Item category 2: LGBT

A unique first-hand account of a historical gay trans man's whole life, which reads like a celebratory coming-of-age novel. Lou kept candid diaries from the age of 10. Through these extracts, we hear Lou's life in his own words: from 'playing boys' in his childhood in Wisconsin, to cruising San F...

Damani is tired. Every day she cares for her mum, drives ride shares to pay the bills and is angry at a world that promised her more before spitting her out. That is until the summer she meets Jolene and life opens up. Jolene seems like she could be the perfect girlfriend - attentive, attractive,...

Freddie is unremarkable - too unremarkable. He doesn't stand out in any way, and in fact teachers and fellow students keep forgetting who he is. Even his mum thinks he's a disappointment, and spends almost all her time at work, producing a TV show. After a particularly awful night when he embarra...

A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem. Around her, a heady swirl of passers-by, car horns, kerosene lamps, the stock market falling, fried bananas, tales of her parents' native Grenada. She trudges to public school along snowy sidewalks, and finds she is tongue-tied, legally blind, l...

Born in South Africa in 1972, Zanele Muholi came to prominence in the early 2000s with photographs that sought to envision black lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and intersex lives beyond deviance or victimhood. Muholi's work challenges hetero-patriarchal ideologies and representations, pres...