Like many queer Philadelphians, I enjoyed the heady celebration of Philly Pride in the Gayborhood on June 1. But Pride’s a month long, and with the current political climate — from open LGBTQ+ opposition to a massive pullback of support (especially corporate support) — I plan on observing the rest of June my favorite way: reading the queer novels that inspire, energize and focus me.
Not only is reading the perfect activity while tanning in my neighborhood’s parks and pools, it has always been central to personality and key to my queerness. Campy novels like Auntie Mame honed my love of style and chosen families. Classics like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance moved me with their beautiful reflections on the romance and loneliness of gay life. Contemporary favorites like Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl and Nevada reminded me of the joyful chaos and endless diversity of queer communities. The list goes on.
When I was teaching, I dedicated time and energy into the belief that reading possesses truly transformative potential. And while I left that career, this belief remains central to my core.
June comes and goes; public allyship ebbs and flows, but I’m always grateful I have my queer books and a queer community of readers to keep me centered, reflective, and ready for the next struggle.
Reading has also been the key way I’ve made a community here in Philadelphia. As the organizer of Philly Queer Book Club, I lead meetings at Philly AIDS Thrift at Giovanni’s Room, the country’s longest running queer bookstore. Every month, around 50 queer people spread out across this historic space and talk about one book. These conversations help us engage deeply with questions that can sometimes seem impossible or sufficient to tackle alone: What is central to queer identity? How does one build a community? What does hope — or real intimacy — look like in a selfish world?
In these challenging times — with our fragmented attention spans, performative politics, a loneliness epidemic, and watering down of queer political potency and radicalism, book club questions and conversations have become more political, yes, but also more urgent. Reading — while a solitary act — is a radical start to opposing oppression, hopelessness, and fracture. And while reading feels (and is) a small action, it’s essential to addressing some of the day’s struggles by developing some key skills that I know I’ll need beyond Pride.
Reading as radical — and radically healthful
Before we became addicted to our phones, I took my ability to sustain focus, particularly when reading, for granted. Nowadays, our patience for understanding issues beyond a cursory level or the subtle complications of the people that surround us has diminished, even as we need it more. For instance, book club’s July selection, Housemates by Philadelphian Emma Copley Eisenberg, asks readers not only to patiently endure the lovable tribulations of two West Philly queers on a road trip, but to consider the type of time and attention that both our own people require and our own adversities demand.
Reading literature also offers opportunities to develop empathy and employ perspective taking. Tracy K. Smith, the former U.S. Poet Laureate, wrote that great works of poetry, “disorient us from our home base, and they teach us to admit and submit to the feeling of vulnerability, to act upon empathy and curiosity, and to follow along allowing sense to accrue at its own pace and upon its own terms. If you do that enough times with a poem, you might begin to think differently about actual strangers, you might also begin to recognize that there are new possibilities of feeling and awareness available to you.”
Queer literature particularly reminds us of the rich messiness and joyful challenges of queer community. When the book club discussed our June selection, My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson, which mines the queer Black history of the 80s to tell a fictionalized history of ACT UP, many of us were struck by the humanizing portraits of social advocates, the imperfect compromises that enable progress, and the inevitable frustrations of “doing the work.” Grappling with such complications on the page can be a first step in achieving that end in the real world, as opposed to throwing up one’s hands and walking away at the first sign of trouble.
Reading — while a solitary act — is a radical start to opposing oppression, hopelessness, and fracture.
Perhaps most importantly, for queer readers, literature reassures hope and possibility for the future of our community. The great queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz wrote eloquently about the utopian possibilities of queer communities that reject the “here and now” for a “then and there,” imagined by art, performance, and literature. When queer literature imagines a future beyond the inevitable and outside of trauma, we reject the fates our opponents have prescribed to us and the type of short-sighted thinking that breeds apathy and enables our oppression.
We need to remember that our futures — like our favorite novels and our own identities — can be ingeniously crafted from past inspiration, present exigencies, and future desires.
Of course, not all novels are created equal, and offer this seemingly endless radical potential. Neither are all readers looking for the same things from the books they pick up. Also, these benefits are not limited to merely the art of letters; slow-looking at a favorite work in the Philadelphia Museum of Art or attending Philly’s new radically accessible opera offer similar world-expanding and emotionally sustaining benefits.
But I speak of literature because I know it best and it has spoken to me most in my own most challenging times. When I get together with book club members at Gio’s or just settle in with a novel and my cat, I’m reminded of the awesome legacy of queer community, creation, and dedication — and that it’s possible to reject the sense that only the quick and easy and recognizable can engage us. To riff an old local queer poet, “I contain multitudes,” and we’ll need those multitudes to survive the coming challenges.
June comes and goes; public allyship ebbs and flows, but I’m always grateful I have my queer books and a queer community of readers to keep me centered, reflective, and ready for the next struggle. Maybe it’s the English teacher in me, I’d suggest that we could all benefit from a little such summer reading.
Danny Maloney organizes the Philly Queer Book Club at PAT @ Giovanni’s Room, edits for Primer.Press, and works in education.
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STORIES FROM THE LGBTQ COMMUNITY
