THE BOOKS
Maia Kobabe - Gender Queer: A Memoir
Graphic Novel
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1549304003/
About the Book:
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears.
Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.
Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings - I Am Jazz
Shelagh McNicholas (Illustrator)
Genre: LGBTQA2S
https://smile.amazon.com/I-Am-Jazz-Jessica-Herthel-ebook/dp/B00INIYH9Q/
About the Book:
The story of a transgender child based on the real-life experience of Jazz Jennings, who has become a spokesperson for transkids everywhere
"This is an essential tool for parents and teachers to share with children whether those kids identify as trans or not. I wish I had had a book like this when I was a kid struggling with gender identity questions. I found it deeply moving in its simplicity and honesty."—Laverne Cox (who plays Sophia in “Orange Is the New Black”)
From the time she was two years old, Jazz knew that she had a girl's brain in a boy's body. She loved pink and dressing up as a mermaid and didn't feel like herself in boys' clothing. This confused her family, until they took her to a doctor who said that Jazz was transgender and that she was born that way. Jazz's story is based on her real-life experience and she tells it in a simple, clear way that will be appreciated by picture book readers, their parents, and teachers.
Organization: https://transkidspurplerainbow.org/
Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass
Genre: Classic, Poetry
https://www.amazon.com/Leaves-Grass-Original-1855-Illustrated-ebook/dp/B074GRBGSY/
About the Book:
When Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855, he rocked the literary world and forever changed the course of poetry. In subsequent editions, Whitman continued to revise and expand his poems--but none matched the raw power and immediacy of the first edition.
This beautifully-designed volume presents the original edition Leaves of Grass in its entirety, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous letter to Whitman.
Anonymous- Go Ask Alice
Genre: nonfiction, diary, addiction
purchase link: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1416914633
About the Book:
A teen plunges into a downward spiral of addiction in this classic cautionary tale.
January 24th
After you’ve had it, there isn't even life without drugs…
It started when she was served a soft drink laced with LSD in a dangerous party game. Within months, she was hooked, trapped in a downward spiral that took her from her comfortable home and loving family to the mean streets of an unforgiving city. It was a journey that would rob her of her innocence, her youth—and ultimately her life.
Read her diary.
Enter her world.
You will never forget her.
For thirty-five years, the acclaimed, bestselling first-person account of a teenage girl’s harrowing decent into the nightmarish world of drugs has left an indelible mark on generations of teen readers. As powerful—and as timely—today as ever, Go Ask Alice remains the definitive book on the horrors of addiction.
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
Genre: Dystopian, drama, women
purchase link https://smile.amazon.com/Handmaids-Tale-Margaret-Atwood/dp/038549081X
About the Book:
In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. At once a scathing satire, an ominous warning, and a tour de force of narrative suspense, The Handmaid’s Tale is a modern classic.
B.P. Smythe - Mavis Bone and the Fledgling Killer
Genre: Detective/LGBTQAS2
purchase link https://smile.amazon.com/Handmaids-Tale-Margaret-Atwood/dp/038549081X
About the Book:
Vincent Pollack is a serial killer, whose evil roots were planted during a traumatic childhood, with an agenda to rob and kill women for financial gain. It is down to Mavis Bone, a forty-year-old Australian, lesbian Private investigator, and her German lesbian secretary, Gertrude Stick, to try and foil his murderous plans. Together they make up the Mavis Bone Detective Agency based in Wimbledon Broadway, London SW19.
It is a hands-on job to chase down this ingenious killer, and Mavis is not afraid to get them dirty. Dirty with the blood of her prostitute philandering husband, and the blood of a problem client that could send her secretary to prison for a war crime. Both detective’s and killer’s paths, have already crossed during their troubled youths, but as the murders pile up, they move towards a final conflict.
Mavis’s hard Australian outback childhood, led to her sexual and gender choices, as well as some questionable racist opinions. Not to mention the drug habit she picked up as a student, while backpacking in South America. This, making her, not your average South London Private Eye.
Abdiel LeRoy- The Covid Protocols: Upholding Your Rights in Authoritarian Times
Genre: International Law/Civil Rights
purchase link: https://www.amazon.com/Covid-Protocols-Upholding-Rights-Authoritarian-ebook/dp/B09R8147XX
About the Book:
WHAT ARE MY RIGHTS?!
