Reflections at the Conclusion of Pride Month

Meet our Contributor: Roy Jackson

Roy Edward Jackson is an associate professor of education at Goshen College in Indiana with a focus on literacy. He holds degrees in English, Education and School Library Science. He is the author of the upcoming book, Reel Around the Fountain, published by Lethe Press.

Reflections at the Conclusion of Pride Month by Roy Jackson

As Pride Month draws to a close, I wandered across the street in my lovely town to the public library for some inspiration. While browsing the displays — not the stacks — I was struck by my own queer privilege in living in Goshen, Indiana. Goshen is an inclusive community, a city where I feel safe — something I never would have expected when I first moved here for a job, leaving a large city behind. The young adult section had wonderful LGBTQ+ titles on full display for readers to find. It made me think about how different that same library display would look if I traveled just 30 miles in almost any direction. Regardless of book bans or quieter, self-selected censorship, we know visibility is one key to combating the troubling decline in support for LGBTQ+ citizens that Gallup recently reported.

In the summer, I usually gravitate toward fiction as an escape from whatever's stressing me out at the moment. But as I browsed the displays, I was genuinely impressed by the nonfiction collection my local library had curated. It took me back to my teaching days and how rote February could feel, with the same handful of figures showing up in book after book — and how, over the decades, educators worked to broaden that scope and multiply the heroes we offered students for Black History Month. The same is true of the books I pulled off the shelf and got lost in that afternoon: so many names, so many remarkable contributions, so many heroes.

I love June and Pride Month, but as an educator, it saddens me that most students aren't in school when we could be celebrating, honoring, and teaching our queer histories. I hope some of these books find their way into classrooms next academic year.

Queer There and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World by Sarah Prager was one of the books I found myself completely absorbed in. It's exactly the kind of broadened-scope storytelling I was thinking about, the same impulse that pushed Black History Month beyond the same five names every February. Yes, Takei and Lincoln are in there, but so is Elagabalus, the teenage Roman emperor whose gender-defying reign reaches back nearly two thousand years and reminds you that none of this is new, queerness has always existed, only the willingness to name it has changed. There's Ma Rainey, the blues singer whose openness about loving women got buried under her musical legacy for decades. There's Alan Turing, a man whose mathematical genius helped win a war and whose own country later prosecuted him for who he loved.
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And then there's Renée Richards, whose chapter felt almost urgent to read given the current moment. Richards, a trans woman and professional tennis player who fought for and won the right to compete in the late 1970s, feels less like history and more like a preview of the exact battles still being fought today, as the lives and rights of trans athletes are once again under attack. Reading her story now hit differently than it might have a decade ago. Prager doesn't limit herself to a narrow definition of queerness; she traces anyone who lived outside the gender and sexuality norms of their time, which means the book reads less like a single thread and more like a tapestry. I kept flipping pages thinking, why didn't I know this person existed? It's conversational, occasionally funny, and built for teens, which made me wish even harder that I had a classroom of students to hand it to.

Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I'd Known by George M. Johnson was another one I couldn't put down. Johnson, the author of the frequently banned All Boys Aren't Blue, weaves together twelve short biographies interspersed with their own personal narrative and poetry, and the effect is part history lesson, part memoir, part reclamation. It's a structure that lets you sit with the past and the present at the same time.

Johnson opens the door with names most of us already recognize: Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston. But then the book does exactly what I keep coming back to in this whole project, it widens the lens. Alain Locke, often called the father of the Harlem Renaissance and the architect of so much of the movement's philosophy, gets his due as a gay man whose influence shaped a generation of Black artists and writers. Gladys Bentley, a blues performer who dressed in men's clothing and openly courted women onstage in 1920s Harlem nightclubs, decades before anyone was using the language we use now, gets brought roaring back into focus. Even Ma Rainey shows up again here, which made me realize how many of these queer histories overlap and echo each other once you start looking.

​This book matters for another reason too. Even within our own community, the loudest, most visible voices in queer history have so often been cis, white, and male. Johnson's book is a direct counter to that imbalance, centering Black queer lives, and several trans and gender-nonconforming lives within them, as foundational rather than footnoted. Johnson's point, and it lands, is that the Harlem Renaissance wasn't just adjacent to queerness, it was one of the queerest eras in American cultural history, and most of us were never taught that part, and we definitely weren't taught who was actually in the room shaping it.

