York Theatre Royal continues its LGBTQ+ Book Club, celebrating queer stories, authors and bringing the community together.
According to organisers the group fosters a sense of community by providing a platform to form meaningful connections, create new friendships, and build relationships within York’s LGBTQ+ community.
Everyone over the age of 18 is welcome to join the book club by securing a spot on the York Theatre Royal website, completely free.
It said: “By blending different genres, we aim to create a well-rounded reading experience that will engage, inspire, and challenge our members.”
This book club is one of York’s safe spaces for this community, as more have been popping up around the city.
The LGBTQ+ Book Group will meet monthly from 7pm – 8pm on the second Tuesday of each month.
The first meeting took place on 10 October. The book selected for the first meeting was Frankisstein by Jeanette Winterson.
One that has become well-known and well-loved, is The Portal Bookshop, that opened in 2019 with the Over the Rainbow Café that brings loyal customers because of their welcoming atmosphere and abundance of queer literature.
A customer in the bookshop said that they were “particularly drawn to the bookshop because of the representation of marginalised voices and the focus on queer authors…I was really happy to find something where the big focus is on different perspectives.”
They also highlighted the difficulty in finding an accurate portrayal of an LGBTQ+ relationship in a typical Highstreet bookshop. “It can feel like every second book is a romance book with a cute boy and a cute girl, and you’re like…where’s my pansexual representation? Where’s my poly representation? Where’s all of that?” they added.
In 2023, YouGov partnered with Audible to survey the importance of LBGTQ+ representation in literature, finding that 82% of the UK’s LGBTQ+ community, believe that representation is important in order to tackle prejudice.
