Sheboygan Country LGBTQ Alliance Book Club

Join the Sheboygan County LGBTQ Alliance for a book discussion series brought to you in partnership with Mead Library highlighting the diversity of the LGBTQIA+ community. Each month a different book covering a unique perspective on the queer experience will prompt deep, thought-provoking, and inspiring conversations for people who identify as LGBTQIA+ and straight allies alike. And if you don't know how you identify, but have a good faith desire to learn with curiosity and humility- we welcome you too. Join us for this facilitated book club that celebrates and explores queer life, love, and liberation. Books and discussions in this club may contain mature themes and language. 

Here's the Summer/Fall lineup. Click the book titles to see a brief description:

June 2: The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021) by Alison Bechdel

From the author of Fun Home, a profound graphic memoir of Bechdel's lifelong love affair with exercise, set against a hilarious chronicle of fitness fads in our times

Comics and cultural superstar Alison Bechdel delivers a deeply layered story of her fascination, from childhood to adulthood, with every fitness craze to come down the pike: from Jack LaLanne in the 60s ("Outlandish jumpsuit! Cantaloupe-sized guns!") to the existential oddness of present-day spin class. Readers will see their athletic or semi-active pasts flash before their eyes through an ever-evolving panoply of running shoes, bicycles, skis, and sundry other gear. But the more Bechdel tries to improve herself, the more her self appears to be the thing in her way. She turns for enlightenment to Eastern philosophers and literary figures, including Beat writer Jack Kerouac, whose search for self-transcendence in the great outdoors appears in moving conversation with the author’s own. This gifted artist and not-getting-any-younger exerciser comes to a soulful conclusion. The secret to superhuman strength lies not in six-pack abs, but in something much less clearly defined: facing her own non-transcendent but all-important interdependence with others.

A heartrendingly comic chronicle for our times.

July 7: Pet (2019) by Awkaeke Emizi
August 4: The Art of Fielding (2011) by Chad Harbach
September 1: The One You Want to Marry (And Other Identities I've Had): A Memoir (2021) by Sophie Santos
October 6: More Happy Than Not (2015) by Adam Silvera
November 3: Gender Queer: A Memoir (2019) by Maia Kobabe

Each title is available at the first floor desk of Mead Library one month in advance of discussion.