Over 100 Queer Authors Share the Books that Changed Their Lives
115 Queer Authors Share the Books that Changed Their Lives
There are few experiences as profound as seeing oneself reflected in art, especially if a significant facet your identity has been traditionally shrouded in shadow. Books, of course, are the best vessel for self-understanding, articulating feelings and experiences you often lack the language to describe yourself.
Over the past three years, we’ve been asking queer authors—both emerging and established—about the books that became the keys to the latch of their selves. This list started in 2019 with 50 writers—on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots—and has swelled to more than double that, a testament both to the power of the written word and to the importance of representation and community.
Something that’s very true about the queer community is that we love to pay it forward and backward, paving the way for future generations while also celebrating those who paved the way for us. One of the unique pleasures of putting a list like this together is watching a lineage of life-changing queer literature unfold. So often we’re not alone in having discovered a book when we most needed it. An example: two authors on this list say their life was changed by Fun Home—and so it’s a thrill to see Bechdel herself write about the book that shaped her own sense of self. There are so many wonderful instances of that here.Another particular pleasure of a list like this is seeing which books are mentioned the most, a web of words that’s not unlike Alice’s chart of connectivity in The L Word (if you know, you know). Among the most commonly mentioned books: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Mrs. Dalloway, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, Essex Hemphill’s Ceremonies. What emerges is a vast and voluminous queer canon.
So read on to see some of the best LGBTQ books, the stories that changed the lives of some of the greatest writers in the world, the ones whose stories will undoubtedly go on to profoundly affect a whole new generation.
In at the Deep End by Kate Davies
amazon.com
Dahlia Adler, author of Cool for the Summer:
"Truthfully, the first book to change me is wrapped in painful memories, but I cope with that thanks to In at the Deep End by Kate Davies, which explores queer self-discovery through a toxic relationship and its mutual perceptions of villainy. That's the book I take with me to process loving who I am even if I didn't love my journey here."
Family Dancing by David Leavitt
Bloomsbury USA
amazon.com
Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind:
"I bought this collection at a used bookstore the summer before college. I was interested in being a writer and Leavitt is a beautiful writer, and thus a great teacher. But Family Dancing was truly my first encounter with gay men. That they were fictional didn’t matter; Leavitt’s men are given the chance to be happy or sad, in love or lonely, good sons or a disappointment. They’re characters, yet somehow real. I learned a lesson about being a writer, but also about being a gay man myself."
Heaven's Coast by Mark Doty
Harper Perennial
amazon.com
Elissa Altman, author of Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing
"Heaven’s Coast entered my world in 1996, at a time of catastrophe; not yet thirty, I had just ended my first relationship with a woman but was still closeted. The grief of AIDS curtained our world--how was it possible to plan for a future that may not come? Reading Doty’s poetic memoir, I could no longer bear witness to the catastrophe unfolding in front of me from inside the closet. It’s a stunningly beautiful elegy for life and love amidst aching tragedy. I clung to it and continue to do so."
Beebo Brinker by Ann Bannon
Cleis Press
amazon.com
Carol Anshaw, author of Right after the Weather:
"I’d like to say the book that confirmed my suspicion that I was gay was something literary like Orlando or Maurice, but in fact it was one of the 1950s-1960s pulp novels by Ann Bannon—Beebo Brinker, Journey to a Woman. Everything happens in cheap apartments and lesbian bars. These women are mostly oppressed in the closet, but they have pages and pages of excellent sex. When I read them I thought, 'Hey, I could be having some of this.'"
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
Vintage
amazon.com
Zaina Arafat, author You Exist Too Much:
"When I read Winterson’s book, I was in grad school, dating a man, pining after a woman, my novel’s first stirrings in my stomach. You’re someone who will always have longing within you, a professor told me. Winterson would be the salve. I wept as I read, for the narrator’s love and loss, for the realization that I was so queer, for this reflection of self, how badly I needed it."
Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
amazon.com
Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth:
"From the opening lines of this novel, I knew I’d found the book that said everything I’d never been able to properly vocalize about myself. I was thirteen and aching, scared of the 'strangeness' welling inside me. Dorothy not only wrote about loving hard places—South Carolina for Bone, Central Florida for me—she manifested the beauty and pain of being young, queer, and wanting. To embrace the things that might ruin you, and love them fiercely. Defiantly. It was the book that turned me into a writer."
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeymi
Riverhead Books
amazon.com
Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us:
"Oyeyemi's collection made me feel seen in ways I didn't think possible. The short stories are mazes; characters mystery into themselves. I love the way they defy ideas of traditional relationships with ease, and how queerness is embedded not only in the characters, but also in the actual DNA of the stories. In a world that constantly demands labels to define ourselves, this book blooms in the relief of un-labeling, in characters simply being without explaining themselves."
Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives
amazon.com
Alison Bechdel, author of The Secret to Superhuman Strength
"This book changed my life in an instant when I was 19. It’s actually a transcript of a documentary film of the same name that came out in 1977, featuring interviews with out gay men and lesbians. Seeing these people talking openly about their queerness made me realize not just that I was gay, too, but that it was okay. I came out that afternoon, in one fell swoop."
Men on Men Vol. 1
amazon.com
Mark Bibbins, author of 13th Balloon:
"A professor assigned the inaugural volume of the Men on Men anthology for a course I took during my freshman year of college, inspiring me to come out in a classroom situation for the first time. I guess it was more a matter of being seen by others than seeing myself in the stories, though I may have caught a glimpse—like spotting my reflection in the window of a passing car."
Superman Comics by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster
DC Comics
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Amy Bloom, author of White Houses:
"The queer book that changed my life was not, properly speaking, a book about queers. It was Superman Comics and it offered me the self I knew I was. In real life, I was seven and round with pink harlequin glasses, an off-putting vocabulary and masses of black, messy curls. From the first page of Clark Kent dashing into the phone booth (running into the closet and FLYING outta the closet), tossing his glasses and revealing that beautiful impossible body with all those surprising super-powers, I knew: Clark Kent, C'est moi. In my dreams, I often found myself at the banks of a raging river, hesitant to cross, fearful of drowning. And then in the dream, I became Super, male and female, extravagantly caped, and I leapt across the river, becoming my own self, once I landed safely. My saddle shoes replaced my glamorous blue boots, but I knew."
