2SLGBTQIA+ Resources

The lives of many lesbians prior to 1965 remain cloaked in mystery. Historians have turned the spotlight on upper-middle-class "romantic friends" and on working-class butch and femme women, but the lives of the lower-middle-class majority remain in the shadows. Awfully Devoted Women offers a portrait of middle-class lesbianism in the decades before the gay rights movement in English Canada. This intimate study of the lives of women who were forced to love in secret not only challenges the idea that lesbian relationships in the past were asexual, it also reveals the courage it took to explore desire in an era when women were supposed to know little about sexuality.

Location: Koerner, Okanagan, and Rare Books & Special Collections

Blue is the Warmest Color is a tender, bittersweet, full-colour graphic novel about the elusive, reckless magic of love: a lesbian love story for the ages that bristles with the energy of youth, rebellion and the eternal light of desire. Clementine is a junior in high school who seems 'normal' enough: she has friends, family and even a boyfriend. When her openly gay best friend takes her to a gay bar, she becomes captivated by Emma, a punkish, confident girl with blue hair, an event that leads Clementine to discover new aspects of herself, both passionate and tragic.

Location: Koerner & Okanagan Library

Body Music is a beautiful and moving meditation on love and desire as expressed in many different forms - between women, between men, between women and men and gender non-conformists alike, all varying in age and race.

Location: Okanagan Library

The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature examines literary representations of lesbian sexuality, identities, and communities, from the medieval period to the present.

Location: Online

No one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals.
Location: Okanagan Library

A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings.

Location: Koerner & Okanagan Library

In the 1960s, a youthful and ambitious lesbian movement began taking shape in Canada. After decades of being patholoAfter decades of being pathologized, disparaged, or erased from public view, lesbians were ready to make a scene – both by calling attention to themselves and by creating places to come together and forge their own culture. Making a Scene tells this story, revisiting the spaces lesbians created across rural and urban Canada, from physical locations, such as bars, bookstores, and members’ clubs, to ephemeral sites, such as conferences, festivals, and protest marches.gized, disparaged, or erased from public view, lesbians were ready to make a scene - both by calling attention to themselves and by creating places to come together and forge their own culture. Making a Scene tells this story, revisiting the spaces lesbians created across rural and urban Canada, from physical locations, such as bars, bookstores, and members' clubs, to ephemeral sites, such as conferences, festivals, and protest marches. Enriched with interviews, this volume captures the exuberance and challenges of this transformational period.

Location: Okanagan Library

When Cameron Post's parents die suddenly in a car crash, her shocking first thought is relief. Relief they'll never know that, hours earlier, she had been kissing a girl.But that relief doesn't last, and Cam is soon forced to move in with her conservative aunt Ruth and her well-intentioned but hopelessly old-fashioned grandmother.

Location: Education Library

A groundbreaking collection tracing the history of intellectual thought by Black Lesbian writers.

Location: Online

"On Loving Women is in turns wistful, sexy, goofy, bittersweet, frank, and adorable. Diane Obomsawin's deceptively simple lifework and straightforward writing style capture the breathless sweetness of holding another girl's hand for the first time, and the happy, lusty intimacy of a virginity-ending, drunken threesome. Delightful."

Location: Koerner & Okanagan Library

Uncompromising in its honesty, at times humorous, angry, confrontational, and erotic, Piece of My Heart celebrates the lives of women both out and coming out.

Location: Koerner & Okanagan Library

A landmark coming-of-age novel that launched the career of one of this country’s most distinctive voices, Rubyfruit Jungle remains a transformative work more than forty years after its original publication. In bawdy, moving prose, Rita Mae Brown tells the story of Molly Bolt, the adoptive daughter of a dirt-poor Southern couple who boldly forges her own path in America. With her startling beauty and crackling wit, Molly finds that women are drawn to her wherever she goes—and she refuses to apologize for loving them back. This literary milestone continues to resonate with its message about being true to yourself and, against the odds, living happily ever after.

Location: Koerner Library

Location: Koerner Library

The definitive and most comprehensive book of 20th century black lesbian and gay writing ever published, this epic anthology features the work of such acclaimed authors as James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, E. Lynn Harris, Audre Lorde and April Sinclair. Divided into three chronological sections, this book includes author profiles and bibliographies, plus a secondary bibliography of works by poets, playwrights, performers and activists, as well as scholarly essays that set the political/cultural/historical context for black gay literature in the US.
Location: Koerner Library

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, New York Public Library, Minneapolis Star Tribune Part memoir, part sweeping journalistic saga: As Casey Parks follows the mystery of a stranger's past, she is forced to reckon with her own sexuality, her fraught Southern identity, her tortured yet loving relationship with her mother, and the complicated role of faith in her life. "Most moving is Parks's depiction of a queer lineage, her assertion of an ancestry of outcasts, a tapestry of fellow misfits into which the marginalized will always, for better or worse, fit." --The New York Times Book Review When Casey Parks came out as a lesbian in college back in 2002, she assumed her life in the South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But then Parks's grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, pulled her aside and revealed a startling secret. "I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man," and then implored Casey to find out what happened to him. Diary of a Misfit is the story of Parks's life-changing journey to unravel the mystery of Roy Hudgins, the small-town country singer from grandmother's youth, all the while confronting ghosts of her own. For ten years, Parks traveled back to rural Louisiana and knocked on strangers' doors, dug through nursing home records, and doggedly searched for Roy's own diaries, trying to uncover what Roy was like as a person--what he felt; what he thought; and how he grappled with his sense of otherness. With an enormous heart and an unstinting sense of vulnerability, Parks writes about finding oneself through someone else's story, and about forging connections across the gulfs that divide us.
Location: Koerner Library