Pride Month

LGBTQ+ Pride Month is every June. Pride Month celebrates the LGBTQ+ community, the spectrum of gender and sexuality, and the struggle for equal rights and acceptance. It is also a commemoration of the Stonewall Uprising, which began on June 28, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in New York. The very first Pride parade was an inaugural protest march that took place on June 28, 1970, in New York City.

The Supreme Court finally decriminalized homosexuality in 2003. With Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, the Supreme Court legalized marriage equality. Even though same-sex marriage bans are no longer enforceable due to national legalization, some states still have bans in place.

Before the rainbow flag, the LGBTQ+ community used pink and black triangles, which had originally been used by Nazis to label people as gay or lesbian in concentration camps. In 1978, activists in San Francisco created an eight-color flag. The rainbow flag has transformed over the years, with the Progress Pride Flag (2018) and later the Intersex Inclusive Progress Pride Flag (2021) becoming representative of the LGBTQ+ community. The colors in the flag are symbolic, with each color and shape representing a part of the community.

As acceptance of LGBTQ+ people has increased, so has the number of people who identify as LGBTQ+. A Gallup poll in 2024 indicated that nearly one in ten (9.3%) of Americans identify as LGBTQ. If you’re interested, Pew Research further breaks down the statistics of Americans identifying as LGBTQ+.

At TBR Books, you can find books by queer writers and books with queer characters in any genre. We do not have a separate section exclusively for queer fiction, although we DO have a section for queer nonfiction.

Take a look at some of our recommendations below!