Queer, There, and Everywhere by Sarah Prager

There are a couple of deaths, Elagabalus’ and Harvey Milk’s that are, for this level of book, pretty graphically described. But our history has been one that gets overshadowed and ignored so often that this book feels really great. It’s not meant to be a comprehensive history by any means, there’s entirely too much rich and complex history for that. The people in this book range from the year 203 (Elagabalus) to today (George Takei). The bibliographies of queer texts are your best friend when it comes to finding further readings, especially if you’re like me who’s really bad at googling things. I know I intend to invest in some of the books used as references for the sections on Renée Richards and Sylvia Rivera. The bibliography in the back is organized by section and so if there’s a particular person you find yourself wanting to look into further, it’s very easy to find other books or resources to pursue.

Queer, There, and Everywhere is also one of those books that makes a great stepping stone for further research. Of course Lili and Josef’s sections were not only summaries of their memoirs, in fact, it wasn’t until this book that I learned Josef’s name, because his name is not included in The Men with the Pink Triangle. He chose to remain anonymous when the book was first published. Queer, There, and Everywhere does a really great job of summarizing the stories in these books. Several of the people included in this book were people whose memoirs I’d already read, including Lili Elbe’s Man into Woman (though what I read was the renamed Kindle version Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change) and Josef Kohout’s The Men with the Pink Triangle. As a voracious reader myself, I breezed through it in a couple hours. Queer, There, and Everywhere, provides good summaries of the amazing lives of twenty-three incredible people in language that you don’t need to be a college student to understand. There are a lot of queer texts that are mainly geared at adults. As I’ve discovered seeking out books for my thesis, when it comes to queer texts they aren’t always the easiest to get your hands on or even read when it comes to more theoretical texts.

It’s well researched, informative, and best of all it’s accessible. Queer, There, and Everyone is a really wonderful book.

Queer, There, and Everywhere by Sarah Prager