June is Pride Month, which is a great time to celebrate being true to one's self and all different kinds of sexual identity. But it's also a perfect time to look back and remember that queer people have always existed and been a part of our history. Author Jordyn Taylor wrote The Rebel Girls of Rome with this in mind, looking at how fascism affected the lives of women, queer people, and Jews during WWII in Italy. We asked her to write about her research and shed light for today's teens on this challenging point of history.

“I want to be with you,” Elsa says. “Even when this is all over.”

Me and Elsa, living together as a couple? Never having to be with men? The idea is unfathomable—and intoxicating. “I want to be with you, too,” I tell her. “But how would we do that without being arrested? We’re two women, and I’m Jewish…” Mussolini’s racial laws prohibited marriage between Jews and non-Jews—not that Elsa and I could ever actually wed.

“That was in the old Italy,” she whispers. “We’re building a new Italy, where everyone is equal, no matter their sex, their race, their religion, their class…” Elsa pauses. “Or who they love.

My new YA historical novel, The Rebel Girls of Rome, jumps back and forth in time between two queer Jewish women separated by more than 80 years: Lilah, in the present day, who comes across an heirloom stolen by the Nazis that upends everything she knows about her family’s history; and Bruna, in 1943, who escapes a Nazi raid in Rome’s Jewish quarter and joins the Italian resistance.

When Bruna joins a resistance group with other queer and Jewish teens, she and her fellow resisters aren’t only rebelling against the Nazi occupation. They’re also taking a stand against the Italian fascist dictatorship that’s been oppressing people like them since long before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Italy’s fascist period began in 1922, when Benito Mussolini assumed control of the country. Under Mussolini’s rule, women were relegated to the domestic sphere—to being wives and mothers and nothing more. The government even gave out medals to mothers who had more than six children per family. For further reading on this topic, I recommend How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 by Victoria de Grazia.

Queer people weren’t welcome anywhere in Fascist Italy. Some gay and bisexual men were arrested and sent into exile, or confino, on a remote island in the Adriatic Sea, while queer women were kept locked inside the home, sent to mental hospitals, and even forced to undergo exorcisms. If you’re curious to learn more about queer history in Italy, I suggest exploring the work of Gabriella Romano, a historian who specializes in queer sexuality in Fascist Italy, and who generously provided a consultation on my manuscript to ensure that I conveyed Bruna’s experience as accurately as possible.

With the enactment of Mussolini’s horrific Racial Laws in 1938, Jews in Fascist Italy were forbidden to attend school, hold certain jobs, own property, marry non-Jews, and do other basic things that many of us take for granted today—all of it based racist so-called “science” claiming that Jews belonged to an inferior race of people. To learn more, I recommend The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution by Michele Sarfatti, translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi.

The more I researched what life was like for women, queer people, and Jews in Mussolini’s dictatorship, the more I understood just how profound it would have been for a young woman like Bruna to join a WW2 resistance group and fight for a new Italy. I hope The Rebel Girls of Rome inspires readers to be brave and fight for a more equal, peaceful, and loving world.