Pride Month is celebrated each year during the month of June to coincide with the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, a watershed event for the Gay Rights Movement in the United States. In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The raid led to six days of protests and ultimately ignited 50 years of change for the LGBTQ+ community, one that historically has been marginalized.
Today, Pride Month celebrations occur around the world and include parades, picnics, parties, concerts, workshops and seminars. In addition, memorials are held for members of the community who have been lost to hate crimes or HIV/AIDS.
To help libraries celebrate Pride Month, we’ve curated a collection of digital resources to support academic research, readers’ advisory and educational programming.
Databases, E-Books and Digital Magazines for Students and Researchers
Libraries can serve LGBTQ+ people by ensuring that this population is reflected in their library collections. This includes databases, e-books and digital magazines.
Databases
LGBTQ+ Source: This database provides scholarly and popular LGBTQ+ publications in full text, plus historically important primary sources, including speeches, interviews, monographs, magazines and newspapers. It also includes a specialized LGBTQ+ thesaurus containing thousands of terms.
Gender Studies Database: Find indexing and abstracts for scholarly and popular publications, including journals, books, conference papers and theses. Subjects include gender inequality, masculinity, post-feminism and gender identity.
Literary Reference Center Plus: This full-text literary database provides a complete collection of reference works across all genres and time periods. It includes biographies, plot summaries and literary criticism for the works of several LGBTQ+ writers, including W. H. Auden, James Baldwin, Patricia Highsmith, Langston Hughes and Tennessee Williams.
Poetry & Short Story Reference Center: This rich full-text database contains thousands of classic and contemporary poems, short stories, biographies, essays, lesson plans and learning guides as well as high-quality videos and audio recordings from the Academy of American Poets. Enhance classroom instruction during Pride Month using Poetry Showcases by The Paris Review for Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Danez Smith, CAConrad and Ocean Vuong. Each showcase includes a biography, three poems for discussion, and an interview with the poet.
E-Books
The newly released LGBTQIA+ Studies EBSCO eBooks Featured Collection contains e-books pertaining to the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual peoples, across a variety of subjects including biography, literary criticism, performing arts, social science, medicine, and more. Browse titles and order using EBSCOhost Collection Manager.
Magazines
Flipster: Enhance your library collection with digital magazines that celebrate LGBTQ+ communities, such as Advocate, Gay Times and Out Magazine.
Magazine Archives: Provide unique perspectives and context for historical coverage of LGBTQ+ stories and events using back issues of popular titles such as Jet, Ebony, TIME, Life, People, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The Atlantic and others.
Readers’ Advisory Resources
With themes such as engendering gender and all kinds of families and genres such as LGBTQIA comics, NoveList Plus can help librarians find fiction, nonfiction and audiobooks that reflect the spectrum of experiences Pride Month celebrates, while LibraryAware offers great templates for books and library events to readers.
For libraries looking to add new books by and about people who celebrate their personal stories during Pride Month, Core Collections has great recommendations.
Librarians may also wish to subscribe to Our Queerest Shelves, a weekly e-newsletter of LGBTQ+ news and recommendations from Book Riot.
Information & Educational Programming Resources for Librarians
The American Library Association (ALA) notes that “the LGBTQIA+ population is diverse, spanning age groups, ethnic and racial groups, socio-economic groups, and personal identities.” Download the ALA’s “Open to All” Toolkit for more information about serving your library’s LGBTQ+ community. The toolkit includes links to resources such as the ALA’s Rainbow Book List, an annual annotated bibliography of quality LGBTQIA+ literature intended for readers ages 0-18.
These additional websites offer information to help libraries develop inclusive and educational programming:
- Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN): GLSEN is a national network of educators, students and local chapters working to ensure every student has the right to a safe, supportive and LGBTQ-inclusive K-12 education. The organization’s blog offers articles, guidance, first-person stories and lesson plans.
- MyPronouns.org: Learn why personal pronouns matter.
- Trans Student Educational Resources: Founded in 2011, this youth-led organization is “dedicated to transforming the educational environment for trans and gender non-conforming students through advocacy and empowerment.” The site provides helpful definitions, infographics and more.
- Want to Start a Queer Book Club? Here’s How: This article from Book Riot provides tips for starting an online or in-person book club that celebrates queer authors, characters and stories.
- We Need Diverse Books (WNDB): This organization provides programs to promote and celebrate diverse children’s books, including those by LGBTQ+ authors. Their website offers helpful resources for librarians, educators, parents and booksellers looking to diversify their collections and programming.
