Library Services Blog

Pride Month is a month long celebration that recognises the LGBTQ+ community, their history and achievements, to acknowledge the challenges and stand in solidarity with their fight for equality, acceptance, and human rights.

Pride Month has its roots in the Stonewall Uprising, which occurred in New York City in June 1969. The uprising was a turning point in the LGBTQ+ rights movement, sparked by a series of protests against police harassment and discrimination. The following year, the first Pride marches were organised to commemorate the anniversary of the uprising.

In the United Kingdom, the first official Pride march took place in London in 1972. Since then, Pride Month has grown in significance, with cities across the UK hosting vibrant parades, events, and educational programs throughout June. It serves as a platform for LGBTQ+ individuals and allies to celebrate diversity, raise awareness about LGBTQ+ rights, and foster a sense of community and acceptance.

Developed in partnership with Hallam LGBTQ+ Network, we’ve gathered 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 LGBTQ+ Network Reading List

If you want to delve back in time with vintage publications ranging from 1954 - 2015… take a look at the ProQuest LGBTQ+ 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.

Prejudice and Pride: LGBT Activist Stories from Manchester and Beyond by LGBT North West (Author), Cliodhna Devlin (Editor)

Explores aspects of LGBT activist history. It covers educational activism, youth work activism and the history of the LGBT Centre in Manchester

Find it on Library Online

Sea Foam and Silence by Dove Cooper

Fantastical worldbuilding meets verse novels in this queer-platonic retelling of The Little Mermaid, the first story in a series of queer fairy tale retellings.

Find it on Library Online

Queer Power: Icons, Activists and Game Changers from Across the Rainbow by Dom & Ink

A celebration of modern trailblazers, activists and icons who have shaped, or are shaping our world. Covering topics including queer rights, sexuality, gender, mental health and activism, this book will provide life lessons from a range of queer icons, from hugely well-known public figures to others you may not immediately recognise but will wish you had heard of earlier.

Find it on Library Online

Our LGBTQI+ discover collection

Covering a wide range of subjects, including history, queer and gender studies, women's studies, literature, law, health, and social sciences.

Find it on Library Online

The BFI Flare LGBTQIA+ collection

Here are the pioneers, the iconoclasts, the brave - from landmark LGBTQIA+ portraits to the next generation of queer classics from the BFI Flare festival. This collection offers a chance to look back, to revisit and discover - not just the icons of queer cinema but the lesser-known treasures.

Explore the BFI Flare collection

Students can access of all of the BFI player's content for FREE! Signing up is easy, go to https://player.bfi.org.uk/students and create an account. Remember it's absolutely FREE to Sheffield Hallam students!

LGBT+ History Month 2024
|Medicine|
February marks the month-long celebration of LGBT+ History Month 2024 and this year’s theme is Medicine showcasing the amazing work of LGBT+ staff across the NHS and in other healthcare settings, in providing healthcare, especially during the pandemic. Whilst still shining a light on the history of the LGBT+ community’s experience of receiving healthcare which has been extremely complicated leaving LGBT+ people still facing health inequalities even today.

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.

It’s June and that means one thing – it’s Pride month! But, what is Pride?

On June 28th 1969, New York police violently invaded a gay night club called The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, prompting days of rioting and protest in the local community. That night sparked the LGBT+ rights movements which continue all over the world today. 

Pride is held each year in June to mark the anniversary of the night at the Stonewall Inn and celebrates how far the fight for LGBTQ+ rights has progressed since then. Colourful parades, festivals, marches and talks are held up and down the country, bringing the LGBTQ+ community and their friends together to celebrate love and identity in all their wonderful forms.

There is undeniably still a way to go for in the fight for equality. Charities such as Stonewall and Mermaids are on hand for help and advice for individuals, employers, and education settings to ensure inclusivity standards are met. At Hallam we have the LGBT+ Students Committee at the Students’ Union and the LGBTQ+ staff network.

At an individual level, you can explore and learn about the history and experiences of people in the LGBT+ community with our extensive LGBTQ+ network reading list, made in partnership with the Hallam LGBTQ+ network. The reading list covers topics from history to music, fiction to books for younger readers, poetry to TV.  

