Oh dear. I had grand plans for an LGBT+ History Month reading summary, with slightly longer than usual descriptions of what I’d read. But then for complicated reasons I didn’t have access to my laptop for a week and a half and suddenly it’s 11 March. Ah well.

I did read a lot again in February (right now it is not looking like March will be so successful) and most of the books were excellent. I think my favourite read was Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis, so I will definitely be looking out for more books by the Uruguayan author.

I seem to have watched an even greater than usual roster of films old and new, including Blade Runner, Last Night in Soho, Lady Macbeth, Aliens and Passing. And in-between the grey drizzly days there was some glorious sunshine for dog walks. We even went out for a super fancy meal at an actual indoor restaurant.

Books read

Greyboy: Finding Blackness in a White World by Cole Brown
This is a memoir about what Brown describes as his greyness: that he is both Black and from a privileged, wealthy family. Which unfortunately in the US (and indeed most of the Global North) is considered a contradiction. Sadly, and predictably, the world always sees his Blackness first. In privileged spaces, such as private schools, Brown tended to find himself the only person of colour, or one of a very few, a situation leading to him referring to himself as a Token. This is a well written, insightful book but I did find it fairly repetitive and wondered if maybe Brown should have waited a few more years to flesh it out with his experiences after university (this book started as a university paper).

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
An epic about just over a year in the lives of four people trying to survive in an unnamed Indian city during the Emergency of 1975-1976. This is an amazing book, packed with characters, details, satire and sorrow. Not an easy read, but one I do recommend.

Solitaire by Alice Oseman
Having loved the first three volumes of Oseman’s Heartstopper comic, I wanted to fill in the story between there and the final volume with this short novel, which was actually published before Heartstopper and is where all the characters began (though the edition I read has been edited by Oseman in recent years). I hadn’t been very impressed with her novella This Winter so I didn’t have high expectations but this was better. Still not as good as the comics but a reasonably well fleshed out story about a teenage girl trying to figure out who she is, while handling family crises.

The Memorial by Christopher Isherwood
An extended family and their friends deal with the aftermath of world war over the course of the 1920s. Told out of order, focusing on different characters from the group at different points, we piece together several lives that haven’t turned out the way any of them imagined. Between them, they’re dealing with grief, PTSD, being gay in a time when that had to be suppressed and secret – even in the fictional narrative a main character’s sexual identity is only obliquely suggested until very late on, while hints that a second character might be gay are never confirmed. What could have been a rural idyll (for large chunks anyway, though it’s also set in London, Berlin and Oxford) is instead a melancholy – but still beautiful – novel.

Heartstopper volume 4 by Alice Oseman
This brings me up to date with the story of Nick and Charlie, a couple at a boys’ school in Kent. Charlie is struggling with his eating disorder, while Nick is struggling with a homophobic family member. This is still a very sweet comic, though far less light in tone than it started.

Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis
In Uruguay in 1977, five gay women (cantoras, or “women who sing”) find each other and holiday together at Cabo Polonio, an isolated spot on the coast where they camp in the ruins of a fishing hut. It’s a dangerous thing to do under a dictatorship where homosexuality is severely punished and gatherings of more than four people are illegal. But the women’s friendship – and other relationships – endure and evolve as the years pass, whether in Montevideo, Cabo Polonio or even further afield. This is such a gripping, wonderful story.

Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks
For years I have been reading books about feminism and/or racism that reference hooks and her quotes always sounded like she was someone I should read. By sad coincidence I picked out this book from my TBR to read next just a month after she died. In this volume she looks at how Black women have been excluded from mainstream feminism. She argues the case that Black women need feminism as well as anti-racism work, but that feminism must acknowledge the specific and different position of Black women in the US, as compared with white women. Every sentence is important and quotable. The historical detail about slavery is of course horrible but important to include, as slavery and its aftermath are so key to the social positions of Black men and women in the US. hooks’ main thesis is that both Black men and white women have contrived to keep Black women at the bottom of the social order, while white men created some of the most pernicious crimes against and myths about Black women to maintain their own position at the top.

What It Feels Like for a Girl by Paris Lees
This is the most unusual, original autobiography I have ever read. I had to keep flipping to the cover blurb to assure myself it wasn’t a novel. Written in broad Nottinghamshire dialect, with plenty of swearing and early-2000s slang, Lees tells her story from the age of 12 to her early 20s. Despite telling her parents from a young age that she was a girl, they insisted on raising her as a boy – one who presented increasingly effeminately, much to her dad’s displeasure. Facing abuse at home and at school, her behaviour was labelled “difficult” and her attempts to find sympathetic friends led her to some dangerous and illegal situations. It’s a remarkable, often shocking, story. I was grateful to Lees for injecting it with so much humour and warmth because in other hands this could have been bleak misery porn. I highly recommend this to everyone – especially anyone who thinks it’s easy to be trans in the 21st century.