The next book on my stack was LGBTQ+ Athletes Claim the Field: Striving for Equality by Kirstin Cronn-Mills, with an introduction by Alex Jackson Nelson, a trans man who works directly with LGBTQ+ youth in sports. And that's exactly the point I keep landing on with this reading session, it doesn't center the same handful of cis, white, male athletes whose coming-out stories tend to dominate the headlines. Cronn-Mills opens with the moment soccer star Abby Wambach kissed her wife on camera after the US women's World Cup win, then widens out from there: Michael Sam, the first openly gay man in the NFL and the first Division I football player to come out while still actively playing, which happened only a little over a decade ago, a fact that still stops me cold every time I read it. There's David Denson too, who came out as gay while playing minor league baseball for the Brewers.

What sets this book apart is that it doesn't stop at athletes. Cronn-Mills looks at coaches, families, and the institutions, the policies, leagues, and locker room cultures, that have been slow to catch up, even as individual courage outpaces them. Reading it now, with the rights of trans athletes specifically back under attack, felt less like a history lesson and more like a mirror held up to where we still are.

My education started in the past was only deepened, and complicated in the best way, by reading the present in Kimm Topping's Generation Queer: Stories of Youth Organizers, Artists, and Educators. The book is organized into six chapters, moving from organizers to artists to educators before closing with a call to action, concrete steps for how young people and the adults who support them can actually get involved. What Topping has done is take the everyday hero theme and place a giant magnifying lens on it, training that focus specifically on a generation I rarely see celebrated this way: queer and trans youth who are building change right now, not someday.

Prior to reading, I didn’t know one name in this book, and that alone says something. Their stories are now etched in my ethos. There's Blair Imani, a Black, bisexual, Muslim educator using her platform to make queer history and identity accessible to people who've never had it explained to them in a way that felt like it included them. There's Alok Vaid-Menon, a gender-nonconforming poet, comedian, and speaker who has turned vulnerability and humor into a genuine tool for changing minds. There are organizers who founded their own advocacy groups while still in high school, students who fought and won the right to safe restroom access for transgender peers, and the first transgender athlete to compete in NCAA Division I sports. Topping threads in brief histories of Marsha P. Johnson, Harvey Milk, and Sylvia Rivera too, so readers can see exactly whose shoulders this new generation is standing on. By the time I closed the book, I wasn't just learning new names, I was watching the same lineage of courage that built Stonewall and the AIDS crisis activism of the 80s continue, unbroken, into kids who are still in school right now.

What strikes me most, looking back at this stack of books, isn't just that I learned new names, it's how many new names there were. Breadth and depth, not just the same handful of figures rotated through every June the way February used to recycle the same five or six names for Black History Month. Lincoln and Takei are still there if you're looking for an entry point, but so are Elagabalus, Ma Rainey, Alan Turing, Renée Richards, Alain Locke, Gladys Bentley, Blair Imani, Alok Vaid-Menon, Michael Sam, David Denson, and so many youth organizers I'd never have found on my own. That's the shift that actually matters. Visibility isn't just about one Pride display in one library window, it's about sheer numbers, about how many lives get to count as part of this history instead of being the single token name a syllabus reaches for. The more names, the harder the erasure becomes to pull off, and the easier it gets for a kid scanning a library shelf in Goshen, or anywhere else, to find someone who looks like them already claiming a place in the story.

But we're already disadvantaging young readers by the simple fact that Pride Month falls in June, when school is out of session and these books are sitting on display instead of in the hands of students. And walking into a public library at all is a privilege, not every kid has reliable transportation, a parent with the time, or even a library branch nearby, for a whole range of reasons that have nothing to do with how much they might need these stories. School libraries and classroom libraries are the equalizer. They're the only guaranteed access point some students will ever have. If visibility and breadth and depth are the goal, then the real question isn't how we celebrate Pride better every summer, it's how we find room for these names, these histories, this many of them, during the school year, on the shelves students walk past every single day, when the students who need to see themselves in these pages are actually in the building to find them.