You probably got plenty of reading done during the Polar Vortex. Who in their right mind would leave the house? But just because the weather has improved, that doesn’t mean that you should skimp on your reading. Just remember, if you go home with someone and they don’t own any books, you don’t sleep with them (thank you, John Waters).

Here are some non-fiction suggestions for the Pride season. Get inspired!

Creative types

In the introduction to her book, The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), edited by Kathleen Bucknell, Bucknell writes, “From February 14, 1953 until January 4, 1986, the conversation between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy never stopped.” One of the greatest true gay love stories of all time, the relationship of legendary author Christopher Isherwood and visual artist Don Bachardy was immortalized in the acclaimed 2007 doc Chris and Don: A Love Story., and readers can now get another intimate glimpse into their lives through this collection of correspondence.

Lauded (and openly gay) British composer Benjamin Britten (The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra), who collaborated with other queer writers of the time, including W.H. Auden and E.M. Forster, is given the biographical treatment in Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music (Henry Holt, 2014) by Neil Powell.

Influential (and somewhat controversial) 20th century “cultural impresario” Carl Van Vechten is the subject of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America by Edward White (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). A familiar face during the Harlem Renaissance, Van Vechten’s circle included Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Bessie Smith and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

A coffee table book, A Journey Through Literary America (Val De Grâce, 2014) by Thomas R. Hummel, with photography by Tamra L. Dempsey, takes readers on a wondrous voyage through New England, the South, the West, the Midwest and beyond, focusing on “the places that America’s great writers had described in their own words.” The writers, living and dead, represented include Raymond Carver, Phillip Roth, Toni Morrison, John Updike, Rita Dove, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Queer voices, including Langston Hughes and Willa Cather, are also present, as is E. Annie Proulx, straight author of the novella Brokeback Mountain.

Edited by Robert Kirby, Qu33r: New Comics from 33 Creators (Northwest, 2014) includes Diane DiMassa, Ed Luce, Justin Hall, Jennifer Camper, Steve MacIsaac, Amanda Verwey, David Kelly, Jon Macy and Eric Orner, providing personal essays in images.

Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire (Duke, 2014) by Amy Villarejo, a professor of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University, takes a close look at the representation of queer life on television and how it has evolved from the 1950s to the present day.

Strong women

Best known as the straight-talking lesbian host of the popular Bravo series “Tabatha Takes Over,” Tabatha Coffey publisher her first book, It’s Not Really About The Hair: The Honest Truth About Life, Love, and the Business of Beauty in 2011. The follow-up tome, Own It! (It Books, 2014), subtitled Be the Boss of Your Life – at Home and in the Workplace, contains more useful advice delivered in Coffey’s trademark style.

Journalist and blogger Kelly Cogswell tells her own story in Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (University of Minnesota, 2014). Abandoning her Southern Baptist roots for a new and queer life in the East Village of the `90s, Cosgrove immersed herself in activism, plunging into the explosive, fire-eating world of the Lesbian Avengers’ brand of in-your-face action, protests and marches, all in the name of making the world a safer place for “baby dykes,” lesbians and women everywhere.

Before there was openly gay football player Michael Sam, there was out, 6’8” WNBA Mercury Phoenix player Brittney Griner. Her memoir In My Skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court (It Books, 2014) by Brittney Griner with Sue Hovey follows her from her Houston childhood to college at Baylor University (where she played basketball) to her career as a professional athlete.

Personals

The “pilgrimage” in the title of Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America (Harper Perennial, 2014) by Jeff Chu takes the writer on a 20,000 mile trek through almost 30 states resulting in more than 300 interviews with people asking and answering similar questions in regards to their own spiritual journeys.

A memoir by Pacific Northwest-based writer Ross Eliot, Babette: The Many Lives, Two Deaths and Double Kidnapping of Dr. Ellsworth (Heliocentric, 2014), traces the writer’s experience during the time he acted as caretaker for Professor Albert Ellsworth, whose Southern French high society childhood and later gender reassignment surgery to become Babette, bracket a life that makes for a lively read.

Consisting of 26 personal essays, In A New Century: Essays on Queer History, Politics, and Community Life (University of Wisconsin, 2014) by award-winning writer and newly retired university professor John D’Emilio, looks at history and its lessons, strategizing and making change, and the under-valued gay community in Chicago.

Over the course of the 12 “Essays on the Body” in You Feel So Mortal (University of Chicago, 2014), Peggy Shinner touches on subjects ranging from feet to posture, from shoplifting to self-defense, from bras to nose jobs, from anti-depressants to autopsies, and places in between and beyond.

Location, location, location

Growing out of South Africa, journalist Mark Gevisser’s obsession with Holmden’s Register of South Africa street guide, Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), “charts” the writer’s “intimate history of Johannesburg.”

For Safe Space (Duke, 2014), Christina B. Hanhardt, Associate Professor of American Studies at University of Maryland, College Park, drew on research in Manhattan and San Francisco to trace the way queer activism and the development of urban communities have intertwined for the past 40 years.

And anyone who has seen hetero takeover in Chicago’s Boystown, NYC’s Chelsea, San Francisco’s Castro, Washington DC’s DuPont Circle or Boston’s South End neighborhoods will find something to relate to in sociologist Amin Ghaziani’s There Goes The Gayborhood? (Princeton, 2014).