UWM Libraries Research and Course Guides: LGBTQIA+ Rights and History: Art and Streaming Media

Databases for Art and Literature

LGBT Studies in Video
LGBT Studies in Video is a cinematic survey of the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as well as the cultural and political evolution of the LGBT community
Docuseek
A collection of independent, social-issue and environmental documentaries. Producers and distributors include Bullfrog, Collective Eye, dGenerate, First Run Features, GOOD DOCS, Icarus, and Women Make Movies.
Alternative Press Index This link opens in a new window
Alternative Press Index (API) is a bibliographic database of journal, newspaper, and magazine articles from over 300 international alternative, radical, and left periodicals. Born of the New Left, the API was launched to provide access to the emerging theories and practices of radical social change. Alternative Press Index covers theories and practices of socialism and revolution alongside; ecology, democracy and anarchism, feminism and organized labor, and indigenous peoples and gays/lesbians. API coverage is both international and interdisciplinary.

Queer Art History (Independent Art History Encyclopedia)
Queer Art History is a visual history and educational resource for queer art and culture. This resource is intended to educate and empower LGBTQIA2S+ folks and allies through sharing our rich histories that extend before and beyond modern Queer Rights movements. Contains photos of fine art and artist profiles.

JSTOR
Provides access to journal articles, books, images, and primary sources. Contents include the Artstor image collection, archival and current scholarly journal content, and historical documents.

Art, Film, and Media Sources

Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe : Aristotle and Dante series, book 1 by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Call Number: S127a 2012
ISBN: 9781442366077
Publication Date: 2013
Aristotle is an angry teen with a brother in prison. Dante is a know-it-all who has an unusual way of looking at the world. When the two meet at the swimming pool, they seem to have nothing in common. But as the loners start spending time together, they discover that they share a special friendship—the kind that changes lives and lasts a lifetime. And it is through this friendship that Ari and Dante will learn the most important truths about themselves and the kind of people they want to be.

Memoirs

Zami: a New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
Call Number: PS3562.O75 Z23 1983 (several print books available)
ISBN: 0895941228
Publication Date: 1982
ZAMI is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author's vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde's work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page
Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein
Call Number: Request from UW System
Publication Date: 1994-05-12
(2010 and 2016 Editions available at UWM)
Part coming-of-age story, part mind-altering manifesto on gender and sexuality, coming directly to you from the life experiences of a trans woman, Gender Outlaw breaks all the rules and leaves the reader forever changed.
An Underground Life by Allison Brown (Translator); Gad Beck; Frank Heibert
Call Number: DS135.G5 B33313 1999
ISBN: 9780299165048
Publication Date: 2000-06-26
Gad Beck, a half-Jewish German, managed to evade the Nazis and live illegally, underground, in Berlin throughout the duration of World War II. While that in itself was notable, Beck didn’t simply exist in some nocturnal world of hiding. Coming of age as a gay man during the war, he also helped organize a Jewish youth group, free friends from the Gestapo, and maintain a series of romantic relationships.
Fun Home: a family tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
Call Number: eBook (Print book also available)
ISBN: 9780547347004
Publication Date: 2007-06-05
In this groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father. In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail. Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the "Fun Home." It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
Gender Queer: a Memoir by Maia Kobabe
Call Number: HQ77.8.K628 K63 2020
ISBN: 9781549307515
Publication Date: 2019-05-28
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity.Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity-what it means and how to think about it-for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.
It Was Never Going to Be Okay by Jaye Simpson
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780889713833
Publication Date: 2020-10-06
It Was Never Going to Be Okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman. The author, Jaye Simpson, is a Two-Spirit Oji-Cree of the Buffalo Clan. This collection of poetry explores Jaye's identities and experiences.

