This past month, NYC (where I live) has been marking the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, honoring the powerful legacy & celebrating LGBTQIA pride culminating in two parades today: the Queer Liberation March which is a people’s political march & the NYC Pride March which is a celebration parade. More than 4.5 million people are expected to attend the events today & the city is a beautiful rainbow of welcoming happiness. But in other places around the US & around the world, people are shunned, hurt, & even killed just for being themselves.
I still clearly remember my cousin coming out to my mom & me, terrified that we’d hate him. He’d learned to hide who he was as a child in the 1950s & to expect extreme prejudice & death threats once people found out he was gay. I also remember someone I used to work with from Russia telling me that people of the same sex were being openly beaten & killed in her country just for holding hands.
Yet amazingly, there are still LGBTQIAP+ books written around the world including those by authors whose countries persecute people for being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, pansexual, & members of other communities (aka LGBTQIAP+). So today, we celebrate World Pride with the LGBTQIAP-friendly books we’ve discovered so far on our adventure around the world.
I also cannot resist including a cookbook as I often do. This one is penned by a well-known private chef here in NYC who’s originally from Europe: A “delightfully witty culinary memoir that takes the reader from his grandmother's kitchen in southern Germany to his formative childhood years in Paris, from the attic apartment in Brooklyn Heights where he lives with his husband to his clients' posh homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons. Alternating intimate anecdotes and wry observations about the culinary world with over 250 easy-to-follow recipes, the book explores a rich, gay life devoted to beauty and art where the home kitchen always takes center stage.” Side note: Even his decadent dessert recipes like his Drowned Pear Cake & the Flourless Hazelnut Cherry Cake seem almost a cinch to make. Yum!
Happy reading!