Saturday 1st June will mark the beginning of Pride Month — a month of encouraging acceptance and equality, celebrating the work of LGBTQ+ people, education in LGBTQ+ history and raising awareness of issues affecting the LGBTQ+ community.
Since Pride Month began in 1969, the publication of writing and literature exploring LGBTQ+ themes has played a crucial role in educating people about the community. Let’s look into this a bit further in today’s blog post.
How did Pride Month begin?
Pride Month began after the Stonewall riots, a series of gay liberation protests which took place in the USA in June 1969. The protests were an important event for the gay community and helped to accelerate change in gay rights for people in America and around the world.
The year after the riots, the first pride marches were held in several cities across the country and after that, the number of LGBT groups rapidly increased as more people became aware of the need for gay rights reform.
Today, most pride celebrations in major cities around the world are held in June.
The publishing industry’s role in supporting the LGBTQ+ community
Journalism, fiction and non-fiction literature has played a pivotal role in disseminating information, acting as an educational tool which has helped address prejudices about the LGBTQ+ community.
Literature about LGBTQ+ characters can be extremely important to some readers and the visibility that comes from this writing can be profoundly valuable for equal representation in the media world.
Authors such as E.M. Forster, Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich have pushed social boundaries and brought LGBTQ+ plots to the mainstream. Many of their works often achieved commercial success.
Exact Editions LGBTQIA+ Community digital resources
Exact Editions curates a freely-available digital resource page to support free access to critical literature that focuses on the LGBTQIA+ community. The page can be accessed here.
Every month, new articles from prominent writers and publications from the Exact Editions platform are made open-access to provide a resource for researchers, academics, students and libraries wanting to explore the topic. The page includes open-access articles from Dazed, The Philosopher and Sight & Sound.
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