Happy Pride!

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Pride Month is celebrated each year in June — sparked by the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village, a tipping point for the gay rights movement in the United States.

The Library commemorates Pride Month with LGBTQIA+ book recommendations, book clubs, highlights from past programs, film offerings, and other resources. This month's programming also includes special storytimes, book displays, and conversations.

• On June 12, MSNBC anchor Jonathan Capehart shares stories from his new book Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man's Search for Home about growing comfortable with his identity as a gay Black man and the internship that made him a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. RSVP here.
• On June 18, the KC Pop Up Book Group discussion of Let Them Stare by Jonathan Van Ness and Julie Murphy. New high school graduate Sully is desperate to leave home, and an amazing local thrift-store handbag seems valuable enough to be a ticket out. Except for one thing – the item is haunted by the ghost of a 1950s drag performer. RSVP here.
• On June 25 at the Plaza Branch, Katherine Rose-Mockry shares the story of Liberating Lawrence: Gay Activism in the 1970s. The story of the early struggle for LGBTQ+ rights has typically been told from the perspective of coastal cities like New York, San Francisco, and Miami. But Lawrence, Kansas, was also a hotspot for activist organizations in the 1960s, and the work that was done there reverberated across the country. RSVP here.

Reading & Watching with PRIDE

Explore suggested LGBTQ Pride Month readings from Library staff and community-created lists in our catalog, including everything from history and nonfiction to popular fiction titles.

Resources with PRIDE

LGBT Studies in Video Learn more about LGBT history and culture with the LGBT Studies in Video database.

Archives of Sexuality & Gender Illuminates the experiences of not just the LGBTQ community as a whole but also individuals of different races, ethnicities, ages, religions, political orientations, and geographical locations.

Past Events with PRIDE

Listen to audio or watch video from some of the Library's past signature events discussing LGBTQ history and experiences.

No Place Like Home: The Struggle Against Hate in Kansas

C.J. Janovy, former editor of The Pitch and former director of content at KCUR 89.3, the NPR affiliate in Kansas City, discussed her 2018 book No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas in a conversation with filmmaker Kevin Willmott. Traveling through a state with a national reputation tied to Topeka’s gay-degrading Westboro Baptist Church, she found LGBT activists who fought in ways big and small for the respect of their neighbors, their communities, and their government, lending hope to those alarmed by the treatment of minorities in an increasingly polarized country. Since its publication, the book was awarded the 2019 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for LBGTQ Nonfiction.

Listen

Show Me Love: Female Impersonation and Drag in Kansas City

In a discussion drawing from his book, The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After, author and scholar Lucas Hilderbrand spotlights two gay establishments on Kansas City’s Troost Avenue in the 1960s: the Jewel Box Lounge and the Colony Bar. He examines how these venues made the differences between drag shows and female impersonation apparent at a time when gay bars were emerging as visible and politicized spaces.

Watch

Queer Eye: Love Yourself, Love Your Life

Near the end of four months of filming in Kansas City, the stars of Netflix’s infectious reality series Queer Eye sat down at the Central Library in November 2018 to discuss their book Queer Eye: Love Yourself, Love Your Life. Makeover specialists Bobby Berk (interior design), Karamo Brown (culture), Tan France (fashion), Antoni Porowski (food and wine), and Jonathan Van Ness (grooming) also reflected on their Kansas City experiences.

Watch

The Ordinance Project: KC’s LGBT Landmark

At the height of the AIDS crisis, the Kansas City City Council added “sexual orientation” to the local Civil Rights Ordinance, barring discrimination against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and people with HIV/AIDS. In June 2018, on the 25^th anniversary of the ordinance, the Library hosted a program that explored its legacy and compared and contrasted the struggle for LGBT rights then and now.

Filmmaker Austin Williams moderated the conversation, kicking off the event with a clip from his in-development documentary, The Ordinance Project, about the lead-up to and passage of the revised ordinance in June 1993. Panelists included Katheryn Shields, a council member then and now, and longtime activists Jon D. Barnett, Lea Hopkins, and Kay Madden. The program was co-presented by the Gay and Lesbian Archives of Mid-America, Out Here Now: Kansas City LGBT Film Festival and the Kansas City Human Rights Commission Task Force on Gay and Lesbian Issues.

Listen

We're Here, We're Queer: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Kansas City

In this program from 2014, a panel of local experts discussed how, before the famous 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City sparked the modern gay rights movement, Kansas City also had an active gay rights community that was a meaningful participant in the larger national movement. Post-Stonewall, the city’s emerging gay and lesbian community strove to provide venues and services to address the growing needs of its members.

Watch