Here's a Handy P & P Flow Chart

My thanks to Mike Mazza for sharing this diagram listing all the characters (and their relationships) in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which we discussed last night as our quarterly non-LGBTQ book. And, of course, I couldn't resist the temptation to share this iconic image from the 2005 BBC adaptation. (OK, I didn't even try to resist...:-)

More of Less

As we get ready to nominate books for our 2023 reading list, several of you have already flagged two new novels. Andrew Holleran's The Kingdom of Sand came out in June, to wide acclaim; here's the New York Times review. And Andrew Sean Greer's Less Is Lost, the eagerly anticipated sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lost (which we discussed in January 2019) drops on Sept. 20. This NYT profile of Greer gives readers a detailed preview of the book; it certainly sounds like a hoot (and a holler)!

Deciphering the Code

In anticipation of our upcoming discussion (this Wednesday) of Rodger Streitmatter's Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples, I wanted to highlight the couple portrayed in Chapter 6: J.S. Leyendecker and Charles Beach. Unlike some of the other figures Streitmatter profiles, I had actually heard of them before, thanks to a truly moving 2021 documentary, "Coded: The Hidden Love of J.C. Leyendecker," that I highly recommend. (I streamed it on the Paramount app.) 

Leyendecker and Beach were also included in the National Portrait Gallery's 2010 exhibition, "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," as were Janet Flanner and Solita Solano (Chapter 8) and Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (Chapter 13). Here is a link to the handsome catalog. 

It's (a) Library Thing

Grant Thompson was kind enough to share this roundup of "Pre-1969 LGBTQ Literature" from the Library Thing blog, containing 100 titles. While acknowledging the "wealth of Pride reading lists that highlight some of the great books of today," the creators of this Pride Month list want to "draw attention to LBGTQ books from an earlier period." As with all such compilations, it is necessarily idiosyncratic, and one can certainly quibble both with what made the list and what didn't. But as we prepare to nominate books for our own reading list (stay tuned for more details on that annual exercise), this is a useful resource.