A Pride Month reading list

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

By Olivia B. Waxman

Staff Writer

The New York City Pride March is set to take place on Sunday, June 25, more than five decades after the uprising at the gay bar Stonewall Inn marked the beginning of the modern gay-rights movement. As Pride Month wraps up, here’s a look back at how TIME has covered milestones in LGBTQ+ history.

—Historian Eric Marcus’s personal essay on the impact of TIME magazine covers on gay-rights issues.

—A mini-documentary on pioneering drag performer Lady Java

—A short video delves into what we know and don’t know about the confrontation at Stonewall.

—A story that goes inside the efforts to incorporate more LGBTQ+ history in K-12 classrooms in the U.S.

—Historian Roland Betancourt explains why same-gender relations in the medieval Christian world didn’t provoke the kind of ‘intense disdain that we find within the modern Christian right.’

HISTORY ON TIME.COM

How TIME Covered the Stonewall Riots

By Lily Rothman

A movie about the 1969 riots will be released Sept. 25

What's Changed—and What Hasn't—in 50 Years of Pride

By Suyin Haynes

The first Pride parades took place in the U.S. in 1970, a year after the Stonewall Inn uprising many see as the catalyst for the modern LGBTQ movement

How the Nazi Pink Triangle Was Repurposed for LGBTQ Pride

By Olivia B. Waxman

The symbol was born from a dark time in history

Why It Took Decades for LGBTQ Stories to Be Included in Holocaust History

By Andrea Carlo

"For the queer survivors of Nazi oppression, 1945 did not bring about any kind of liberation"

The Overlooked LGBTQ+ History of the Harlem Renaissance

By Olivia B. Waxman and Video by Arpita Aneja

Acknowledging the queer culture of the Harlem Renaissance is essential in order to paint a full picture of the period

FROM THE TIME VAULT

This week in 1975: Jaws

“What sets Jaws apart from most of the other ceiling busters and makes it a special case, like The Godfather, is that it is quite a good movie…. At one time or another, the film makers did battle with a recalcitrant mechanical shark, intrepid sailors and high-living yachtsmen, larcenous townspeople, tourists who were both curious about the movie and miffed that their vacations were being disrupted, striking labor unions and, inevitably, the elements. Spielberg says now, ‘Jaws should never have been made. It was an impossible effort.’” (June 23, 1975)

This week in 2002: Tom Cruise

“Minority Report is a smart move for him at this point in his career--an edgy, mind-bending piece of film noir in the vein of Memento and the Matrix. Cruise's audience is vast, but like him, it's getting older. It's the Matrix generation that he needs to capture if he is to remain top gun at the box office. Driving toward Hollywood, he shrugs off a question about his aging demographic. ‘I'm getting older,’ he says. ‘But a story is a story, and a character's a character. That's what I think about.’” (June 24, 2002)

This week in 2012: Anthony Kennedy

“No case is of greater moment than the fate of President Barack Obama's signature health care reforms…Kennedy keeps an easel with an oversize pad of paper handy, and on particularly complicated cases, the clerks will ‘try to write it out for him when he is trying to visualize it.’ Many clerks interviewed for this article can recall times when the entire table appeared to agree on the proper outcome, only to have the Justice decide the opposite. ‘You don't know how he's going to go,’ one recent clerk says.” (June 18, 2012)