Rainbow Reading Book Club

Rainbow Reading is our book club devoted to the queer literary experience. A new book is selected each month and represents a diverse range of themes, genres, and authors reflective of the LGBTQ+ experience.

Philly AIDS Thrift at Giovanni’s Room (345 S. 12th St.) offers book club members a 10% discount on each month’s selected book. The club usually meets on the third Wednesday of the month at 6 p.m. unless there are scheduling conflicts.

May 19. 6:00 pm: “Real Life” by Brandon Taylor 

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends–some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.

Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.

For more information, contact [email protected].