Library Service Blog

LGBT+ History Month February 2023: Behind the Lens

 LGBT+ History Month 2023
|Behind the Lens|

February marks the month-long celebration of LGBT+ History Month 2023 .This year’s theme, Behind The Lens, celebrates LGBT+ peoples’ contribution to cinema and film from behind the lens. Directors, cinematographers, screen writers, producers, animators, costume designers, special effects, make-up artists, lighting directors, musicians, choreographers and beyond.

Our LGBTQ+ curated reading list gathers together an extensive but not exhaustive range of LGBTQ+ books, journal articles, DVDs, picture books and comics within the Library to help you explore narratives, social history, academic texts, fiction and nonfiction, aimed at all age ranges.
Explore the list here.

If you want to delve back in time with vintage publications ranging from 1954 - 2015… take a look at the ProQuest LGBT Magazine Archive! The collection is an archival run of twenty six of the most influential, longest-running magazine publications covering LGBT interests. The collection includes the pre-eminent US and UK titles – The Advocate and Gay Times, respectively and chronicles more than six decades of the history and culture of the LGBT community.

Queer As Folk: The Scripts Book by Russell T. Davies 1999
Queer as Folk is a 1999 British television series that chronicles the lives of three gay men living in Manchester's gay village around Canal Street. Initially running for eight episodes, a two-part follow up was shown in 2000. It was written by Russell T Davies, a Welsh screenwriter and television producer, whose works include Queer as Folk, The Second Coming, Casanova, the 2005 revival of the BBC One of Doctor Who, Cucumber, A Very English Scandal, Years and Years and It's a Sin.
Guardian box set review by Hannah Verdier

120 BPM (Beats Per Minute) Film by Robin Campillo 2018
French writer-director Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats Per Minute is a deep house opera, an urgent, steamy love story and a jubilant battle cry that demands to be witnessed. Centring on the activist group Act Up-Paris, an offshoot of the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power that started in New York in 1987, it serves as a snapshot of those who resisted in the early days of the disease’s global pandemic. The film lives its “politics in the first person”, showing how Act Up lobbied for legislation, research and treatment for those with HIV/Aids, while also tracking a tender romance between two of its members.
Read more from Simran Hans’ Observer review

Call Me By Your Name Film by Luca Guadagnino 2018
This gorgeous gay love story, directed by Luca Guadadigno seduces and overwhelms. Set during an endless Italian summer, this ravishing drama starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet’s summer romance is saturated with poetic languor and a deeply sophisticated sensuality. The debt to pleasure is deferred in exquisite style for this ravishingly beautiful movie set in Northern Italy in the early 80s: a coming-of-age love story between a precocious teenage boy and a slightly older man.
Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian review

Portrait Of A Lady On Fire Film by Celine Sciamma 2020
Full of secret messages, only obvious once you know where to find them, Céline Sciamma directs this glorious, spare and heartfelt story about lovers coding their feelings onto worldly things, and the dance of desire that precedes the birth of love. Portrait Of A Lady On Fire is about a private love language created by two women and the works of art, literature and music that help it to find its fullest expression. The artworks that helped them to intimately know each other become part of their private love language forevermore
Sophie Monks Kaufman review for Empire

The Miseducation of Cameron Post Film by Desiree Akhavan 2019
Based on the 2012 Young Adult novel of the same name by Emily M Danforth, The Miseducation of Cameron Post tells of a 17-year-old girl who is sent to a Christian conversion therapy camp after being caught in a compromising situation with another girl on the night of her school’s Homecoming ball. Although Desiree Akhavan’s film is set in 1993, the subject matter couldn’t be more timely given the ongoing battle for LGBT rights happening in the US and elsewhere.
Little White Lies review by Hannah Strong

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit Book by Jeanette Winterson 1985
Jeanette Winterson’s extraordinary debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, knits a complicated picture of teenage angst through a series of layered narratives, incorporating and subverting fairy tales and myths, to present a coherent whole, within which her stories can stand independently. Imaginative and mischievous, she is a born storyteller, teasing and taunting the reader to reconsider their worldview.
In 1990, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit was adapted by Jeanette Winterson into a 3 part BBC TV series starring Charlotte Coleman and winning a BAFTA for best drama.