No matter where you live, you are inside the COVID-19 pandemic.
First and foremost: This will be okay. The LGBTQI+ Community has been here before – or at least in the neighbourhood. Our community has experienced the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We have been exiled, hunted and ostracized. We have self-isolated, we have sheltered in place. We’ve been there, and we are still here. We are together, and, without wanting to sound cliché, we are family.
In the days and weeks ahead, each of us has rights, and responsibilities, which vary from county to county, state to state and country to country. I hope you take care, be well, and lend a hand if you can.
Honestly, there is not much I can do to lend a hand, but “not much” that isn’t the same as “nothing”. For those who are isolated, suddenly unemployed or otherwise hurting from this pandemic, there are books.
Reading sharpens your mind and lowers your stress. The very acts of focussing on words and maintaining the story line stimulate your brain and can help distract it, temporarily, from the news.
Reading can decrease your depression. From self-help books to speculative fiction, from inspiring biographies to pure poetry, you have an opportunity to connect with another person, and feel less alone. Pro tip: if you aren’t enjoying with book, stop reading that book and switch to a new one. I promise the author whose book you put down, won’t feel rejected. She or he or they won’t even know.
Reading improves your memory and enhances your imagination. It can help you sleep or it can be the bright spot in your day. Reading is, as they say, fundamental. So let’s get to it. Here are 19 digitized books you can read for free from Open Library. Just create an account, download and enjoy!
1. Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
Rubyfruit Jungle is the first milestone lesbian novel in the extraordinary career of one of this country’s most distinctive writers. Bawdy and moving, the ultimate word-of-mouth bestseller, Rubyfruit Jungle is about growing up a Lesbian in America — and living happily ever after anyway. Born a bastard, Molly Bolt is adopted by a dirt-poor Southern couple who want something better for their daughter. Molly plays doctor with the boys, beats up Leroy and loses her virginity to her girlfriend in sixth grade.
As she grows to realize she’s different, Molly decides not to apologize for that. In no time she mesmerizes the head cheerleader of Ft. Lauderdale High and captivates a gorgeous bourbon-guzzling heiress. But the world is not tolerant. Booted out of college for moral turpitude, an unrepentant, penniless Molly takes New York by storm, sending not a few female hearts aflutter with her startling beauty, crackling wit and fierce determination to become the greatest filmmaker that ever lived.
Critically acclaimed when first published in 1973, Rubyfruit Jungle has only grown in reputation as it has reached new generations of readers who respond to its feisty and inspiring heroine. Or read reviews of other Rita Mae Brown books.
2. Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
Three Lives is separated into three stories, “The Good Anna,” “Melanctha,” and “The Gentle Lena.” Each story is independent of the other, but all are set in Bridgepoint, a fictional town based on Baltimore. Author Gertrude Stein, as a college student at Radcliffe and a medical student at Johns Hopkins Medical School, was a privileged lesbian author and artist, but she was surrounded by women who were trapped by poverty, class, and race into lives that offered little choice. Her portraits of Anna and Lena are examples of realistic depictions of immigrant women who had no occupational choice but to become domestic workers. This collection of documents from the history of women’s suffrage, medical history, modernist art, and literature enables readers to see how radical Stein’s subject was.
Three Lives needs interpretation and thoughtfulness when reading it. “The Good Anna” takes us through the life and death of Anna, a servant in a lower middle-class home. “…Mrs. Lehntman was the only romance Anna ever knew… Mrs. Lehntman needed Anna just as much as Anna needed Mrs. Lehntman, but Mrs. Lehntman was more ready to risk Anna’s loss…”
“Melanctha” is the story of a mixed-race woman who journeys to find acceptance and place in a tumultuous world. She searches for more than life is offering her, and finds it in family, friends, love and heartbreak. “…Melanctha Herbert was beginning now to come less and less to the house to be with Rose Johnson. This was because Rose seemed always less and less now to want her…” Stein uses language in this 1909 book that you may love, or hate. As author Richard Wright once said, it is “not what Stein’s characters were saying but rather Stein’s attitude toward language… she made him aware of the validity of language that was not in the scientific mode… but in its sensory qualities, as music or incantation” (as quoted in Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright: The Poetics and Politics of Modernism by M. Lynn Weiss).
The last story is “The Gentle Lena”, tracing the life and death of a woman transplanted from Germany to Bridgepoint. She lives, she marries, she has babies, she dies. But her life is marked with growing passivity and distance, a long slow and not unpleasant death. Often given short-shrift by critics, “The Gentle Lena” explores anhedonia without ever saying what it’s doing. Anhedonia is the total loss of interest in life and an emotional flatlining and apathy. The story is as dull as Lena’s emotions, and yet it speaks volumes if you care to listen. By the way, did you know, there are different editions of the book, with some really cool covers?
