Recommended Reading: A Symmetry, by Ari Banias
Inside the refuse of our pre-/mid-/post-apocalyptic age, Ari Banias revels in the beauty hidden outside the reach of capitalism’s ugly hand—sometimes discovered in his microscope’s lens (“a large tree tosses its wig a little”), sometimes
Recommended Reading: Punch Me Up to the Gods, by Brian Broome
In his memoir Punch Me Up to the Gods, Brian Broome chronicles growing up gay and Black in 1980s Ohio and how his search for love and belonging led him to Pittsburgh and beyond that
Recommended Reading: Racial Erotics, by C. Winter Han
Racial Erotics: Gay Men of Color, Sexual Racism, and the Politics of Desire argues that, of course, white supremacy doesn’t end the moment gay men cross the threshold into bedrooms, bars, and virtual meet-ups. Armed
Recommended Reading: Antiman, by Rajiv Mohabir
Mixing poetry, transcripts of spoken stories, and first-person narrative, Rajiv Mohabir first probes and later peels away the multiple layers of racism, colonialism, xenophobia, and queer hatred that have long kept him from knowing the
Recommended Reading: Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, by Jeremy Atherton Lin
The 2020s, so far, have erupted in a profound culture quake, with little to tether individuals to the world before pandemic, uprising, and insurrection arrested the nation. The desire to be bound to a fixed
Recommended Reading: Bessie Smith, by Jackie Kay
In this meditative improvisation between biography and memoir, Scottish lesbian poet of color, Jackie Kay, reflects on Bessie Smith’s hardscrabble early life in Tennessee, the successful career she made and her transcendent artistry, while charting
Recommended Reading: The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel
The Atlantic calls Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength “quietly astonishing,” and that it is. While the book purports to be about athleticism, Bechdel’s narrative unfolds and opens onto much bigger questions about the
Recommended Reading: Mouths of Rain, edited by Briona Simone Jones
If any book is to have unifying potential and power, its spiritual and erotic core undivided from its politics, Mouths of Rain, An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought is such a volume. Anchored by such