Poetry

Academy of American Poets: LGBTQ Poetry
Explore the rich tradition of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer poets and poetry by browsing a selection of poems & audio.
The Poetry Foundation Collection: LGBTQ+ Pride Poems
A collection of poems and essays by LGBTQ+ poets on topics and themes of identity, gender, and sexuality. By The Editors and Robert Eric Shoemaker
The Poetry Foundation Collection: Queer Love Poems
A collection LGBTQ love poetry by and for the queer community.

Fractal: Stories Across the Gender Spectrum (documentary) | 2022
Fractal is a collection of 4 documentary shorts that explores the wide spectrum of experiences often left out of the traditional narrative. From a successful trans woman running her own salon in New Orleans to a collective experimental video essay road film; the collection expands on the joys, struggles and honest conversations within the community.
Markie in Milwaukee (documentary) | 2020
Fundamentalist Baptist minister Markie Wenzel decides, at age 46, to finally come out as transgender and start living as female. It is a decision that ended her 20-year marriage, cut her off from her community, and estranged her from her three children. But that decision is just the beginning of her trials. Markie misses the births of her grandchildren and starts to re-evaluate her faith. She also struggles to present herself as feminine at the height of seven-feet tall. With over a decade of vérité footage, filmmaker Matt Kiegman brings this film a Diane Arbus-like observational style that is at once intimate, tragic and hopeful.
One in 2000 (documentary) | 2015
One in two thousand babies are born with anatomy that doesn't clearly mark them as either male or female. This provocative documentary demystifies the issue through intimate profiles of people born intersex.
How to Survive a Plague (documentary) | 2012
"How to Survive a Plague" is the documentary about of the brave people who successfully reversed the tide of an epidemic, demanded the attention of a fearful nation and stopped AIDS from becoming a death sentence. This improbable group of activists bucked oppression and, with no scientific training, infiltrated government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry, helping to identify promising new medication and treatments and move them through trials and into drugstores in record time.
Intersexion (documentary) | 2012
this groundbreaking documentary, intersex individuals reveal the secrets of their unconventional lives – and how they have navigated their way through this strictly male/female world, when they fit somewhere in between.

Brother Outsider : The Life of Bayard Rustin (documentary) | 2002 by Question Why Films
On November 20, 2013, Bayard Rustin was posthumously awarded the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. Rustin was at most of the important events of the Civil Rights Movement-but always in the background. This film asks "Why?" It presents a vivid drama, intermingling the personal and the political, about one of the most enigmatic figures in 20th-century American history. One of the first "freedom riders," an adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and A. Philip Randolph, organizer of the march on Washington, intelligent, gregarious, and charismatic, Bayard Rustin was denied his place in the limelight for one reason-he was gay.

National Equity Map | Transgender Law Center
The Movement Advancement Project (MAP) tracks over 50 different LGBTQ-related laws and policies. This map shows the overall policy tallies (as distinct from sexual orientation or gender identity tallies) for each state, the District of Columbia, and the five populated U.S. territories. View policies by state or use the "choose an issue" option to to view maps on over 50 different LGBTQ-related laws and policies.
Wisconsin LGBT History Project
This webpage is meant to docuement the Wisconsin LGBT History Project from when it first started in 2003. The projects focus is to document individuals contributions to the Milwaukee area. Includes an interactive map of historic gay bar locations.
Queering the Map
Queering the Map is a community generated counter-mapping platform for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space.
Openly (LGBTQ+ News)
Openly is an independent, digital news platform delivering global LGBTQ+ news. Powered by original coverage from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Openly also aggregates select lgbt+ news and authoritative reports from other sources. Find stories and first hand testimony about Queer experiences all over the world.
"A pioneering gender-affirming health institute opened in 1919 in Berlin" | All Things Considered (NPR)
The Institute for Sexual Research, founded in 1919, pioneered modern gender-affirming health care. NPR's Ailsa Chang speaks with medical historian Brandy Schillace on this piece of queer history.
Trans Activist Lindsey Spero injects Testosterone in front of Florida state medical licensing boards | The Independent Feb 2023
The video of this moment is embedded in the article.