What we’re about
A book club for lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and queer people in Silver Spring and surrounding areas in MD and DC. We read a variety of genres, not limited to LGBTQ-themes, and meet once a month to discuss a book and socialize.
Our book club is way to meet other LGBTQ people in the area for socializing and friendship, and of course to read and discuss books. As a group we read one book a month and then get together to talk about it. Members suggest books to read and we select upcoming books as a group. We read a variety of genres, primarily fiction — novels and short story collections — with the occasional non-fiction book or memoir. We're not limited to LGBTQ authors or themes, although we read those too. See this page for how our members have rated our recent books.
We hold the book discussions at members' homes, on a rotating but voluntary basis, and the host provides light snacks and drinks. We generally meet on the third Thursday of the month, and our locations are usually not within walking distance to the metro.
We're looking for members who want to actively attend discussions so please don't join if you're not interested in participating.
Upcoming events (4)
See all- Colored Television by Danzy SennaNeeds location
We'll be discussing Colored Television by Danzy Senna.
We meet in person at a member's home -- the address will be sent to those attending a week before the event.
Find the book on Bookshop.org, and at Montgomery County Public Libraries.
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“A laugh-out-loud cultural comedy… This is the New Great American Novel, and Danzy Senna has set the standard.” –LA Times“Funny, foxy and fleet…The jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart.” –Dwight Garner, The New York Times
A brilliant take on love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia
Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane’s sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel—a centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her “mulatto War and Peace.” Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp.
But things don’t work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer,” and together they begin to develop “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.
Funny, piercing, and page turning, Colored Television is Senna’s most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.
- Wild Geese by Soula EmmanuelNeeds location
We'll be discussing Wild Geese by Soula Emmanuel.
We meet in person at a member's home -- the address will be sent to those attending a week before the event.
Find the book on Bookshop.org, and at Montgomery County Public Libraries.
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Lambda Literary's Best Transgender novel 2024.Irish novelist Soula Emmanuel's debut novel is an intimate sprawl of memory, migration, and queer desire--charting the messy layers of love and loss that constitute a life.
Phoebe Forde has a new home, a new name, and is newly thirty. An Irish transplant and PhD candidate, she's overeducated and underpaid, but finally settling into her new life in Copenhagen. Almost three years into her gender transition, Phoebe has learned to move through the world carefully, savoring small moments of joy. After all, a woman without a past can be anyone she wants. But an unexpected visit from her ex-girlfriend Grace brings back memories of Dublin and the life she thought she'd left behind. Over the course of a weekend, their romance rekindles into something sweet and radically unfamiliar as Grace helps Phoebe navigate the jagged edges of nostalgia and hope.
Written with wit and warmth, Wild Geese is a tale of dislocations and relocations, encounters, and accidents: a novel of past lives, messy feelings, and the desire to start afresh.
- The Future Was Color by Patrick NathanNeeds location
We'll be discussing The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan.
We meet in person at a member's home -- the address will be sent to those attending a week before the event.
Find the book on Bookshop.org, and at Montgomery County Public Libraries.
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A dazzling novel about the inextricable link between the personal and the political set against the decadence of Hollywood and postwar Los AngelesAs a Hungarian immigrant working as a studio hack writing monster movies in 1950s Hollywood, George Curtis must navigate the McCarthy-era studio system filled with possible communists and spies, the life of closeted men along Sunset Boulevard, and the inability of the era to cleave love from persecution and guilt. But when Madeline, a famous actress, offers George a writing residency at her estate in Malibu to work on the political writing he cares most deeply about, his world is blown open. Soon Madeline is carrying George like an ornament into a class of postwar L.A. society ordinarily hidden from men like him.
What this lifestyle hides behind, aside from the monsters on the screen, are the monsters dwelling closer to home: this bacchanalia covers a gnawing hole shelled wide by the horror of the war they thought they’d left behind and the glimpse of an atomic future. It’s here that George understands he can never escape his past as György, the queer Jew who fled Budapest before the war and landed in New York, all alone, a decade prior.
Spanning from sun-drenched Los Angeles to the hidden corners of working-class New York to a virtuosic climax in the Las Vegas desert, The Future Was Color is an immaculately written exploration of postwar American decadence, reinventing the self through art, and the psychosis that lingers in a world that’s seen the bomb.
- Brother Alive by Zain KhalidNeeds location
We'll be discussing Brother Alive by Zain Khalid.
We meet in person at a member's home -- the address will be sent to those attending a week before the event.
Find the book on Bookshop.org, and at Montgomery County Public Libraries.
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From the winner of the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, CLMP Firecracker Award, and Bard Fiction Prize, National Book Award "5 Under 35" Honoree, and finalist for the NBCC John Leonard Prize, an astonishing debut novel about family, sexuality, and capitalist systems of control, following three adopted brothers who live above a mosque in Staten Island with their imam fatherIn 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef. They are adopted as infants and share a bedroom perched atop a mosque in one of Staten Island's most diverse and underserved neighborhoods. The three boys are an inseparable trio, but conspicuous: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul is Korean, and Youssef indeterminately Middle Eastern. Youssef shares everything with his brothers, except for one secret: he sees a hallucinatory double, an imaginary friend who seems absolutely real, a shapeshifting familiar he calls Brother. Brother persists as a companion into Youssef's adult life, supporting him but also stealing his memories and shaking his grip on the world.
The boys' adoptive father, Imam Salim, is known in the community for his stirring and radical sermons, but at home he often keeps himself to himself, spending his evenings in his study with whiskey-laced coffee, reading poetry or writing letters to his former compatriots back in Saudi Arabia. Like Youssef, he too has secrets, including the cause of his failing health and the truth about what happened to the boys' parents. When, years later, Imam Salim's path takes him back to Saudi Arabia, the boys, now adults, will be forced to follow. There they will be captivated by an opulent, almost futuristic world, a linear city that seems to offer a more sustainable modernity than that of the West. But this conversion has come at a great cost, and Youssef and Brother too will have to decide if they should change to survive, or try to mount a defense of their deeply-held beliefs.
Stylistically brilliant, intellectually acute, and deft in its treatment of complex themes, Brother Alive is a remarkable debut by a hugely talented writer that questions the nature of belief and explores the possibility of reunion for those who are broken.
