LGBTQ+ Resources: Library Resources

In her dreams, Bailey is a young girl. Every night she dreams about magical dresses. Unfortunately, when Bailey wakes up, nobody wants to hear about her beautiful dreams. This is because Bailey is a boy and shouldn't be thinking about dresses at all. However, Bailey meets an older girl who is touched and inspired by Bailey's dreams and courage. Eventually they start making dresses together that represent Bailey's dreams coming to life.

And Tango Makes Three is the bestselling, heartwarming true story of two penguins who create a nontraditional family. At the penguin house at the Central Park Zoo, two penguins named Roy and Silo were a little bit different from the others. But their desire for a family was the same. And with the help of a kindly zookeeper, Roy and Silo get the chance to welcome a baby penguin of their very own.

Donovan's two moms are getting married, and he can't wait for the celebration to begin. After all, as ringbearer, he has a very important job to do. Any boy or girl with same-sex parents--or who knows a same-sex couple--will appreciate this picture book about love, family, and marriage.

When Chloe's favorite uncle announces that he's getting married, everyone is excited. Everyone except Chloe, that is. What if Uncle Bobby no longer has time for picnics, swimming, or flying kites? Chloe just wants to keep having fun with her favorite uncle, but she's afraid everything is going to change. Can Uncle Bobby and his boyfriend Jamie show Chloe that, when it comes to family, the more the merrier? In this inspiring, love-filled story, Chloe learns just what family means.

In the sterile dormitories and on the quiet winter greens of an American university, a young woman named M-- deals with the repercussions of a strange encounter with an angel, one that has left a large bruise on her forehead. Was the event real or imagined? The bruise does not disappear, forcing M-- to confront her own existential fears and her wavering desire to tell the story of her imagination. As a writer, M-- is breathless, desperate, and obsessive, questioning the mutations and directions of her words while writing with fevered immediacy.

A fun and edgy anthology of hot new fiction by young gay writers.

The author describes five lawsuits that have helped change the way lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual (LGBT) people are treated in the United States. The cases are Braschi v. Stahl Associates, in which an appellate court recognize that two men can constitute a family; Nabozny v. Podlesny (1996), in which a Wisconsin jury recognized that a bullied gay teenager had had his constitutional rights violated by school officials who looked the other way; Rome v. Evans, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that it is unconstitutional to deny LGBT people the opportunity to seek antidiscrimination protection under the law; Baehr v. Lewin (1993), in which the Hawaii Supreme Court questioned the constitutionality of denying same-sex couples the right to marry; and Lawrence v. Texas (2003), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the government cannot criminalize private and consensual gay sex. For each case, he offers a description of the facts involved, a discussion of the legal issues involved and how they were dealt with in the litigation, and an analysis of the legal and social impact of the case.

Fiction and poetry from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer authors from Appalachia. Like much Appalachian literature, these works are pervaded with an attachment to family and the mountain landscape, yet balancing queer and Appalachian identities is an undertaking fraught with conflict. This collection confronts the problematic and complex intersections of place, family, sexuality, gender, and religion with which LGBTQ Appalachians often grapple.

Jason Cianciotto and Sean Cahill, experts on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender public policy advocacy, combine an accessible review of social science research with analyses of school practices and local, state, and federal laws that affect LGBT students. In addition, portraits of LGBT youth and their experiences with discrimination at school bring human faces to the issues the authors discuss. This is an essential guide for teachers, school administrators, guidance counselors, and social workers interacting with students on a daily basis; school board members and officials determining school policy; nonprofit advocates and providers of social services to youth; and academic scholars, graduate students, and researchers training the next generation of school administrators and informing future policy and practice.

Living Out Islam documents the rarely-heard voices of Muslims who live in secular democratic countries and who are gay, lesbian, and transgender. It weaves original interviews with Muslim activists into a compelling composite picture which showcases the importance of the solidarity of support groups in the effort to change social relationships and achieve justice.

A small troupe of drag queens take their act on the road through the Australian outback and find it isn't so easy to shock people anymore.

During World War II in the Battle of Berlin, two women find each other. One is single, Jaguar; the other, Aimée, is unhappily married and mother to four sons. In war-torn Germany it was not safe to be Jewish; it was just as unsafe to be a lesbian. Trouble results when Aimée's husband, who is a German soldier, finds out about his wife's relationship to Jaguar.

Set in 1985. Revolves around two very different men with AIDS, one fictional, one fictionalized. Roy Cohn personifies all the hypocrisy, delusion and callousness of the official response to the plague. Nothing shakes Roy's lack of empathy: even on his death bed, he's fighting with his gay nurse and taunting the woman he helped put to death, Ethel Rosenberg. The other patient is Prior Walter, who is visited by an angel and deserted by his self-pitying lover, Louis. Louis moves on to a relationship with Joe Pitt, a Mormon lawyer whose closeted homosexuality drives his wife to delusions and brings his mother to New York.

The story of a middle-aged gay couple's comic encounter with a self-righteously straight and conservative family. Armand and Albert reluctantly accept young Val's intention to marry the daughter of a conservative Senator, but when the fiancee's family comes to visit, the whole household is turned upside down.

It's 1963, a time in the United States when life was simple, straightforward and the lines between the sexes and sex roles were crisply drawn and severely delineated. Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist find themselves thrown together when they are hired to tend sheep in the remote area of Brokeback Mountain, Wyoming. Because of the job, the two are forced to spend many hours together alone in the wild. Ennis and Jack are inexorably drawn to each other through their proximity, loneliness and through a shared lack of tenderness and emotion in their lives and are emotionally, physically and psychically bonded to each other almost from the start.

"This film is based on transcripts of over 200 interviews with the people of Laramie, Wyoming."--Title screens. In October 1998, 21 year-old Matthew Shepard had been found savagely beaten, tied to a fence, and left to die. National media attention made his case a cause célèbre, and a month later, off Broadway writer-director Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theatre (his collaborating actors) arrived. They succeeded in interviewing a wide range of relevant persons, from those who knew Shepard or knew the accused to police, university, and hospital personnel and community members. Then they wrote a play.

An unblinking behind-the-scenes story of the fashion-obsessed New Yorkers who created 'voguing' and drag balls, and turned these raucous celebrations into a powerful expression of fierce personal pride.

Cheryl, a young black woman in a video store, is making a documentary about an obscure black actress from the 1930's. When she discovers that the actress (known as "the Watermelon Woman") had a white lesbian lover, Cheryl just happens to fall in love with a very cute white woman herself!