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June is Pride Month, which means it’s time to celebrate the members of our LGBTQ+ community! At a time when the Queer community is being increasingly marginalized and attacked by politicians, it is more important than ever to come together in support of LGBTQ+ individuals and communities. Here at the University of Michigan Press, we have a robust collection of books that showcase the diversity of the LGBTQ+ community on topics from Detroit Ballroom culture to drag shows in Puerto Rico. Celebrate Pride Month with us by starting with these books, and be sure to check out our Sexuality Studies subject area and our Triangulations series for more.

Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing by Ina Linge

This book brings together an exciting new archive of queer and trans voices from the history of sexual sciences in the German-speaking world. A new language to express possibilities of gender and sexuality emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, providing a language of sex and sexuality that is still recognizable today. Queer Livability shows that individual voices of trans and queer writers had a significant impact on the production of knowledge about gender and sexuality during this time and introduces lesser known texts to a new readership. It shows the remarkable power of queer life writing in imagining and creating the possibilities of a livable life in the face of restrictive legal, medical, and social frameworks.

The Taylor Mac Book: Ritual, Realness and Radical Performance by David Román and Sean F. Edgecomb, Editors

This latest addition to the Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance series is the first book to dedicate critical attention to the work of influential theater-maker Taylor Mac. Featuring essays, interviews, and commentaries by noted critics and artists, the volume examines the vastness of Mac’s theatrical imagination, the singularity of their voice, the inclusiveness of their cultural insights and critiques, and the creativity they display through stylistic and formal qualities and the unorthodoxies of their personal and professional trajectories. Contributors consider the range of Mac’s career as a playwright, performer, actor, and singer, expanding and enriching the conversation on this much-celebrated and deeply resonant body of work.

Queer Subjects in Modern Japanese Literature: Male Love, Intimacy, and Erotics, 1886–2014 by Stephen D. Miller, Editor

This book is an anthology of translated Japanese literature about men behaving lovingly, erotically, and intimately with other men. Covering more than 125 years of modern and contemporary Japanese history, this book aims to introduce a diverse array of authors to an English-speaking audience and provide further context for their works. While no anthology can comprehensively represent queer Japanese literature, these selections nonetheless expand our understanding of queerness in Japanese culture.

Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance by Lauron J. Kehrer

Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapper as a Black, masculine, heterosexual, cisgender man who enacts a narrative of struggle and success. In Queer Voices in Hip Hop, Lauron J. Kehrer turns our attention to openly queer and trans rappers and positions them within a longer Black queer musical lineage. Combining musical, textual, and visual analysis with reception history, this book reclaims queer involvement in hip hop by tracing the genre’s beginnings within Black and Latinx queer music-making practices and spaces.

Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

Translocas focuses on drag and transgender performance and activism in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Arguing for its political potential, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes explores the social and cultural disruptions caused by Latin American and Latinx “locas” (effeminate men, drag queens, transgender performers, and unruly women) and the various forms of violence to which queer individuals in Puerto Rico and the U. S. are subjected. This interdisciplinary, auto-ethnographic, queer-of-color performance studies book pays careful attention to transgender experience, highlighting how trans activists and performers mold their bodies, promote social change, and create community in a context that oscillates between glamour and abjection.

Queer Nightlife by Kemi Adeyemi, Kareem Khubchandani, Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Editors

The mass shooting at a queer Latin Night in Orlando in July 2016 sparked a public conversation about access to pleasure and selfhood within conditions of colonization, violence, and negation. Queer Nightlife joins this conversation by centering queer and trans people of color who apprehend the risky medium of the night to explore, know, and stage their bodies, genders, and sexualities in the face of systemic and social negation. The book focuses on house parties, nightclubs, and bars that offer improvisatory conditions and possibilities for “stranger intimacies,” and that privilege music, dance, and sexual/gender expressions. Queer Nightlife extends the breadth of research on “everynight life” through twenty-five essays and interviews by leading scholars and artists.

Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit by Marlon M. Bailey

This book examines Ballroom culture, in which inner-city LGBT individuals dress, dance, and vogue to compete for prizes and trophies. Participants are affiliated with a house, an alternative family structure typically named after haute couture designers and providing support to this diverse community. Marlon M. Bailey’s rich first-person performance ethnography of the Ballroom scene in Detroit examines Ballroom as a queer cultural formation that upsets dominant notions of gender, sexuality, kinship, and community.

James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination by Matt Brim

The central figure in black gay literary history, James Baldwin has become a familiar touchstone for queer scholarship in the academy. This book draws on the contributions of queer theory and black queer studies to critically engage with and complicate the project of queering Baldwin and his work. Brim argues that Baldwin animates and, in contrast, disrupts both the black gay literary tradition and the queer theoretical enterprise that have claimed him. Baldwin’s work, this book posits, is deeply marked by ruptures of the “unqueer” into transcendent queer thought—and that readers must sustain rather than override this paradoxical dynamic within acts of queer imagination.

Transgender Rights and Politics: Groups, Issue Framing, and Policy Adoption by Jami K. Taylor and Donald P. Haider-Markel, Editors

As transgender activism has become more visible, policymakers, both in the United States and around the world, have begun to respond to demands for more equitable treatment. This book brings together research employing the concepts and tools of political science to explore the politics of transgender rights. Contributors address the framing of transgender rights in the U. S. and in Latin America. They discuss transgender interest groups, the inclusion of transgender activists in advocacy coalitions, policy diffusion at the state and local levels, and, importantly, the implementation of transgender public policy. This volume sets the standard for empirical research on transgender politics and demonstrates that the study of this topic can contribute to the understanding of larger questions in the field of political science.

This post was written by Emilia Ferrante, a graduate from the University of Michigan with a BA in Honors English and Anthropology and a proud Queer person! In addition to being a UM Press intern, she was also the Editor-in-Chief of the Residential College’s literary magazine and has held several editorship positions in the Arts section of the Michigan Daily. In the fall, she will start studies at SciencesPo in Paris for her Master’s degree in creative industries.