Looking for a safe space to read and discuss books about the LGBTQIA+ community? You've found us! In this monthly book club we'll read both fiction and nonfiction books about the queer* experience, the intersectionality of queerness, class, religion, and race, and discuss the ways in which things have changed, remained the same, or ways we can affect the change we want to see. 

This book club is open to anyone who identifies as being part of or is supportive of the LGBTQIA+ community. 

*We acknowledge that the term queer has been used through the years as both a pejorative term as well as a rallying cry. In an effort to be inclusive, we've decided to use it in accordance with modern definitions. If you'd like to read more, please click here.

This book club meets the 1st Wednesday of every month on Zoom. To get the Zoom link please register below.

This month we'll be discussing Flung Out of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith by Grace Ellis.

Flung Out of Space is both a love letter to the essential lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, and an examination of its notorious author, Patricia Highsmith. Veteran comics creators Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer have teamed up to tell this story through Highsmith’s eyes—reimagining the events that inspired her to write the story that would become a foundational piece of queer literature.

Flung Out of Space opens with Pat begrudgingly writing low-brow comics. A drinker, a smoker, and a hater of life, Pat knows she can do better. Her brain churns with images of the great novel she could and should be writing—what will eventually be Strangers on a Train— which would later be adapted into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.
 
At the same time, Pat, a lesbian consumed with self-loathing, is in and out of conversion therapy, leaving a trail of sexual conquests and broken hearts in her wake. However, one of those very affairs and a chance encounter in a department store give Pat the idea for her soon-to-be beloved tale of homosexual love that was the first of its kind—it gave the lesbian protagonists a happy ending.
 
This is not just the story behind a classic queer book, but of a queer artist who was deeply flawed. It’s a comic about what it was like to write comics in the 1950s, but also about what it means to be a writer at any time in history, struggling to find your voice.