The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst
Vintage
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Christopher Bollen, author of A Beautiful Crime:
"I spent a lot of my youth hunting for glimpses of gay characters in books. By 15, I’d willingly read an entire 600-page snooze of a novel if I’d heard it contained one paragraph of a gay scene. That’s how rare and precious gay characters were. But I don’t think I ever read gay characters I could relate to or feel existed in three dimensions until I discovered Hollinghurst. Finally, here were gay men, flawed, funny, horny, human, difficult, and unashamed. There was no apology for their messy, wonderful sexuality, no asking for permission, no careful, brace-yourself approach, and no moralizing in either direction. It’s celebratory without being pious and it’s all wrapped in exquisite, gorgeous prose."
Canary by Canary Conn
amazon.com
Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs:
"The book that rocked my world was Canary, by musician Canary Conn, a trans woman who published her memoir in 1974. I was 15 years old, and it was the first time I’d ever understood that there were people like me in the world, and that life as a transgender person could be lived with dignity and grace. Since then, she’s vanished from the public eye. Where are you now, Canary Conn? Do you know how much hope you gave to so many people by telling your story?"
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Vintage
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Sarah Broom, author of The Yellow House:
"Here was how I learned the power of a single room—those metaphorical spaces to which we confine ourselves. How I came to see love's variousness. Giovanni’s Room became the place where I lived, too. Within its walls I felt free to form a question that launched a personal metamorphosis: What exactly did I need to escape—why and how?"
Ceremonies by Essex Hemphill
Brand: Cleis Press
amazon.com
Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition:
"I first found Ceremonies when I was 20 years old and suicidal. The poems and essays let me know there was a world of thinking going on about my Black queer experience—and that I wasn’t alone. To this day, Hemphill is an ancestor poet whose outspoken cultural activism unites the hopes of Black gay men all over this country."
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
amazon.com
Kacen Callender, author of Felix Ever After:
"Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe was life-changing for me because aside from being one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read, it was the first time I saw two queer boys of color fall in love and receive their own happily ever after, which included the full support of loving, encouraging families who were
glad to see Aristotle and Dante find each other."
Poems and Prose by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Penguin
amazon.com
Casey Cep, author of Furious Hours:
"Dappled things, shook foil, kingfishers, hearts in hiding: I carry around so many images from Hopkins's work that it’s hard to remember which poem I read first. Somewhere along the way, though, I found the work of this Victorian poet (who became a Jesuit priest, partly, it seems to cope with his attraction to men), and his beautiful, broken verses were so arresting and strange that I wanted to read everything he ever wrote. There’s so much desire and longing that you’re just overwhelmed by the wrestling of this brave soul with the world."
Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai
Thomas Allen Publishers
amazon.com
K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary:
"I found this book during middle school and was stunned by the first line, spoken by a Sapphic snake goddess: 'In the beginning there was just me.' She then creates the entire world. Before this book, I didn’t know it was possible for my loneliness to fuel invention and innovation. It showed me that my desires were divine, that storytelling could be wild and unbridled, full of beauty and crudity. This book became one of my creation myths, a map to my past and future, a tether to the women who made me."
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
Vintage
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Bill Clegg, author of The End of the Day:
"A novel in verse based on the Greek myth of Geryon and Herakles, the story details the doomed romance between two men. I read for the first time when I was in my twenties, still in the closet, but at a time when my desire and emotional longing for men had reached a boiling point. I remember being flattened by one passage in particular: 'How does distance look?' is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved. I felt like I’d been exposed. It was tragic and frank and named a border I was on the verge of crossing."
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
New Directions Publishing Corporation
amazon.com
Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased:
"There are many lines from Nightwood that have brought me inspiration, but the one that speaks to me most concerns the nature of suffering and its role in ushering in joy: 'The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.' The word choices here are meticulously crafted: 'unendurable' implying not only suffering but a breaking point from which there's no return; the 'curve' suggesting there’s a shape to these cycles, and that joy will have gradations. Like most of Barnes’s lines, it’s also a bit mysterious, open to multiple readings. Love this book so much."
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
New Directions Publishing Corporation
amazon.com
Dominique Crenn, author of Rebel Chef: In Search of What Matters:
"I am fascinated with Nightwood, which offers a small window into lesbian expatriate culture in 1920s Paris. Barnes was surrounded by creative geniuses like Gertrude Stein, and I think what struck me the most about this work was less the story itself and more her ability to thrive during that time and in that community. Her contradictions, curiosity, layers of beauty, and the exotic, strange world she created inspired me to be who I am and create art with the same certitude as her."
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Mariner Books
amazon.com
Emily Danforth, author of Plain Bad Heroines:
"Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway was assigned the semester when I first fell in love with a woman who loved me back. This was 1999. I was a weirdo Montanan away at a coastal college, stunned to find my likeness in a decades-old British novel. Woolf’s take on the heady intensity of sapphic love was perfection: ‘She is beneath this roof!’ Even today, Clarissa’s terrace kiss with Sally Seton is one of the only prose passages I have memorized."
Moab Is My Washpot: An Autobiography by Stephen Fry
amazon.com
Kate Davies, author of In at the Deep End:
"When I was seventeen, I fell horribly in love with a girl I’d never spoken to: one glimpse of the back of her head and somehow I knew I’d be crying myself for sleep for the next couple of years. Then I read Moab is my Washpot, Stephen Fry's memoir of his childhood. He describes falling in love with a boy at school, in exactly the same way, and I felt much less alone. I underlined the passage in pencil, the way teenagers do: 'His head isn’t even turned towards me but I know… How can it be that just the gait of him, the stand of him, the shape and turn away of him, can be enough for me to know and to know at once?… I wrote it down that first afternoon. I love Matthew Osborne. I instinctively knew this meant that everything was changed.'"
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
Crossing Press
amazon.com
Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Patsy:
"I read Zami during freshman year of college, an 18-year-old from Jamaica, still struggling with my sexuality. I realized I wasn’t alone as a Black immigrant lesbian—I, too, could be as courageous and loud with my truths; I could defy a legacy of silence through the power of the written word. Lorde inspired me to write for the next generation of girls—LGBT+ or otherwise—who must be reminded that their voices matter, too."
