hello lake county library! i’m a library assistant out of utah, and i’ve volunteered to put together our pride display this year since i’m the only queer person on the team. while i have a lot of support from our wonderful director, we’re in an area with much conflict and many book challenges.
do you have suggestions for good pride display books? especially those featuring transgender people. since we won’t ever make the challengers happy, my main hope for the display is to show the quiet queers in my community that we live, write, and matter, and that there’s a person in this building who will show up for them. thank you for any suggestions you may have.
How exciting! To get the best advice, I sent this one over to Max, who creates the Pride Month display at our largest branch every year. Here's his advice:
For my Pride displays, I typically steer more towards educational titles about queer history and key figures. Since our library is in Northwest Indiana (right outside Chicago) we have a lot of books about LGBTQ+ life in the Chicagoland area. So if there are any books that discuss queer culture and history in Utah, that'd be useful in showing patrons the long legacy of queerness in their area. For more specific recommendations, some titles I've used are The LGBTQ+ History Book from the DK Big Ideas series, A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski (which also has a young readers' version), and The Book of Pride by Mason Funk. As the names suggest, these are all about queer history through the ages or about the Queer Liberation Movement. Another popular one is The Queens' English by Chloe Davis; since many people, especially young folks and teens, get to know queer culture via the slang that filters into media or memes, I always think it's useful for folks to learn the context of popular queer phrases and how these connect to larger histories. Looking at trans experience, a couple books I really like are Trans + and The Trans Teen Survival Guide. Both of these provide social and medical advice for trans youth. There are other titles that speak more to personal experiences from trans individuals, like Growing Up Trans by Dr. Linda Herriot, Out! by vlogger Miles Mckenna, and The T Guide by drag performers Gigi Gorgeous and Gottmik. Finally, here's a quick random list of other titles that have been crowd-pleasers on my displays:
Felix Ever After
Simon and The Homo Sapiens Agenda
Leah On The Offbeat
Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me
The Magic Fish
The Guncle
Queer - 2nd Edition
Transgender History
Beyond Magenta
Beyond the Gender Binary
A Quick & Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns
A Quick & Easy Guide to Queer & Trans Identities
I could keep going, but hopefully this gives a good jumping-off point.
-Max