Check out our library Twitter feed @hallamlibrary for our literary recommendations throughout the month of June.

Happy Pride!

 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.
 

LGBT+ History Month 2022

February marks the month long celebration of LGBT+ History Month 2022 and this year’s theme is Politics In Art: The Arc is Long. Five artists were chosen (one each to represent the L,G,B,T and ‘+’ of the community) who used their talents for political ends, or expressed their orientation through their work.

This year’s faces of 2022 are: Keith Haring, Doris Brabham Hatt, Fiore de Henriquez, Mark Aguhar and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Discover more about their art and lives in our LGBT+ Reading List and their biographies below.

Our LGBT+ Reading list [RLO]

Hallam Library has a range of resources to support UK LGBT+ History Month. You can find examples of the artist’s work on the Hallam Library LGBT+  curated reading list alongside a range of LGBT+ books, journal articles, DVDs, picture books and comics within the Library to help you explore narratives, social history, academic texts and fiction aimed at all age ranges.

Explore our LGBT+ Reading List here.

LGBT Magazine Archive

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.

About the artists

Keith Haring (4 May 1958 – 16 February 1990) was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. Haring's popularity grew from his spontaneous drawings in the city’s subways - chalk outlines of figures, dogs, and other stylised images on blank black advertising spaces. He produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982 and 1989 and his later work often conveyed political and societal themes; anti-crack, anti-apartheid, safe sex, homosexuality and AIDS through his own iconography.

Website > https://www.haring.com/

Jean-Michel Basquiat (22 December 1960 – 12 August 1988) was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement. Basquiat first achieved fame as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of Manhattan's Lower East Side during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture. By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. At 22, he was one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York.

Website > https://www.basquiat.com/

Doris Brabham Hatt (24 September 1890 – 27 August 1969) was a painter and printmaker, was a pioneer of Modernism in Britain. In 1915, while at Goldsmiths College, London, Hatt designed a First World War recruiting poster, featuring St George and the Dragon. It was successful in a competition organised by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, becoming 'poster no. 108' with a first print run of 50,000 and a second run later that year. Hatt first exhibited her paintings with the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers at the Grosvenor Gallery, London, in 1918. Her work was initially influenced by the way the French modernist movement was being interpreted in Britain but as she began to travel, she was able to see works by Cézanne, Picasso and Georges Braque at first hand, the influence of Modernism deepened. Hatt exhibited her work for five decades, featuring in over 40 exhibitions in Clevedon, Clifton, Bath, Oxford, London and Paris. Doris was a woman ahead of her time – a feminist and socialist whose remarkable life and work have remained surprisingly little known.

Website > https://swheritage.org.uk/museum-of-somerset/doris-hatt/

Fiore de Henriquez (1921-2004) was an Italian-British sculptor. Following her exhibition debut in Florence in 1947 De Henriquez moved to Britain and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1950. In 1951, she produced work to commemorate the Festival of Britain, for which she earned the then enormous fee of £4,000. De Henriquez created portrait sculptures of a wide range of individuals, including Igor Stravinsky, Margot Fonteyn, Peter Ustinov, John F. Kennedy, Vivien Leigh, the Queen Mother, Oprah Winfrey and Laurence Olivier. Towards the end of the 1970s, she began to travel in East Asia, and carried out commissions for clients in Japan and Hong Kong. She was a prolific artist, and known to have created some 4000 portraits between 1948 and her death in 2004. De Henriquez's gender identity informed much of her work, with its recurring motifs of paired heads, conjoined figures, and ambiguous mythological creatures.

Website > https://artuk.org/discover/artists/de-henriquez-fiore-19212004

Mark Aguhar (16 May 1987 – 12 March 2012) was an American activist, writer and multimedia fine artist known for her multidisciplinary work about gender, beauty and existing as a racial minority, while being body positive and transgender femme-identified. Aguhar was made famous by her Tumblr blog that questioned the mainstream representation of the "glossy glorification of the gay white male body".

Website > https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5bwm8/mark-aguhar-art-id-rather-be-beautiful-than-male