In honor of Pride Month, Ablaze present three titles spotlighting LGBTQ+ themes, characters, and creators. In Red Lightning: On the morning of January 10, 2016, thirty-year-old Samuel is ready to leave the house and live another day of his ordinary existence. But, as soon as he arrives on the street, he learns about David Bowie's death. The news strikes him so hard that he is stunned, and his are not moments of bewilderment, but hours, days, years, and centuries...he finds himself catapulted across space and time. He awakens hundreds of thousands of years later, in a society of the future, the year 200016. In Tales of the City: Anna Madrigal runs a boarding house at 28 Barbary Lane, San Fransico. She welcomes people who have nowhere else to go: the misfits. This matriarch is known for her unending kindness and her superb marijuana crop. The novel starts with the arrival of Mary Ann Singleton, a prudish, naive, young woman who escaped her dull Ohio hometown. She settles in with her other fellow tenants: Michael "Mouse," a personable young gay man, Brian Hawkins, an incorrigible Don Juan, and Mona Ramsey, a young hippyish bisexual. In A Man’s Skin: Tackling universal themes such as gender, sexuality, LGBTQ+, compassion, religion, and morality through a captivating and subtle fable, Hubert and Zanzim brilliantly question our relationship to gender and sexuality... but not only that. By mixing religion and sex, morality and humor, nobility and outspokenness, A Man's Skin invites us both to the liberation of morals and to the mad and noble quest for love.
