Full Digital 2025 Calendar

CA$15.00

The full digital version of our 2025 calendar is here and better than ever. Each month includes a new botanical fantasy print — a magic, mythical look at queer joy in nature in an art nouveau-inspired style.

2025 MQH Google Calendar Link

New this year, you can get our Making Queer History important dates on the go with a Google calendar! All the same historical dates without the clutter.

This calendar is pay-what-you-can! If you’d like to support our work, you can make a donation here.

This calendar is designed for Google calendar. If you use another calendar, please check if Google calendars are compatible before purchasing.

The Future of MQH

I will be trying to keep this updated, and as the project grows, have y'all in the loop as to what is coming and what directions we will go upon further support.

In 2024 we got the chance to read 60 queer books, 13 of which were decided by our patrons and social media followers! What should we be reading in 2025? What new releases should we keep an eye out for, and which old books deserve another look?

The Bone People

Keri Hulme

The powerful, visionary, Booker Award-winning novel about the complicated relationships between three outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage"This book is just amazingly, wondrously great." --Alice Walker In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes: part Maori, part European, asexual and aromantic, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor--a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon's feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where indigenous and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.

Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.

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Desert Queen

Jyoti Rajan Gopal (Author) Svabhu Kohli (Illustrator)

In a kaleidoscope of desert sands and swirling skirts, Queen Harish takes flight. This picture book biography, spun in vibrant verse by Jyoti Gopal, traces the journey of a beloved Rajasthani drag performer who defied tradition and dazzled the world. Fueled by an inner fire, young Harish yearns to join the captivating desert dancers, their music pulsing through his veins. But societal constraints paint a narrow path, one that clashes with his vibrant spirit. Through lyrical stanzas and Svabhu Kohli's evocative art, Harish's story unfolds, a tapestry woven with resilience and the transformative power of dance. From village gatherings to Bollywood stages, Queen Harish twirls her way into hearts, leaving a trail of shattered stereotypes and empowering others to embrace their true selves. This is a celebration of courage, finding your inner queen, and dancing to your own rhythm.

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Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture

By Sherronda J. Brown

Everything you know about sex and asexuality is (probably) wrong.

The notion that everyone wants sex–and that we all have to have it–is false. It’s intertwined with our ideas about capitalism, race, gender, and queerness. And it impacts the most marginalized among us. For asexual folks, it means that ace and A-spec identity is often defined by a queerness that’s not queer enough, seen through a lens of perceived lack: lack of pleasure, connection, joy, maturity, and even humanity.

In this exploration of what it means to be Black and asexual in America today, Sherronda J. Brown offers new perspectives on asexuality. She takes an incisive look at how anti-Blackness, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalism enact harm against asexual people, contextualizing acephobia within a racial framework in the first book of its kind. Brown advocates for the “A” in LGBTQIA , affirming that to be asexual is to be queer–despite the gatekeeping and denial that often says otherwise.

With chapters on desire, f*ckability, utility, refusal, and possibilities, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality discusses topics of deep relevance to ace and a-spec communities. It centers the Black asexual experience–and demands visibility in a world that pathologizes and denies asexuality, denigrates queerness, and specifically sexualizes Black people.

A necessary and unapologetic reclamation, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality is smart, timely, and an essential read for asexuals, aromantics, queer readers, and anyone looking to better understand sexual politics in America.

Beyond the Gender Binary

Alok Vaid-Menon

In Beyond the Gender Binary, poet, artist, and LGBTQIA rights advocate Alok Vaid-Menon deconstructs, demystifies, and reimagines the gender binary. Pocket Change Collective is a series of small books with big ideas from today's leading activists and artists. In this installment, Beyond the Gender Binary, Alok Vaid-Menon challenges the world to see gender not in black and white, but in full color. Taking from their own experiences as a gender-nonconforming artist, they show us that gender is a malleable and creative form of expression. The only limit is your imagination.