Loving in the War Years by Cherríe Moraga
amazon.com
Carolina de Robertis, author of Cantoras:
"I found this book—or, it found me—when I was nineteen, and just coming out. It was my first time reading anything by someone who, like me, was both Latina and a lesbian. Its vibrant, ferociously beautiful poems and essays rove in search of liberation and a true way of inhabiting one’s skin. This book tore open my world, made it larger, and made me more possible."
Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera
Dial Books
amazon.com
Jaquira Diaz, author of Ordinary Girls:
"It wasn't until Gabby Rivera's wonderful, joyful Juliet Takes a Breath, which was first published in 2016, that I actually found a book about a Puerto Rican lesbian in the diaspora who comes out to her Puerto Rican family. Juliet is queer, smart, fat, funny, brown, and loves her queer fat brown body. She finds a community among other feminist queer people of color. Juliet is full of love and joy and curiosity. This is the book I wish I'd had when I was a teenager discovering feminism and coming to terms with my sexuality and my body."
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Signet
amazon.com
Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times:
"I suspect Irish queers encounter Oscar Wilde’s plays younger than most people do. I read The Importance of Being Earnest in my early teens, and basked in the paradoxes. I loved that none of the characters had a ‘true’ self under their main persona. They escaped performance by performing something else. This spoke to queerness as I know it—not self-excavation, but self-fashioning; being who you want."
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister
Little, Brown UK
amazon.com
Emma Donoghue, author of The Pull of the Stars:
"At 19, taking refuge from the rain in a bookshop, I picked up a copy of Anne Lister's diaries (then called I Know My Own Heart) edited by Helena Whitbread. Wham! The lid of a sarcophagus cracked open and the lesbian past leapt out, still breathing, still sexy. My first play was inspired by Lister's diaries. I wrote a conference paper on her that got me my first book commission. Lister (finally getting her moment in the spotlight in the HBO series Gentleman Jack) fascinates and inspires me still."
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
amazon.com
Mark Doty, author of What Is the Grass:
"In Leaves of Grass, Whitman created a robust, distinctively American poetic voice that was casual, intimate, and startling in its claims: 'I am the poet of the body, and I am the poet of the soul.' Flesh and spirit were inseparable for him, and sex a way of celebrating our physical being while dissolving boundaries between self and other. His visionary poems show me again how daring great writing can be, challenging our very sense of who we are."
Numbers by John Rechy
Grove Press
amazon.com
Benjamin Dreyer, author of Dreyer's English:
"As a teenager skulking around the Shelter Rock Public Library c. 1973 for a book to illuminate an existence I could still barely admit to, I happened upon this novel-length work of, um, good parts with (in the phrase of the era) an all-male cast. I blushed—there’s a euphemism—to read it in some dim corner of the stacks; I wouldn’t have dared to take it home. I’m not the only one of me, I now knew."
Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles
Ecco Press
amazon.com
Gaby Dunn, author of Bury the Lede:
"Before Chelsea Girls, I had never read a woman who loved other women so unapologetically. Not just their bodies, but something deeper. But yes, also, a thorough appreciation of their bodies in a way that invokes no shame. I was captivated by Myles’s description of their romantic ups and downs while living in New York City in the drug- and alcohol- drenched 70s. Myles, a poet, has a beautiful and dark way with words that soaks you in their world—and makes it your queer existence too."
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
Mariner Books
amazon.com
Cameron Esposito, author of Save Yourself:
"My first girlfriend gifted me with a copy of Fun Home. Over a decade later, I saved up for front row tickets to see the musical adaptation on Broadway. Meeting the actors at the stage door after the show, they recognized me not from my career in standup comedy, but as someone who cried so vigorously during the show, they were worried. 'Are you okay?' they asked. 'Of course,' I replied. 'This is me happy.' Pro tip: please also read The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, a collection of Alison Bechdel’s comics of the same name. It’s perfect."
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
Vintage
amazon.com
Melissa Faliveno, author of Tomboyland:
"It took a long time to really find myself in a book. There were characters along the way—Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and a few other literary tomboys—who helped me feel a little less alone when I was a kid. But it wasn’t until recently, when at long last I read Written on the Body—whose narrator is a bisexual of indefinite gender, and whose language is a love affair in itself—that I thought: Finally."
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
Vintage
amazon.com
Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood:
"When I found Written on the Body, I was 15 and madly, exuberantly in love with another girl for the first time. I drank the book in a single breathless draw, curled in a corner of my small town’s library. I understood that it was possible for a queer woman to write the madness of love, to strike the right words together and burn up the page. And I will, I thought. I will."
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
Mariner Books
amazon.com
Emil Ferris, author of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters:
"Fun Home is more than an elegy for a closeted father and the coming-out of his lesbian daughter. Bechdel sculpts the marble of Story with the chisels of mystery, poetry, and myth. The sorrow within the book is sunlit with Bechdel’s humor and enveloped in a beauty so great it’s absolutely impossible to stop reading. Rereading it now, I thought, 'This is magic.'"
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
Yearling
amazon.com
Claire Rudy Foster, author of Shine of the Ever:
"Harriet’s secret notebook thrilled me. She taught me that noticing is an essential art form for writers. Like Harriet, I am a private person, but feeling seen was vital for surviving my gender transition. Harriet and I both struggled to get comfortable with vulnerability, not just observing others. In my short stories, characters learn to scrutinize themselves, too. Their physical, outer landscapes evoke the secrets they scribble on their hearts."
Ceremonies by Essex Hemphill
Brand: Cleis Press
amazon.com
Casey Gerald, author of There Will Be No Miracles Here:
"Hemphill was a poet-hero, comrade, and contemporary of the great filmmaker Marlon Riggs. We lost them both in the plague, but they continue to live and give life through their dangerously beautiful work, like Hemphill’s classic, 'American Wedding': 'Every time we kiss/we confirm the new world coming.'"
The Motion of Light in Water by Samuel R. Delany
Univ Of Minnesota Press
amazon.com
Masha Gessen, author of Surviving Autocracy:
"I read Delany’s autobiography at seventeen, when I was living in the East Village with my gay best friend, who was also my family—we were married. A generation earlier, Delany had been a gay teenager living in the East Village with his best friend, family, and spouse, the poet Marilyn Hacker. Motion is a textbook in observing the self, thinking about sex and love, and the best writing manual I know. A couple of years ago, when I read part of it to my 17-year-old daughter, I discovered that now we live next door to the building where Delany grew up in Harlem."
Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman
Picador
amazon.com
John Glynn, author of Out East: Memoir of a Montauk Summer:
"I fell in love for the first time at 27—a late bloomer. When a friend slipped me a sand-battered copy of Call Me By Your Name, it was like each sentence was tracing the contours of my heart. No book captures the unalloyed intensity of first love with such gutting and gorgeous clarity, the life-starting possibility that lingers between glances. Aciman's writing—on summer, heartache, and Italy—is music."
My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel
Grove Press
amazon.com
Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness:
"Lemebel, the Chilean activist, performance artist, and writer, rejected the idea of 'global literature.' His books were defiantly local, written from and for the streets of Santiago. Out of the language of those left behind by Chile’s 'economic miracle'—sex workers, drug addicts, homeless kids—he made an exuberant, rapturous queer music. My Tender Matador, his only novel, tells an unlikely love story between an aging drag queen and a straight revolutionary. It’s one of the greatest books I know."
Women by Chloe Caldwell
Short Flight/Long Drive Books
amazon.com
Katie Heaney, author of Would You Rather?:
"I'm not a gay person who always knew she was gay. For a long time, I had no idea. And without Women's equally confused, struggling narrator, I might not have known such a seemingly monumental shift in self-identity was possible so 'late' in life. Caldwell’s novel is also just incredibly sexy—when I read it, I felt the need to hide it, and that felt like it meant something."
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
amazon.com
Katie Hill, author of She Will Rise: Becoming a Warrior in the Battle for True Equality:
"As a freshman in high school trying to figure out both my feminist and bisexual identities in a conservative community, I was obsessed with The Awakening by Kate Chopin. To me, Edna awoke to her feelings for women and her desire for independence at the same time, and I just felt like there was so much of a queer element hidden in the text, but no one was talking about it in my English class and I, not yet out, was afraid to bring up. I just identified so much with Edna then, and I have many times since."
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Grove Press
amazon.com
A.M. Homes, author of Days of Awe:
Naked Lunch was mind-blowing in its non-linear, dry-as-a-bone hallucinatory prose – infused with the energy of the beat generation, hyper-alive, perverse, and sometimes a little scary. The work of Burroughs, and his pals Ginsburg and Kerouac, was an atomic wake up call to a 16-year-old white girl living in suburban Washington DC.: dark, dangerous and utterly thrilling. These guys were the real deal; artists, perverts, outlaws rejecting the familiar, the normal and instead hurling themselves at the taboo, the unknown, the unexplored. It wasn’t so much that I saw myself in the classic sense of reflection, but rather in their work I saw an opening, a possibility of freedom of another way of thinking, living, writing."
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
Dover Publications
amazon.com
Genevieve Hudson, author of Boys of Alabama:
"No one writes about longing like Patricia Highsmith. The Price of Salt perfectly captures the feeling of wanting something you thought you could never have and then getting it. I had read a lot of queer literature before turning to these pages, but there is something about the way she portrays the ache of first infatuation that felt uniquely true. In the novel, two women have fallen in love and are fleeing town to escape society’s rules. Their love is forbidden but finds its way. Published in the 1950s, it is known for being the first lesbian novel to portray a happy ending. And at the time, I needed to believe in a happy ending."
Child of the Sun by Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner
amazon.com
Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf:
"This was literary trash with a capital T. Lazy, ridiculous, preposterous and so smutty that plot was pretty much using ‘and’ to bridge sex scene after scene. But here’s the secret to Gay Trash: it was about the only kind of literature that dared to propose that man-man lust could just be fun without the sense that one day you would pay for it with your life."
Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran
Harper Perennial
amazon.com
Richie Jackson, author of Gay Like Me: A Father Writes to His Son:
"I was seventeen when I read this line in Dancer from the Dance and saw myself: 'Isn’t it strange that when we fall in love, this great dream we have, this extraordinary disease, the only thing in which either one of us is interested, it’s inevitably with some perfectly ordinary drip who for some reason we cannot define is the magic bearer…Why?' Like Cupid’s arrow, Holleran’s words pierced my heart. That was my sole aspiration, which I had never expressed out loud. It was in a lockbox deep inside me, wordless until that moment."
Technical Difficulties by June Jordan
amazon.com
Chelsey Johnson, author of Stray City:
"Jordan’s poems hooked me in first. As a teenager, I found her in an anthology of women poets. The poems had such a finely-crafted ferocity and vivid, captivating presence. This carries through her essays, too, which feel like urgent, candid conversations with an exceptionally smart companion and gifted teacher. Accessibly political, personal, and prescient, Jordan’s storytelling and analysis taught me intersectionality long before I knew its name and transformed my understanding of America itself."
Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South by E. Patrick Johnson
The University of North Carolina Press
amazon.com
Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives:
"For much of college, I kept a copy of Sweet Tea on my dorm room desk. The book, which collects the oral histories of Black gay southerners, was both revelatory and affirming. Reading about the lives of elderly Black men who lived bold, complicated lives helped me locate myself in an under-appreciated tradition. It felt like meeting family I didn't know I had. Black queer southerners are varied, exquisite, and legion. Though conversations about the LGBT community rarely center people who aren't white or living in cities like New York or Los Angeles, Sweet Tea reminds us that we have family everywhere and would do well to embrace them."
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
amazon.com
Peter Kispert, author of I Know You Know Who I Am:
"A Visit from the Goon Squad acknowledged something deep within me as a young queer writer. Sasha’s compulsion, rendered so humanely, Rob’s real grappling with a sense of masculinity and queerness, Rolph’s earnest sweetness. Egan writes desire and disillusionment so brilliantly, as in the conclusion of that unforgettable first chapter, words that rang like a bell inside me: ‘Redemption, transformation—God, how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn’t everyone?'"
