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Home / Arts & Lit

LGBT+ artists to celebrate post-Pride Month

by Deepa Lalwani

It’s been 50 years since homosexuality was partially decriminalised in the UK and, in the wake of Pride Month, there’s no better time than to celebrate the ever-growing number of openly LGBT+ artists who exist in our world today. I’ve picked out a few of my favourites for you to get into during the inevitable period of summer holiday boredom.

  1. Jeanette Winterson
Image: flickr.com

Jeanette Winterson is an author and professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester. Her semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit recounts a coming-of-age tale about a lesbian girl growing up in a strict religious community, and won the Whitbread Award for a First Novel. Since then she has become one of the most-read lesbian authors in the country. However, she disputes the label of her book being a “lesbian novel”, stating that “I’ve never understood why straight fiction is supposed to be for everyone, but anything with a gay character or that includes gay experience is only for queers.”

 

  1. Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Sáenz is a Mexican-American novelist and poet. He came out as gay just a few years ago at the age of 54; in interviews, he has mentioned that he was sexually abused as a child, which caused him to hide his sexuality from others. Through his writing, Sáenz was able to work through his own issues of reconciling his background and his sexuality: his young adult book Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe follows the relationship between two Mexican-American teenage boys growing up in the 1980s who struggle against social expectations and pressures to conform.

 

  1. Amandla Stenberg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

An activist, model, actress, and singer, Amandla Stenberg is best known for playing Rue in the film adaptation of The Hunger Games. She is also the co-writer of the NIOBE comics. Recently, she has become a teen icon after coming out as bisexual and non-binary. On social media she is a constant reminder of just how celebrities should use their influence for positive activism; her numerous posts and videos about cultural appropriation versus the celebration of black culture are both entertaining and genuinely interesting.

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