Folsom Library Collection Highlights

• An Archive of Hope by Harvey Milk; Jason Edward Black (Editor); Charles E. Morris (Editor)

  ISBN: 0520955021

  Publication Date: 2013-02-15

  Harvey Milk was one of the first openly and politically gay public officials in the United States, and his remarkable activism put him at the very heart of a pivotal civil rights movement reshaping America in the 1970s. An Archive of Hope is Milk in his own words, bringing together in one volume a substantial collection of his speeches, columns, editorials, political campaign materials, open letters, and press releases, culled from public archives, newspapers, and personal collections.
• Blackouts by Justin Torres

  Call Number: PS3620.O5897 B55 2023

  ISBN: 9780374293574

  Publication Date: 2023-10-10

  Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book -- Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns -- and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan's tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time.
• Black Queer Freedom by GerShun Avilez

  ISBN: 0252052250

  Publication Date: 2020-11-09

  Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomic injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists' work throughout the black diaspora. GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces--specifically prisons and hospitals--and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.
• Boy with the Bullhorn by Ron Goldberg

  ISBN: 9781531500979

  Publication Date: 2022-09-06

  A coming-of-age memoir of life on the frontlines of the AIDS Crisis with ACT UP New York. From the moment Ron Goldberg stumbled into his first ACT UP meeting in June 1987, the AIDS activist organization became his life. For the next eight years, he chaired committees, planned protests, led teach-ins, and facilitated their Monday night meetings. He cruised and celebrated at ACT UP parties, attended far too many AIDS memorials, and participated in over a hundred zaps and demonstrations, becoming the group's unofficial "Chant Queen," writing and leading chants for many of their major actions. Boy with the Bullhorn is both a memoir and an immersive history of the original New York chapter of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, from 1987 to 1995, told with great humor, heart, and insight. Using the author's own story, "the activist education of a well-intentioned, if somewhat naïve nice gay Jewish theater queen," Boy with the Bullhorn intertwines Goldberg's experiences with the larger chronological history of ACT UP, the grassroots AIDS activist organization that confronted politicians, scientists, drug companies, religious leaders, the media, and an often-uncaring public to successfully change the course of the AIDS epidemic.
• Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

  Call Number: PN6727.B3757 Z46 2006

  ISBN: 0618871713

  Publication Date: 2007-06-05

  This book takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It's a father-daughter tale perfectly suited to the graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned 'fun home, ' as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive.
• The Gay Revolution by Lillian Faderman

  Call Number: HQ76.8.U5 F33 2015

  ISBN: 9781451694116

  Publication Date: 2015-09-08

  The fight for gay and lesbian civil rights -- the years of injustice, the early battles, the defeats, and the victories beyond the dreams of the gay rights pioneers -- is an important civil rights issue of the present day. In this book, Lillian Faderman tells this unfinished story through the accounts of passionate struggles with sweep, depth, and feeling. The Gay Revolution begins in the 1950s, when gays and lesbians were criminals, psychiatrists saw them as mentally ill, churches saw them as sinners, and society victimized them with hatred. Against this dark backdrop, a few brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and beyond. Faderman discusses the protests in the 1960s; the counter reaction of the 1970s and early eighties; the decimated but united community during the AIDS epidemic; and the current hurdles for the right to marriage equality.
• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

  Call Number: PS3552.A45 G5

  ISBN: 0385334583

  Publication Date: 2000-06-13

  In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni's curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella's return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy. David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night -- "the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life." With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a deeply moving story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
• How to Be Queer by Sarah Nooter (Edited and Translated by)

  ISBN: 0691248605

  Publication Date: 2024-06-04

  In recent years, sexual fluidity has increasingly entered mainstream consciousness. However, the ancient Greeks got there long ago, and often with little angst and much wit, insight, and depth. Surviving texts from Archaic and Classical Greece offer glimpses of queer love and life in poetry, prose, and plays They also make evident a Greek willingness to countenance and experimentation with sexuality, gender, and the erotic.
• Pageboy by Elliot Page

