• In the midst of this holiday season, the Housing Works Advocacy team would like to share some of their favorite books, movies, and videos to decompress, learn, and prepare for a 2022 of more advocacy work! You can find these books through our Housing Works Bookshop page. Happy holidays!

See all of the recommendations below:

Ginny Shubert, Senior Advisor for Policy and Research:

In Where To Invade Next, filmmaker Michael Moore visits various countries to examine how Europeans view work, education, health care, sex, equality, and other issues - noting the benefits of more enlightened approaches, from drug decriminalization to healthy school lunches.

Jaron Benjamin, VP of Community Mobilization:

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable does an excellent job of demystifying Malcolm X and, in that process, makes his story even more amazing. Marable was an academic and approached this work as such. It is not a commentary on his life but an academic and historian presenting his findings, which are very well researched and compellingly written.

Jennifer Johnson-Avril, Director of Advocacy Communications:

DiAna’s Hair Ego, a short film by ACT UP/ DIVA TV member Ellen Spiro chronicles the efforts of cosmetologist DiAna DiAna and Dr. Bambi Sumpter to educate DiAna’s clients and neighbors about HIV and AIDS in Columbia, South Carolina, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Funny and moving, the film says a lot about how someone with no activist background can step up and transform an injustice. It also speaks to how our government and larger activist organizations failed the Black community at the height of the AIDS crisis. Bonus: DiAna’s Hair Ego REMIX, in which Spiro and iconic filmmaker Cheryl Dunye return to DiAna’s salon 30 years later to talk about her legacy, meet with young HIV/AIDS activists, and examine the continuing AIDS crisis in the South.

Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution is just one of many offerings from the Beautiful Trouble collective, a global network of artists, organizers, trainers, and writers working toward collective liberation. Drawing on examples of creative actions from around the world, the book is a dazzling resource for methods and ideas that will disrupt how audiences think about social problems and how to address them. Some things you’ve seen from Housing Works and our allies are here, like banner drops and civil disobedience, and some you may never have heard of before. When I need creative inspiration, this is where I go. Speaking of which, I keep giving this book away – I need to pick up another copy!

Seth Pollack, Director of New York Community Mobilization:

We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba is an essential collection on abolition and racial justice. This set of short essays and interviews can serve as a primer on abolition and a guiding light through challenging moments. Kaba includes sections titled "The State Can't Give Us Transformative Justice" and "Accountability is Not Punishment," reminding us that a punishment-oriented criminal legal system is simply not designed to decrease harm. Kaba's work is rooted in hope that organizers can create new systems of community accountability.

Valerie Reyes-Jimenez, NYC Organizer:

United Nations General Assembly informal committee on HIV/AIDS on the topic “End Inequalities. End AIDS. End Pandemics.” I felt incredibly honored to have been considered to address the general assembly. As someone who has survived with the virus in their body for 40 years and knowingly for 30, I felt qualified in my experience. Even though speaking at the UN was not on my bucket list, I felt grateful and proud to have been given the opportunity. Queue the video to minute 43 to hear my testimony.

Kaitlin Abrams, NY State Organizer:

Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown is a combination of Black feminist theory, interviews, and artwork, this book explores how we can frame our activism by what brings pleasure, happiness, and joy. The book includes a shoutout to beloved Housing Works founder, Keith Cylar, from whom Brown first heard the term ‘pleasure activism,’ a challenge to the idea of activism as just another form of work. Using subjects from sex work to climate change and harm reduction, Brown builds new narratives about how politics can feel good.

Falastin: A Cookbook by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley, this is a tour of Palestinian cooking meets history; “When the events of 1948 forced residents from all regions of Palestine together into one compressed land, recipes that were once closely guarded family secrets were shared and passed between different groups in an effort to ensure that they were not lost forever.” I highly recommend the muhammara recipe- a delicious red pepper spread!

Jason Rosenberg, National Organizer:

Buddies (1985) has been coined as the 'first dramatic film about AIDS' written and directed by Arthur J. Bressan Jr. who died of AIDS-related complications two years after its release in 1987. I watched a 2018 restored version on Kanopy a few months ago and was blown away. It's a simple story of a young—in some ways immature gay man (David) volunteering with the LGBTQ+ center to be a "buddy" for someone in hospice care (Robert). You expect a movie of that era to be dated but its themes on queer politics are still so relevant and poignant today. How conversations and getting to know someone intimately (sometimes very intimately) can deeply radicalize you. Although it was one of the first films on HIV/AIDS, it shared commentary on stigma, sex positivity, government neglect, and Queer liberation something many other early HIV/AIDS-related films lacked.

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 (2021) is a 736-page book written by Sarah Schulman. Sarah is known for her criticism on AIDS-related media, mainly the focuses of white gay men being the "heroes" of the HIV/AIDS movement. Sarah's project, with Jim Hubbard, "ACT UP Oral History Project" was a way to reclaim the narrative and allow the diverse accounts and experiences of ACT UP's rich history to speak for itself (now with a new website with videos of the 187 interviews: https://actuporalhistory.org/). Let the Record Show is in some ways the oral history project materialized into an expansive manifesto and ode to the untold actions, campaigns, working groups, and stories that have yet to be told in any type of mainstream way.

Juana Urrea, Special Projects Manager:

Braiding Sweetgrass by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer is an incredibly compelling read that combines botany, science, history, and indigenous knowledge in an approachable and familiar way. Dr. Kimmerer draws on her experiences as a botanist and part of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation to show a side of science that is filled with emotion and sensibility, something new for me that has led me on a journey of re-connecting and re-exploring myself and my relationship to my surroundings.

You & a Bike & a Road is a graphic novel by Eleanor Davis where she documented her experiences while biking across the country. I read this book in one day and have had it in a special place on my bookshelf since. It is a quiet book of internal monologues that connects to other larger, but no less quiet, stories of (im)migration, mental health, and place-hood.