Reading List: Pride Month 2022

Taking place throughout the month of June, Pride Month is the celebration of the LGBTQ2I communities and their histories, diversity, and freedom. In honour of Pride and our new Queer Film Classics series, we’ve compiled a reading list of books engaged with the theme of queerness in culture and the media.

Queer Film Classics, edited by Matthew Hays and Thomas Waugh, is a new series offering scholarly reflections and readings of various queer films. “Books in the series have much to teach us, not only about the art of film but about the queer ways in which films can transmit our meanings, our stories, and our dreams.”

Boys Don’t Cry

By Chase Joynt and Morgan Page

Queer Film Classics Series

The Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry (1999) offered the first mainstream access to transmasculine embodiment in North America. Authors Morgan Page and Chase Joynt relocate the film within historical and conceptual contexts that influenced its ambivalent reception while emphasizing the importance of trans visibilities and representations in the mainstream.

L’homme blessé

By Robert Payne

Queer Film Classics Series

L’Homme blessé (1983) was one of France’s first major cinematic releases to depict homosexual desire and queer sexual cultures in an unapologetic and complex way. Robert Payne guides readers through the powerfully erotic underworld of the film, giving the cinematic milestone the critical attention it deserves. Combining formal analysis, historical research, and original interviews, this book cements L’Homme blessé in its rightful place within queer cultural history.

Making Out in the Mainstream
GLAAD and the Politics of Respectability

By Vincent Doyle

Making Out in the Mainstream is the first full-length study of LGBT media activism, revealing the daily struggle to reconcile economic and professional pressures with conflicting personal, organizational, and political priorities. Documenting the rise and evolution of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Vincent Doyle presents a nuanced perspective on the complexity, contradictions, and ambivalences of advancing social causes through popular media.

The Romance of Transgression in Canada
Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas

By Thomas Waugh

From pornography to autobiography, from the Cold War to the sexual revolution, from rural roots and mythologies to the queer meccas of Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, The Romance of Transgression in Canada is a history of sexual representation on the large and small screen in English Canada and Quebec. Thomas Waugh offers both a scholarly account and a celebration of Canadian LGBTQ films.

Queer Atlantic
Masculinity, Mobility, and the Emergence of Modernist Form

By Daniel Hannah

The instability of modernist form has everything to do with the social, political, and economic shakeups of the nineteenth century that left masculinity a site of contestation, racial anxiety, homophobic paranoia, performative display, and queer desire. Refusing to take white masculinity for granted, Daniel Hannah considers how the canonical novels of modernist fiction explore the ways that privilege is propped up and driven by factors of race, place, gender, and sexuality.

Ganymede’s Dog

By John Emil Vincent

This collection of prose poems startles myths back to life, whether it is Ganymede’s abduction by Zeus in the form of an eagle, his abduction by a century’s worth of Budweiser labels, Sophocles’s boozy boy-chasing, or the dancing plague of 1518. Deeply infused with gay culture and mythology, Ganymede’s Dog is a collection of smart, knowing, allusive, often ironic poems that ponder the boundaries of legend and the privileges of youth and beauty.