  Call Number: PN2308.P34 A3 2023

  ISBN: 9781250878359

  Publication Date: 2023-06-06

  The Oscar-nominated star who captivated the world with his performance in Juno finally shares his truth. "Can I kiss you?" It was two months before the world premiere of Juno, and Elliot Page was in his first ever queer bar. The hot summer air hung heavy around him as he looked at her. And then it happened. In front of everyone. A previously unfathomable experience. Here he was on the precipice of discovering himself as a queer person, as a trans person. Getting closer to his desires, his dreams, himself, without the repression he'd carried for so long. But for Elliot, two steps forward had always come with one step back. With Juno's massive success, Elliot became one of the world's most beloved actors. His dreams were coming true, but the pressure to perform suffocated him. He was forced to play the part of the glossy young starlet, a role that made his skin crawl, on and off set. The career that had been an escape out of his reality and into a world of imagination was suddenly a nightmare. As he navigated criticism and abuse from some of the most powerful people in Hollywood, a past that snapped at his heels, and a society dead set on forcing him into a binary, Elliot often stayed silent, unsure of what to do, until enough was enough.
• Pocket Guide to LGBTQ Mental Health by Petros Levounis (Editor); Eric Yarbrough (Editor)

  ISBN: 9781615373109

  Publication Date: 2020-07-06

  The Pocket Guide for Understanding LGBTQ Mental Health is a manual for mental health clinicians working with patients of diverse gender and sexual identities: lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people, queer people, questioning people, intersex people, asexual people, pansexual people, and allied heterosexuals. The book discusses psychological and cultural contexts and challenges faced by patients and addresses questions that well-meaning people may ask.
• Queer Twin Cities by Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project

  ISBN: 9780816675371

  Publication Date: 2010-09-23

  The Twin Cities is home to one of the largest and most vital GLBT populations in the nation-and one of the highest percentages of gay residents in the country. Drawn from the pioneering work of the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project-a collective organization of students, scholars, and activists devoted to documenting and interpreting the lives of GLBT people in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
• The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar. Wilde; Nicholas Frankel (Editor)

  Call Number: PR5819.A2 G56 2007

  ISBN: 9780674068049

  Publication Date: 2012-08-13

  Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray makes a Faustian bargain to sell his soul in exchange for eternal youth and beauty. Under the influence of Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, where he is able to indulge his desires while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society - only Dorian's picture bears the traces of his decadence.

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  Brokeback Mountain (2005)

  It's 1963, a time in the United States when life was simple, straightforward and the lines between the sexes and sex roles were crisply drawn and severely delineated. Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist find themselves thrown together when they are hired to tend sheep in the remote area of Brokeback Mountain, Wyoming. Because of the job, the two are forced to spend many hours together alone in the wild. Ennis and Jack are inexorably drawn to each other through their proximity, loneliness and through a shared lack of tenderness and emotion in their lives and are emotionally, physically and psychically bonded to each other almost from the start.
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  Carol (2015)

  Two women from very different backgrounds find themselves in an unexpected love affair in 1950s New York. As conventional norms of the time challenge their undeniable attraction, an honest story emerges to reveal the resilience of the heart in the face of change. A young woman in her twenties, Therese is a clerk working in a Manhattan department store and dreaming of a more fulfilling life when she meets Carol, an alluring woman trapped in a loveless, convenient marriage.
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  Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989)

  The story of the AIDS Memorial Quilt established by the San Francisco NAMES Project Foundation in 1987 to commemorate the lives lost to AIDS. From the thousands memorialized in the quilt, profiles five individuals--including a recovered IV drug user, a former Olympic decathlon star and a boy with hemophilia--whose stories reflect the diversity and common tragedy of those who have died from AIDS. Celebrates their unique personalities and achievements, interweaving these personal histories with a chronology of the epidemic's development and the negligence of the government.
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  Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

  Evelyn Wang, a flustered immigrant mother, is contacted from a parallel universe and told that only she can save the world. The unlikely hero must learn to channel her newfound powers and fight through the splintering timelines of the multiverse to save her home, her family, and herself in this big-hearted and irreverent adventure.
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  Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives (1993)

  Compelling, often hilarious and always rebellious, the women interviewed in Forbidden Love recount stories about their first loves and their search for the places where openly gay women gathered in mid-20th century urban centers. Against a soundtrack of pop hits and a backdrop of pulp novel covers, archival footage, and tabloid headlines, these women's coming-of-age experiences in the 1950s and '60s are explored with grace, humor, and irreverence. With the candor of survivors of struggle, the women offer an affecting portrait of a community once consigned to silence and exile. Forbidden Love brings an important and empowering history of lesbian sexuality in Canada out of the closet.
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  How to Survive a Plague (2012)

  The story of the brave young men and women who successfully reversed the tide of an epidemic, demanded the attention of a fearful nation, and stopped AIDS from becoming a death sentence. This improbable group of activists bucked oppression and infiltrated government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, helping to identify promising new medication and treatments and move them through trials and into drugstores in record time.
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  The Lavender Scare (2019)

