Anti-capitalist Queer Liberation: A Reading List

As corporations pull their Pride merch and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation mounts, it is more clear than ever that we need anticapitalist queer liberation over rainbow capitalism!

Featuring a brilliant introduction to trans politics, a conversation with a black trans revolutionary, and an alternative history of homosexuality, our hope is that these books can help us bring Pride Month back to its radical roots.

Plus, on the fourth episode of The Verso Podcast, Ben Miller and Amardeep Singh Dhillon join Eleanor Penny for a deep dive on the historical construction and ordering of sexualities into the categories we are familiar with today — listen here!

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Further Reading:

Queer as Folk, The New Labour project, and Sexual Modernity

Queer Nation Manifesto: Queers Read This (1990)

Miss Major Speaks

by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Toshio Meronek

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a transgender elder and activist who has survived Bellevue psychiatric hospital, Attica Prison, the H...

Bad Gays

by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and/or dastardly deeds have ...

The Transgender Issue

by Shon Faye

In this brilliant introduction to trans politics, journalist Shon Faye gives an incisive overview of systemic transphobia and argues that the struggle for trans rights is necessary to any struggle ...

Bodies Under Siege

by Sian Norris

Think today's anti-abortion ideas are rooted in religious prohibitions or arguments about where life begins? Wrong: today's anti-abortion movements is largely financed and planned by far-right extr...

Democracy in the Political Present

by Isabell Lorey

‘Presentist democracy is without a people and without nation. Rather than regimes of borders and migration, its borders are sexism and racism, homo- and transphobia, colonialism and extractivism.’I...

Deadly and Slick

by Sita Balani

If race is increasingly understood to be socially constructed, why does it continue to seem like a physiological reality? The trickery of race, Sita Balani argues, comes down to how it is embedded ...

Glitch Feminism

by Legacy Russell

The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our...

Females

by Andrea Long Chu

“Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.”So begins Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and ...

Burn It Down!

by Breanne Fahs

In this landmark collection spanning three centuries and four waves of feminist activism and writing, Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. The manifes...

Trans

by Juliet Jacques

Afterword by Sheila Heti

In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery—a process she chronicled with unflinching honesty in a serialised national newspaper column. Trans tells of her life to ...

Revolting Prostitutes

by Juno Mac and Molly Smith

How the law harms sex workers - and what they want insteadDo you have to endorse prostitution in order to support sex worker rights? Should clients be criminalized, and can the police deliver justi...

Edward Carpenter

by Sheila Rowbotham

The gay socialist writer Edward Carpenter had an extraordinary impact on the cultural and political landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A mystic advocate of, among other...

American Homo

by Jeffrey Escoffier

American Homo offers a sweeping interpretation of the political, cultural and economic struggles of lesbian, gay and bisexual people to reveal how sexual minorities have challenged and changed Amer...

Come Together

Edited by Aubrey Walter

Come Together tells the incredible story of the emerging radicalism of the Gay Liberation Front, providing a vivid history of the movement, as well as the new ideas and practices it gave rise to ac...

Pink Triangles

by Pam Mitchell

Though the interpretations of the interplay between sexism and capitalism, between the personal and the political, vary across this spectacularly wide ranging collection, each essay shares two fund...

Homosexuality

by Gay Left Collective

After the leading organizations of radical sexual politics – the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Marxist Group – imploded or dissolved, the Gay Left Collective formed a research group to make sens...

Sexuality and Class Struggle

by Reimut Reiche

This book which combines the methods and results of both Freud and Marx is by one of the leaders of the West German student left during its most militant phase in the late 1960s. For reasons the au...

Straight Sex

by Lynne Segal

Is heterosexual sex inherently damaging to women? Is it possible for women to enjoy sensuality and pleasure with men that does not increase male power? Lynne Segal's unflinching examination of femi...

Pink Triangles

by Pam Mitchell

Though the interpretations of the interplay between sexism and capitalism, between the personal and the political, vary across this spectacularly wide ranging collection, each essay shares two fund...

Sexuality and Class Struggle

by Reimut Reiche

This book which combines the methods and results of both Freud and Marx is by one of the leaders of the West German student left during its most militant phase in the late 1960s. For reasons the au...

The Pope Is Not Gay!

by Angelo Quattrocchi

Translated by Romy Giuliani Clark

The Pope is Not Gay! is an irreverent history of homophobic and sexist obscurantism in the Holy Roman Church and an endoscopic examination of its greatest contemporary advocate, Pope Benedict XVI. ...

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