3. Stealing Nasreen by Farzana Doctor
Stealing Nasreen is a novel about the lives of three very different people, all of whom belong to the same small religious community. Set in Toronto with back story in Mumbai, Nasreen Batawala, an Indo-Canadian lesbian and burnt-out psychologist, becomes enmeshed in the lives of Shaffiq and Salma Paperwala, new immigrants from Mumbai. While working in the same Toronto hospital as Nasreen, Shaffiq develops a persistent and confusing fascination with Nasreen, causing him to bring home and hide things he “finds” in her office.
Salma, his wife, discovers some of these hidden treasures and suspects that something is amiss. Unbeknownst to Shaffiq, Nasreen begins attending weekly Gujarati classes taught by Salma, who finds herself inexplicably attracted to her student. An impulsive kiss sets off a surprising course of events.
4. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was published in 1985 and subsequently adapted into a BBC television drama of the same name. It is a coming-of-age story about a lesbian girl who grows up in an English Pentecostal community. The book is semi-autobiographical and is based on Winterson’s life growing up in Accrington, Lancashire. The main character is a young girl named Jeanette, who is adopted by evangelists from the Elim Pentecostal Church. She believes she is destined to become a missionary.
The book depicts religious enthusiasm as an exploration of the power of love. As an adolescent, Jeanette finds herself attracted to another girl, and her mother’s group of religious friends subject her and her partner to exorcisms. Winner of the 1985 Whitbread Prize for best first fiction (now called the Costa Book Awards).
5. Curious Wine by Katherine V. Forrest
The intimacy of a cabin at Lake Tahoe provides the combustible circumstances that bring Diana Holland and Lane Christianson together in this passionate novel of first discovery. Candid in its eroticism, intensely romantic, remarkably beautiful, Curious Wine is a love story that will remain in your memory.
Published by Naiad Press in 1993, Curious Wine has been republished by Silver Moon Books (1983 and 1990), Alyson Books (2002) and Bella Books (2011). With multiple printings and translations worldwide, Curious Wine is an enduring classic.
6. Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
Feinberg’s book Stone Butch Blues was published in 1993. This fictional account of Jess Goldberg’s life is touching, brave and poignant. It is an excellent story of the complexities of being transgender. Growing up in a blue-collar town in the 1950s is never easy, but is almost nightmarish for anyone who was differently gendered. Jess is institutionalized after mom and dad begin to see the real Jess. Jess comes out as queer and butch in the bars and factories, and finds community and support from butch dykes and drag queens.
But when the police start to beat and brutalize the patrons, including Jess’s mentors Butch Al and Jacqueline, Jess is again adrift in the world. Different bars, different friends, different cops, same brutal treatment. At every turn, Jess faces being ostracized and embraced by LGBTQI+ people. Jess begins the transition process and gains acceptance as a man in the world, but loses connecting to the lesbian community. We are taken on a journey to self-acceptance through a complex issue that society demands simple answers to.
Stone Butch Blues is a 1994 Lambda Literary Award finalist for Lesbian Fiction, and a co-winner in the Small Press Books category (along with Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS). Stone Butch Blues also won the 1994 American Library Association Gay & Lesbian Book Award (now Stonewall Book Award).
7. Keeping You a Secret by Julie Anne Peters
With a steady boyfriend, the position of Student Council President, and a chance to go to an Ivy League college, high school life is just fine for Holland Jaeger. At least it seems to be. But when Cece Goddard comes to school, everything changes. Cece and Holland have undeniable feelings for each other, but how will others react to their developing relationship?
This moving love story between two girls is a worthy successor to Nancy Garden’s classic young adult coming out novel, Annie on My Mind. With her characteristic humor and breezy style, Peters has captured the compelling emotions of young love.
8. Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters Of Eleanor Roosevelt And Lorena Hickok
In 1978, more than 3,500 letters written over a thirty-year friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok were discovered by archivists. Although the most explicit letters had been burned (Lorena told Eleanor’s daughter, “Your mother wasn’t always so very discreet in her letters to me”), the find was still electrifying enough to create controversy about the nature of the women’s relationship.
