I talk a lot about using your local library, and as a person with a fantastic local library, I am privileged in that push. Unfortunately, it has become apparent in the new year that the budget for audiobooks has shifted. Whether due to inflation, changes in funding, or something else, my local library has not been buying as many audiobooks, which affects me as an audiobook reader deeply.
The secondary service I rely on after the library is, without a doubt, Libro.fm. So, if you want to help me get access to more books, and also enjoy an audiobook service I genuinely believe in, check out my referral link. If you use it, I get credits, which I use to expand my digital library when the library rejects my suggestions.
To discuss Elagabalus, one thing must be noted before all other things; there are almost no reliable accounts of her life. An empress who quickly became known as one of the most reviled leaders in the Roman Empire has a lot of different sources saying a lot of different things about the reign of a bisexual transgender empress from the years 218 to 222.
Zheng Xie, a remarkable figure in Chinese art history, was a talented painter, calligrapher, and poet known for his depictions of orchids, bamboo, and stones and his social consciousness. Born into poverty, he was adamant in his support of others facing the same struggle, even at the expense of his own position and status. After he became a magistrate in Shandong, he eventually found himself critical of life as an official. His refusal to fawn over his superiors and the criticism he later faced after building a shelter for houseless people left too deep a scar on him and led to his resignation after over a decade of work.
After his departure, he found himself deeply entrenched in his art. His art and calligraphy captured the essence of the natural world, blending meticulous brushwork with a profound appreciation for the beauty of his surroundings. He is known today for his repeated use of orchids, bamboo, and stones in his paintings. Orchids were, in fact, such a common motif in his work that they influenced the style of calligraphy he created. He called his style “six-and-a-half script.” It was a sort of hybrid script in every way; blunt but fluid, formal yet clerical, cursive and semicursive. He eventually became one of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou and even worked as an official calligrapher and painter for a short time.
He also found an interest in literature and poetry and preferred to write about ordinary people. Although he is most known for his paintings and calligraphy, his poetry is where his love and affection for men come through most clearly.
Created by, for, and about lesbians, On Our Backs came about in the tumult of the “feminist sex wars,” a deeply polarizing internal debate in the feminist movement regarding sex, sexuality, pornography, erotica, and BDSM. Divided into sex-positive and anti-porn camps, the sex wars saw rabid disagreement on what the nature of things like pornography were doing for lesbians and for society as a whole. Many feminists argued that pornography and erotica were inherently objectifying and abusive. Writer and theorist Andrea Dworkin argued that not just pornography but heterosexual sex as a whole was a “means of physiologically making a woman inferior,” and claimed that anyone aroused by porn that depicted sexualized violence (whether real or scripted) “was evidence of a mind that’s absorbed the propaganda of the patriarchy and eroticized the subjugation of women.” On the flipside, sex-positive feminists argued that pornography itself was not an inherent evil, but rather its morality was dependent upon the creators and participants. Rubin, one of the founders of the lesbian feminist BDSM group Samois, believed sexual liberation was a key component of the feminist movement and that public expressions of female sexuality were crucial in asserting women’s existence as fully realized beings.
Glyn Philpot was a 20th Century English painter most well known for his portrait work featuring his contemporaries. Born in 1884 in London, Philpot studied his media first in London and later in Paris. He was a relatively successful artist, enough so that he was able to live and travel on the income he made. Unfortunately, both because of the time in which he worked and the fact that he was himself Catholic, some of his works got negative attention and were removed from their galleries, which led to financial struggles he never quite recovered from.
But, as we’ve talked about throughout the course of this project, there is rarely just tragedy in queer history. There are always pockets of joy, and those are just as worth remembering. Later in his life, Philpot began a relationship with Vivian Forbes, a fellow artist with whom he would spend over a decade of his life. Philpot never regained his former popularity or income, but he continued to paint and his works are still exhibited today.