Trash by Dorothy Allison
Penguin Books
amazon.com
Gabrielle Korn, author of Everybody (Else) Is Perfect: How I Survived Hypocrisy, Beauty, Clicks, and Likes:
"I bought a used copy of this collection at Bluestockings in the Lower East Side when I was 19, dating a woman for the first time. Before reading, I didn’t understand my complicated feelings — yearning for honesty but fearing the truth, angry the world wasn't better, obsessive curiosity toward other women, and a nearly pathological desire to write it all down, as though that was the only way to understand it. Her words gave me strength, hope, and validation. She writes of 'slow glances and slower approaches; the way my hands always shook when I would finally touch the flesh that I could barely admit I wanted, the way I could never ask for what I wanted, never accept if they offered." Still gives me chills."
Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence
Harperteen
amazon.com
Sam Lansky, author of Broken People:
'This lovely, hopeful collection, published in 1995, was the first ever anthology of queer YA stories, featuring contributions from authors including Lois Lowry and Francesca Lia Block. I found it on a shelf at Powell's in Portland, Oregon as an eleven-year-old, and tore through it in an afternoon. Now, queer people are so much more visible in culture—but for me, then, this book was a lifeline.'
Edinburgh by Alexander Chee
Mariner Books
amazon.com
Celia Laskey, author of Under the Rainbow:
"For most of my young life I was so intensely closeted, even to myself, that it wouldn’t have occurred to me to search out queer books. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I went back and started reading all the queer classics. Edinburgh just blew me away—if I had read it when I was 16, my whole life might have been different."
Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
amazon.com
Malinda Lo, author of A Line in the Dark:
"I first read Tipping the Velvet while I was writing my first novel. It stunned me with its bold, sexy, and unapologetic portrayal of lesbians, but it also impressed me because it was Waters’s first novel, and it was such a global success. It certainly gave me something to aim for! Writers—especially queer ones who have been stifled for so long—need examples like this. I still take courage from it today."
A Compass Error by Sybille Bedford
amazon.com
Daniel M. Lavery, author of Something That May Shock and Discredit You:
"A Compass Error seemed dated on publication—a sprawling look at a moneyed, decadent, aristocratic family legacy through the eyes of 17-year-old Flavia as she flails from one destructive girlfriend to the next. It looks to the past and no one acts in a way as to inspire hope for the future. When I first read it I felt overwhelmed by possibility, by humanity, by detail and affection. Its recent republication suggests Bedford is finally getting her due."
Meet Me There by Samuel Ace
Belladonna*
amazon.com
Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl:
"Smukler’s gorgeous prose poems investigate queer masculinity, sex, butch/femme desire, and consensual BDSM. Like John Rechy and Samuel R. Delany, Smukler took dirty queer sex as the subject of serious literary investigation, for which I will be forever grateful. Smukler now goes by Samuel Ace, and Belladonna* has just released Meet Me There, a volume which collects his first two books, along with a series of letters between Ace and Smukler."
Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz
Vintage
amazon.com
Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World:
"At first, the intensity is almost unbearable: the hallucinatory descriptions, the headlong sentences. Then your resistance gives way and you’re deep inside the consciousness of an HIV-positive person in the darkest years of the AIDS pandemic. To read this book is to participate in someone’s survival, moment by moment. It’s as much the story of Wojnarowicz’s awe and fury ahead of death as it is a historical record of a devastating age, in which church and government had no qualms about telling queer people that our lives were expendable."
House Rules by Heather Lewis
Brand: Serpent's Tail
amazon.com
T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls:
"Heat rises from a Heather Lewis book. That may sound romantic, false, but I swear it—there’s a pulse felt through the pages. I miss Lewis every day, for all the truth and humanity she gave us in her stories, and all the work we’ll never see. In House Rules, she spins the story of a 15-year-old lesbian making her way through the equestrian horse show circuit. It’s all body, all guts. A horrifying marvel. I’m a writer because she showed me how."
Out East: Memoir of a Montauk Summer by John Glynn
Grand Central Publishing
amazon.com
Greg Mania, author of Born to Be Public:
"Before I could reach back into my memory for a formative book from my youth, a more recent release announced its presence louder than any other. Out East by John Glynn has stayed with me since it came out last year. Not only does it examine the complexities of queerness beyond crossing the threshold from private into public, it vibrates in a frequency beyond identity markers. Not only did I see myself, I felt myself, too."
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
Bantam
amazon.com
Mesha Maren, author of Sugar Run:
"I found a paperback of Rubyfruit Jungle on a re-shelving cart in the public library when I was about thirteen and devoured it all in one reading, hidden away in the back of the stacks. My heart was beating so loud, my palms so sweaty, I thought for sure I must be sending out signals that someone would detect but no one found me. I stashed the book behind some accounting texts so I could find it on my next library visit."
Something Queer Is Going on: A Mystery by Elizabeth Levy
Delacorte Press
amazon.com
Ilana Masad, author of All My Mother's Lovers:
"When I think of formative queer lit, I always go back to things I read as a kid, like Elizabeth Levy's Something Queer is Going On series, where two kinda weird girls, best friends Jill and Gwen, solve mysteries together, Jill's basset hound Fletcher always in tow. I loved those books, how Gwen and Jill were so awkward, not tomboyish but not girly either. Years later, I realized: Queer! Duh!"
She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan
Broadway Books
amazon.com
Sarah McBride, author of Tomorrow Will Be Different:
"In many ways, Jenny Boylan is one of the trans community's original memoirists. Compelling writing not only gives life to the author's story, but can help give voice to the readers' stories as well. Along with other trailblazing trans writers, Boylan's works have helped construct the language of the modern community and movement and, in doing so, have laid the foundation for progress."
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Signet
amazon.com
Casey McQuiston, author of Red, White & Royal Blue:
"At 14, I read and loved The Importance of Being Earnest—my very first Wilde, and also the very first time I read a book by an author I knew was gay. Growing up in a conservative, religious environment in the deep south, it wasn't like gay voices were exactly easy for me to come by, but a hand-me-down paperback of a play that was as gay as it possibly could be in its time lit up parts of my brain I didn't even know about yet. I saw my own strange sense of humor in it, but more than that, I saw something of my own confusing, obstructed self in every double meaning and coded joke. Oscar Wilde was so smart, he knew I was queer before I did."