Historian Rodger Streitmatter has transcribed and annotated more than 300 of those letters-published here for the first time-and put them within the context of the lives of these two extraordinary women, allowing us to understand the role of this remarkable friendship in Roosevelt’s transformation into a crusading First Lady. Heartbreaking, discreet and conservative (for these times, not those times). An intimate look at friendship, love and leaving.
9. Zami; Sister Outsider; Undersong by Audre Lorde
ZAMI: “Zami” is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her. Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page. In this classic autobiography, Audre Lorde combines elements of history, biography, and myth to tell her own story. A young black girl grows up in thirties Harlem, a teenager lives through Pearl Harbour, a young woman experiences McCarthyism in fifties Greenwich Village. In and out of this lyrical chronicle move the women – mothers, lovers, friends – who are zami: ‘Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon on me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me – so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognise her’.
SISTER OUTSIDER: Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, “Sister Outsider” celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde’s philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. These landmark writings are, in Lorde’s own words, a call to “never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is. . . .”
UNDERSONG: Hurricane-inspired and filled with love, pain and history, Audre Lorde’s last book of passionate verse underscores why her strong voice will continue to reverberate into the decade and beyond. Undersong contains revised versions of most of the pieces from Chosen Poems, a 1982 collection, as well as nine new poems. This new book serves as a testament to Lorde’s role as both a revolutionary spirit and an accomplished artist. ~ Undersong review by Natasha H. Leland.
10. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras edited by Gloria Anzaldúa
A bold collection of creative pieces and theoretical essays by women of color. New thought and new dialogue: this is a book that will teach in the most multiple sense of that word, a book that will be of lasting value to many diverse communities of women as well as to students from those communities. The authors explore a full spectrum of present concerns in over seventy pieces that vary from writing by new talents to published pieces by Audre Lorde, Joy Harjo, Norma Alarcón and Trinh T. Minh-ha.
11. Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule
Set in the late 1950s, this is the story of Evelyn Hall, an English Professor, who goes to Reno to obtain a divorce and put an end to her disastrous 16-year marriage. While staying at a boarding house to establish her six-week residency requirement she meets Ann Childs, a casino worker and fifteen years her junior. Physically, they are remarkably alike and eventually have an affair and begin the struggle to figure out just how a relationship between two women can last. Desert of the Heart examines the conflict between convention and freedom and the ways in which the characters try to resolve the conflict. And if you have not yet had the opportunity to see the movie, Desert Hearts, you have to ask yourself… “Have I really lived?”
12. Empress of the World by Sara Ryan
Nicola Lancaster is spending eight weeks at the Siegel Institute Summer Program for Gifted Youth, a hothouse of smart, articulate, intense teenagers. She soon falls in with Katrina (Manic Computer Chick), Isaac (Nice-Guy-Despite-Himself), Kevin (Inarticulate Composer) . . . and Battle. Battle Hall Davies is a beautiful blonde dancer, and everything Nic isn’t. The two become friends-and then, startlingly, more than friends. What do you do when you think you’re attracted to guys, and then you meet a girl who steals your heart?
13. The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea & Heart of the Earth: A Popul Vuh Story by Cherríe L. Moraga
In “The Hungry Woman”, an apocalyptic play written at the end of the millennium, Moraga uses mythology and an intimate realism to describe the embattled position of Chicanos and Chicanas, not only in the United States but in relation to each other. Drawing from the Greek Medea and the myth of La Llorona, she portrays a woman gone mad between her longing for another woman and for the Indian nation which is denied her.
In “Heart of the Earth, ” a feminist revisioning of the Quichi Maya Popul Vuh story, Moraga creates an allegory for contemporary Chicanismo in which the enemy is white, patriarchal, and greedy for hearts, both female and fecund.
Through humor and inventive tale twisting, Moraga brings her vatos locos home from the deadly underworld to reveal that the real power of creation is found in the masa Grandma is grinding up in her metate. The script, a collaboration with master puppet maker Ralph Lee, was created for the premiere production of the play at The Public Theater in New York in 1994.
14. The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
A novel of relationships set in 1940s London that brims with vivid historical detail, thrilling coincidences, and psychological complexity, by the author of the Booker Prize finalist Fingersmith.
Sarah Waters, whose works set in Victorian England have awards and acclaim and have reinvigorated the genres of both historical and lesbian fiction, returns with novel that marks a departure from nineteenth century and a spectacular leap forward in the career of this masterful storyteller.
Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit liaisons, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of Londoners: three women and a young man with a past-whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in ways that are surprising not always known to them. In wartime London, the women work-as ambulance drivers, ministry clerks, and building inspectors. There are feats of heroism, epic and quotidian, and tragedies both enormous and personal, but the emotional interiors of her characters that Waters captures with absolute and intimacy.
