10 books to read on the occasion of Pride Month From the latest releases to the great classics of LGBTQIA+ literature
LGBTQIA+ literature refers to the type of narrative that involves characters, plots or themes belonging to the LGBQT + community. Hindered and censored for centuries, gay and queer literature is today the address of specialized studies in the largest universities in Europe and beyond (including Cambridge and Oxford), a real object of study.
On the occasion of Pride Month, here is a selection of 10 books on the subject, from the most recent to classics of the genre, to remind us to fight discrimination every day with the most powerful means we have: culture.
MIDDLESEX by Jeffrey Eugenides
Jonathan was 31 years old in 2016 when one day in January he got a fever shich never went away, a constant, exhausting fever that freezed him when he went out, made him sweat at night as if he had water instead of blood in his veins. This happens to Jonathan, who despite the diagnosis of HIV and the consequent exhausting fever that follows, continues his life as always, with the longtime boyfriend, the cats Mirtilla and Purè, the apprehensive mother, the absent father: everything is different, but everything remains the same.
Only a pink pill is added to his daily routine, to be taken every day at 7 pm, a pill as big as a candy becomes his pass for normality. Between childhood memories and fragments of present, the fortitude of a homosexual boy in the suburbs of Milan clearly emerges: a child ignored, beaten, mocked for stuttering, now a man who refuses to let a medical report decide for his life. Febbre was born from the autobiographical experience of Jonathan Bazzi, candidated for the Strega 2020 award, a very current and sincere testimony that will soon become a film for Cross Production.
ALEXIS or THE TREATY OF VAIN DESIRE by Marguerite Yourcenar
A thriller halfway between a novel and an essay, based on a true story. Published for the first time in 2016, Preston's novel aims to reveal the behind the scene of the Thorpe scandal in the 70s in Great Britain, an intrigue that shocked public opinion of the times and involved the former leader of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe, accused of conspiring to kill his alleged ex-lover model Norman Scott. In 1979 Thorpe was tried on charges of hiring a killer to murder his lover, too bad that the killer in question had missed his aim by hitting the dog instead of Scott.
The novel focuses on Thorpe's early and secret love life at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the UK: a story of hypocrisy, deceit and betrayal at the heart of the English political system. The book was adapted into a three-part British television miniseries starring Hugh Grant as the protagonist.
SPUTNIK SWEETHEART by Haruki Murakami
In New York during the summer of high school, James argues with the psychotherapist his divorced parents sent him to, works in his mother's art gallery, where no one ever enters and to enter, and in the hope of finding an alternative to university he’s is looking online for a home in the Midwest where he can pursue his favorite activities, reading and solitude. Until one day he enters a chat of lonely hearts and, under a false name, proposes a blind date to John, the manager of the gallery of his mother who is a compulsive user.
A coming-of-age novel that draw sthe portrait of James Sveck, a young misfit who remembers froma afar the young Holden in his desperate effort to escape from social conventions, until, with a sacrifice and the irreverent spirit of adaptation of a morality that applies to everyone, he has to accept the inevitable with the awareness that one day this pain will be useful. An Italian-American film adaptation of the novel directed by Roberto Faenza has been made, starring Toby Regbo, among others Peter Gallagher and Lucy Liu.
TRANSITIONS by Pajtim Statovci
Written in the spring of 1834, The Girl with the Golden Eyes completes the Story of the Thirteen, a fictional trilogy that focuses on the exploits of the secret society with the omonimous name. In a nocturnal and sinister Paris, a scenario of intrigue, revenge and power games, the aristocrat Henry De Marsay falls in love with a young woman with an exotic charm and irrepressible sensuality, Paquita Valdes. Henry manages to meet the young girl in secret several times, despite the strict control of her housekeeper, but at the very height of the passion, when the two dream of escaping together to Asia, Paquita surprisingly invokes the name of a woman, arousing the Henry's wrath and vengeance.
Together with the gang of thirteen, De Marsay raids the girl's house, to discover the girl already dying in the arms of the Marquise de San-Real, Marsay's half-sister and Piquita's betrayed lover. Balzac describes the amorous passion between women as no novelist up to that time had yet dared to do, and, at the same time, with extreme modernity he describes existence as a democratic hell in which men and women of all social classes, from the most poor to the wealthiest, are consumed in a frantic search for glory, money and pleasure, in which even love underlies the logic of power and tyranny. The 1961 film adaptation was directed by Jean-Gabriel Albicocco with Marie Laforet.
BOY ERASED by Garrard Conley
The only child of a car salesman who is about to become a Baptist pastor, Garrard is a boy from Arkansas who at 19 is completely terrified of his own sexuality. During college, Garrard declares his homosexuality to his parents and they put him in front of a clear choice: not to complete his studies and be dishonored or undergo conversion therapy. Torn between his faith and his sexuality, between the love for his family and that for his own freedom, the protagonist retraces his days at the ex-gay Love in Action program, where, deprived of any personal effects, he is to activities such as the Moral Inventory, which consists in writing all the impure thoughts that have distanced him from God and then list them in front of the community, or the Genogram, in which the sins of his family are listed in a family tree with the aim of identifying the faults transmitted from father to son.
Boy Erased is a courageous denunciation of the pathological fear of the different in the great South of the United States, as well as the difficult attempt to dig up and understand the reasons why Gerrard's own family found it necessary to submit him to this "cure". In 2018, the film based on the book on the book, written, directed and in part starring Joel Edgerton, starring Lucas Hedges and Nicole Kidman.
