LGBT Memoir Reading Group | South Side Initiative

LGBT Memoir Reading Group

Overview

Since the spring of 2017, SSI has worked with Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center (BSC) to facilitate community reading groups of memoirs written by LGBTQ people. The reading groups meet monthly to discuss groundbreaking books that illustrate the challenges faced by LGBTQ people and the resiliency of individuals and communities as they fight for social change, civil rights, and liberation.

Originally sponsored by the Mellon Digital Humanities Initiative (MDHI), the LGBTQ Community Reading Group is funded currently through Lehigh University’s Humanities Center and SSI in partnership with Let’s Play Books; these partnerships allow us to offer free books to participants in the series thereby making the group accessible to many. SSI and BSC believe that community reading groups create greater regional literacy of urgent issues for LGBTQ communities and expand awareness of how racism, sexism, transphobia, biphobia, homophobia, classism, and ableism impact diverse LGBTQ populations.

As participants read award-winning memoirs, they encounter narratives both different and similar to their own life experiences and explore how LGBTQ communities might create stronger political platforms that address the divergent and overlapping needs of LGBTQ people. As Audre Lorde notes, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” Our community reading group encourages recognition and celebration of differences within LGBTQ communities and exploration of how political movements and social spaces might better advocate for all LGBTQ people.

Origins

In the spring of 2017, SSI learned that BSC was interested in partnering with an area university to expand their library holdings, to create a digital catalog of library materials, and to garner increased attention to their arts and culture programming. Partnering with Lehigh University’s Humanities Center and Pride Center, SSI received funding through MDHI to accomplish these goals and offered to lead two community reading groups as a way to create excitement about BSC’s library. With strong turnout at the first two reading groups, SSI and BSC committed to finding funding to create a full-fledged annual series that invites regional LGBTQ readers and allies to discuss contemporary memoirs that are making a splash nationally.

Goals of the LGBTQ Community Reading Group

To support a community-partner in developing outstanding humanities programming with facilitation by a faculty member well-versed in LGBTQ literary arts
To create community conversation about pressing issues in LGBTQ communities with an emphasize on exploring memoirs by writers of diverse sexual and gender identities as well as racial, ethnic, religious, regional, and class identities
To build greater regional awareness of LGBTQ individual’s and community’s responses to oppression as well as expansive political movements to address racism, homophobia, biphobia, transpophia, classism, sexism, and ableism
To offer safe spaces in which LGBTQ people and their allies may share their personal experiences in response to selected memoirs in a safe and validating environment

SSI Director Mary Foltz works closely with BSC leaders to create the annual series with an eye to celebrating the diversity of LGBTQ communities and introducing Lehigh Valley readers to memoirs that are making a huge impact on the national stage. Careful curation of each annual series allows for readers to encounter leading LGBTQ writers that explore disability activism like Eli Clare, prominent anti-racism activism like Darnell Moore, and moving accounts of working-class Latinx communities like Rigoberto González and Daisy Hernández. Additionally, each annual series includes memoirs that explore the history of liberation movements as authors like Sean Strub address AIDS activism, Mark Segal traces LGBTQ activism in Pennsylvania, and Karla Jay explores lesbian feminists in the gay liberation movement. Each annual series provides opportunities to acknowledge and engage with diversity in LGBTQ communities. By attending to the different experiences of LGBTQ people, we are building a map for LGBTQ communities to pursue political goals that accommodate all of us and policy-making efforts that respond to many distinct needs.

By coming together to talk about stories from LGBTQ authors, the Lehigh Valley LGBTQ community opens itself up to collective healing as discussions of memoirs address topics like the beauty in building chosen family and community. The vulnerability these authors display in their memoirs reveals a stubborn joy and resiliency, which LGBTQ reading group members can recall in their own lives. Memoirs, as a genre, invite readers to think through how their own life stories connect with or diverge from an author’s narrative, prompting conversational reflections upon our lives even as they call us to advocate for those whose experiences differ from ours. Reading series, as a form of public humanities work, create sustained spaces for community engagement in which we expand our knowledge of LGBTQ communities, survival strategies, political tactics, and joyful community formations that help LGBTQ people thrive in the face of systemic oppression. In these groups, we discover again and again how the sharing of personal narratives builds community knowledge, reflection, and imaginative engagement with political coalition-building.

Awards

2018 LGBT Community Leadership Award: SSI Director Mary Foltz received this award from Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center for her work in the creation of the LGBT memoir reading group.

2018 Arts Ovation Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Literary Arts: Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center received this award from the Allentown Arts Commission due to their exceptional library programming of which community reading groups were a small part.

2017-2018 Readings

Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation by Karla Jay

The Summer We Got Free by Mia McKenzie

Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts

George Hodgman’s Bettyville: A Memoir

Willy Wilkinson’s Born on the Edge of Race and Gender: A Voice for Cultural Competency

2018-2019 Readings

The Prince of Los Cocuyos by Richard Blanco

Tango by Justin Vivian Bond

Black Dove: Mama, Mi’jo, and Me by Ana Castillo

Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America by Darnell L. Moore