The Persian Boy by Mary Renault
Vintage
amazon.com
Daniel Mendelsohn, author of Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate:
"It’s almost impossible today to remember the obliterating isolation you felt growing up gay in the 1970s, before the Internet. Luckily, when I was twelve I found Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy (from 1972), a novel about Alexander the Great told from the point of view of Alexander’s lover, a Persian eunuch. (All historically accurate!) In that book I found, for the first time, my own desires beautifully reflected—and discovered the Classics."
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Mariner Books
amazon.com
Kate Milliken, author of Kept Animals:
"By middle school, I knew that I was bisexual and that that fact was to be denied. In college, I found reading Mrs. Dalloway oddly illicit. Unearthing Clarissa’s longings from the novel’s kaleidoscopic points of view and beneath the burden of societal manners was a tantalizing disrobing, revealing the futility of trying to live under the weight of others’ expectations."
In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology
Redbone Press
amazon.com
Darnell Moore, author of No Ashes in the Fire:
"When I couldn’t find traces of the complex and bountiful Black queer expressions I had come to love and emulate in the communities I called home, I searched for them. I searched for pasts, for futures, for self. And I found them in Joseph Beams's metamorphic anthology, In the Life, which affirmed what I knew to be true—that Black queer and trans people are worthy of pages upon pages of exploration and testimony."
A Different Person by James Merrill
amazon.com
Benjamin Moser, author of Sontag: Her Life and Work:
"A Different Person was the first book I read about a young gay character for whom the discoveries of sex and art and language went together, as they had for me—ways of knowing world and self. Merrill's childhood had been terrible in many ways, but he described a youth without the misery I had so often found in writings by and about young gay people. Instead, his memoir is sparkly, elegant, full of anecdotes and travels and jokes. I was sad to learn he had died just a couple of years before I happened upon this book. I never got to meet him. But through his book, I found a friend."
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
Brand: Alyson Books
amazon.com
Eileen Myles, author of Evolution:
"I read this book fairly late but no book had ever explained to me how LGBT oppression is a civil rights issue. Feinberg really opens the door to what was actually done to dykes in the good old days of police raids of gay bars. It’s disturbing, so rich and exacting in its description of the baroque punishment reserved for being a queer female. Feinberg’s account illustrates a threat subtly implied all the time in warnings to wrong-behaving women that you’ll get yours. Immensely valuable, hard and great to read. It’s our history."
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
Vintage
amazon.com
Patrick Nathan, author of Some Hell:
"On pleasurable mornings, a line still comes to me: 'Herakles liked to make love early in the morning, like a sleepy bear taking the lid off a jar of honey.' When I first read it, I hadn’t yet slept with a man. Between virginities, I romanticized Geryon’s adoration of and lust for Herakles, and fell in love, too, with his sadness. Even today, sadness is the shadow of what feels like terminal desire—something I’ll starve from, if that lid is too tight."
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
Wordsworth Editions
amazon.com
Chani Nicholas, author of You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance:
"I read The Well of Loneliness the summer I was 21 and it sent me into a frenzy of lesbian longing that I’m not sure I’ve recovered from. I also had a crush on a woman that didn’t know I existed at the same time so it was pining x summertime blues. I think if I could have transported myself back to Paris in the 20’s I would have never returned."
I Am Not Myself These Days by Josh Kilmer-Purcell
Harper Perennial
amazon.com
Matt Ortile, author of The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance:
"A high school friend lent me Josh Kilmer-Purcell's I Am Not Myself These Days because, she said, 'it reminds me of you, Matt.' I should say, I was not (and am currently not) a six-foot-one ad exec by day and a seven-foot-two drag queen by night. But, in a way, my friend was right; prophetic, almost. Kilmer-Purcell's memoir about loving and losing in his New York of the 1990s informed how I loved and learned in the New York of the 2010s, both of us in sparkling doormanned buildings and plush queen beds. These Days was an affirming read for me as a teen. In reading it, I realized that a book about gay things, sad things, joyful things could exist, could be entertaining and edifying at once—that maybe, one day, I could write one such book, too."
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
Wordsworth Editions
amazon.com
Camille Perri, author of When Katie Met Cassidy:
"I was a teenage library page when I discovered The Well of Loneliness, dust-jacketless, as if it had thrown off its own protective cover. Inside I found young Stephen Gordon, a girl who hated dresses, loved sports, and longed to be a boy. By adulthood she was wearing tailor-made men’s suits, was a loyal lover of women, and a bestselling writer. The novel wasn’t perfect, but it offered me the first heroine with whom I could identify because she was just hero enough."
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Harpercollins
amazon.com
Tommy Pico, author of Feed:
"Bridge to Terabithia is my queer root. I immediately identified with the bookish tomboy Leslie, because her gender at first eludes the main character. 'Are you a boy or a girl?' was a refrain throughout my elementary school days because, like all the men in my family on the reservation, I had long hair. Also, the book had lessons about keeping an open mind and, let’s face it: imagination is gay."
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Mariner Books
amazon.com
Natalia Borges Polesso, author of Amora:
"I remember vividly going out one cold morning while reading Orlando. I was eighteen and it was my first year of college. My house growing up wasn't full of books, so I used to go to the library a lot. I felt a bit like the protagonist walking on thin ice--a bit different, queer, excited. That week I bought a pink dress and a pair of army boots and wore them together to a party."
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
Yearling
amazon.com
Rory Power, author of Burn Our Bodies Down:
"I’ve decided that all my childhood favorite books were in fact queer, my reason being 'because I said so,' but of them all, the most formative was Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild. While I’m deeply fond of all three of its central sisters, I connected with the middle child, Petrova, in an immediate and fundamental way that now is obvious to me as translating roughly to: 'Oh. Queer? Yeah. She’s queer. Me too.'"
Fall On Your Knees by Anne Marie MacDonald
Scribner
amazon.com
Tegan and Sara Quin, authors of High School:
"We passed a deeply loved copy of Fall on Your Knees between us in high school, reading and rereading it until entire passages were memorized. That it was critically acclaimed and a best seller (Oprah's Book Club!) felt particularly important given that it was the first queer story either of us had ever read."
Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing by Erika Lopez
Simon & Schuster
amazon.com
Gabby Rivera, author of Juliet Takes a Breath:
"Flaming Iguanas is one of my forever books. It stars my favorite character ever, Tomato Rodriguez, a thick-bodied, tattooed Puerto Rican bisexual babe riding her motorcycle cross country. She cursed, spit, f*cked, cried, and didn’t give one damn about what anyone else thought. Without her, I wouldn’t have ever seen the impact of a truly relatable character. Tomato Rodriguez gave me permission to put my magic, my messiness, my queerness, Puerto-Rican-ness and all the other wild magnificent things in my life into all the stories I write."
Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany
amazon.com
Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox:
"The terror and pleasure I felt in 1990 on reading Driftglass’s centerpiece story 'Aye, and Gomorrah' inaugurated my decades-long devotion to Delany. The story’s spacers are genderqueer intergalactic laborers, lusted after by the earth-bound frelks—suitors with a 'free-fall sexual displacement complex.' Across his inimitable oeuvre, Delany shows not only that we spacers and frelks have the right to love each other, but so too do we have the right to build speculative architectures, make art, theorize, and dream."
Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block
Harperteen
amazon.com
Steven Rowley, author of The Editor:
"A friend recognized me struggling my first year in college and placed this book in my hand. 'Read this,' he said, and I did. Block upends the fairy tale, crafting a heightened Los Angeles for girls who want to do the rescuing and boys who dream of meeting their prince. Published in 1989, the book celebrates found family, normalizes gay marriage, and tackles AIDS head on. Yes, there is darkness and pain, but it can be vanquished with kindness and love. Weetzie is barely one hundred pages, but those pages profoundly changed my life."
Magic's Pawn by Mercedes Lackey
amazon.com
Hugh Ryan, author of When Brooklyn Was Queer: A History:
"I was a mass-market-fantasy-novel-a-day kid, so you know I was popular and had great taste. Mostly those books have blurred into a pastiche of clichés, but not Magic’s Pawn. I remember sitting on the wooden bench in my grandmother’s room, realizing this kid was like me: lonely; gay; confused; a powerful magician with a psychic horse...I was 12. It was 1989. In reality, the only gay people I heard about were dying. But on the page, we could be anything."
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
amazon.com
Patrick Ryan, author of The Dream Life of Astronauts:
"This novel showed me not just that I wasn’t alone in the world, but that I might grow older in that world, and be true to myself, and have a straight best friend, and be privy to the same worries and fears and longing and joy that were in everyone else’s wheelhouse. The novel was published the year before I was born and yet seemed to be a window into my future. The protagonist, George, was my hero."
What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell
Picador
amazon.com
Rakesh Satyal, author of No One Can Pronounce My Name:
"I’m inclined to name books that I read during my adolescence or young adulthood, but I read this novel in my mid-30s and found it all the more life-changing. It is ambitious in every part of its being, from the line level to the larger narrative structure, and it depicts the intersection of desire and self-reflection in a way that feels entirely new yet deeply relatable. Garth is one of the great writers of our time."
The Complete Claudine by Colette
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3PL
amazon.com
Cathleen Schine, author of The Grammarians:
"For me, it was Colette, and not the sumptuous, witty stories of undeniable literary value but the Claudine series, the naughty novels that Colette’s first husband, Willi, locked her in a room to write, then claimed as his own. Claudine, so innocent, so rebellious, so open to the world and its pleasures – what took me by storm, and it did, boy did it, was the sensuality, a realization of the power and the beauty and glory of desire. I recognized not so much who I was, but what I wanted."
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Mariner Books
amazon.com
Sarah Schulman, author of Maggie Terry:
"From tomboy Mick, to the gay Jewish deaf mute Singer, McCullers transgresses in larger ways. The author grew up in segregated Georgia but published this novel in 1940, in which Richard Wright saw a white writer 'handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.' After decades of study I think that Carson's own conflicted gender enabled her to humanize across boundaries because she didn't know where she herself stood."
Jean Cocteau: A Life by Claude Arnaud
Yale University Press
amazon.com
David Sedaris, author of Calypso:
"I got a biography of Jean Cocteau from the public library in Raleigh when I was in my early twenties and wore a beret. Cocteau worked in Paris during the Golden Age when that city was the center of the universe. It’s nice to think that creative people just admired and accepted one another back then, but most of the straight male artists were awful to him because he was gay. Nevertheless he persisted."
The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
amazon.com
Jenn Shapland, author of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers:
Some of the most transformative queer touchstones aren’t overtly queer. The Boxcar Children made me feel like another life was possible: one in which I fashioned my own home and my own family and my own values out of scraps, cast-offs. The series is a long object lesson in queer reuse, caretaking, haircuts, and world building, plus a slew of whodunnits. And go ahead, Google the author: total lez!
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
Speak
amazon.com
Carter Sickels, author of The Prettiest Star:
As a queer trans man who grew up in the ‘80s, I searched for myself in books long before I had the language to understand myself. S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders showed me that masculinity could be tender and vulnerable. Of course, I identified with Ponyboy, the sensitive greaser who recites poetry to Johnny and gazes at sunsets. I was twelve years old. One day, like him, I would become my own man.
Mean by Myriam Gurba
Coffee House Press
amazon.com
Carmen Giménez Smith, author of Be Recorder:
"In her harrowing and uncategorizable memoir, Gurba chronicles the contradictions of her identity as what she wryly calls 'a Molack,' but most urgently, Mean foregrounds the struggle of the author’s eating disorder that develops in the wake of sexual violence, both in childhood and college. Yet against all odds, Gurba’s 'queer art of being mean' is a triumph of deadpan humor in a timely and thrilling voice. Stop everything and read this brave and tender book."
Red Dirt Revival by Tim'm West
Brand: Poz'trophy Publishing
amazon.com
Danez Smith, author of Homie:
"Being given Red Dirt Revival was a rite of passage more than a few sweet uncles and aunties slid to me across kitchen tables in Madison and Minneapolis. 'Have you read this? Do you know Tim’m?' always in the tone of, 'Do you know yourself?' West’s work in poetry and rap was where I first saw my black sissy self so real, so free, allowed to be in pain and in love without pretext or boundary."
My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Kabi Nagata
Seven Seas
amazon.com
$12.59
Noelle Stevenson, author of The Fire Never Goes Out: A Memoir in Pictures:
"A book that made me feel uncomfortably seen (but in a good way) was My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Kabi Nagata. An unflinching, vulnerable look into the messiness of adult life, family, and mental health where exploring lesbian desires is connected inseparably to all of those things, but also far from the most painful aspect, as the author bares her soul in the search for connection."