Waters describes with perfect knowingness the taut composure of a rescue worker in the aftermath of a bombing, the idle longing of a young woman her soldier lover, the peculiar thrill convict watching the sky ignite through the bars on his window, the hunger a woman stalking the streets for encounter, and the panic of another who sees her love affair coming end. At the same time, Waters is absolute control of a narrative that offers up subtle surprises and exquisite twists, even as it depicts the impact grand historical event on individual lives.
15. The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith writing as Claire Morgan
The Price of Salt has grown in popularity and in importance, and is now recognized as an American masterwork. Highsmith has given us the enthralling story of Therese Belivet and Carol Aird. Therese is a young stage designer who is trapped in a department-store day job, until one day her salvation arrives in the form of Carol. Carol is a beguiling suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce.
They fall madly in love and set out across the USA, pursued by a private investigator. The P. I. eventually blackmails Carol into a choice between her daughter and her lover. A generation of women took this love story to heart and it had become a best selling lesbian novel. Since the production of the movie “Carol” starring Cate Blanchett as Carol Aird and Rooney Mara as Therese Belivet. And there are many editions of the book, with some great covers.
16. Beebo Brinker by Ann Bannon
Beebo Brinker is the last book in Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker Chronicles. This book introduces the reader to the central character, Beebo, as a prequel. She is a handsome, young butch woman who travels to New York City. Still wearing a dress, the naive Beebo turns on her butch charm and soon has all the Greenwich Village femmes eating out of her hand.
Beebo falls for Paula, then becomes a secret play toy for Venus, a wealthy, secretly bisexual movie star. She helps care for Venus’s son and avoid her husband until the media catch on. Beaten both literally and emotionally, Beebo returns to the living arms of NYC and the tender heart of Paula. The Chronicles has been transformed into a well-received play.
17. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing by May Sarton
Hilary Stevens is an aging writer asked to recount her poetic inspirations, and we are taken along on this journey of rediscovery. Both subtle and intense, Stevens sympathetically gives life lessons to Mar, a newly-queer young man whose heart had been broken. As she recalls her process and inspiration, she reflects lightly on her sexuality. The book had been turned into a movie by the same name, staring Lucy Brightman.
18. Seriously… I’m Kidding by Ellen DeGeneres
Ellen DeGeneres has a style of communication that is welcoming and casual, personal and unexpectedly funny. This somewhat-autobiography, one of a few, is random, quirky and delightfully oddball, and if you’ve ever seen Ellen in performance, you know it’s a compliment. Thoughtful chapters are made light, light chapters are made easy to digest (and forget). A perfect quick read written the world gets overwhelming.
“I’ve experienced a whole lot the last few years and I have a lot to share. So I hope that you’ll take a moment to sit back, relax and enjoy the words I’ve put together for you in this book. I think you’ll find I’ve left no stone unturned, no door unopened, no window unbroken, no rug unvacuumed, no ivories untickled. What I’m saying is, let us begin, shall we? ”
19. Sapphism on Screen: Lesbian Desire in French and Francophone Cinema by Lucille Cairns
Looking for something intellectual that will challenge your focus and intelligence? Sapphism on Screen is a study of lesbian desire in French and Francophone films (written in English). This book sets out to investigate and theorise mediations of lesbian desire in a substantial corpus of films (spanning the period 1936-2002) by male and female directors working in France and also in French-speaking parts of Belgium, Canada, Switzerland and Africa.
The corpus is unique in never before having been assembled, and represents a valuable tool not just for researchers but also for university teachers creating courses both on lesbianism in film and on sexuality in French cinema. Many of the 89 texts treated are mainstream films which have achieved high critical acclaim and/or high viewing figures including, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “Quai des orfevres” (1947), Louis Malle’s “Milou en mai” (1989), “Claude Chabrol’s “La Ceremonie” (1995), Andre Techine’s “Les Voleurs” (1995), and Francois Ozon’s “Huit femmes” (2001).
As such, they have contributed to hegemonic constructions of and debate on (female) homosexuality, in a century wherein sexed/gendered identity, including sexual orientation, has become a pre-eminent factor in the constitution of subjectivity. While the arguments have a French-language specificity, and have been produced in distinct sociopolitical and cultural contexts, this study also engages in analytical comparisons with relevant anglophone films and their own distinct discursive contexts. An excellent source of information and analysis that can carry you through advanced party conversation to impress the ladies.
