10 Pride Essentials

Check out these 10 pieces of print and multimedia to better understand the varied experiences of the LGBTQ community!

art: multicolor vertical stripes

The following recommendations are part of the larger project from the Division of Inclusion, Diversity & Equity: Resources for Identity Education. We also suggest browsing the wonderfully comprehensive list 51 Books for the 51st Anniversary of Stonewall!

Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, by C. Riley Snorton. Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-19th century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials, Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable.

Black Trans* Lives Matter, TEDxCSU, March 2019: Dr. D-L Stewart, higher education scholar, explores what their life and the world would look like if Black Trans* Lives mattered. Race, gender, social class, and disability all intersect to shape Black Trans* lives. How would social institutions, such as education, law, healthcare, religion, and family be different? Available on TED.

Borderlands by Gloria E. Anzaldúa. Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa’s experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. Borderlands / La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a “border” is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. 

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith. Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the prison industrial complex. Stanley and Smith offer a new understanding of how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/ queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together.

Normal life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, by Dean Spade. Dean Spade presents revelatory critiques of the legal equality framework for social change, explodes assumptions about what legal rights can do for marginalized populations, and describes transformative resistance processes and formations that address the root causes of harm and violence.

Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism, by Uriel Quesada, Letitia Gomez, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz. Comprising essays and oral history interviews that present the experiences of fourteen activists across the United States and in Puerto Rico, the book offers a new perspective on the history of LGBT mobilization and activism. The activists discuss subjects that shed light on their broad-ranging experiences of being racialized and discriminated against, fighting for access to health care during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and struggling for awareness.

Queer (In) Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, by Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock. Drawing on years of research, activism, and legal advocacy, Queer (In)Justice is a searing examination of queer experiences as “suspects,” defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, the authors prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities.

Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, by Janet Mock. In Redefining Realness, Janet Mock describes her life as a transgender woman, from childhood to adulthood. Mock opens the book with a scene from 2009, where she starts to tell her boyfriend Aaron that she is transgender and then starts telling her story from childhood. Mock said she wrote the book for transgender girls of color, particularly for women like herself, and the book has connected with readers on a national scale, becoming a best-seller. The complexity in representation of queer people of color has earned it widespread critical acclaim.

Unapologetic: A Black, queer, and feminist mandate for radical movements, by Charlene Carruthers. Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist.

Visible: Out of Television by Ryan White: A documentary miniseries about the representation of LGBTQ+ people in television, both on-screen and behind the camera. Available on Apple.