OUTstages Reading List
Inspired by the programming at OUTstages, our friends at the Greater Victoria Public Library have put together a curated reading list to get more out of the themes on the stage during the festival. Put together by the GVPL’s finest, these librarian recommendations can be found at your local library. Our thanks to librarians at the GVPL for putting this beautiful list together.
Click here for a printable full list.
Didn’t We Almost Have It All: In Defense of Whitney Houston by Gerrick Kennedy
Sets Houston’s struggles against the backdrop of tabloid culture, mental health stigmas, and racism in America.
Drag King Dreams by Leslie Feinberg
From award-winning and best-selling author of Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg, comes Drag King Dreams, a story of queer community, activism, and connection in a post-9/11 time of cultural uncertainty.
Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City by Elyssa Goodman
Illuminates Harlem Renaissance balls, drag’s crucial role in the Stonewall Uprising, drag’s influence on disco and punk rock as well as its unifying power during the AIDS crisis and 9/11, and culminates in the era of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
A profound meditation on queerness and indigeneity from the youngest ever winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize Billy-Ray Belcourt. Blends memoir and essay and grapples with a legacy of trauma and records the joy that flourishes in spite of it.
How You Get Famous: Ten Years of Drag Madness in Brooklyn by Nicole Pasulka
Joyfully documents the rebirth of the New York drag scene. A sweeping portrait of the 21st-century search for celebrity and community, as well as a chronicle of all the struggles, fights, and disappointments along the way.
Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead
A startling, heartwrenching look at what it means to live as a queer Indigenous person “in the rupture” between identities. In sharp, surprising, unique pieces Whitehead illuminates this moment, in which both Indigenous and non Indigenous peoples are navigating new (and old) ideas about “the land.”
Out North: An Archive of Queer Activism and Kinship in Canada by Craig Jennex
An exploration and examination of one nation’s queer history and, activism and Canada’s definitive visual guide to LGBTQ2+ movements, struggles, and achievements.
Queer as Folklore: The Hidden Queer History of Myths and Monsters
A wild ride through the night from ancient Greece to the main stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race, visiting cross-dressing pirates, radical fairies and the graves of the ‘queerly departed’ along the way.
Queers Were Here: Heros & Icons of Queer Canada edited by Robin Ganev
Tells personal stories to illuminate the enormous social changes that have transformed sexuality in Canada. A celebration of queer identity, this book will look back so that we can look forward.
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
A searing indictment of a racist, patriarchal society and a manual for claiming an intersectional identity, Sister Outsider is a comprehensive collection of poet and writer Audre Lorde’s most famous and influential works of nonfiction prose.
The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst
A brilliant novel about sensuality and scruples set against a backdrop of social change in England in the 20th century.
Unprotected: A Memoir by Billy Porter
To the public, his talent propelled him to the top, but Porter’s memoir is about the rough road that he travelled to get there, in a world stacked against him as a gay Black man.
When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan
A groundbreaking exploration of the LGBT history of Brooklyn, from the early days of Walt Whitman in the 1850s up through the women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and beyond.
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