Happy Pride Month!

June is LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) Month! The origin and heart of Pride Month is in honoring the Manhattan Stonewall riots of 1969 – a major turning point for gay and lesbian civil liberties in the United States (information partially gathered from the Library of Congress). Pride Month is also a time to celebrate America’s rich sexual and gender diversity through parades and large scale peaceful gatherings. America’s LGBT community has an incredible history and its members contribute to all parts of society. In celebrating diversity, here are five items you can check out from FDL to learn more about our LGBT community:

  1. This Book is Gay by James Dawson. This book lives in the YA section at FDL, but is accessible to all ages and orientations. This is a series of first hand accounts of LGBT life, with advice and information on topics like coming out, labels and stereotypes, and living your best life.
  2. Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights by Ann Bausum. Stonewall is a very specific history of the state of gay rights in America. It focuses on the Stonewall Inn and the riot of 1969 that started the push for LGBT rights that we are still fighting for today.
  3. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Some of you might already be familiar with Bechdel’s name from the Bechdel Test, an assessment of how well women in fiction can converse with each other by talking about things other than men. Fun Home is a biographical graphic novel about Bechdel’s own coming out in college and the discovery that her father was also gay.
  4. Redefining Realness by Janet Mock. With Redefining Realness, Mock has written not only an autobiography discussing her own young adulthood and transition, but provided “a bold and inspiring perspective on being young, multicultural, economically challenged, and transgender in America” (from Goodreads).
  5. Angels in America by Tony Kushner. Originally a play by Tony Kushner, Angels in America was also adapted into a miniseries on HBO in 2003. It is a fictional work about the very real AIDS crisis in the 1980s as told through fictional characters, very real government officials, and supernatural messengers of god.

Post by Carey Gibbons

About #FDL

Welcome to #FDL! #FDL is a twice weekly update on all things Fondulac District Library and East Peoria. Twice a week, library staff will make posts that highlight some aspect of library life and relate it to you – our readers. Have you ever wanted to know which Dewey number represented a certain topic? Are you looking for book recommendations based on your favorite television show or television recommendations based on your favorite book? Have you ever wondered about the secret details of librarian life? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then #FDL is for you. We look forward to writing posts that are informative and entertaining and hope that you enjoy getting better acquainted with Fondulac District Library.