What We’re Reading: Pride Month Edition

Written By Nicole Fisher

 The joy of reading

I have always found reading to be incredibly impactful and meaningful. As a therapist, I often think about how powerful it is to see ourselves reflected in stories, and the ability of stories to connect us with others, learn new things, understand different perspectives, and empathize with each other. Narratives help us feel seen and understood, learn, and grow. In this new series, we will begin sharing books that have been impactful, insightful, interesting, informative, and supportive.

Reading during Pride

June is Pride month and we want to start off this series with books for a range of ages and book types to connect with members of the LBTQIA+ community, allies, parents, family, partners, educators, and mental health professionals that focus on identity, family diversity, supporting LGBTQIA+ authors, experiences, and incorporate queer joy. We know this is a challenging time for many members of this community. As queer-affirming therapists at Kaleidoscope, and some queer-identifying therapists, we want our clients and families of all identities to feel embraced, supported, and comfortable showing up as themselves in our therapy space.

We can all read

As a neuroaffirming practice we want to highlight, celebrate, and share the many ways you can read or consume stories in a way that is accessible and supportive of your neurotype! This can be using audiobooks or a multimodal approach, using audio to listen while simultaneously reading with your eyes, visual modifiers like dyslexia-friendly fonts or e-readers with settings to adjust size, background contrast, and brightness. Other approaches can include stimming while reading (audibly or visually), tactile pacing to keep track of where you are on a page, sticky notes or highlighting passages, rewinding and relistening to parts, changing the listening speed, taking notes, and alternative formats including comic books, graphic novels, manga, and audio. We highly recommend checking out Libby and your local library.

Why share book recommendations for Pride Month or at all?

Books, and specifically LGBTQ+ books provide validation, joy, connection, education, and emotional support. Different readers need different things, for some it is an opportunity to explore their identity, for others to see other families or people like them, some need comfort, spaces for queer joy and celebration, opportunities for learning how to support family members, memoirs of others who have gone through similar experiences and challenges, and information about how to affirm one's identity, grow their family, and advocate for family and friends.

To close out, I hope that you will read something off this list for Pride Month. Reading LGBTQ+ stories during Pride Month can deepen empathy and help people feel less alone. Who and what we see in the books we read matters; representation matter. In our list for this month, we tried to break down books by age and then our adult books by category. This is not a comprehensive list, but hopefully feels like a good place to start to learn, feel safe, and seen. (Please note that we recommend parents looking through and reading books before giving to their children).

Children (age 0-10)

Middle School / Preteen

Teen and up

Adult

Interested in more book recommendations to celebrate pride, understand or better support yourself or your loved ones here are some other lists and recommendations for a more comprehensive list of options or something more specific to what you’re looking for.

https://lgbtqreads.com/

https://www.notimeforflashcards.com/2022/06/101-lgbtq-books-for-kids.html

https://copperdogbooks.com/kids-books-pride

https://www.readbrightly.com/30-great-lgbtq-books-kids/

https://guides.lib.uconn.edu/c.php?g=1100296&p=8407160

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