Freedom to Learn
WorldPride Book Club
Countdown to WorldPride Washington, DC 2025 with the Capital Pride Alliance and libraries and independent bookstores in the National Capital Region! Each month, until WorldPride 2025, we’ll meet virtually to discuss a different book that celebrates LGBTQ+ authors and stories while meeting fellow readers from across the World.
Join our community and get ready for literary events during WorldPride DC from May 17-June 8, 2025.
Monthly (see below)
Virtual on Teams
James Kirchick, Secret City : The Hidden History of Gay Washington, 05/20
May 20, 2025 · 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Alliance Francaise de Washington
Brought to you by Alliance Francaise de Washington
Join Capital Pride Alliance at the Alliance française for an evening with James Kirchick, author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. Kirchick will be in conversation with New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh. Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Beginning with the tragic story of Sumner Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s brilliant diplomatic advisor and the man at the center of “the greatest national scandal since the existence of the United States,” Kirchick illuminates how homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration through the end of the twentieth century.
WorldPride Book Club: February
February 19, 2025 · 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Virtual
Lost City will host the February meeting of the WorldPride virtual book club. In partnership with the Capital Pride Alliance, the book club will meet once a month virtually, highlighting LGBTQ+ authors from around the world and fostering conversations led by DC booksellers and librarians. This month, Lost City has chosen The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher for discussion. The conversation will be led by Lost City bookseller and Queer Lit Book Club host Nell.
WorldPride Book Club: March
March 11, 2025 · 7:00 pm – 8:15 pm
Virtual
Guests from the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System and the Prince George’s County Office of Human Rights will join the conversation and take questions about the book. .
Book Club: April
April 8, 2025 · 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
April’s book club is on Tuesday, April 8 from 7-8pm, in collaboration with the Fairfax County Public Library. We’re reading a classic of queer literature: Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.
Book Club: May
May 7, 2025 · 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Join Capital Pride Alliance and Loyalty Bookstores’ Gaysians! Book Club for the May WorldPride Book Club meeting. We’re reading The Emperor and the Endless Palace by Justinian Huang. The Gaysians! Book Club focuses on reading and championing books by Queer Asian authors and is led by Loyalty’s resident gaysian Christine! Christine Bollow is the Co-Owner and Director of Programs for Loyalty Bookstores — a Black, Queer, and Asian owned bookstore in Washington, DC and Silver Spring, MD. Christine is a 2024 Kirkus Prize Fiction Juror, 2022 Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree, winner of the Duende-Word BIPOC Bookseller Award for Leadership, and is the Founder and Co-Organizer of the Liwanag Filipino Lit Fest DC.