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Review and Study Guide for Rebecca Felix's Pride
This short book offers an essentialized history of the LGBTQ movement.
by Ari Armstrong, Copyright © 2026
I read this book as part of my review of the books suppressed by Colorado's Elizabeth School District. See the main document.
#Pride: Championing LGBTQ Rights
Rebecca Felix
Abdo Publishing, 2019
Reading Notes
The first book I read from the list of books suppressed by the Elizabeth School District, because it's short and available online through the library via Hoopla, is Rebecca Felix's book on LGBTQ pride. I read this 32-page book aloud to my wife and son. (I also read this book a couple years ago because of the Elizabeth controversy.)
Here is what I wrote about the book for the Colorado Times Recorder (forthcoming):
The district removed Rebecca Felix's nonfiction book, . . . a 32-page history of the LGBTQ movement. According to the original document from the district (republished by Denver 7), the focus was on "materials . . . determined to be inappropriate based on age level, flags, or lacking educational merit." There's nothing remotely inappropriate about Felix's book for any age reader. As a short history of the LGBTQ movement, clearly it has educational merit. Obviously the district removed this book because of its ideological bent (although district officials deny that). . . . I read Felix's book aloud to my family, and we discussed it and looked up aspects of its history.
Felix takes the angle that people used #pride (with the hashtag) to mark content on social media relevant to LGBTQ issues. This dates the 2019 book somewhat as hashtags have since lost prominence. But that does not affect the bulk of the book's contents, which covers the LGBTQ movement (as it came to be known) from 1924 through the Obama era.
I'd pick some nits in the book, as I would in any book. The book points out, "Historically, religion has played a large role in LGBTQ oppression." Although true, Felix also should have mentioned that many religious people embrace LGBTQ people and make theological arguments for doing so.
Felix mentions that Alfred Kinsey's work "included explorations of non-heterosexuality" and was therefore important to the gay-rights movement. Felix does not mention that Kinsey also discussed pre-adolescent orgasms. Felix could have mentioned the controversial nature of some of Kinsey's work in a way appropriate for young readers.
Sometimes critics of books on LGBTQ issues say that one cannot discuss LGBTQ issues without discussing sex, and that's inherently inappropriate for children. Even if you grant the premise (which I don't), certainly it is possible to discuss the fact that people can enter into romantic relationships, as every child has seen many times, without bringing up physical intercourse. It's not hard to say that, just as a man and a woman can fall in love, so can two men or two women. Conservatives obviously do not believe their own propaganda on this point, or they'd also say that we can't discuss heterosexual marriages with children.
For the most part, Felix is just conveying noncontroversial historical facts. Examples: "President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an order making it illegal for [gay people] to work for the US government." "In 1961, Illinois became the first state to decriminalize sexual relations associated with homosexuality." Okay, there's that word "sex," but this hardly entails or mandates a discussion about details. Adults easily can get away with saying something vague about physical aspects of a romantic relationship.
Felix justifiably places the Stonewall Riots at the center of LGBTQ activism. Felix does not draw a distinction between appropriate forms of protest (as I would call them) and outright vandalism that some engaged in. But pulling the book because of Felix's oversights is not the answer. My family benefitted by using the book as a jumping off point for precisely these sorts of complexities.
Felix mentions the importance of Ellen DeGeneres "coming out" in 1997. This gave my family the opportunity to pull up the old clip from the TV show in question. My son is a fan of DeGeneres because more recently she frequently hosted Colorado science educator Steve Spangler to put on demonstrations. So Felix's book offered a great opportunity to put the history of the LGBTQ movement in the context of our own lives.
Felix's book also is directly relevant to our region in discussing the horrific 1998 murder in Wyoming of Matthew Shepard "because he was gay." Felix's remarks hold even though the crime also involved robbery.
Does anyone really want to argue that children cannot handle learning about murders? If that's the case then schools also cannot teach anything about wars or current events, basically the entirety of history. Of course grisly details would be inappropriate for children, but those are not in Felix's book.
Felix mentions two important Supreme Court decisions, the one of 2003 holding "that laws banning sexual relations associated with homosexuality were unconstitutional" and the one of 2015 legalizing same-sex marriage. Thus, my child again was able to relate the LGBTQ movement in history to the period of his own life.
Here is the blunt fact: Felix's book was not removed because it is inappropriate for children or because it lacks educational merit. It was removed because those who removed it are biased against LGBTQ people and did not want children in their district exposed to this work sympathetic to LGBTQ rights.
I, on the other hand, am proud to have read the book to my child, and he and I both learned a lot from it and from my family's discussions surrounding it.
Questions for Discussion and Review
1. Felix discusses the use of hashtags on social media to mark LGBTQ content. Use of hashtags peaked in the late 2010s and social media companies turned more to content algorithms. Based on research or your own experience, how did people use hashtags, and now how do they categorize social media content? Also what are the downsides to such categorization?
2. How have different religious groups and ideas dealt with LGBTQ issues?
3. What do you think about Alfred Kinsey's efforts to discuss sexual practices in an academic setting? In what respects did he cross ethical lines? (Obviously whether and how people address this topic will depend on the age and maturity of readers.)
4. "Peaceful protests" often take place around the same time as, and sometimes even right beside, riots that damage property and sometimes even injure or kill people. In my view, rights-respecting protests are appropriate, whereas property damage and other rights-violating acts definitely are not. What do you make of some people's efforts to blur the lines or even to justify violent rioting?
5. Beyond social media and protests, what are the various tactics that cultural-political movements use to advance their agendas, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of different tactics?
6. One topic Felix does not cover is the AIDS epidemic, which peaked in the 1990s and into the 2000s. How did that epidemic affect the LGBTQ movement and critics of that movement? Can you think of any other important topic that Felix left out?
7. Felix mentions DeGeneres. What are some other key examples of LGBTQ people in modern American art? Generally, how to artists and political movements interact?
8. On June 3, 2026, Gallup reported, "After two decades of rising support for LGBTQ+ issues, U.S. attitudes have plateaued and begun to slide back modestly." What do you make of the relatively rapid rise of LGBTQ support in the U.S. and throughout much of the world, and what do you make of the dip in support in the Trump era? More generally, what do you think about the political coalitions that support or oppose the LGBTQ movement? (And to what extent do you think that movement is unified?)
9. Felix discusses a variety of court decisions that expanded LGBTQ rights. There can be a tension between Constitutional protections of rights as recognized by courts and democratic processes. For example, at one point Colorado was known as the "Hate State" because of a popularly supported ballot measure. When do courts appropriately intervene, and when should they defer to popular will?
10. Felix gets into some of the history of the evolving language surrounding LGBTQ issues. Even that acronym, now widely recognized, has not been in use for very long. How has the LGBTQ movement (as we now call it) developed and embraced changing terminology to discuss issues its members care about?
11. What specific person or event mentioned by Felix do you think had the greatest impact on LGBTQ rights and public acceptance? What event or events in your own life most shaped your personal views on the topic? (Note: Be careful with this last question if used in a book club with people who do not know each other well, as it could lead to some difficult and potentially heated discussions.)