LibGuides: LGBTQIA Resources: Suggested Reading

Non-fiction

Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein
ISBN: 9780415860901

Publication Date: 2013-10-23

Gender Outlaw is the work of a woman who has been through some changes--a former heterosexual male, a one-time Scientologist and IBM salesperson, now a lesbian woman writer and actress who makes regular rounds on the TV (so to speak) talk shows. In her book, Bornstein covers the "mechanics" of her surgery, everything you've always wanted to know about gender (but were too confused to ask) addresses the place and politics of the transgendered and intterogates the questions of those who give the subject little thought, creating questions of her own.
Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg
ISBN: 0807079405

Publication Date: 1996-05-01

"In this fascinating personal journey through history, Leslie Feinberg - one of the most prominent transgender rights activists today - unearths a vast body of evidence that throughout history there have always been people who defy cultural boundaries of sex and gender." "During an embattled childhood and teenage years as a gender outlaw, Feinberg began a search for others struggling to assert an identity. What s/he found was a long tradition of individuals fighting back against injustice - from Joan of Arc to the Welsh peasants who cross-dressed to protest taxes, from the Black and Latina drag queens who led the Stonewall rebellion to transsexual parents fighting for custody today..."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The Persistent Desire by Joan Nestle (Editor)
ISBN: 1555831907

Publication Date: 1992-05-01

A Femme-Butch Reader A groundbreaking anthology about femme and butch identities in the lesbian community.

Fiction

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel From the author of Fun Home -- the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and others For twenty-five years Bechdel’s path-breaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in award-winning volumes (with a quarter of a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers, and translated into many languages. Now, at last, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For gathers a “rich, funny, deep and impossible to put down” (Publishers Weekly) selection from all eleven Dykes volumes. Here too are sixty of the newest strips, never before publishedin book form. Settle in to this wittily illustrated soap opera (Bechdel calls it “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel”) of the lives, loves, and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city that may or may not be Minneapolis. Her brilliantly imagined countercultural band of friends -- academics, social workers, bookstore clerks -- fall in and out of love, negotiate friendships, raise children, switch careers, and cope with aging parents. Bechdel fuses high and low culture -- from foreign policy to domestic routine, hot sex to postmodern theory -- in a serial graphic narrative “suitable for humanists of all persuasions.”
ISBN: 9780618968800

Publication Date: 2008-11-12
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
ISBN: 0374400113

Publication Date: 2007-02-20

This groundbreaking book, first published in 1982, is the story of two teenage girls whose friendship blossoms into love and who, despite pressures from family and school that threaten their relationship, promise to be true to each other and their feelings."
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
ISBN: 9780802135162

Publication Date: 1997-08-20

Winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-out novel from Winterson, the acclaimed author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of God’s elect, but as this budding evangelical comes of age, and comes to terms with her preference for her own sex, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household crumbles.