For me, queerness has always been related to imagination. Like many of us, I grew up without a blueprint for a queer life. In the evangelical household I was raised in, I had to dream my queerness into existence, conjure a life that was forbidden to me, claim it because no one was ever going to give it to me. This has been true for so many of us, now and in the past, as we’ve existed outside of and beyond the boundaries of what our world calls normal and good. There is a long lineage of LGBTQ+ people who came before us, crashing against the barriers erected around them and finding ways to make their own lives, communities, and loves anyway.
There is so much of queer history we don’t know. It’s been erased, lost to time, pathologized and told by people other than us, never recorded in the first place. Each of the books on this list work to move and play within this fluidity, reimagining queer and trans history in the wide gaps between what was true and what we know. In their pages are previously untold stories, fictionalized imaginings based on real people, and present-day reflections on moments, stories, and even items from the past.
These books are flares sent up in the darkness. They are works of imagination and resistance. They plot the future forward as they dig their hands through the warm, wet soil of the past. They say the names of those we know and those who have been made invisible through time, history, and systems of oppression, who have been reduced to their carceral records or hidden inside a social worker’s report or the journal of a rent collector. They are the books that have shown me who my ancestors are, taught me about where I come from, connected me to a long lineage beyond my blood family.
This history gives me hope. Not because it is all beautiful. But because there is beauty, love, care, and connection amidst the struggle. There always has been. There always will be.
Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects edited by David Evans Frantz, Christina Linden, and Chris E. Vargas
Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects began as a series of gallery exhibitions and culminated in this book, where meaningful objects from the trans archives are paired with text by poets, scholars, activists, and historians. The book’s introduction shares a quote from writer Morgan M Page that frames the project: “Uncovering and sharing our histories is a powerful tool for helping us dream our way into futures we want to live.” The objects highlighted include a doughnut that may or may not have been thrown in a riot against the police a decade before Stonewall, a 1975 box of hair dye featuring Black trans model Tracey Africa Norman before discrimination halted her modeling career, a transsexual menace t-shirt worn at “a time when passing as cisgender was everything,” a two-thousand-year-old Indigenous clay being that confused archaeologists with its lack of conformity to binary gender, and many more. Without pretending to be a comprehensive accounting of trans past and culture, the images and accompanying writings explore, reconstruct, and reimagine trans hirstory—a hirstory that is expansive, dynamic, alive, and continues to be built today.
Blackouts by Justin Torres
In Blackouts, which won the 2023 National Book Award for fiction, Torres builds a nonlinear work of fiction around the history of a 1940s book that pathologized queerness, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. Juan Gay and the narrator, referred to affectionately as nene, met at a mental institution. The two friends reunite in the desert at a mysterious place known as the Palace ten years later when Juan is dying, and the novel takes the form of one long conversation between them. In Juan’s room is a copy of Sex Variants with thick black marker crossing through many of the lines. Through this erasure, the buried voices of the eighty queer people whose lives and histories were used to create this monstrous project are resurfaced, sharing a queer world that existed before Juan’s, before nene’s. The blackouts document pain and desire, love and fear, hope and oppression and freedom, all coming through this book that was intended to be a tool for their own erasure.
Lesbian Love Story by Amelia Possanza
Possanza was prompted to explore the lives and loves of historical lesbians as she craved more lesbians in her own life. She was looking to see the ways she loved reflected back to her, for blueprints of love from the past to offer a way forward in her own life. As Possanza combs through archives searching for little-known lesbian love stories, she starts to build a more visible lesbian life of her own. Her research introduces us to lesbians across time and identities, some of whom would have identified that way and some of whom never would: children’s toy inventor Mary Casal in the 1890s, dancer and activist Mabel Hampton in 1930s Harlem, athlete Babe Didrikson in the 1950s, needs-no-introduction Sappho, male impersonator Rusty Brown in the 1950s, Chicana feminist and activist Gloria Anzaldúa in the 1970s, and lesbian Amy Hoffman who cared for her friend Mike as he suffered and eventually died from AIDS in the 1990s. We’ll never really know how it felt for Mary to passionately kiss Juno in her hotel room, or Mabel to be arrested after being set up as a prostitute, or Rusty to do her Fred and Ginger act with her friend John, but through the scenes Possanza creates in Lesbian Love Story, we can imagine it all.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiences, like Lesbian Love Stories, is an intimate and heavily researched work of imagination. Hartman’s characters are young Black women in the early twentieth century. They are “riotous Black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals.” Some of them are queer, some are not. Some are well-known, like Gladys Bentley and Billie Holiday; others are ordinary and previously overlooked, like Hartman’s “chorus,” which she identifies as all the unnamed young women of the city trying to find a way to live and in search of beauty. But all are struggling to create lives on their own terms in a world that wants to press them into the oppressive shapes and forms it already has pre-cut for them. Hartman’s writing places us inside the lives of her characters, helping us imagine who they were, what they saw, what they felt, and how they moved through the world, wayward and beautiful, to create something wholly them.
After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
After Sappho blends fiction with nonfiction to reimagine the lives of queer figures like renowned performer Josephine Baker, writer and literary salon hostess Natalie Barney, and poet Lina Poletti, to name a few. Much like what has survived of Sappho’s poems, the novel is told in fragments and vignettes that circle around and narrow in on different women’s lives. At the heart of After Sappho is an exploration of women who lived queer, creative lives connected to themselves, their art, and each other. Inspired by Sappho, who Schwartz writes was “garlanded with girls” and lived “…the opposite/…daring,” the women set sail for islands, fall in and out of love, write poetry, take to the stage, leave their husbands, paint, attend salons at Natalie Barney’s house in Paris, and carve their own nonlinear paths in twentieth century Europe.
The Love That Dares: Letters of LGBTQ+ Love & Friendship Through History by Rachel Smith et al.
There is less reimagining here than in the other books on this list. The power of this book lies in two places: centering both platonic and romantic love in queer history, and inviting the reader to reimagine alongside the letters in ways other books on this list don’t necessarily give as much space for. With minimal context alongside each letter, what do you envision as you read? Who will these love letters make you think of in your own life? Who will you send a snapshot to or read them aloud with, passing the book on a picnic blanket under a tree? What will they inspire in your own life? Across these letters are portraits of obsession, love, fear, tenderness, and care. “I am more afraid than I have ever been in my life. Afraid of the totality of my desire for you,” Laura wrote to Madison in 1993. “I have always loved you, Pat, and wanted for you those things you wanted deeply for yourself,” Audre Lorde wrote to her friend in 1985. Together, the letters in this book paint a picture of the different ways love has looked—and could look—in queer communities.
The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison by Hugh Ryan
In the 20th century in Greenwich Village, across from the Stonewall Inn, was a women’s prison: The House of D. The prison, Ryan argues, helped make Greenwich Village queer, and the Village, in return, helped define queerness for America. Where before we’ve mostly had data instead of stories of individual incarcerated people, Ryan reconstructs the experiences of the working-class queer women and transmasculine people housed inside the now-defunct prison, bringing them to life from their carceral records. We meet Charlotte, a queer woman who fell in love with a celebrity criminal; Big Cliff, a transmasculine person who was incarcerated for his gender identity; Serena, an ambitious Black girl who would eventually end up involuntarily incarcerated in a mental institution for most of the 1950s; Honora, who was arrested for prostitution after her butch-femme relationship and the financial security that came with it dissolved, and many others.
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