Pride month reading list | 7 queer-themed books that you must read

Back in 2016, I used to take the Delhi Metro for my daily commute to the office. Reading in the metro was an everyday thing for me except that fateful day when I was subjected to unwarranted attention and the gaze of fellow metro riders because the book I was holding in my hands was Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History (originally published in 2000 by Penguin), edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai. I was so embarrassed that I began covering queer titles with a newspaper while reading in public. For a few years, I and my books both remained in the closet. Like me, for many queer people, this book was our way into the world of queer storytelling. No wonder, through it, I discovered several myth-historical facts, queer histories, and so many other texts that came out (no pun intended) long ago when queer writing was non-existent. As sodomy and equivalent discriminatory laws across the world get increasingly decriminalised, and, back home, ever since Section 377 was read down on 6 September 2018, it’s heartening to see the publishing industry’s newfound interest in publishing works by LGBTQIA+ writers and/or queer-themed stories. Of late, some remarkable books have been published. They not only break new grounds but also set the bar rather high in terms of queer storytelling. It is thus fitting to begin this reading list with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby (Hachette). While most narratives involving trans characters are trauma-oriented, Peters wanted to explore “ways in which trans women are screwed up and flawed.” In this book, one of her characters, Reese, who has dated cismen in the past and never quite learnt from her mistakes, faces a dilemma when her ex-lover Amy (who transitioned to being a woman, Ames, but has recently detransitioned) offers her to co-parent his child with his boss Katrina — a cisgender woman. It’s highly unlikely to find a tragicomic book like Detransition, Baby, as it’s not so much about the plot as it’s about the politics. Or as Peters writes, “I am trans, but I don’t need to do trans.” A cisgender person can never get the nuances right the way Peters does. Her book was on the longlist for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. She was the first trans person to receive this recognition. However, several ciswomen writers were, of course, not happy with Peters’s inclusion, for they felt that a “male” shouldn’t be eligible for the prize. The open letter that they circulated, which funnily had dead signatories, not only misgendered Peters but also reeked of heteronormative gaze and gatekeeping. This sorry episode must remind us why it’s essential to sensitise people right from the start so that the conversations that Peters and other writers try to have in their stories get normalised. Two children’s books — Me, My Dad and the End of the Rainbow (Simon & Schuster), written by Benjamin Dean and illustrated by Sandhya Prabhat, and Ritu Weds Chandni (Puffin, an imprint of Penguin), written and illustrated by Ameya Narvankar — took that step. The former is a story of a troubled 12-year-old Archie Maverick Albright who is unhappy because he finds his parents fighting every day. But there’s much more that this young boy must deal with — a revelation that’ll take him all the way to Pride! And in the latter, little Ayesha wants to enjoy the biggest day in her cousin sister Ritu’s life — her marriage — but things soon turn haywire for the heteropatriarchal society gets irritated seeing the same-sex couple. Both stories are told intelligibly and are full of humour and emotion. In an article, Dean writes, “Children look for themselves in stories.” Through these books not only will young queers find themselves being seen, but these books will also serve as a roadmap for writers to tell an engaging, yet sensitive narrative that children can enjoy reading. Though it’s worth celebrating where we’ve reached where we’re today, it’s crucial to look back, remember, and appreciate the struggle and atrocities that so many queer and trans people had to endure to make this world a little more accepting than it was. Two such brilliantly told works are Affliction: Growing Up with a Closeted Gay Dad (She Writes Press) by Laura Hall and The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes: The Transgender Trial that Threatened to Upend the British Establishment (Bloomsbury) by Zoë Playdon. In Affliction, Hall takes us through the painful journey of her father who remained closeted for 64 years. Back in the 1940s, US police would arrest anyone for being gay or on suspicious of being queer, and they’d extort money from them to ‘hide’ this fact and continue instilling fear in them of outing them. The ‘shame’ that one such arrest brought to her father Ralph Hall was unbearable for him. He not only lost his job, but this trauma also kept him away from the love of his life Stanley Hughes, whom he distinctly remembered even on his deathbed and regretted not being with him. The book is not only about what Ralph went through. It is also about his conviction to serve his community in whatever capacity he could. Later in his life when the world was faced with the AIDS epidemic, he would offer his services to the ones in need and would actively organise prayer meetings. One of the wonderful qualities of this book is how deeply Laura goes on to tell her father’s story, unabashedly and with a reporter-like conviction to get everything right. The Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London and former co-chair of GLADD (Gay and Lesbian Association of Doctors and Dentists) Zoë Playdon unravels the mystery behind a 1968 legal case that had the potential to change the discourse of the ongoing trans rights struggle in her book The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes. Not only did Mr Forbes belong to a wealthy family of baronetcy holders, but he was also one of the first few transmen to be a medical practitioner. While he was able to do the impossible for his time — got transitioned and attained a renewed birth certificate, too, only because he came from money, he was taken aback when his gender was questioned in a civil suit by a potential inheritor of the baronetcy, his cousin John. Interestingly, the hearing was kept secret, which is why this case remained inaccessible until Playdon unearthed the 500 pages of the court transcript. She writes that the multiple waves of trans rights would have taken a different turn had activists been armed with the information of this remarkable but hidden case. Time for personal histories now. Two hot-off-the-press memoirs should be read by everybody for the kind of rich narrative and struggles they underline in their stories. One is Onir’s I am Onir, and I am Gay (Viking, an imprint of Penguin), co-written with his sister Irene Dhar Malik. And A Small Step in a Long Journey: A Memoir (Zubaan) — as told to Gowri Vijayakumar — by Akkai Padmashali. While in the former the National Award-winning filmmaker and editor Onir lays bare everything as it is — right from growing up years to cruising and dating while Section 377 was very much around, and from the difficulties he faced making queer-themed movies to unrequited loves, in the latter Akkai narrates a horrifying, nightmarish childhood that she had to endure just because of being who she was. Both these memoirs shall serve as a reminder to anyone who is queer (or not) how excruciatingly painful it was for queer people before us to assert their identities and that we owe the newfound freedom we enjoy today to them!  And some latest and upcoming releases for your ever-increasing TBR list

• You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty (Faber & Faber) by Akwaeke Emezi
• Get Out: The Gay Man’s Guide to Coming Out and Going Out (HarperCollins) by Aniruddha Mahale
• Footprints of a Queer History: Life-Stories from Gujarat (Yoda Press) by Maya Sharma
• Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (Hachette) by Kit Heyam

Saurabh Sharma (He/They) is a Delhi-based queer writer and freelance journalist. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.