This June, listen to these 8 audiobooks with pride – The Seattle Times
This June, celebrate Pride with one of these diverse, LGBTQ+ listens. Whether your interest is history, memoir, mystery, romance or fantasy, there’s an outstanding audiobook here for you.
In “When We Rise: My Life in the Movement,” activist and grassroots organizer Cleve Jones offers a vivid and moving front row perspective on the gay rights movement, from its heady early days through the devastating murder of politician Harvey Milk, with whom Jones worked, and the painful onslaught of the AIDS epidemic. A founder of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, Jones helped create the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and like that eloquent project, this candid memoir, voiced by the author, is a sobering and inspiring testament to resilience and remembrance.
For anyone who thinks that the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights is a thing of the past, or is none of their concern, South African journalist Mark Gevisser’s “The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers” persuasively demonstrates the large and growing centrality of sexual orientation and gender identity in geopolitical conflicts around the world, across Africa, the Muslim world, Russia and Ukraine, and the United States. With an impressive breadth of research, conveyed with empathy and authority by narrator Vikas Adam, Gevisser reveals a complex dynamic of progress and backlash, as gay and trans individuals increasingly find themselves the subject of theocratic, nationalist and nativist efforts to turn back the clock. This wide-ranging account leaves no doubt that LGBTQ+ rights are human rights.
There is perhaps no better arena for fully appreciating the complexities and challenges encountered by trans and nonbinary persons than that of parenthood, as revealed in Krys Malcolm Belc’s “The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood.” That title refers to the legal designation assigned to the transmasculine father Belc, who carried he and his wife’s middle child, negotiating a heavily codified world of pinks and blues amidst his own transition. In this forthright collection of essays, Belc shares searching questions and reflections on the elusive and sometimes arbitrary nature of gender, challenging our preconceptions and broadening our appreciation of the full spectrum of humanity.
For younger listeners seeking to understand the original meaning of Pride as it emerged from shame and secrecy, Ann Bausum’s “Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights” offers a powerful and impassioned account of how yet another police raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar erupted into three nights of rioting that would stake a claim for basic human rights and dignity, and spawn a movement across America and beyond. Seasoned author and actor Tim Federle is the perfect performer for this visceral, dramatic narrative. Listeners seeking to hear a more thorough account of these events should follow this with The New York Public Library’s “The Stonewall Reader,” presented by a diverse and talented cast of narrators, and including interviews with many actual participants in the riots, and its commemoration in first Pride parade.
When “Fadeout,” Joseph Hansen’s first mystery initially appeared, the Stonewall riots were just a few months old, and fictional depictions of homosexuality were limited to lurid pulp tales of depravity and dysfunction. Imagine the surprise of many readers then, caught up in the intriguing case of a missing radio personality, when they realized that Hansen’s manly, no-nonsense investigator Dave Brandstetter happened to be gay. The whole Brandstetter series has recently been reissued both in print and in audio, with great matter-of-fact narrations by Keith Szarabajka, whose deep, gravelly voice perfectly suits Hansen’s crisp, hard-boiled banter.
In the world of Francesca May’s queer gothic fantasy “Wild and Wicked Things,” World War I was epoch-making not for its machine guns and mustard gas, but for its use of magic. Although sorcery is banned in peacetime, the infamous witches of Crow Island are rumored to practice it still in wild soirees that rival Jay Gatsby’s. Annie Mason, drawn to the island on business, now finds herself under the spell of her neighbor Emmeline Delacroix, but this is a different kind of magic altogether. Narrators Marisa Calin, Gemma Dawson and Ralph Lister wring every bit of drama out of this spooky, sexy delight.
In L.C. Rosen’s charming teen romance “Camp,” Randy Kapplehoff is deeply relieved to leave his small-town Ohio home for another summer at Camp Outland, where he can finally be himself. Or can he? In pursuit of his mad crush, the hypermasculine Hudson, Randy now forsakes his beloved campy theater friends, cutting his hair and taking up sports as the buff, tough Dell. He may no longer be on stage, but Dell is desperately playing a role, and so, it turns out, is Hudson. Narrator Drew Caidan gives a heartfelt, nuanced portrayal of the LGBTQ+ diverse cast, capturing the vulnerability and enthusiasm of youth.