The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp
Penguin Classics
amazon.com
Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain:
"As a boy, Quentin Crisp’s flamboyant, lavender coif terrified me. Whenever he appeared on television it made me hide away inside myself. Only as a gay adult did I come to appreciate the bravery it took to be so unapologetically queer. What extraordinary courage to be gender non-conforming in 1930’s Britain, in the face of such mockery and loathing. This is a wonderfully wry book, a beacon for anyone looking to embrace their true, fabulous self."
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Mariner Books
amazon.com
Meredith Talusan, author of Fairest:
"I first read Orlando for a seminar junior year of college. I'd experimented with drag a few times by then, but seeing that title character take her sudden and mysterious gender change with such aplomb inspired me to take on the same insouciant attitude when it came to dressing up as a woman in public. For my class presentation on the book, I raided the university theater closet and outfitted myself in full Renaissance drag, bustle and petticoat included. I feel echoes of Lady Orlando in my step even now, as the life I lead in a different gender than when I began may seem strange to other people, but is a self-evident and deeply fulfilling trajectory for myself."
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Penguin Books
amazon.com
Malcolm Tariq, author of Heed the Hollow:
Seeing the film adaptation of The Color Purple as a child, I was not expecting the depth of this story until I read the novel in my teens. I had read books about the South before, but none that featured the nuances of black family, sexuality, desire, and feminism. From its first sentence, The Color Purple taught me that there is more room for my true self in the world than what I was told is allowed.
Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman
Picador
amazon.com
Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life:
"I first read Call Me by Your Name the summer I turned eighteen. I had never imagined that there were other people like me--sensitive, shy, and queer. That novel taught me things about myself that I hadn’t even known to ask and made me a less lonely person. It changed my sense of what was possible in a queer life. That my life could be beautiful."
Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles
Ecco Press
amazon.com
Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir:
"Discovering Chelsea Girls just as I was beginning to write prose blew my mind and affirmed that my own queer life was worthy of translation into literature—and really how important it is to tell our raw, authentic stories. I reread it frequently to invite inspiration from it’s cool, wise, and stylish stance."
The Hardy Boys Casefiles by Franklin W. Dixon
amazon.com
R. Eric Thomas, author of Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America:
"Frank and Joe Hardy are not queer. But I sure was when, as a middle schooler, I devoured their adventures, daydreaming about Frank having a crush on me (sorry Joe), and staring at the cover illustrations that aged them up and gave them heartthrob hair. The Hardy Boys Casefiles were the first books to prompt the question: 'Do I think this character is hot?'and that, my darling, is queer history!"
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Back Bay Books
amazon.com
Maggie Thrash, author of Lost Soul, Be at Peace:
"If you don’t have gaydar, you might fail to perceive the queer relationship in Brideshead Revisited. Seventy-four years after its publication, people are still debating whether Charles Ryder and his quixotic classmate Sebastian are lovers or 'just good friends.' The ambiguity of their love was, to me, the most romantic part. Ever since, I have lived in horror of DTR ('Define the Relationship')."
Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral
Yale University Press
amazon.com
Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous:
"In 2011, this collection struck the literary world with its heart-wrenching lyric poems on queerness and migration, all while enacting a powerful examination of Latinx life with pride, joy, honesty and a searing eye towards the realities of class in America. All of these elements exist as uncompromising truths woven alongside and into queerness. 'The heart can only be broken once, like a window' he writes; as such, these poems recast marginalized possibilities as singular acts of breaking and making at once. This book saved me. No, it saves me."
A Line in the Dark by Malinda Lo
Dutton Books for Young Readers
amazon.com
Tillie Walden, author of Are You Listening?:
"My search for the perfect queer book in my teen years came up short until I read Malinda Lo’s A Line in The Dark. Finally, I found a book I could call home. It wasn’t sappy sweet—it was dark, edgy, even frightening at times. And still very, very gay. It’s a thriller about friendship, secrets, and privilege. The twists knocked me out. This is what I had been looking for: a story where a lesbian gets to be more than just a lesbian."
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
Vintage
amazon.com
Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias:
"I read Written on the Body when I was in my first year in high school, in love with my first girlfriend—my first real kiss—and so desperate with hormones and obsession that there was no book more perfect for me. Written on the Body taught me to be not only in love with language, but to be in love, full stop."
Everything Is Awful and You're a Terrible Person by Daniel Zomparelli
Arsenal Pulp Press
amazon.com
Bryan Washington, author of Lot:
"This collection totally changed what I thought queer narratives could look like. Structurally. Tonally. The forms those stories could take. How it could take them. It's a book that's very conscious of our moment, which can be a tricky thing to parse, but Zomparelli navigates those plains in stellar fashion, and his stories are squarely among my favorites."
A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan
Vintage
amazon.com
Nick White, author of Sweet and Low:
"I read A Visitation of Spirits when I was a junior in college, when I was still deeply in the closet, hopeless, questioning not only my desires but also my Christian faith. Reading about Horace Cross—a 16-year-old in North Carolina, steeped in church mythology, battling demons so closely resembling my own—was a reckoning to the very foundations of my life, a kind of exorcism, too. I was not the same man when I finished Kenan’s book. Quite possibly, it saved my life."
Not Otherwise Specified by Hannah Moskowitz
Simon Pulse
amazon.com
Meryl Wilsner, author of Something to Talk About:
"I read Not Otherwise Specified as an adult, but I wish I had it as a teen. The main character is a bisexual kid just trying to find her place in the world. She’s messy and imperfect and refuses to conform to anyone’s expectations—and she finds people who love her exactly as she is. This book reminds me that I am whole and real and worthy, all on my own."
Invisible Life by E. Lynn Harris
Anchor
amazon.com
De'Shawn Charles Winslow, author of In West Mills:
"I was 20 when I read E. Lynn Harris’s Invisible Life and I was so happy to read about queer, Black lives. The character Basil is most memorable—not just because he’s described as a gorgeous man but because he has to hide his queerness to protect his career, his social status, his life. A timeless novel."
David Sedaris, Marlon James, Alison Bechdel, and more share the powerful works they saw themselves in.