesbian rights—based on amazing interviews with politicians, military figures, and members of the entire LGBT community who face these challenges every day.

The fight for gay and lesbian civil rights—the years of outrageous injustice, the early battles, the heart-breaking defeats, and the victories beyond the dreams of the gay rights pioneers—is the most important civil rights issue of the present day. In “the most comprehensive history to date of America’s gay-rights movement” (The Economist), Lillian Faderman tells this unfinished story through the dramatic accounts of passionate struggles with sweep, depth, and feeling.

The Gay Revolution begins in the 1950s, when gays and lesbians were criminals, psychiatrists saw them as mentally ill, churches saw them as sinners, and society victimized them with hatred. Against this dark backdrop, a few brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and beyond. Faderman discusses the protests in the 1960s; the counter reaction of the 1970s and early eighties; the decimated but united community during the AIDS epidemic; and the current hurdles for the right to marriage equality.

“A compelling read of a little-known part of our nation’s history, and of individuals whose stories range from heart-wrenching to inspiring to enraging to motivational” (Chicago Tribune), The Gay Revolution paints a nuanced portrait of the LGBT civil rights movement. A defining account, this is the most complete and authoritative book of its kind.

By: Hugh Ryan, 2020, Paperback

Hugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer is a groundbreaking exploration of the LGBT history of Brooklyn, from the early days of Walt Whitman in the 1850s up through the queer women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and beyond. No other book, movie, or exhibition has ever told this sweeping story. Not only has Brooklyn always lived in the shadow of queer Manhattan neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Harlem, but there has also been a systematic erasure of its queer history―a great forgetting.

Ryan is here to unearth that history for the first time. In intimate, evocative, moving prose he discusses in new light the fundamental questions of what history is, who tells it, and how we can only make sense of ourselves through its retelling; and shows how the formation of the Brooklyn we know today is inextricably linked to the stories of the incredible people who created its diverse neighborhoods and cultures. Through them, When Brooklyn Was Queer brings Brooklyn’s queer past to life, and claims its place as a modern classic.

Through the eyes of publishing icon Michael Denneny, this cultural autobiography traces the evolution of the US’s queer community in the three decades post-Stonewall.

The Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s have been captured in minute detail, and rightly memorialized in books, on tv, and in film as pivotal and powerful moments in queer history. Yet what about the moments in between—the tumultuous decade post-Stonewall when the queer community’s vitality and creativity exploded across the country, even as the AIDS crisis emerged?

Michael Denneny was there for it all. As a founder and editor of the wildly influential magazine Christopher Street and later as the first openly gay editor at a major publishing house, Denneny critically shaped publishing around gay subjects in the 1970s and beyond. At St. Martin’s Press, he acquired a slew of landmark titles by gay authors—many for his groundbreaking Stonewall Inn Editions—propelling queer voices into the mainstream cultural conversation. On Christopher Street is Denneny’s time machine, going back to that heady period to lay out the unfolding geographies and storylines of gay lives and capturing the raw immediacy of his and his contemporaries’ daily lives as gay people in America. Through forty-one micro-chapters, he uses his journal writings, articles, interviews, and more from the 1970s and ‘80s to illuminate the twists and turns of a period of incomparable cultural ferment.

One of the few surviving voices of his generation, Denneny transports us back in time to share those vibrant in-between moments in gay lives—the joy, sorrow, ecstasy, and energy—across three decades of queer history.

2020 American Indian Youth Literature Young Adult Honor Book

2020 Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People,selected by National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and the Children’s Book Council

2019 Best-Of Lists: Best YA Nonfiction of 2019 (Kirkus Reviews) · Best Nonfiction of 2019 (School Library Journal) · Best Books for Teens (New York Public Library) · Best Informational Books for Older Readers (Chicago Public Library)
Spanning more than 400 years, this classic bottom-up history examines the legacy of Indigenous peoples’ resistance, resilience, and steadfast fight against imperialism.

Going beyond the story of America as a country “discovered” by a few brave men in the “New World,” Indigenous human rights advocate Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reveals the roles that settler colonialism and policies of American Indian genocide played in forming our national identity.

The original academic text is fully adapted by renowned curriculum experts Debbie Reese and Jean Mendoza, for middle-grade and young adult readers to include discussion topics, archival images, original maps, recommendations for further reading, and other materials to encourage students, teachers, and general readers to think critically about their own place in history.

“A highly informative, detailed, even thrilling account of how the Supreme Court arguments reshaped American law.”―Michael Bronkski, San Francisco Chronicle

No one could have predicted that the night of September 17, 1998, would be anything but routine in Houston, Texas. Even the call to police that a black man was "going crazy with a gun" was hardly unusual in this urban setting. Nobody could have imagined that the arrest of two men for a minor criminal offense would reverberate in American constitutional law, exposing a deep malignity in our judicial system and challenging the traditional conception of what makes a family. Indeed, when Harris County sheriff’s deputies entered the second-floor apartment, there was no gun. Instead, they reported that they had walked in on John Lawrence and Tyron Garner having sex in Lawrence’s bedroom.

