From time to time, our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads. This is what we read these days of global unrest.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
We are grateful!
Can't donate? Sharing our work helps more than you think
Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth — Daisy Hernández (Hogarth/Penguin Random House, 2026)
Hernández, a queer Latina essayist and associate professor at Northwestern, has written a book that arrives with the grim punctuality of history repeating itself. Published in February 2026, it braids family memoir with cultural criticism and legislative history to argue that American citizenship is less a legal status than a story the nation tells about itself — and revises whenever convenient. Her mother came from Colombia; her father was a political refugee from Castro’s Cuba, granted passage by Cold War immigration policy that had less to do with humanitarian principle than with geopolitical theatre. That distinction matters. Hernández’s central contention is that the United States’ relationship to Latin American migration has always been governed by strategic calculation dressed up as civic generosity — and that the category of “citizen” has been redrawn, from the Naturalization Act of 1790 through the Chinese Exclusion Act to today’s deportation apparatus, with a consistency that makes the mythology legible. Winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for her previous work The Kissing Bug, Hernández has also won Lambda Literary’s Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award. The book closes with Hernández applying for dual Colombian citizenship. The gesture is quiet, practical, and devastating.
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A Black Queer History of the United States — C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost (Beacon Press, 2026)
This is, by its own accounting, the first Black history to centre queer voices — and the claim holds up. Snorton, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, and Bost, an associate professor of Black studies and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, have assembled something both archival and argumentative: a study, published in Beacon Press’s ReVisioning History series, that tracks Black queer, trans, and gender non-conforming life from the era of slavery through to the present day. Josephine Baker appears, as does Bayard Rustin, but so do figures less routinely invoked — Private William Cathay, who enlisted in the Union Army in the 1860s under a male identity, and Amanda Milan, a Black trans woman whose murder in 2000 galvanised a generation of trans people of colour into collective action. The argument running through these stories is that gender and sexual expression have always been woven into Black freedom struggles, and that the mainstream narrative of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, which has largely centred white experience, has obscured this. Snorton — whose earlier work Black on Both Sides won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction — and Bost, author of the award-winning Evidence of Being, do not treat recovery of overlooked figures as an end in itself. They make a structural case: that Black queer history is not a sidebar to American history, but one of its organising forces.
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Gay Print Culture: A Transnational History of North America — Juan Carlos Mezo González (Duke University Press, 2026)
Mezo González, a historian of sexuality and culture at Mount Royal University, has produced a scholarly account of the periodicals that helped build gay liberation movements across Mexico, the United States, and Canada between the early 1970s and mid-1990s. The book’s particular contribution is its attention to visual culture: how images circulated in community newsletters, commercial magazines, and erotic publications, and how that circulation shaped political consciousness across borders. Specific periodicals receive sustained analysis, among them Toronto’s The Body Politic, San Francisco’s Gay Sunshine, and the Mexico City publication Macho Tips. Mezo González examines their production, distribution, and reception, and finds in them a medium through which activists, editors, and artists visualised the goals of gay liberation — the celebration of homoerotic desire chief among them. The book is candid about the contradictions embedded in that project. Its chapters on Macho Tips and transnational desire confront the racialised economies of representation that ran through the gay press, and how liberation for some rested on the exoticisation of others. Mezo González, who earned his PhD in history from the University of Toronto, has published related scholarship in Historia Mexicana and the Hispanic American Historical Review.
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