06:45 PM
He International LGBTQ+ Pride Day, In addition to commemorating the struggle and resistance that took place in the Stonewall bar riots in New York, where the precedent was set for the first pride march, it is an opportunity to learn more about the stories of this population that has been violated for years.
You may be interested in: Why is LGBTQ+ Pride Day celebrated on June 28? The history of the Stonewall riots
That’s why the Planet Group, one of the leading publishers in Latin America, together with Profamilia, a reference in the defense of Sexual and Reproductive Rights in the country, decided to create the campaign #WeReadWithPride, which was born five years ago to make visible the struggles of the diverse population.
“Books are a safe place, that’s why we recommend five great stories whose authors reflect the power of diversity and the freedom to be and feel,” they expressed in the official statement.
Based on this initiative, the publisher recommends five books to read about queer and diverse stories.
1. I am my own woman, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf
Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (1928-2002), born Lothar Berfelde, led an existence as full of tension and adventures as the plot of a crime novel. A withdrawn and sensitive adolescent, born into a suffocating family environment, he survived, now a transvestite, first his despotic father, whom he killed in self-defense, later the Nazi regime, which did not tolerate his provocative sense of freedom, and after the communist dictatorship of the former GDR.
In the 1990s, when she was already a famous activist in favour of gay and lesbian rights in her country, she bravely faced the attacks and threats of skinheads and neo-Nazis. In these passionate memoirs, which we are recovering thirty years after their dazzling appearance in the catalogue of Tusquets Editores, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf is shown to us above all as a brave, obstinate and combative personality, who knew how to navigate with commendable dignity all the hells of intolerance, incomprehension and rejection against those who dare to stray from the beaten path.
2. Certain boys, Alberto Fuguet
Tomás Mena counts the minutes to enter university and inaugurate a new stage of his life: the family, the neighborhood and the dictatorship, which oppresses and suffocates, cannot go any further. He does not want to continue feeling incomplete and is eager to experience everything, to take in the world that opens before his eyes, to be different. Across town, Clemente Fabres hopes to finish his fourth year of journalism so he can take things from him and return to England, where he believes he belongs.
Santiago de Chile seems boring, suffocating and grey to him. The only thing that keeps him safe is writing a fanzine about music, films and books, which he distributes for free and which takes him to meet Tomás in record stores, cinemas and underground parties. While the atmosphere of the country becomes suffocating, they fight, with the furious impetus of youth, to illuminate those dark years. Kaleidoscopic and irreverent, as well as tender and emotional, even political, Certain boys reaffirms Alberto Fuguet’s mastery in constructing generational novels. A beautiful and dangerous love story that serves as a tribute to the countercultural scene of the 1980s.
3. Bad habit, Alana S. Porter
Narrated by a unique and heartbreaking first-person voice, La mala costumbre traces the adolescence of a girl trapped in a body she doesn’t know how to inhabit, who tries to understand herself and the world she lives in, from her childhood in a working-class family in the San Blas neighborhood, devastated by heroin in the eighties, to the clandestine nights in the center of Madrid in the nineties. As in a bastard version of the hero’s journey, junkies, pop divas and fallen angels accompany her on a vital journey in which, in the end, it will be other women who help her overcome the violence she encounters at every step.
Bad habit It is a raw and fierce novel, but also poetic and moving, in which extremes are touched to show us why resentment and rage against the system are completely valid to survive in a society that does not accept those who are different. Owner of a unique creative universe in which theater, classic history and activism coexist, Alana S. Portero debuts in fiction with this dazzling novel that has become an international publishing phenomenon before its publication
4. The beauty and the butterflies, Fernando Molano Vargas
“Perhaps it may not interest anyone. But I write, I allow myself to write, because I still have a little faith. Very fickle and fragile, yes; but compelled by instinct and love, I hold on to it. I write because by doing so, although less than when reading the pages of others, in a way that I cannot explain, I feel that I protect from the threat of reality the rest of the trust that I still have in others and, above all, in myself.” Fernando Molano Vargas.
Inside a cardboard box, for years and unexamined, the private papers of the author of A kiss from Dick. There were unpublished stories, television scripts, poems inspired by Neruda, love letters and comments on other writers, among many others. From that unknown archive this book was born, in which several genres and registers share the stage to reveal other faces of the Molano writer. The beauty and the butterflies Now it is added, as an intimate and unexpected coda, to the Molano Vargas Library that Seix Barral published between 2019 and 2020, and which includes the novels A Kiss from Dick and View from a Sidewalk, and the collection of poems All Things and None . May the appearance of this book on the 25th anniversary of Molano’s death be another reason to return to the pages of a writer who dazzles and moves us like few others.
5. The evil ones, Camila Sosa Villada
When she arrived in the capital of Córdoba to study at university, Camila Sosa Villada went one night, scared to death, to spy on the transvestites in Parque Sarmiento and found her first place of belonging in the world. The bad ones is a rite of passage, a fairy tale and horror, a group portrait, an explosive manifesto, a guided tour of the author’s imagination and a chronicle unlike any other.
In her DNA, the two trans facets that most repel and terrify high society converge: transvestite rage and the party of being a transvestite. In her literary voice, Marguerite Duras, Wislawa Szymborska and Carson McCullers coexist, with a Cordoban accent. Las malas is the kind of book that, as soon as we finish reading it, we want the whole world to read it.
“When we write, Cami dear, the ancestors rise from the pig’s death, from sadness and loneliness, and we avenge the destiny that this pig world imposes on us, and we are finally our dream, being born, boiling, being born, boiling, being born …” – Susy Shock.
This selection of books is a guide to discovering diverse stories.
“In Planeta Group and Profamilia We work to build a more inclusive society. #LeemosConOrgullo seeks to join the normalization and recognition of the rights of all LGBTIQ+ people in Colombia,” the publisher stated.