Yes! I will admit, I don’t have a lot on the hippie community, but I do have a lot for late sixties America and U.K.! Since I mostly write about stories outside of America and U.K., I just have books to recommend that I have read:
Reminder to Request Queer Books from your Local Library
If you’re panicking about the state of the world, one of the easiest ways to make a difference right now is engaging with your library.
There is a reason that libraries are targetted by fascists. They are sites of immesurable power. Both just on their own, and also because of their patrons. So first step is, if you haven’t, sign up for a library card ASAP.
Next, find out how your library takes requests (almost all libraries do), and start filling out the forms. Make it a ritual, go through queer books that interest you (here is an affiliate link for 165 queer books to get you started), and request as many as you can. It also helps if you take queer books out. Both digitally and physically.
Many libraries have a system in place where they have to rebuy the rights to a digital copy of a book after a certain amount of borrows. This is not contingent on you reading every single book you check out. No one will know if you read it or not. Though, I will admit that reading the books is also a good strategy to keep you invested in this very important discussion.
Regardless of your personal reading habits, you have space to make real change in your community with just a small amount of effort. Borrowing and requesting queer books backs up the irrefutable fact that queer stories are worth telling, and it pays queer authors for their work. I will say it until my face is blue, request queer books, read queer books, and engage with your local library.
Seeing generative AI in queer spaces is chilling for a lot of reasons. Not least among them being that it’s an easy way to edge out queer creators who are already in a precarious position, facing book bans and attacks from all sides.
As a queer history resource, watching an AI try and fill the roll that has taken so long to carve out for actual people, is disheartening. It’s great to know that there is demand for queer history resources, but after so many queer people have worked so hard to build a space for themselves, it feels disrespectful to watch that spot be filled by machines.
Queer people have won the battle in a way, convinced the world that our stories are worthwhile. I suppose it shouldn’t be shocking to see that the response is to try and find a way to not compensate queer people for any of their work and value.
Masterfully blending elements of psychological suspense and true crime, Jessica Knoll–author of the bestselling novel Luckiest Girl Alive and the writer behind the Netflix adaption starring Mila Kunis–delivers a new and exhilarating thriller in Bright Young Women. The book opens on a Saturday night in 1978, hours before a soon-to-be-infamous murderer descends upon a Florida sorority house with deadly results. The lives of those who survive, including sorority president and key witness, Pamela Schumacher, are forever changed. Across the country, Tina Cannon is convinced her missing friend was targeted by the man papers refer to as the All-American Sex Killer–and that he’s struck again. Determined to find justice, the two join forces as their search for answers leads to a final, shocking confrontation.
Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s-1990s explores the history of gay, lesbian, and non-heterosexual people in the Communist Party in the United States.
The Communist Party banned lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people from membership beginning in 1938 when it cast them off as “degenerates.” It persisted in this policy until 1991. During this 60-year ban, gays and lesbians who did join the Communist Party were deeply closeted within it, as well as in their public lives as both queer and Communist. By the late 1930s, the Communist Party had a membership approaching 100,000 and tens of thousands more people moved in its orbit through the Popular Front against fascism, anti-racist organizing, especially in the south, and its widely read cultural magazine, The New Masses. Based on a decade of archival research, correspondence, and interviews, Bettina Aptheker explores this history, also pulling from her own experience as a closeted lesbian in the Communist Party in the 1960s and ‘70s. Ironically, and in spite of this homophobia, individual Communists laid some of the political and theoretical foundations for lesbian and gay liberation and women’s liberation, and contributed significantly to peace, social justice, civil rights, and Black and Latinx liberation movements.
This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and general readers in political history, gender studies, and the history of sexuality.
I talk a lot about using your local library, and as a person with a fantastic local library, I am privileged in that push. Unfortunately, it has become apparent in the new year that the budget for audiobooks has shifted. Whether due to inflation, changes in funding, or something else, my local library has not been buying as many audiobooks, which affects me as an audiobook reader deeply.
