Genre: Non-Fiction, Biography, Historical
Date Published: May 23, 2017
Rating: ★★★★
LGBTQ+: ✅
📖 Click here to read the synopsis
World history has been made by countless lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals—and you’ve never heard of many of them.
Queer author and activist Sarah Prager delves deep into the lives of 23 people who fought, created, and loved on their own terms. From high-profile figures like Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt to the trailblazing gender-ambiguous Queen of Sweden and a bisexual blues singer who didn’t make it into your history books, these astonishing true stories uncover a rich queer heritage that encompasses every culture, in every era.
My ongoing reading goal is read more LGBTQ+ books, particularly non-fiction, and this book was a great place to start when I read it last year. It features some people I haven’t heard of before and others I have, but for each and every one of them, I loved reading their stories about how they positively impacted the queer world in so many wonderful ways.
As other reviewers have said, it would have been good to see people from other non-western backgrounds included, but the author did state at the end that this is down to a lack of source material and records from other parts of the world. I definitely still want to seek out more books about a wider scope of people, though.
Quick warning for anyone interested in reading this: there are some quite graphic and gory descriptions in a couple of places, namely the chapters about Frido Kahlo and Mychal Judge. They shocked me a bit because I definitely wasn’t expecting them, so just be aware!
“All these stories are about people who brought originality, courage, and love to their work—whatever the work was, whatever way they set themselves to it. And as we see in all these transformative lives, and from the effect reading about them has on us today, however you want to live is valid and important—because the mere fact of you, living, makes the world more radiant. Live bravely.”
