Reading Our Leaves is a book club devoted to books in the literary tradition tracing the emergence of gay male identity in English-language literature of the Nineteenth Century and from this trajectory, dawning notions of queerness and gender expansiveness as we get closer to the present.

In the fractured media environment of the 21st Century, and given the loss of a large proportion of a generation of gay men in the 1980s and ’90s and beyond in the AIDS crisis of the HIV epidemic, the roots of the specifically ‘gay’ identity in a fascinating, moving literary tradition that for our purposes in Body Electric can be seen to originate with the publication of the first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves Of Grass in 1854 have begun to be a bit obscured.

A fascinating canon of works of gay literature can be traced, and will be traced in this book club, leading all the way up to the present day through the great jubilation of the struggle for rights for sexual minorities and the great conflagration of AIDS in which constituents for many different varieties of sexual experience and identity began to emerge into greater and greater political visibility alongside the gay community.

In Reading Our Leaves, we’ll discuss these books with a special attention to books in the history of gay literature that have movies made of them, and for which audiobooks exist — for inclusivity. This is a ‘low-pressure book club,’ meaning that it is not required that one has read the book or even watched the movie or TV show to participate in the discussion. And you do not need to be a gay male to be part of the club!

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• Bookshop
• Amazon
• Audible (for audiobooks)