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LGBTQIA+ History and Literature: Find Books

interdisciplinary research guide

Browse for books about...

Click on the subjects below to browse books held by Gitenstein Library. Select the "Books, Articles & More" radio button and re-execute your search to include online journal articles.

Add the phrase "literary collections" to many subject searches to find anthologies (e.g., Lesbians AND "literary collections").

Important Note: The above headings are drawn from the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) thesaurus. Some headings are old fashioned and perhaps even offensive (e.g., transsexualism), but can and should be used to find scholarly sources about your topic(s). For background information about librarians' longstanding concerns regarding "non-pejorative physical and intellectual access to library materials on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people," see Matt Johnson's GLBT Controlled Vocabularies and Classification Schemes (2007), a brief history with bibliography published by the Rainbow Round Table (RTT), American Library Association.

Browse the Stacks

Non-fiction adult books about LGBT history are not generally shelved with other history books but rather can be found alongside books about the family, marriage, and women (HQ). Children's and Young Adult literature, both fiction and non-fiction, is also located on the 2nd Floor.

  • HQ74 (bisexuality)
  • HQ76.25 (history and development of gay culture)
  • HQ76.5 (Gay Rights Movement)
  • HQ77 (transgenderism)

Selected books about...

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) and Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) were among the earliest gay rights activists. The following Gitenstein Library books tell the history of the modern Gay Liberation Movement from the mid-to-late nineteenth century in Germany, the era of Ulrichs and Hirschfeld, through to Stonewall and beyond. Read more about Ulrichs, Hirschfeld, and other early figures in Robert Beachy's article, "The German Invention of Homosexuality," published in The Journal of Modern History (vol. 82, no. 4), 2010.

Creating community:

Daughters of Bilitis:

Mattachine Society:

Berlin:

Budapest:

Chicago:

London:

Los Angeles:

Multiple cities:

New York:

Pennsylvania:

Provincetown:

San Francisco:

Southern States:

Washington, D.C.:

Africa:

East Asia:

Native (and Latin) America:

South and Southeast Asia:

Ancient Mediterranean:

Medieval Europe:

Renaissance and Early Modern Europe:

19th and 20th Centuries:

Nazi persecution: 

Transgender histories:

ILL (for Books) and WorldCat

Use Interlibrary Loan (ILL) to request books and book chapters not held by our library. Chapters typically arrive within hours. Physical books take days.

WorldCat is a "union catalog" of millions of records for books held by thousands of libraries. Search WorldCat to find more books about your topic.

Identify e-books available to read or borrow immediately by conducting an Advanced search. Look for the Library Code box toward the bottom of the page. Enter one of the following library codes:

  • INARC (e-books from Internet Archive)
  • HATHI (e-books from HathiTrust)
  • NJT (books/e-books from our Gitenstein Library)
  • OAPEN (open access e-books)