SuitabookGay and Lesbian History for Kids
Jerome Pohlen
- Reading
- Read it as an introduction to a broad historical arc. Pause after major eras or personal accounts to distinguish individual experience from wider movement history, and choose activities that invite reflection without rushing through difficult topics.
- Themes
- LGBT civil-rights history: The book places recent events within a struggle beginning more than a century ago and follows eras from the 1920s to today. Its stated purpose is to provide historical context for the development of LGBT equality movements.
- Personal lives within public movements: Personal stories and firsthand accounts accompany profiles of figures including Magnus Hirschfeld, Phyllis Lyon, Del Martin and Harvey Milk. The approach appears to connect individual lives with collective organising and civil-rights history.
- History through creative participation: Twenty-one activities include writing a poem, learning a line dance, designing an AIDS quilt panel and writing a song parody. The activities present creative making as a way to engage with people, events and forms of community expression.
- Worth knowing
- Some sections may require thoughtful conversation because the book covers discrimination-related civil-rights struggles, the Lavender Scare, Stonewall and the AIDS crisis.