Pride Month Reading Recs from Small Kine Book Club

June is National LGBT Pride Month, a declaration commemorating the Stonewall riots of 1969 and honoring the month that same-sex marriage was legalized in the US. Championing equality for LGBTQ+ people, Pride Month is also a wonderful time to celebrate the writers, books, and stories that give voice to a diversity of queer experiences.

Recently, Da Shop: Books + Curiosities has had the privilege of collaborating with Kaimukī gift shop Small Kine Gift to host the Small Kine Book Club. This bi-monthly gathering began with three intentions: to connect with other queer people over queer books, offer low-stakes incentives to read and highlight the robust selection of queer books offered at local businesses. Prioritizing work by kama‘āina and Kānaka writers, the Small Kine Book Club is a great opportunity to read across genres and topics while celebrating the joy and beauty of queer lives.

We spoke with Mitchell Kuga, co-owner of Small Kine Gift and founder of Small Kine Book Club, to get his recommended reads for Pride Month.

SEE ALSO: Charm Abounds at Kaimukī’s Newest Gift Shop, Small Kine Gift

Photo: Courtesy of Da Shop: Books + Curiosities

Rolling the R’s

by R. Zamora Linmark

Discovering this book a few years ago felt like a revelation, probably because I’d never read anything that so truthfully captures the texture of growing up brown and queer and working class in Honolulu. Told through experimental non-linear vignettes, Linmark’s 1995 debut follows a group of mostly Filipino fifth graders in 1970’s Kalihi who are finding themselves amidst a backdrop of racism, sexual abuse and Farrah Fawcett’s Charlie’s Angels. It’s no wonder the book has been adapted for the stage more than once; through a Pidgin that rings true, this local cult classic brims with theater, comedy, and style.

Photo: Courtesy of Da Shop: Books + Curiosities

The Mahele of Our Bodies: Nā Mo‘olelo Kūpuna Māhū/LGBTQ

edited by Stephanie Nohelani Teves

This was the book that kicked off Small Kine Book Club and in some ways feels like a mission statement for the club: reading books featuring unabashedly queer voices from Hawai‘i. On the surface, its description—an oral history published in 2025 by University of Hawai‘i Press that was generated from the life histories of ten Native Hawaiian kūpuna who identify as LGBTQ+ māhū—emits a whiff of austerity that doesn’t fully capture the book’s humor and verve. Equal parts gossip, memoir, and historical record, the book felt like meeting the queer grandparent I never had and hearing them tell me, over Heinekens and Marlboros, about life back when. I took something away from each subject, even the ones I struggled to understand, which felt honest to the experience of listening to someone speak; sometimes talking story means making a mess.

Photo: Courtesy of Da Shop: Books + Curiosities

Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More

by Janet Mock

Mock’s unflinching coming-of-age memoir details her childhood moving to O‘ahu as a young child and growing up poor in different parts of the island in the 90s and early 2000s, all while navigating a deeper understanding of her sexuality and gender as a trans woman. Her tribulations are often harrowing—racism, parental drug abuse, molestation—but Mock writes about it with the distance of age (and I’m assuming a lot of therapy) and with a candor and courage that feels infectious. The texture of downtown Honolulu, in all its gritty glory, feels like another character in this book.

SEE ALSO: A Transgender Reading List to Add to Your TBR

Photo: Courtesy of Da Shop: Books + Curiosities

Ask the Brindled

by No‘u Revilla

Confession: I don’t love poetry. I say this without pride, but as a journalist, I often struggle with the genre’s painterly strokes of figurative language, the immense meaning undergirding every line break. Revilla’s debut full-length collection disrupts my preconceived notions. Not because her poems fail to engage seriously with the art form, but there’s something about how the queer Hawaiian educator born and raised in Wai‘ehu braids the personal and political that feels urgently indigenous and pointedly queer. She dedicates the book to the late Hawaiian activist Haunani Kay-Trask, and the connection makes sense. Both seem to be saying, in decolonial language that sounds entirely new, now now now.

Photo: Courtesy of Da Shop: Books + Curiosities

Heated Rivalry

by Rachel Reid

Is this book good? I wouldn’t say so, at least not in a literary sense. But as someone in our second meeting astutely pointed out, sometimes you want McDonald’s. If that’s you, consider this your Big Mac. Heated Rivalry, the second of seven books in Reid’s horny gay hockey series, which you might’ve binged on HBO, feels like more of a cultural phenomenon than a book. This proved fertile ground for discussions about everything from how successfully it was adapted to why women, often queer, are so obsessed with watching two (hot) male hockey players having sex. Someone else at that meeting said it was the first book he was able to finish in years, which, in this attentional economy, felt like a huge win.

Mahalo nui to Mitchell Kuga for sharing these Pride Month picks with us! And if you’re ready to join in on the discussion, be sure to sign up for the next gathering of the Small Kine Book Club, where we’ll be discussing the dazzling memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Māhealani Madden!

Da Shop: Books + Curiosities, 3565 Harding Ave., Kaimukī, open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., (808) 421-9460, dashophnl.com, @dashophnl