Comic book: The Lumberjanes

An all-ages comic, Lumberjanes is a cheesy but heartwarming story of a group of girls—Jo, Molly, April, Mal, and Ripley—and their adventures to achieve their Lumberjane patches while experiencing the magic of summer camp and friendship. Made by girls, for girls, these comics inherently hold feminist values, and support LGBTQ+ readers by representing that audience through Jo, a transgender girl, and through the lesbian couple Mal and Molly. Filled with puns, silly substitutions for swears, and sickly sweet moments that will make readers grin from ear-to-ear, Lumberjanes is an empowering comic that every girl could stand to gain from.

T.V. Show: When We Rise

When We Rise is a mini-series that follows the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement in San Francisco from 1971-2013. It focuses on the lives of three youth activists who live in a country where they face severe oppression. While omitting some history of the movement, writer Dustin Lance Black keeps the story true to the desperate outcry and tone of the movement itself, including events such as the assassination of Harvey Milk, the AIDS epidemic, and the repealing of California’s Proposition 8 in 2013. It places special emphasis as to how the LGBTQ+ movement came to become intersectional.

Movie: Moonlight

Awarded three Oscars, notably Best Motion Picture, Moonlight captivates audiences through its raw and honest reality. Chiron is a black, gay man who grows up fatherless, bullied, and lives with an addict mother. Moonlight shows the coming of age story of Chiron in three stages—childhood, teenage years, and adulthood. His adulthood chapter ends the movie on an open ending, leaving audiences satiated but also desperate to know what happens next. This film is explicit, and appropriately rated R, but also worth the experience for viewers to not only discover something about themselves, but about other people in the world.

Video Game: Life is Strange

Life is Strange offers a BAFTA award-winning story with hipster-like aesthetics and a characterizing soundtrack that immerses the player. The “butterfly effect” gameplay leaves players to make morally challenging decisions that leave them emotionally invested. Players make these decisions through Maxine Caulfield, a girl who moves back to her hometown, Arcadia Bay, to attend an Academy for photography. While she’s there, Max discovers that she’s capable of time travel, and ends up saving her childhood best friend’s, Chloe Price, life. Life is Strange is a soul-stirring game that will leave players desperate to replay the game to see how else it could have turned out.