A strikingly illustrated collection of short biographies from Sappho to the current day, this collection includes queer people who made their mark in various fields: politics, art, science, sports, entertainment, and more. While generally engaging, the appeal of the volume is dimmed slightly by a lack of organization (biographies are neither chronological nor alphabetical nor grouped by identity), occasional clunkiness in the writing, and numerous editing errors.
Small details in some of the profiles could also use refinement. For example, the book says that Harvey Milk’s parents were “of Lithuanian decent” without noting they were Jewish, showing an ignorance of how Jewish culture was distinct from mainstream Lithuanian culture and how Milk’s Jewish roots impacted him. Intersectional identities matter. The book also says astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala studied “at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, going on to study for her PhD following her first degree.” This implies she got her PhD at Wellesley, but she didn’t; she got it at MIT, which is never mentioned. (Wellesley does not offer graduate degrees.) And to say “she received at MacArthur Fellowship for her work” without any explanation of what that fellowship is feels like bad form.
While the people featured are fairly diverse in racial/ethnic identities, they are primarily LGB men and women. There are no nonbinary or asexual/aromantic people. There is only one transgender man (Laith Ashley), and somehow his name is missing from the list of included people in the publisher’s description. (See list below; I’ve added him, but he’s missing in the descriptions at Amazon, Bookshop, and the publisher’s site). His profile mentions his transgender identity, but that page is somehow not included in the index under “Transgender.”
A glossary at the end offers definitions of key terms related to LGBTQ identities, along with an eclectic selection of unrelated words that apparently the authors/editors felt readers might not know, such as “donate,” “military,” “pioneer,” “sceptical,” “surreal,” “triumph,” and “warfare.” Given that the publisher says the book is aimed at ages 10 to 15 (which feels right, based on the density of text), those are likely to be words intended readers already know.
A list of “Useful Sources” includes several LGBTQ organizations, but no further sources for information on any of the people covered. Other issues speak to hasty editing; for example, some URLs in the “Useful Sources” at the end include “http://” or “https://” and others do not. (These days, they’re not really necessary, but having some URLs with and some without feels sloppy.)
I do appreciate that the profiles generally note if their subjects had children; this is a detail sometimes left out of similar books, but which I think helps young queer people see that a) they can become parents if they choose; and b) it’s possible to be a parent and be successful in other areas of life, too.
Are the flaws of the book enough for me to say not to read this? No. There is definitely value in what is here, and there are some profiles not included in other queer collective biographies for the age group. But if you’re choosing only one such book to have on your shelves, make it Sarah Prager’s Rainbow Revolutionaries (for middle graders) or her Queer, There, and Everywhere (for teens), which feel better written and edited. If you have room for more, then Queer Heroes will offer some additional material of interest.
People included are: Freddie Mercury, Sappho, Audre Lorde, Manvendra Singh Gohil, Frida Kahlo, Emma Gonzalez, James Baldwin, Leonardo da Vinci, Alexander Wang, Subhi Nahas, Tove Jansson, Alan Turing, Michelangelo, Martina Navratilova, Sia, Tim Cook, Pedro Almodovar, Virginia Woolf, Tchaikovsky, Vikram Seth, Yotam Ottolenghi, Johanna Sigurðardóttir, Marsha Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, David Bowie, Kasha Nabagsera, Lili Elbe, Matthew Bourne, Alvin Ailey, Harvey Milk, Willem Arondeus, Nergis Mavalvala, Rufus Wainwright, Marlene Dietrich, Larry Kramer, Didier Lestrade, Nabuko Yoshiya, Bayard Rustin, Claire Harvey, Barbara Jordan, Josephine Baker, k.d. lang, Kristen Stewart, Jazz Jennings, Elio di Rupo, Laith Ashley, Oscar Wilde, Harish Iyer, Khalid Abdel-Hadi, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Ellen DeGeneres, and Portia de Rossi.
Content warnings: One person profiled experienced child sexual abuse; one may have “committed suicide” (although the preferred phrasing, per the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, is now “died by suicide”).
