I wrote much of Lesbian Love Story during the Covid-19 lockdown, when I was desperate to build queer community inside the walls of my own home. From my living room, with the cat making the occasional interjection as she strutted across the keyboard, I slowly connected with a community of archivists at libraries, universities, and volunteer-run institutions across the country. Through the research, I also built a community of dykes, most of them long dead. Their voices, whether on warbly oral history tapes or in written interviews or scrawled across tattered postcards, filled up the empty rooms of my apartment.
I was also desperate to find romantic love in a time of isolation, and I was looking to these dykes to show me the way. Just a few months before the pandemic hit, my first live-in relationship had ended. I scooped up the cat and moved into the first apartment I found online, not knowing that it would soon become my entire world: my office, my study carrel, my movie theater and my mess hall, my Zoom date spot.
What I didn’t expect was for these dykes to illuminate an entirely different kind of love. Sure, many of my subjects had sustained years-long romantic relationships in their lifetimes, even when it put them at risk. For many of them, though, the radical power of collective queer love was the heartbeat of their stories.
As a reader who grew up on a healthy diet of ’90s romcoms, I’ve often wondered why we give so much power to romantic love. What about the stories of community love, and what people, particularly queer people, can accomplish together? These books, both fiction and nonfiction, center the love of queer communities, reminding readers of what collective power has achieved in the past, and to imagine what it could do in the future.
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
Maupin’s beloved series, which began as a serialized column in The San Francisco Chronicle in 1976 and has since inspired two separate TV adaptations, tells the story of the residents of 28 Barbary Lane, owned by the mysterious and benevolent Anna Madrigal. Some might consider kind-hearted and gay Michael Tolliver, “Mouse,” to be the main character (and a possible stand-in for the author), but together Mouse’s best friend, uptight, Midwestern Mary Ann, his roommate Mona, and “the true mother of them all,” Mrs. Madrigal make for an unforgettable, inextricable ensemble. While seemingly light and easy to reach on the surface, Maupin’s characters confront deeper questions about queerness, community, and family that still resonate today. If you really breeze through this one, don’t worry, there are nine more books waiting for you, including the most recent, Mona of the Manor.
The Famous Lady Lovers: Black Women & Queer Desire Before Stonewall by Cookie Woolner
This heavily researched account of how queer Black women lived between the wars centers their intimate lives. Woolner uses “Black newspapers, vice reports, blues songs, memoirs, sexology case studies, manuscripts, and letters” to reconstruct the romantic relationships of both well-known and everyday women alike, as well as the broader networks these queer women formed to offer up safety and support to pursue their desires and resist social norms. Her history takes readers out onto the public stage of the entertainment industry, where lady lovers like Bessie Smith and Gladys Bentley not only met other queer women but also enjoyed economic success, and into private homes, where people hosted rent parties to raise money for the exorbitant amounts their landlords demanded. Through these lives and stories, it quickly becomes clear that for the lady lovers, having communities of Black, queer women created space to break the mold of heterosexual expectations.
My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson
A Lambda Literary Award finalist, Newson’s debut novel brings to life some of the most inspiring activists that came out of the AIDS crisis, including Larry Kramer and Bayard Rustin. These real-life figures are seen through the eyes of 17-year-old Trey Singleton, who has run from his family and his trust fund in Indianapolis and arrived in New York City just as ACT UP is taking shape. What follows is Trey’s coming-of-age story as he goes cruising at Mt. Morris bathhouse, caretakes for dying patients at a makeshift hospice center set up inside someone’s apartment, and risks arrest at an ACT UP protest. This isn’t the story of one individual’s triumph, but rather a portrait of an entire community’s resistance to a government death sentence.
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz
A cult classic that is as beloved as it is difficult to parse. Muñoz, now deceased, applies the theories of some heavyweight Marxist thinkers to everything from the predominantly gay male practice of cruising to the artwork of Andy Warhol to the poetry of Frank O’Hara to complicate the purely concrete definition of Utopia. Rather than imagining a perfect world on some faraway island, or simply dismissing such an idea as naively optimistic, Muñoz finds pockets of utopian thinking in the past and identifies them both as critiques of a harsh, capitalist reality and proof of why we shouldn’t give up on yearning for something better. He dismisses “community” as a concept that’s become too mainstream and instead advocates for the “singular plural,” which I’ve come to see as the coexistence of individual and communal drives. Don’t worry, even if you don’t follow every word, every twisted clause, you’ll still walk away with a sharper vision of what our future world could look like, and a burning desire to hang on to that vision.
Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade
This handy little how-to guide can fit into some of the smallest backpacks and fanny packs I own. That’s not its only selling point, but I consider it an important one as someone who never wants to get caught without a book. Written in response to the rise of mutual aid groups during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Spade, a law professor and activist, offers a practical guide to starting your own mutual aid group, complete with worksheets to tackle. Logistics aside, it also underscores the differences between volunteering, the nonprofit industrial complex, and true mutual aid, which, Spade argues, is the only way to effect true change.
Moby-Dick: or, The Whale by Herman Melville
This book has been taught and recommended and analyzed and adapted so many times that I hesitate to give it a spot here. I’ll breeze through the usual English teacher talking points: Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal quest to find and kill the white whale that ate his leg; the pages and pages Melville devotes to now mostly outdated observations about various species of whale, most of them lifted from scientific texts of the time in a manner some might call plagiarism today; the religious imagery and allegories; the allusions to Shakespeare. Here’s what I haven’t heard enough about: the collective effort it takes to keep a ship afloat, especially one as big as the Pequod. (I gave boat work a try last fall as a volunteer aboard the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater and only lasted a week.) It’s a far cry from utopia, but men of all races work side by side, with their hierarchy structured not by the color of their skin but by their ability, entirely unlike in the society they left back on land. The chapter “A Squeeze of the Hand,” where our narrator Ishmael works alongside other men to squeeze the lumps out of spermaceti taken from the whale’s head case and often grasps the hands of his crew mates by mistake, is an ode to collective labor. (And evidence enough to consider the novel a queer text.) By the end (apologies for the spoiler, but the novel has been out for over 100 years), the story becomes a parable for the ills that befall a community when one man’s individual ambition goes unchecked.
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Peters’ groundbreaking novel, which sought to (and succeeded in, if the critical acclaim and awards attention is as good a measure as any) depict the everyday lives of trans women without explanation, is really the love story between three people: Ames, who has recently detransitioned; his ex-girlfriend Reese; and Ames’ new lover (and boss) Katrina. When Ames was Amy and still with Reese, the only thing missing from their boring, perfect life together was a child. But Katrina’s announcement that she’s pregnant with his child isn’t the happy ending he imagined. Is there a way, Reese wonders, for all three of them to raise a child together? What ensues is a tragicomic exploration of gender and family, complete with a scorned lover chase scene fueled by iPhone location sharing. There’s also a wonderful moment at a transfemme picnic in Prospect Park, which I swear I’ve passed by in real life, that’s a love scene all its own.
Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison by Hugh Ryan
Queer historian Hugh Ryan uses the history of one prison—the Women’s House of Detention, which once stood in Manhattan’s West Village—to tell the broader story of America’s carceral system, and to make a queer case for abolition. Through some enviable archival sleuthing, Ryan reconstructs the lives of the prison’s inmates from its creation in 1929 to its closure in 1974, connecting their individual stories to bigger moments in our nation’s history, like the rise of fingerprinting, which became a tool for branding some inmates as lifelong criminals. Through these stories, Ryan shows that the inmates had been incarcerated because the judicial system wanted to remove them from society, as if their actions were determined by genetics, rather than the systems of oppression they lived under. Finding ways to sneak into each other’s cells for both platonic company and physical intimacy Riots and other collective actions taken by inmates
People in Trouble by Sarah Schulman
Recently republished in the UK, Sarah Schulman’s 1990 novel offers up another love triangle, this time at the height of the AIDS crisis in New York City. Molly, a young lesbian who spends one “suffocating” summer attending the funerals of friends who have died of AIDS, grocery shopping for her friends living with AIDS, and organizing with ACT UP so that more of her friends might live, strikes up an affair Kate, an older artist whose husband Peter is dismayed by the way the city is changing all around them. The juxtaposition of the trio’s personal choices against the backdrop of a community’s collective activism illuminates the radical power of a broader kind of love. “‘Here we are trying to have a run-of-the-mill illicit lesbian love affair,’ Molly said. ‘And all around us people are dying and asking for money.’” For bonus points, you can also read Schulman’s more recent book, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, an oral history account of the same time period.
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