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Booklists Recommendations

Pride Month

by Public Service Associate Nichole

While Pride festivities are mostly still on hold this year, you can still show support for the LGBTQ+ community by reading, watching, and listening to their stories with your BPL card.

BOOKS

Check out Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters which follows Reese, a trans woman who seemingly had it all. The only thing missing? A child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Ames isn’t happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames’s boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she’s pregnant with his baby—and that she’s not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he’s been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together?

Or get immersed in the true-crime tale Last Call by Elon Green. The Townhouse Bar, midtown, July 1992: The piano player seems to know every song ever written, the crowd belts out the lyrics to their favorites, and a man standing nearby is drinking a Scotch and water. The man strikes the piano player as forgettable. He looks bland and inconspicuous. Not at all what you think a serial killer looks like. But that’s what he is, and tonight, he has his sights set on a gray-haired man. He will not be his first victim. Nor will he be his last. The Last Call Killer preyed upon gay men in New York in the ‘80s and ‘90s and had all the hallmarks of the most notorious serial killers. Yet because of the sexuality of his victims, the skyhigh murder rates, and the AIDS epidemic, his murders have been almost entirely forgotten. This gripping true-crime narrative tells the story of the Last Call Killer and the decades-long chase to find him.

FILMS

Enjoy cult-classics like The Birdcage and But I’m a Cheerleader, or settle in for 49 Pulses a documentary chronicling the June 2016 attack on Orlando’s Pulse nightclub which resulted in over 100 victims shot and 49 lives lost.

MUSIC

Dance around to classics like Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets” or jam out to Sam Smith’s latest album Love Goes.

  • Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John | CD / digital
  • Hey, I’m Just Like You by Tegan and Sarah | CD / digital
  • Love Goes by Sam Smith | CD / digital

Whatever you do this month, celebrate the lives of our LGBTQ+ friends and storytellers because without them, our lives wouldn’t be nearly as colorful!