Happy Pride Month Toronto! This year our home city has dedicated the entire month of June to celebrating the LGBTQ+ community. The celebrations will conclude with the annual Pride Parade on July 3rd.
We would like to take this opportunity to tell you about some of our books on the subject of LGBTQ+ issues both past and present. These titles touch on cultural concerns, social psychology, and health in a way that offers insight and support.
Growing into Resilience: Sexual and Gender Minority Youth in Canada
By André P. Grace with Kristopher Wells
This title discusses the challenges of ensuring that sexual and gender minority youth experience fairness, justice, inclusion, safety, and security in their schools and communities. The authors are co-founders of Camp fYrefly, a summer leadership camp for sexual and gender minority youth. They have studied the physical, mental, and sexual health of these youth in an effort to find exactly what support is needed.
This book draws on personal narratives and focuses on how teachers, healthcare workers, and other professionals can help sexual and gender minority youth build the human and material assets that will empower them to be happy, healthy, and resilient. It is a valuable resource for anyone working with youth.
Troubled Masculinities: Reimagining Urban Men
Edited by Ken Moffatt
Troubled Masculinities is a collection of essays set against the backdrop of Toronto that deal with the issues associated with stereotypical masculine identity. They engage with the global and transnational processes that affect identity and consider how the social hybridity of large cities allows individuals to work against fundamentalist and essentialist attitudes toward gender.
The essays are from contributors that represent diverse backgrounds, races, ethnicities, sexualities, and gender orientations. This book is an important contribution to the growing field of masculinity studies and a valuable assessment of the nature of gender in a modern Canadian urban setting.
Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination
By Sheila L. Cavanagh
Though published 6 years ago, Queering Bathrooms is still very relevant- The LGBTQ+ community, especially transgender people, are still prevented in many places from using their preferred bathroom. This book is based on 100 interviews with people in major North American cities and explores how public toilets demarcate the masculine and the feminine and condition ideas of gender and sexuality.
This title both discusses how the queer and trans communities challenge the rigid gendering and heteronormative composition of public washrooms and offers suggestions for imagining a more inclusive public washroom.
We hope that these titles will make good additions to your LGBTQ+ reading this month. Have a safe and happy Pride!