Did you know that, under international law, no-one can demand you get a medical test, wear a mask, or have any other medical procedure?
And did you also know that no emergency, even if it threatens the life of a nation, takes away any of your rights? Or that any leader who attempts to persecute a group based on medical status is committing a Crime Against Humanity?!
Meanwhile, international law also confirms YOUR MEDICAL STATUS IS CONFIDENTIAL, a protection supported by medical codes dating back millennia to the Hippocratic Oath!
Yet governments are not only demanding we hand over this sacred information, but using it to divide and discriminate, penalizing bodily sovereignty and autonomy.
SOMETHING IS SERIOUSLY WRONG, AND WE ALL KNOW IT!
"I know in my heart that these measures are an offence against God," writes Abdiel LeRoy in the Introduction to this book, "an attack on what it means to be human, and my spirit rebels against them. But merely having that instinct is not enough now. WHAT ARE MY RIGHTS?! I'm going to need more than personal disgust if I am to overrule the fearmongering tyrants who are exploiting Covid's arrival to impose authoritarian rule. I'm going to need intellectual ammunition and armour based in constitutionality, law, and precedent, and I'm going to need it quickly. And when I have it, I will share it with those who may benefit."
Here is the result. This book will protect you. It will remind you, and anyone who is trying to trample the sacred ground of your inalienable rights, of eternal values at the core of Humanity. You will learn how to be a CONSTITUTIONAL EXTREMIST, and you will find the sacred armour that guards you from ruling autocrats and their functionaries.
The author also counsels in overcoming fear, instead instilling the "fear of God" into the 'pharaohs' of this age, prophesying their downfall when, "like a mighty river," Justice returns. Meanwhile, he calls for healing across the 'vaccine divide', and across the divides of police and civilian.
Here is your constitutional Bible, a rebuking voice to the winds and waves of fear and propaganda, and herald to a new and better world.
Anne Frank- Anne Frank Diary of a Young Girl
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Genre: Memoir/Biography/WWII
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https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/0553577123/
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About the Book:
Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank’s remarkable diary has since become a world classic—a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit.
In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another family lived cloistered in the “Secret Annex” of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and amusing, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.
Amy Sonnie - Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology
Contributors: Amy Sonnie, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhran, Alegria Sonata Barclay, Alix Lindsey Olson, Andromeda,
Anna Mills, Antigona, Ariana Banias, Attar of Nishapur, Beth Ann Dowler, Bree Zuckerman, Cecilia Isaacs-Blundin, Chris Cotrina, Colleen K. Donovan, Dana Nicole Robinson, Dani Frances Montgomery, Daryl Vocat, De Anne Lyn Smith, Emil Keliane, Gina de Vries, Gloria Ng, Jason Roe, Jerome C. Boyce, John Frazier, Katherine Heather Grobman, Kevin Rolfe, Kohei Ishihara, Lisa Lusero, Liz Gaden, Margot Kelley Rodríguez,Maria Poblet, Mario Anthony Balcita, Matt Wiedenheft, Meicha, Meliza Banales, Mollie Biewald, Nzinga Akili, Qwo-Li Driskill, Rachel Josloff, Ryan Pesigan Reyes, Ryn Gluckman, S. Asher Hanley, Sara Frog Davidson, Shane Luitjens, Sherisse Alvarez, Siobhan Brooks, T. Rowan, Thea Gahr, Tim Arevalo, Uchechi Kalu,
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Genre: LGBTQA2
purchase link: https://www.amazon.com/Revolutionary-Voices-Multicultural-Queer-Anthology/dp/1555835589/
About the Book:
Invisible. Unheard. Alone. Chilling words but apt to describe the isolation and alienation of queer youth. In silence and fear they move from childhood memories of repression or violence to the unknown, unmentored, landscape of queer adulthood, their voices stilled or ignored. No longer. Revolutionary Voices celebrates the hues and harmonies of the future of gay and lesbian society, presenting not a collection of stories but a collection of experiences, ideas, dreams, and fantasies expressed through prose, poetry, artwork, letters, diaries, and performance pieces.
