As students get increasingly busy with readings for class, they may lose track of time to dedicate to pleasure reading. The Queer Book Club on campus offers an inclusive solution.
Gabby Brown, secretary for the Sexuality and Gender Alliance here at UNC founded the Queer Book Club through SAGA last year and has worked to bring it back again this year.
“Most students don’t have enough time for leisure reading,” Brown said. “The club is an opportunity for people to come and discuss books once a month.”
Brown is responsible for selecting the books, but they take into account any suggestions from other members of SAGA. They try to choose books that feature good representation of the LGBTQ community.
“There’s really not a lot of queer and trans representation in the media," said Magnus Schulz, co-president of SAGA. “The books that we read have a lot of relatable content that we don’t always get to see in other popular media.”
The group meets once a month in the LGBTQ Center on campus. The meeting for September was postponed to October due to the break for Hurricane Florence.
The group will be discussing the book “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe” by author Benjamin Alire Sáenz at the next meeting.
“It is more of a social club,” Brown said. “It’s a very chill way to talk about books. It’s not like a class.”
The meetings put an emphasis on discussion, but club members do not have to feel compelled to speak as though the experience is a graded assignment.