So begins Dale Carpenter’s "gripping and brilliantly researched" Flagrant Conduct, a work nine years in the making that transforms our understanding of what we thought we knew about Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark Supreme Court decision of 2003 that invalidated America’s sodomy laws. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Carpenter has taken on the "gargantuan" task of extracting the truth about the case, analyzing the claims of virtually every person involved.

Carpenter first introduces us to the interracial defendants themselves, who were hardly prepared "for the strike of lightning" that would upend their lives, and then to the Harris County arresting officers, including a sheriff’s deputy who claimed he had "looked eye to eye" in the faces of the men as they allegedly fornicated. Carpenter skillfully navigates Houston’s complex gay world of the late 1990s, where a group of activists and court officers, some of them closeted themselves, refused to bury what initially seemed to be a minor arrest.

The author charts not only the careful legal strategy that Lambda Legal attorneys adopted to make the case compatible to a conservative Supreme Court but also the miscalculations of the Houston prosecutors who assumed that the nation’s extant sodomy laws would be upheld. Masterfully reenacting the arguments that riveted spectators and Justices alike in 2003, Flagrant Conduct then reaches a point where legal history becomes literature, animating a Supreme Court decision as few writers have done.

In situating Lawrence v. Texas within the larger framework of America’s four-century persecution of gay men and lesbians, Flagrant Conduct compellingly demonstrates that gay history is an integral part of our national civil rights story. 8 pages of illustrations

By: Micheal Waters (Author), 2024, Hardcover

Named a Most Anticipated Book by Esquire, Town & Country, and Electric Literature

"Michael Waters performs an Olympian act of storytelling, using the stories of these extraordinary athletes to explore in brilliant detail the struggle for understanding and equality." ―Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

The story of the early trans athletes and Olympic bureaucrats who lit the flame for today’s culture wars.

In December 1935, Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes.

In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany’s atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC’s nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender.

Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.

This book will ship on or after the release date of May 26, 2026

A revised and expanded edition of the first book to cover the entirety of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from pre-1492 to the present

In this new edition of A Queer History of the United States, Michael Bronski’s classic book now covers 500 years, bringing queer history into the 21st century and further illuminates how profoundly the LGBTQ+ life and people have shaped America.

Drawing upon primary documents, literature, and popular culture, Bronski weaves a comprehensive tapestry of LGBTQ+ history, providing startling examples of unknown or ignored aspects of our collective past.

From the ineffectiveness of sodomy laws in the colonies, to how rock music and youth culture unintentionally engendered the devastating backlash against gay rights in the late 1970s; from individuals such as Robert Treat Paine and Ezekiel Dodge, Harvard classmates in 1774 who formed a deep, loving relationship and wrote passionate love letters to one another to Lucy Hicks Andersen, a married African American socialite and celebrity chef in Oxnard, California, whose story appeared in Time magazine in 1945 after her transgender identity became known, Bronski covers an eclectic breadth of facts and stories.

This revised edition includes details on the evolution of the transgender liberation movement, the upsurge of vibrant queer movements of color, the groundbreaking emergence of new sexual and gender identities, and concludes by analyzing the current conservative backlash against LGBTQ rights, racial and social justice policies, and the drive to eradicate historical diversity.

Not simply about "gay history" it is about all American history, Bronski’s dynamic and revealing narrative radically reframes how we understand our past and, more important, our present.

The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America

Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian Kyle T. Mays argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in antiblackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present. He explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled for freedom, sometimes together, and sometimes apart. Whether to end African enslavement and Indigenous removal or eradicate capitalism and colonialism, Mays show how the fervor of Black and Indigenous peoples calls for justice have consistently sought to uproot white supremacy.

Mays uses a wide-array of historical activists and pop culture icons, “sacred” texts, and foundational texts like the Declaration of Independence and Democracy in America. He covers the civil rights movement and freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and explores current debates around the use of Native American imagery and the cultural appropriation of Black culture. Mays compels us to rethink both our history as well as contemporary debates and to imagine the powerful possibilities of Afro-Indigenous solidarity.

Includes an 8-page photo insert featuring Kwame Ture with Dennis Banks and Russell Means at the Wounded Knee Trials; Angela Davis walking with Oren Lyons after he leaves Wounded Knee, SD; former South African president Nelson Mandela with Clyde Bellecourt; and more.