  In 1953, President Eisenhower declared gay men and lesbians to be a threat to the security of the country and therefore unfit for government service. In doing so, he triggered the longest witch hunt in American history. Over the next four decades, tens of thousands of government workers would lose their jobs for no reason other than their sexual orientation. But the actions of the government had an unintended effect. They inadvertently helped ignite the gay rights movement. In 1957, after thousands had lost their jobs, a Harvard-trained astronomer named Frank Kameny became the first person to fight his dismissal. His attempts to regain his job evolved into a lifelong fight for the rights of LGBTQ people.The Lavender Scare is a compelling story of one man’s fight for justice.
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  Moonlight (2016)

  A young Black man struggles to find his place in the world while growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami. A timeless story of human connection and self-discovery, this film chronicles the life of a young Black man from childhood to adulthood as he struggles to find his place in the world while growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami. At once a vital portrait of contemporary African-American life and an intensely personal and poetic meditation on identity, family, friendship, and love, this is a groundbreaking piece of cinema that reverberates with deep compassion and universal truths.
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  The New Black (2014)

  This award-winning documentary boldly examines the controversial and challenging issues facing African American communities on gay civil rights, campaigns for/against marriage equality and in particular the role of faith institutions. The film makes a compelling case that the fight for LGBT rights in Black communities is an extension of the Black Freedom Struggle. Director Yoruba Richen was inspired to make the film in response to erroneous reports that African American voters caused the passage of an anti-same sex marriage initiative in the 2008 California election. The film looks at other pro and anti-gay rights campaigns over the years and how right-wing groups have used the issue to make inroads in to black communities.
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  The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

  A mixture of fantastical rock opera and horror movie spoof. A couple of ordinary kids have car trouble one dark and rainy night and knock on the door of a looming gothic mansion. They are stunned to learn that they have stumbled into an ongoing convention of kinky characters, hosted by Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a mad scientist from the planet Transylvania.
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  Saving Face (2004)

  For 28-year old New Yorker Wilhemina "Wil" Pang, life is a juggling act between a promising career a surgeon and her responsibilities as a dutiful daughter. Like the #7 train she takes to visit her Chinese family on a weekly basis, Will is perpetually in transit between two worlds. As her carefully compartmentalized worlds collide, Wil is forced to find her mother a husband, placate her girlfriend, and choose between breaking a cycle of keeping up appearances, or risk losing the girl she loves. Saving Face is a romantic comedy about a daughter struggling to understand her mother's heart, which ultimately allows her to understand her own.

• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

  Includes information about identity-based clubs and organizations, LGBTQ students, Office of Multicultural Programs, and Women at Rensselaer
• Division of Student Life - Student Success

  The Student Success portfolio engages all students in authoring their unique definition of success. Through advocacy, instruction, support, and mentoring, Student Success intentionally empowers students to achieve their academic and personal goals.
• Gender-inclusive restroom available in Folsom Library

  A gender-inclusive/gender-neutral restroom is located on the second (main) floor of the Folsom library in the café.
• LGBTQ+ Students at Rensselaer

  With an active LGBTQ+ student, faculty, and staff community and a fully inclusive nondiscrimination policy, Rensselaer asks all students, “Why Not Change The World?”
• LGBTQIA Task Force Discord Channel
• Rensselaer Counseling Services

  We believe that everyone could benefit from counseling from an objective, knowledgeable, and caring person at some time. For some of us, this time occurs during the college years. The goal of Counseling Services is to help students maximize their sense of well being as well as their academic, personal and social growth. Counseling Services staff are available in case of a crisis on evenings and weekends.
• Rensselaer Pride Alliance

  RPA is devoted to promoting understanding, appreciation and pride in LGBT history and culture on the RPI's campus
• Rensselaer Student Health Center

  All services provided by the Rensselaer Student Health Center are confidential. The Student Health Center offers free HIV & STI testing to Rensselaer students every Wednesday and Friday afternoon by appointment. Free male latex condoms and lubricants are available upon request or in the waiting room. All staff are Safe Zone trained.
• Sexual Misconduct Resources

  Includes resources such as supportive, reporting, policies and laws, Student Sexual Conduct Bill of Rights, communications, and contact information.
• Student Experience

  Includes resources for life on campus, sports & recreation, performing arts, civil & democratic engagement, professional & leadership development, diversity and inclusion, and student support.
• Student Living and Learning

  Includes resources for campus housing, off-campus house, living and learning, and Greek life commons