Books for the LGBTQ History in Your Life

Denver is the Mile High City, the Queen City of the Plains, and the Gateway to the West. Today, the city attracts thousands of new residents each year, including the LGBTQ people from the rural West and digital nomads from around the nations seeking a welcoming community where they can thrive. In LGBTQ Denver, Phil Nash showcases how the city evolved from its pre-1970s history of rebuking gay people to a magnet for LGBTQ residents and the capital of the first state to elect and reelect the nation’s first openly gay governor.

Nestled in the Eureka Valley area, the Castro is arguably the most well-known of San Francisco's neighborhoods, having been the epicenter of the gay rights movement since the 1970s. This new collection of photographs shows the area's growth from a smattering of Victorian houses built for working-class families in the 1870s to the flood of young gay men who settled in the neighborhood during the 1970s. This influx transformed the area and led to the rise of Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person elected to a major public office. This book also chronicles the 1978 assassination of Milk and Mayor George Moscone, the subsequent riots, and the effects of AIDS on the community in the 1980s and 1990s. Ultimately, these stirring images bear witness to the resilience of the Castro today.

The scene is Charleston, South Carolina; the time, the 1920s, when old ladies dream of the past and a strange new dance, "the Charleston," is seducing the youth of the city. Years later, whispers emerge of something baffling and tragic that happened back then. As an old man confronts those demanding the truth, we catch brilliant flashes of the confrontation between the dark, doomed Hirsch Hess, son of immigrants, and the fantastically ethereal Ned Grimke, a scion of the city.

Told in intoxicatingly beautiful prose, this story of passion, beauty and the deadly effects of sexual repression takes us to a specific time and place, yet simultaneously blossoms as a universal tale of the human heart in conflict with its era.



This cult classic, set in the most intriguing period of one of America's most beautiful cities, is now restored to print with an afterword by its author that traces the facts upon which it is based.

Long Beach, California, founded in the 1880s by conservative, pro-temperance settlers, has been known as “American Colony,” “Queen of the Beaches,” “Iowa-By-The Sea,” “Home of the Pike,” and “Paradise for Pansies.” This book gives a glimpse of how Long Beach went from making national headlines in 1914 for entrapping 31 gay men as “social vagrants” to receiving a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign’s “Municipal Equality Index” for issues that contribute to a positive climate for LGBTQA+ people. Over time, Long Beach changed, becoming one of the most diverse cities in California. Voters elected a lesbian to city council in 2006 and a gay mayor in 2014 who they sent to Congress in 2022. Its new main library is named in honor of its hometown lesbian heroine, Billie Jean King. Today, Long Beach has the third largest “Pride Parade and Festival” in California.

Since the early 1900s, Silver Lake has been a magnet for iconoclastic writers, architects and political activists. Famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed the Hollyhock House for socialist and oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, drew a wave of visionary modernists to the area. Local civil rights advocate Loren Miller spearheaded the fight against housing discrimination. Silver Lake's Black Cat bar and Harry Hay's Mattachine Society were central to the early gay rights movement. Literary artists Anäis Nin and James Leo Herlihy made the neighborhood their home, as did other notables like first lady of baseball Effa Manley and Hobo Millionaire James Eads How. Michael Locke and Vincent Brook chronicle these and other people and places that helped make Silver Lake the bohemian epicenter of Los Angeles.