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LGBT+ History Month: Home

 

 

2025 marks the 20th anniversery of the LGBT History Month in the UK. 

The theme this year is activism and social change, highlighting the significant history of LGBT+ activists who have pushed for social change. 

They have helped shape and create all aspects of society, not just for the LGBT+ community, but for everyone. 

 

 

 

 

 

Have you seen the University's LGBT+ Toolkit?

The University has recently updated the LGBT+ Tool Kit so it now has loads of information on LGBT+ history, how to be an ally, podcasts, support, guidance and information, and much more...

LGBT+ 2025 Ebook Selection

Welcome to our 2025 book choices to celebrate LGBT+ History Month. These ebooks are all viewable from Primo, please click through for the links.

United Queerdom

Throughout the 1970s the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) initiated an anarchic campaign that permanently changed the face of Britain.

United Queerdom evocatively captures over five decades of LGBT+ culture and protest from the GLF to 2020s. Showing how central protest is to queer history and identity.

Queering Urbanism

Conflicts about space and access to resources have shaped queer histories from at least 1965 to the present.

Here the legacies of LGBTQ+ rights activism meet contemporary debates about the right to housing and urban life.

Queer Brown Voices

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, LGBT Latinas/os faced many forms of discrimination.

Queer Brown Voices is the first book published to counter this trend, documenting the efforts of some of these LGBT Latina/o activists

Ordinary in Brighton?: LGBT, Activisms and the City

Ordinary in Brighton? offers the first large scale examination of the impact of the UK equalities legislation on lesbian, gay, bi- and trans (LGBT) lives, and the effects of these changes on LGBT political activism.

It argues that geographical imaginings of this city as the ’gay capital’ formed activisms that sought positive social change for LGBT people.

Sexuality, Subjectivity, and LGBTQ Militancy in the United States

LGBTQ movements in Western Europe and North America are becoming increasingly successful at awarding LGBTQ people rights.

What becomes of the deeper social transformation that these movements initially aimed to achieve?

Prejudice and Pride

LGBT activist and civil rights history from the 1960s to the 2000s has had a huge impact on our social and political landscape in the UK, yet much of this history remains hidden.

Through personal stories of activists, recorded by young people from LGBT Youth North West, the book explores the 'wibbly wobbly' nature of people's histories.

Stories of Change

Based on in-depth interviews with over twenty inspirational Kenyan and Ugandan Christian and Muslim leaders actively involved in struggles for LGBTIQ rights, this book shows how religious leaders in East African countries can be agents of progressive social change through a community-based approach of life-story methodology.

LGBT Activism and the Making of Europe

This book explores the alleged uniqueness of the European experience, and investigates its ties to a long history of LGBT and queer movements in the region.

These movements, the book argues, were inspired by specific ideas about Europe, which they sought to realize on the ground through activism.

Between HIV Prevention and LGBTI Rights

Between HIV Prevention and LGBTI Rights investigates the transformative impacts of global development's sexual rights agenda on queer politics and activism in Ghana.

This book offers fascinating insights into the political economy of sexuality and global development for scholars, activists, and policymakers.

Feminist and LGBTI+ Activism Across Russia, Scandinavia and Turkey

What do struggles for women’s and LGBTI+ rights in Russia, Turkey and the Scandinavian countries have in common?

Drawing on ethnographic insights and encounters from various sites, this book conceptualizes resistance as situated in the grey zone between barely perceptible, mundane activist practices and highly visible street protests, gathering large crowds.

LGBT+ Reading List

A selection of LGBT+ authors from around the world, available to read in the Library

Click on a image to find the shelfmark number or click through to browse the LGBT Databases below

 

LGBT Thought and Culture                                   LGBT Magazine Archive                        
This is an online resource hosting books, periodicals, and archival materials documenting LGBT political, social and cultural movements throughout the twentieth century and into the present day. The collection illuminates the lives of lesbians, gays, transgender, and bisexual individuals and the community with content including selections from The National Archives in Kew, materials collected by activist and publisher Tracy Baim from the mid-1980s through the mid-2000s, the Magnus Hirschfeld and Harry Benjamin collections from the Kinsey Institute, periodicals such as En la Vida and BLACKlines, select rare works from notable LGBT publishers including Alyson Books and Cleis Press, as well as mainstream trade and university publishers. Archival runs of many of the most influential, longest-running serial publications covering LGBT interests. Includes the pre-eminent US and UK titles – The Advocate and Gay Times, respectively. Chronicles more than six decades of the history and culture of the LGBT community. In addition to LGBT/gender/sexuality studies, this material also serves related disciplines such as sociology, political science, psychology, health, and the arts.                            

 

Art, Design & Photography

Mapplethorpe: Altars

Maggi Hambling: waves and waterfalls

Mapplethorpe: the Complete Flowers

A Writer's World

Lady Lisa Lyon

Posters by Maurice Sendak

Winding Paths

Keith Haring Journals

Queer British Art - 1867-1967

Autobiography & Memoir

Herculine Barbin

The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist

Not Just a Tomboy

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Undivided

A War of Loves

Tomboy Survival Guide

To My Trans Sisters

Dancing Ledge

Zami: a new spelling of my name

Dress your family in corduroy and denim

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Trans: a memoir

It Takes Blood and Guts

Fiction

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Drawing blood

Lost Souls

The house of impossible beauties

On the black hill

The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Babel 17

Strangers on a train

The Talented Mr Ripley

Of Drag Kings and the Wheel of Fate

Goodbye to Berlin

Family Dancing

Lot

Fiction - Classic and Modern

The Summer Book

Mr. Fortune’s maggot

Fingersmith

Tipping the Velvet

Lolly Willowes, or, The loving huntsman

Tender Buttons

Blood on the Dining-room floor

Fight Club

The Last Romeo

Another Country

Carol

The Well of Loneliness

Maurice

Nightwood

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Three Lives

A Room with a View

Howard's End

Poetry

Selected Poems

Your name here: poems

Collected poems

The world’s wife

Rapture

Jack Straw’s castle

The man with Night Sweats

Collected Poems

Your silence will not protect you

Film, Cinema, Plays & Criticism

The English Auden: poems, essays and dramatic writings

Up in the air: collected film scripts

Teen dreams: reading teen film from Heathers to Veronica Mars

Let’s explore diabetes with owls

The importance of being Earnest and other plays

Up against it: a screenplay for the Beatles

The Complete Plays of Joe Orton

The ascent of F6

Politics, Society and Education

Dispossession: the performative in the political

This Book is Gay

Queer theory: an introduction

At your own risk: a saint’s testament

Who Killed My Father

The persistent desire: a femme-butch reader

Sexual personae: art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.

Gay and after

Down the Line

Democratic defence: a non-nuclear alternative

Europe in the pink: lesbian & gay equality in the new Europe

The Stonewall Reader

The Descent of Man

We Are Everywhere

Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights Book

Transgender Health: A Practitioner's Guide to Binary and Non-Binary Trans Patient Care

School Experience Collection

Moominvalley in November

The frog who dreamed she was an opera singer

Where the wild things are

Julian is a Mermaid

History

British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives Book