Pride 2022 Reading List

Happy Pride Month!

Celebrate and become more deeply informed about LGBTQ+ histories throughout the coming month with the following recommended reading list titles, and take 40% off using our centennial anniversary sale promo code 01DAH40 when purchasing direct from uncpress.org.

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Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City
By Samantha Rosenthal

“A brilliantly blended book that, much like queerness itself, transcends genre and blurs boundaries. Using memoir to look outward and history to look inward, Rosenthal makes theory concrete, finds the past in the present, and brings Roanoke’s overlooked queer demimonde to beautiful life.”—Samantha Allen, author of Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States

Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism
By Allyson P. Brantley

“This impressive book sheds new light on the history of intersectional activism and conservative politics, as well as labor and business history. It is one of the most clarifying, empirically rich analyses of post-1960s activism ever written.” – Pacific Historical Review

Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism
By Taylor G. Petrey

Information-packed, with a forceful thesis and jargon-free prose, this is an important contribution to Mormon studies as well as a convincing consideration of the ways religions construct and maintain frameworks. Any academic studying the intersection of religious practice and progressive social change will want to pick this up.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life
By Troy R. Saxby

“This detailed biography on an underrated social and political activist results in an ambitious undertaking by Saxby, whose emphasis on Murray’s private life tells a history of trials based on personal experiences and records.”—Library Journal

Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers
By Anne Balay

“Written in a lucid style punctuated by the language of truckers themselves, this is an engaging narrative that must be viewed as a major contribution to understanding the impact of (de)regulation, the trucking industry, and the lives of black, gay, female, indigenous, Mexican, and trans workers.”—Labor

Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History
By E. Patrick Johnson

“Johnson lays the foundation for other scholars to engage a younger generation of black queer southern women. For scholars, students, and teachers in southern, African American, gender and sexuality, and oral and folklore studies, Johnson’s oral history will be indispensable for future interventions.”—Journal of Southern History

Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940
By Julio Capó Jr.

“Eschews the earlier scholarly impulse in lesbian and gay studies to produce histories of same-sex desire and community-building without grappling with how gender, race, and class inequities structured differential access to spaces of leisure and transgression where those formations might have emerged.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism
By J. Samaine Lockwood

“Lockwood deftly reveals how much ‘spectral fusions’ performed the most intimate historicism of all, as past women’s lives haunted and inhabited the very bodies of their unmarried subjects”—American Historical Review

Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers
By Anne Balay

“Balay’s life-changing book is a compelling 192-page study exploring how sexuality and gender overlap in the sprawling steel mills of Northwest Indiana. . . . Groundbreaking.”—Chicago Post-Tribune