The secondary service I rely on after the library is, without a doubt, Libro.fm. So, if you want to help me get access to more books, and also enjoy an audiobook service I genuinely believe in, check out my referral link. If you use it, I get credits, which I use to expand my digital library when the library rejects my suggestions.
We loved reading with y'all last year and wanted a way to include you a bit more in the coming year! So we will still have the polls, but I was looking at book club ideas to see if any of them would fit into the project and wasn’t in love with any of what I saw. In the end, I was struck by inspiration because of my love for Booktube and queer Scotts!
Watching Literary Diversions book bingo board, I realized we could do something similar in the MQH community! So here are the rules:
Fill in squares through the year with your reads
When the filled-in squares make up a full line, you win! And we will be releasing a little digital reward for the people who do win
One book can count for multiple prompts
If you choose to join me, my overall goal is to blackout the whole sheet! I will update you on this journey most months and look forward to hearing how you are doing!
We have a Discord channel specifically for discussing the bingo board. This channel is for patrons, and we will keep each other updated there.
If you’re not a patron, please keep me updated anyways by tagging MQH on social media with your journey! (Feel free to repost the board, but please do so while tagging Making Queer History)
If y'all have any questions, feel free to ask. Otherwise, please screenshot/download this sheet and join me in 2025 in reading very queer books!
Every year we make a calendar of dates that have particular significance to queer history. It has always been a pleasure project and hasn’t made us much money, so when we made a Google Calendar plug-in, we made it pay-what-you-can. I’m grateful we did because it means anyone can access this now.
To be clear, this is more than Pride Month; this has near-daily reminders of queer history. Birthdates of people you may not recognize (though we encourage you to learn more about them on our website). This doesn’t address everything. Google also removed Black History Month, Indigenous People Month, Jewish American Heritage Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage Month. We have many of them on our calendar, but we can’t promise we have everything Google got rid of, as this was made with no clue that Google would do this.
Regardless, we wanted to put this resource out there in response to the news. Preserving queer history is a community responsibility, and we are grateful to share any tools that we have.
A heart-breaking and hilarious memoir about the author’s fight to be true to themselfWINNER OF THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE 2020WINNER OF A SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD
Amrou knew they were gay when, aged ten, they first laid eyes on Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. It was love at first sight.
Amrou’s parents weren’t so happy…
From that moment on, Amrou began searching in all the wrong places for ways to make their divided self whole again.
Life as a Unicorn is a hilarious yet devastating story of a search for belonging, following the painful and surprising process of transforming from a god-fearing Muslim boy to a queer drag queen, strutting the stage in seven-inch heels and saying the things nobody else dares to ….
Zheng Xie, a remarkable figure in Chinese art history, was a talented painter, calligrapher, and poet known for his depictions of orchids, bamboo, and stones and his social consciousness. Born into poverty, he was adamant in his support of others facing the same struggle, even at the expense of his own position and status. After he became a magistrate in Shandong, he eventually found himself critical of life as an official. His refusal to fawn over his superiors and the criticism he later faced after building a shelter for houseless people left too deep a scar on him and led to his resignation after over a decade of work.
After his departure, he found himself deeply entrenched in his art. His art and calligraphy captured the essence of the natural world, blending meticulous brushwork with a profound appreciation for the beauty of his surroundings. He is known today for his repeated use of orchids, bamboo, and stones in his paintings. Orchids were, in fact, such a common motif in his work that they influenced the style of calligraphy he created. He called his style “six-and-a-half script.” It was a sort of hybrid script in every way; blunt but fluid, formal yet clerical, cursive and semicursive. He eventually became one of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou and even worked as an official calligrapher and painter for a short time.
He also found an interest in literature and poetry and preferred to write about ordinary people. Although he is most known for his paintings and calligraphy, his poetry is where his love and affection for men come through most clearly.