An inclusive and landmark history, emphasizing how essential Asian American experiences are to any understanding of US history

Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. Reckoning with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence, award-winning historian Catherine Ceniza Choy presents an urgent social history of the fastest growing group of Americans. The book features the lived experiences and diverse voices of immigrants, refugees, US-born Asian Americans, multiracial Americans, and workers from industries spanning agriculture to healthcare.

Despite significant Asian American breakthroughs in American politics, arts, and popular culture in the twenty-first century, a profound lack of understanding of Asian American history permeates American culture. Choy traces how anti-Asian violence and its intersection with misogyny and other forms of hatred, the erasure of Asian American experiences and contributions, and Asian American resistance to what has been omitted are prominent themes in Asian American history. This ambitious book is fundamental to understanding the American experience and its existential crises of the early twenty-first century.

A “riveting” and “indispensable” (Alison Bechdel) cultural history of queer women’s lives in the second half of the twentieth century, told through six iconic spaces

For as long as queer women have existed, they’ve created gathering grounds where they can be themselves. From the intimate darkness of the lesbian bar to the sweaty camaraderie of the softball field, these spaces aren’t a luxury—they’re a necessity for queer women defining their identities. In A Place of Our Own, journalist June Thomas invites readers into six iconic lesbian spaces over the course of the last sixty years, including the rural commune, the sex toy boutique, the vacation spot, and the feminist bookstore.

Thomas blends her own experiences with archival research and rare interviews with pioneering figures like Elaine Romagnoli, Susie Bright, and Jacqueline Woodson. She richly illustrates the lives of the business owners, entrepreneurs, activists, and dreamers who shaped the long struggle for queer liberation. Thomas illuminates what is gained and lost in the shift from the exclusive, tight-knit women’s spaces of the ’70s toward today’s more inclusive yet more diffuse LGBTQ+ communities.

At once a love letter, a time capsule, and a bridge between generations of queer women, A Place of Our Own brings the history—and timeless present—of the lesbian community to vivid life.

by Kirsty Loehr: Paperback; 208 pages / English

[Oneworld Publications] A funny, bullshit-free and surprising history Queer families have always existed Even Sappho, the OG lesbian, had a daughter named Cleis, in honour of vaginas everywhere! For centuries, the women of ‘The Golden Orchid Society’ in Qing-dynasty China were getting married and raising daughters together – platonically, obviously... And Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson’s fabulously bisexual open marriage proved women really can have it all – a husband, two kids, a writing career and Virginia Woolf. Maybe you’re exploring your options. Maybe you don’t want kids but you have questions. Either way, Kirsty Loehr provides another rollicking guide to the ups and downs of queer parenthood through the ages.

A graphic memoir and adapted oral history of Unit 371, an inpatient AIDS care hospital unit in Chicago that was in existence from 1985 to 2000. Examines the human costs of caregiving and the role art can play in the grieving process.

In 1994, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, MK Czerwiec took her first nursing job, at Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago, as part of the caregiving staff of HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371. Taking Turns pulls back the curtain on life in the ward.

A shining example of excellence in the treatment and care of patients, Unit 371 was a community for thousands of patients and families affected by HIV and AIDS and the people who cared for them. This graphic novel combines Czerwiec’s memories with the oral histories of patients, family members, and staff. It depicts life and death in the ward, the ways the unit affected and informed those who passed through it, and how many look back on their time there today. Czerwiec joined Unit 371 at a pivotal time in the history of AIDS: deaths from the syndrome in the Midwest peaked in 1995 and then dropped drastically in the following years, with the release of antiretroviral protease inhibitors. This positive turn of events led to a decline in patient populations and, ultimately, to the closure of Unit 371. Czerwiec’s restrained, inviting drawing style and carefully considered narrative examine individual, institutional, and community responses to the AIDS epidemic―as well as the role that art can play in the grieving process.

Deeply personal yet made up of many voices, this history of daily life in a unique AIDS care unit is an open, honest look at suffering, grief, and hope among a community of medical professionals and patients at the heart of the epidemic.

By: Ibram X. Kendi (Author), Joel Christian Gill (Author), 2023, Graphic Novel

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A striking graphic novel edition of the National Book Award-winning history of how racist ideas have shaped American life—from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist.

NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD

Racism has persisted throughout history—but so have antiracist efforts to dismantle it. Through deep research and a gripping narrative that illuminates the lives of five key American figures, preeminent historian Ibram X. Kendi reveals how understanding and improving the world cannot happen without identifying and facing the racist forces that shape it.

In collaboration with award-winning historian and comic artist Joel Christian Gill, this stunningly illustrated graphic-novel adaptation of Dr. Kendi’s groundbreaking Stamped from the Beginning explores, with vivid clarity and dimensionality, the living history of America, and how we can learn from the past to work toward a more equitable, antiracist future.