#LGBTMonth Movies, a book, and maybe a little story!

LGBT Month is hosted by Laura @ Laura Plus Books and Cayce @ Fighting Dreamer.  It runs throughout the month of April and it's here to celebrate LGBT+ readers, LGBT+ authors and of course LGBT+ books.

I've been writing tons of LGBT posts this month, but sadly they never made it past my thoughts. So here I am with a long-winded chat about movies, a book, and maybe a story.

One of my all time favorite movies, LGBT or straight as a vanilla board, is Shelter. If this was a book, it would fall into the New Adult contemporary romance category. Zach's had a hard life, but he doesn't feel sorry for himself. He's an artist. He loves his little brother. He has no idea what to do with the stuff he feels. I love the romance, music, and art in this movie! 

Some of you know I'm a total sports movie girl, so it makes sense that I have a favorite LGBT sports movie. I'm like that. Guys and Balls is hilarious, also more in the NA category, plus there are subtitles, unless you understand German. I do not, but I do get a hankering for subtitles. I'm weird. So is Ekkie, the main character who totally crosses the line with his teammate, gets kicked off his team, and decides he'll show those small-minded jerks by starting up a gay soccer team!




If you're looking for something a little different, two movies come to mind.
Transamerica rocks the planet. You have a transsexual woman who discovers she has a 17 year old son. He's not sweet and chipper or very understanding and the two end up taking a road trip together. I love road trip movies! This one will capture your heart!



Flawless is the perfect movie for anyone looking for second chance stories. A homophobic cop suffers a stroke and the only person available to help him is a gay drag queen. Come on, that's good stuff, did I mention the cop is Robert De Niro and the gay drag queen is Philip Seymour Hoffman?






I have so many more LGBT movies I love. I'll try to fit another movie post next week. For now, I'll move on to books. I just read Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz and I can't stop thinking about it. This is one of those stories you wish you could go back in time and read for the first time again!!

It got got me to thinking about my inner-world when I was in high school. There was drama for sure but I did my best to shove it all down so I could have fun. I didn't want to think, so I played. I played ball. I played boys. I played innocently, and a couple times crazy stupid. Mostly, I led my team of guardian angels to drink. I'm a love at first sight kind of girl with everything from best friends to future boyfriends. And I had this moment I'll never forget. My girls (my basketball team) just ran a ridiculous number of laps. I'm not sure how I got out of it that time, but I usually found a way out of running. We were sitting outside the gym, which happened to be at the all boys high school. I was mad in love with this one boy. Oh, man. It almost broke my heart to crush so bad, but feeling so big for someone is too good to be sad. So I went on and on and then turned to my teammate. "So, how about you? Who do you like? Come on. Tell me." She had a secret in those dark eyes of hers, but then it was gone, shoved away like my dark thoughts I refused to entertain. I bumped my shoulder into hers and teased that she had a crush on a Father Duenas boy (which in my eyes wasn't a complement). She shook her head and smiled at me. I loved my girls. We were one of the worst teams ever, but we had so much fun. A few years later on a break from college I found out the girl I grilled about boys liked girls. I wished she could have told me. I would have talked hot girls with her. 

#LGBTMonth! My first two favorite LGBT movies have a story behind them!

LGBT Month is hosted by Laura @ Laura Plus Books and Cayce @ Fighting Dreamer.  It runs throughout the month of April and it's here to celebrate LGBT+ readers, LGBT+ authors and of course LGBT+ books.

I wanted to share a little story with you all...I was in college, living off campus with a girl from my art history class. I barely knew her, but one day in class she gave me a sideways look and said, "Hey, you're a transfer student, right?" I nodded. "How do you like the dorms?"

"They just had a meeting about how messy I am. The whole dorm."

"Want to get an apartment together?" We introduced ourselves and a month later found the crappiest, cheapest apartment a mile from campus.

Shortly after moving in, she spent days sleeping and crying and shuffling her feet over our suspect carpet. Deciding this wasn't typical behavior for her, I asked her what was wrong. She didn't want to talk about it. I convinced her I was outside her circle, so I didn't really matter and she could tell me.

She stood there with her hands dropped to her sides, her pajamas ready to walk themselves to the laundromat, and her arty cute hair too oily to be called arty or cute. In a whine almost like a kid complaining, she said, "I'm a lesbian. No one knows. I barely know. I've never even kissed a girl. I don't even know any lesbians."

I jumped to my feet, scaring the tar out of her. "Well, we gotta get you a girlfriend!" She sniffle laughed and I started pacing our empty living room. We had two chairs. No TV. No table. We were pretty sad.

"I don't even know how to be a lesbian."

"Then we get out there and you learn to be the best damn lesbian ever!" She cheered. I cheered. What can I say? We were two over achieving art students.

"There is a dance tonight." I promised to be her wingman. She promised to be social. It was the shittiest dance ever. I'm not sure it was even a dance, just some lame politically correct social gathering with three or four people milling around the snack table.

We hit cool clubs in Seattle, concerts and festivals all over the Pacific Northwest, the video store for movies...Ack! Early independent movies were very artsy. A few times she worried people would assume I was gay. I told her I didn't give a shit about that because I didn't. See, I needed her as much as she needed me. This perfect lesbian quest occurred at one of my lowest points. I was a bit broken, extremely homesick, and very close to quitting school. So close to quitting I did quit. I cancelled my registration for the next semester (without telling anyone).

I never managed to get her a girlfriend. She hopped online and discovered chat rooms, but we did see Indigo Girls (more than once), Ani DiFranco, and Catie Curtis. She filled me in on all the celebrities that were gay but didn't know it. We saw two amazing movies (out of a slew of movies) that remain favorites to this day. She fell in love with a woman she met in an Indigo Girls chat room. I cancelled my cancelled registration. We made it through that time. Aside from her supernatural ability to be messy, we were night and day from each other. But we pulled together. And we made it through that time.

My first two favorite LGBT movies are Beautiful Thing and The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love.


Do check out these movies. Teens finding love, fighting love, fighting the world together. Throughout the month I'll be posting more movie love. I have designs on reading Gemini Bites by Patrick Ryan and I just learned I won Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. Yay!! I'll share those reads with you too!

You can sign up through April. We'd love to have you join us! Just click on the cool picture.