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A Short History of Trans Misogyny

Jules Gill-Peterson

An accessible, bold new vision for the future of intersectional trans feminism, called "one of the best books in trans studies in recent years" by Susan Stryker "A beautifully written and argued book." - Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby There is no shortage of voices demanding everyone pay attention to the violence trans women suffer. But one frighteningly basic question seems never to be answered: why does it happen? If men are not inherently evil and trans women do not intrinsically invite reprisal--which would make violence unstoppable--then the psychology of that violence had to arise at a certain place and time. The trans panic had to be invented. Award-winning historian Jules Gill-Peterson takes us from the bustling port cities of New York and New Orleans to the streets of London and Paris in search of the emergence of modern trans misogyny. She connects the colonial and military districts of the British Raj, the Philippines, and Hawai'i to the lively travesti communities of Latin America, where state violence has stamped a trans label on vastly different ways of life. Weaving together the stories of historical figures in a richly detailed narrative, the book shows how trans femininity emerged under colonial governments, the sex work industry, the policing of urban public spaces, and the area between the formal and informal economy. A Short History of Trans Misogyny is the first book to explain why trans women are burdened by such a weight of injustice and hatred.

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Dead Collections

Isaac Fellman       

Queer history is often complex. One particular complication that I am thinking about right now is the messy Venn diagram that occurs when the erasure of a lesbian relationship leads to homophobic historians suggesting that the parties in question had no physical relationship so as to say that they had no relationship at all. With the current knowledge that two (or more) people can have a romantic relationship without a physical one, this does not change the possibility of the women in question being lesbians, but does bring forward the possibility that they were asexual.

This possibility is complicated by the fact that finding evidence of a sexual relationship between two women is a difficult task on the best of days. It is further made difficult by the additional fact that a large part of history (especially though not exclusively European history) has included the specific brand of sexism that assumes that women have no sexuality to speak of. This first can lead to people trying to make a woman seem respectable by stripping her of her sexuality, and second, can lead the woman in question to not know or not express her sexuality out of fear. Neither of these things makes a person asexual by most definitions of asexuality in use today.

All these things are inseparable, frustrating, and worth acknowledging in the broader discussions of queer history. Asexual history exists and deserves to be explored, and I am hopeful that, as a queer historian, queer history continues to complicate the discussion. There is so much worth in the addition of asexuality into our understanding of queer history, and a part of that worth is how it adds depth and dimension to these particular dynamics that have appeared in the telling of history.

Open Throat

Henry Hoke

"Open Throat is what fiction should be." --The New York Times Book ReviewA lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel. A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity's foibles, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience. When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call "ellay." As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one? Henry Hoke's Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world recounted by a lovable mountain lion. Feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings the mythic to life.

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Queer history fact: From 1938-1939, San Domino in Italy was designated an internal exile exclusively for queer people. What began as an attempt to exclude any men who didn’t fit the fascistic ideal of perfect masculinity, ended as a glimpse of the queer community in an impossible time. Equally a prison and a carved-out space where queer people connected in hostile circumstances, San Domino proves the past and continued resilience of the queer community.

Selected Works from Toni Ebel

Toni Ebel was a pioneering trans woman and a remarkable figure in art and queer history. Ebel's paintings were primarily landscapes and portraits, including the self-portrait shown here. As one of the first individuals to receive gender confirmation surgery, she navigated her identity during a time of immense societal constraints. Ebel worked as housekeeping staff at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, an institution at the forefront of gender and sexuality studies, which also led her to connect with other LGBTQ people.

Toni Ebel also shared a profound relationship with Charlotte Charlaque, a fellow trans woman who worked as a receptionist at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Their bond highlighted the close-knit nature of the German trans community at the time and underscored the importance of mutual support in an often hostile world. They navigated World War II as Jewish trans women, at times parting for safety. Ebel ended up in East Germany and continued working as a painter, while Charlaque spent the rest of her life in the United States working as an actress.

You can find these works and more in our gallery!