7 Books Reimagining Queer Histories

a reading list for Electric Literature

For me, queerness has always been related to imagination. Like many of us, I grew up without a blueprint for a queer life. In the evangelical household I was raised in, I had to dream my queerness into existence, conjure a life that was forbidden to me, claim it because no one was ever going to give it to me. This has been true for so many of us, now and in the past, as we’ve existed outside of and beyond the boundaries of what our world calls normal and good. There is a long lineage of LGBTQ+ people who came before us, crashing against the barriers erected around them and finding ways to make their own lives, communities, and loves anyway. 

There is so much of queer history we don’t know. It’s been erased, lost to time, pathologized and told by people other than us, never recorded in the first place.

I recently wrote a reading list for Electric Literature, and each of the books on the list work to move and play within this fluidity, reimagining queer and trans history in the wide gaps between what was true and what we know. In their pages are previously untold stories, fictionalized imaginings based on real people, and present-day reflections on moments, stories, and even items from the past.

These books are flares sent up in the darkness. They are works of imagination and resistance. They plot the future forward as they dig their hands through the warm, wet soil of the past. They say the names of those we know and those who have been made invisible through time, history, and systems of oppression, who have been reduced to their carceral records or hidden inside a social worker’s report or the journal of a rent collector. They are the books that have shown me who my ancestors are, taught me about where I come from, connected me to a long lineage beyond my blood family. 

This history gives me hope. Not because it is all beautiful. But because there is beauty, love, care, and connection amidst the struggle. There always has been. There always will be.

Check out the list here!

With care,

Eryn