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Celebrating Pride Month With Our Favorite Pieces of Queer Media
As we roll into Pride month, it’s time to repeat one of our favorite traditions: uplifting our favorite pieces of queer media. Read on for our staff members’ suggestions and check out our other Pride month piece on queer joy here!
Hannah’s recommendation: The Ultimatum: Queer Love
Here’s what I love about Netflix’s reality dating show The Ultimatum: it doesn’t pretend to make any sense. On Love Is Blind, the show where contestants fall in love and get engaged before ever seeing the other person, hosts Nick and Vanessa Lache pretend the show is all in service to a grand philosophical experiment deciphering whether love truly is blind.
Viewers everywhere, I am sorry to have to break this news: Nick and Vanessa are not scientists. They don’t care if love is blind or not. The “grand experiment” is merely a pretense, a gimmick. Nick and Vanessa may care about the people on the show, and they likely care about the paychecks they’re earning from it, but they do not care about love’s true nature. And that’s okay!
The Ultimatum makes no such assertions. It doesn’t pretend its insane premise is actually an altruistic attempt at decoding how love and successful relationships work. Instead, it embraces its true purpose: to bring unadulterated messiness to our screens, week after week. And that’s just what I expect the show’s second all-queer season to do when it premieres in late June.
(Note: The first all-queer season contains depictions of domestic violence without addressing the issue–so you might want to skip that and just jump into the new season).
Josia’s recommendations: Hijab Butch Blues, Pizza Girl, Family Meal, and Manhunt
As a certified (by no one) book worm, I like to read queer books year-round, and my love language is giving people personalized recommendations. Some of my recent favorites reads with queer characters, themes, and plots include:
- Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H., an incredibly written memoir that dives into the author’s coming of age with faith, sexuality, and community;
- Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier, which is a bit weird and won’t be for everyone – featuring a young, queer, pregnant protagonist with a fixation on one of her customers;
- Family Meal by Bryan Washington, exploring grief and loss intertwined with food and comfort; and
- Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin, a visceral and thrilling horror where we follow a group of trans found family on their quest for survival.
I have so many other faves, and at a time where pro-censorship extremists are using book bans to keep students from accessing inclusive materials, championing these works is crucial. And shoutout to public libraries and my most-used app, Libby, for keeping me on top of my reading goals and being essential community hubs!
Kenna’s recommendation: Hacks
The television show Hacks centers on the toxic co-dependent relationship between legendary aging stand up, Deborah Vance, and her up-start millennial comedy writer, Ava Daniels. Ava Daniels is less queer icon and more queer everyman. She’s weird, neurotic, loving, overly earnest at times, and achingly hilarious. And she brings all of that to her relationships. Watching a funny bi woman on screen messing up in relationships because she is messy but trying her hardest because she’s a try hard? It feels deeply true to life and a breath of fresh air. Thanks, Hacks!
Michael’s recommendations: The End of Eddy, The Last Time I Wore a Dress, About Ed, and fourteen poems’ anthologies
This Pride month, I’m focused on rereading memoirs written by queer authors. One such book is The End of Eddy, a memoir about the author, Édouard Louis, and his experience growing up as the target of homophobic acts of violence in rural France. Another one is The Last Time I Wore a Dress by Dylan Scholinski, a memoir about his three years undergoing abusive conversion therapy – an especially important read given that the Supreme Court will hear a case challenging a ban on conversion therapy in Colorado.
Given that Republican lawmakers in Congress recently proposed cuts to Medicaid that would threaten life-saving health care coverage for LGBTQIA+ people, About Ed, author Robert Glück’s memoir about his relationship with Ed Aulerich-Sugai, his lover and friend who died of AIDS in 1994, is a timely read. If you’re looking to read some poems by queer poets, I recommend fourteen poems, a poetry publisher that publishes three anthologies yearly highlighting queer poets.
Jordan’s recommendation: Open Throat by Henry Hoke
Have you ever considered that mountain lions could be queer? Maybe you have, but I never had until cracking open Open Throat, a novel that takes you into the internal monologue of, well, a queer mountain lion. They live under the Hollywood sign, on the outskirts of what nearby humans call “ellay” and do their best to protect a nearby encampment where a group of unhoused people have been living. Our lion thinks in fragments of both memory and present-day musings. They observe hikers complaining about helicopters and the homeless in between their own reflections on their troubled past fleeing an abusive father and losing a partner they refer to as “kill-sharer.”
Being immersed in this lion’s world took me on an incredibly emotional whirlwind of a journey—if you’re looking for a compassionate, empathetic read that reckons with gender identity, climate grief, and late-stage capitalism (in less than 200 pages), look no further.
Emily’s recommendation: She Gets the Girl by Rachel Lippincott and Alyson Derrick
She Gets the Girl is a sweet, earnest coming-of-age rom com written by a wife-wife duo, and it’s loosely based on how they met. It features one of my favorite rom com tropes: a charismatic, reformed player (Alex) teaches an insecure wallflower (Molly) how to flirt. It shouldn’t be a huge surprise that the girls’ efforts to woo their ostensible crushes take them in a direction they never saw coming. But what sets this novel apart is the complex relationship between Molly and her mother, a Korean adoptee who is reluctant to embrace her heritage. The central romance directly ties into this theme: through Alex’s “lessons,” Molly slowly comes out of her shell, giving her the courage for a long-overdue conversation with her mother about their racial identity. I love this book because Molly and Alex don’t just fall in love—they help each other grow. Come for the warm, fuzzy romantic feels, stay for the nuanced exploration of racial identity. Oh, and did I mention there’s roller skating?
Kat’s recommendation: The first two seasons of Dead to Me
In These Troubling Times, I’ve turned back to a comfort show of mine: the first two seasons of Dead to Me. The set-up for the show is darkly funny: Judy (Linda Cardellini) and Jen (Christina Applegate) meet at a grief support group after Jen’s husband is killed by a hit-and-run driver, and Judy quickly becomes an indispensable source of support for Jen…until it’s revealed that she is said hit-and-run driver. By the second season, there’s another murder on the pile and a surprise twin reveal, but the heart of the show remains the same: Cardellini and Applegate’s wonderful chemistry. Both characters have other love interests—bisexual Judy dates the luminous Natalie Morales and straight Jen goes for the surprise-reveal twin—but Judy and Jen never falter in their dedication to each other. They are each other’s “person,” as they drunkenly declare in a hotel bar; Judy is a second mother to Jen’s children; and their lives are so entwined that, by the second season, they never even try to disentangle them. There’s nothing queerer to me than a story that recognizes that the love of your life might not be someone you marry or date or sleep with—it might be the strange, needy woman who accidently killed your husband. Just don’t watch the third season.
Caitlin’s recommendations: Queer zines and Carry On by Rainbow Rowell
This Pride Month, I’m rereading the Carry On trilogy by Rainbow Rowell—because the gays deserve our fantasy adventures! Set in the Watford School of Magicks, this series both pulls out all the best tropes yet responds to and subverts them at the same time. It’s funny, beautiful, and features a fantastic group of friends and love story. (This trilogy is also a great read if you want to read something in the magical school genre by someone who is not a transphobic bigot.)
I’m also on the lookout for queer zines; sometimes I find them at Pride events and in bookstores, but I want to make more of effort to seek out zines this month! The queer community pours so much love and talent into not only creating incredible art, but also preserving and archiving it. Here are some resources I’ve found so far:
- Queer Zine Archive Project: a “labor of love project” collecting, archiving, and tagging queer zines from across the community.
- Queer Zine Library: a UK-based “roaming DIY queer library” celebrating LGBTQIA+ self-published works.
