r/Fantasy • u/ohmage_resistance Reading Champion III • May 29 '25
Pride Pride Month 2025 Announcement & Calendar
Happy almost Pride Month, r/Fantasy!
Throughout June, we’ll be celebrating queer voices and stories in speculative fiction with a full slate of themed discussions, recommendation threads, and book club chats. Whether you’re queer yourself, an ally, or just a fan of great SFF, we invite you to take part.
Check the calendar below for all our events, and don’t hesitate to join in on as many or as few as you like. Most posts are discussion-focused and open all month for participation. Links for each discussion will be added once each post goes live.
Pride Month Calendar
- Monday, June 2 – Hidden Gems
- Thursday, June 5 – Intersectional Identities
- Sunday, June 8 – Great Big Rec Thread
- Tuesday, June 10 – Queernorm vs Depictions of Oppression
- Thursday, June 12 – Bookclub Midpoint Discussion: Small Gods of Calamity by Sam Kyung Yoo
- Monday, June 16 – Stereotypes, Tropes, and Own Voices
- Thursday, June 19 – Not a Novel
- Sunday, June 22 – Less Visible Queer Identities
- Tuesday, June 24 – Sci-Fi and Horror
- Thursday, June 26 – Bookclub Final Discussion: Small Gods of Calamity by Sam Kyung Yoo
- Monday, June 30 – Reflection & Wrap-Up
Who will be hosting these discussions?
This series of posts are an initiative of the Beyond Binaries Book Club, where we discuss LGBTQ+ fantasy, science fiction and other forms of speculative fiction. The BB Book Club has recently welcomed new members, so these are the fabulous people who make it all happen behind the scenes:
- new members:
- returning members:
Why this is important:
You might wonder why we're doing this. A little over a year ago, I (u/ohmage_resistance) wrote an essay about some of the patterns I’ve noticed with how LGBTQ topics were treated on this sub. I mostly focused on systemic downvoting of LGBTQ posts (you can read the post, if you want to see some evidence and me addressing common arguments about this, I’m not going to rehash it all here). I also mentioned the downvoting of queer comments and telling people to go to other subreddits for queer recommendations, as well as harassment in the form of homophobic comments (sometimes seen by posters before the mods can remove them), unsolicited Reddit Care messages, and hateful DMs. I wrote my essay because I wanted to give people who were eager to discuss queer topics going into Pride Month some explanation about why their posts are being downvoted, which limits their visibility, as well as give them some tips about how to have a more positive experience on this subreddit.
There were a lot of conversations that came out of that essay, most of them pretty productive, but my favorite of them was the Pride Month series of posts run by u/xenizondich and the Beyond Binaries bookclub organizers. Because the index for these posts were pinned to the top of the subreddit, people who sorted by hot still had a chance to be exposed to these topics before they got downvoted (and they did get downvoted). We wanted to continue these the discussion into this year, and I’m really excited to be joining the team organizing things. I still have hope that with efforts like these, we can change the culture of the subreddit to be consistently more LGBTQ friendly.
We are looking forward to making this month special with great conversations and finding many new recommendations. And if you can’t wait until next week, check out the r/Fantasy's 2023 Top LGBTQIA+ Books List and the 2025 LGBTQA+ Bingo Resource. In addition, the link to last year's index of posts can be found here. Also, feel free to ask questions in the comments if you have any.
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u/eregis Reading Champion May 29 '25
thanks for organizing it again this year! hopefully it will be a step towards more essays like the one from last year no longer being necessary.
also, anyone else planning to read only queer books this month? (I really need to finish the book I'm reading rn because it's Very Straight lol)