Watertown Adult Pride Reading List

"An exhilarating debut from a radiant new voice, After Sappho reimagines the intertwined lives of feminists at the turn of the twentieth century. "The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho," so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths: in 1892, Rina Faccio...

"It's opening night, but far from glamorous. Alice is performing in a local Bay Area production of The Winter's Tale, the complete opposite of what she had envisioned for her career back home in Los Angeles. She doesn't have dreams of superstardom per se, but the basement theatre in a wildfire-choked town simply isn't ideal. To make matters worse, her best friend Sadie is not even coming. Pragmatic and serious Sadie and flighty, creative Alice have...

"James Fitzgerald likes his life the way it is. He has a stable academic career teaching American literature; a comfortable townhouse in Brooklyn; a satisfying, open marriage with his partner of fifteen years; a sweet and playful young boyfriend; and a recently-published, well-received novel about a famous early-twentieth-century Harvard professor. But his poise is shattered when a woman appears at a book signing bearing a surprise gift: an unsent...

When her landlord raises the requirements for "social scores" necessary for her and her polyamorous partners to stay in their property, a desperate Kiera takes a job with hangdog, technophobic private eye Angel Herrera tracking down and exposing duplicitous lovers using her hacking skills. Then two bodies turn up with only two things tying them together: their connection to Kiera and a stick of Nag Champa incense left at the crime scenes. The unlikely...

"An exploration of anti-fatness and anti-Blackness at the intersections of race, police violence, gender identity, fatness, and health"--

"Greta lives with her friend Sabine in an ancient Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York. The house, built in 1737, is unrenovated, uninsulated, and full of bees. Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she affectionately refers to as Big Swiss, since she's tall, stoic, and originally from Switzerland. Greta is fascinated by Big...

"Being a bisexual man isn't easy -- something Vaneet Mehta knows all too well. After spending more than a decade figuring out his identity, Vaneet's coming out was met with questioning, ridicule and erasure. This experience inspired Vaneet to create the viral #BisexualMenExist campaign, combatting the hate and scepticism m-spec (multi-gender attracted spectrum) men encounter, and helping others who felt similarly alone and trapped. This powerful book...

"Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book--Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns--and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early...

Willa grudgingly takes in her brother, Justin, who is spiraling out of control, unable to manage his sobriety and the ongoing effects of a brain injury suffered when he fled a terrifying act of violence committed by his first boyfriend.

"From the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of The Gods of Tango, a revolutionary new novel about five wildly different women who, in the midst of the Uruguayan dictatorship, find each other as lovers, friends, and ultimately, family. In 1977 Uruguay, a military government has crushed political dissent with ruthless force. In an environment where citizens are kidnapped, raped, and tortured, homosexuality is a dangerous transgression. And yet,...