Welcome to Queer Reads!
Queer Reads is a genre-fiction website designed to assist Reader’s Advisory Librarians searching for good books to recommend to patrons. Yet we welcome everyone that is curious about LGBTQ literature.
Why The LGBTQ Focus?
Humans have participated in a variety of relationships with some kind of blend of the emotional and the physical between same-sex couples and different-sex couples. Yet it was the sexologists of the nineteenth century that began examining human sexual behaviors. Like much science that originated at that time human bodies were separated, pigeonholed, scrutinized and labeled. As time past sexologists’ diagnosis became self-absorbed labels. By the twentieth century humans labeled themselves and distinctions between behavior and identity blurred as AIDS took lives and one label was blamed.
The “gay community” rooted in sexual politics, grew in numbers due to the attention sex, sexual preferences, and biological genders were given. As a result, stories were told, books were written all relating to humans’ diverse and complicated sexual history. These stories became part of the human experience around the globe. Some books were non-fiction, some fiction, and all are vital to understanding the diversity of life.
We all need to see some part of ourselves in the world in which we live. We all need to see what others have been though, survived and how they have survived. We all need to feel like there are others like us, so that we can understand ourselves and others better. Therefore it is important, in Readers’ Advisory work, to make sure we support the diversity of our patrons.
This is why the LGBTQ focus is used. There are only a handful of great resources available to provide this kind of connection for LGBTQ patrons in the 21st Century. Most of the reasons for this lack of resources does not appear intentional, rather it is the lack of connective resources and research. This blog is meant to add to the resources available to Readers’ Advisors.
For an exclamation of the acronym LGBTQ please go to the Lexicon page.
For specific information concerning any genre got to their page located on the bar across the top of the page. For summaries of the books we reviewed, please access them under the side bar “Categories”.
Thank you for visiting this blog and for your interest in LGBTQ books.