The political landscape may look bleak for LGBTQ people right now, but if history is any indicator, their opponents have a real fight on their hands. This community has long been shaped by resilience, defiance and hope, and Pride Month is an opportunity to look back at and draw strength from past activism before continuing the push for acceptance and equality.
The following ten books showcase hopeful and inspiring voices from across the LGBTQ spectrum. One explores how gay men sought certainty amid the devastation of the AIDS crisis. Another explores how queer sexuality was coded through subtext and suggestion in classic Hollywood cinema. Still others unpack the ups and downs of the modern trans experience, spin beautiful queer coming-of-age stories and remind us that love is love.
Across these must-read books for Pride Month, the LGBTQ community’s storied past meets newly imagined lives to showcase the joy and hope we so desperately need to make it through our turbulent times.
Marsha by Tourmaline
The Stonewall Riots, a series of NYC clashes in 1969 between police and LGBTQ folk, were the fiery spark that helped jumpstart the 1970s gay liberation movement. While gay men were often centered in retellings of this pivotal event, trans women played a critical role in the uprising, especially Marsha P. Johnson (1945-92). The queer icon is now the subject of an inspiring new biography, Marsha, which underlines her pioneering activism and difficult existence living as a trans woman in 1960s America. Johnson turned that marginalization into action, both at the frontlines of protests and by helping found “STAR: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries,” a group dedicated to advocating for young trans folk. Beyond bold crusading, Johnson remained a memorable Black figure of fashion and femininity, a trans icon now receiving a biography deserving of her remarkable life.
Sick and Dirty by Michael Koresky
From 1934 to 1968, movies had to follow the strict rules set by the feared Motion Picture Production Code. Films could only “imply or metaphorically evoke the existence” of gay and lesbian identity on screen, which meant depictions of homosexuality were often absent or obscured. In Sick and Dirty, Museum of the Moving Image editorial director Michael Koresky retraces classic movies that attempted to circumvent the censors through hidden metaphor and two-tiered messaging. The likes of Golden Age classics The Children’s Hour and Rope are closely scrutinized by the film scholar to provide an incisive history lesson on how homosexuality may have been missing but never entirely hidden from view. Given that this type of film criticism usually sits within academia, it’s a welcome study for mainstream readers.
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters
In 2021, torrey peters exploded on the literary scene with her bestselling novel Detransition, Baby. It was a riveting work that challenged assumptions about trans women and motherhood. The author now returns with Stag Dance, a novella paired with short stories that wryly wrestles with concerns around gender play, sissiness and a life without sex hormones. One short story sees a school student form an intense attraction to his effeminate roommate, a closeness which elicits questions about his own sexuality and attraction to femme bodies. In another, a trans woman gathering in Las Vegas leads a character to question who counts as trans when a guest arrives in a female silicone body suit. Peters is unapologetic about representing queer rejects—losers, sissies, outcasts, jerks—to complicate issues of identity politics and gender performance, etching perversely entertaining takes on the trans experience today.
The Very Heart of It by Thomas Mallon
“We’ve all been exposed, we’re all living under the sword.” Among many forlorn entries, this sentence is one that perhaps best encapsulates The Very Heart of It, Thomas Mallon’s moving epistolary memoir chronicling a coming-of-age during the AIDS crisis. As Mallon climbs the ranks of the academic world and makes inroads as a novelist (even achieving a John Updike endorsement), he suffers privately through the grief and pain that sweeps the city’s queer community (including losing a lover to the destructive disease). The journals, with both candor and levity, reveal a city at once inhibited by Reagan-era conservatism and emboldened by passionate social justice. Mallon’s diaries are a powerful and palpable historical record, sure to remind many of the injustices faced by so many LGBTQ folk only a few decades ago.
A Sharp Endless Need by Marisa Crane
In A Sharp Endless Need, basketball becomes the court—figuratively and literally—two queer teens use to negotiate their charged adolescent attraction. Mack, a senior in high school, is a basketball talent but stymied when transfer student Liv joins the school team. There’s an instant spark between Mack and Liv, one which begins as a close but sometimes evasive friendship between teenagers: both discovering their sexuality in private while sharing an intensely public bond. Author Marisa Crane mines themes of self-destruction, grief and desire that often shape adolescence against the competitive game of basketball. It’s an affecting coming-of-age story that underscores the many intense emotions that fuel young, unadulterated love—perhaps even more so when it’s queer.
Separate Rooms by Pier Vittorio Tondelli
Newly back in print this year, Separate Rooms is a 1989 cult classic meditating on grief, longing and forgetting. The novel follows Leo, a writer whose male lover has recently passed, as he begins a journey across Europe to heal in the aftermath. The bond of the two men was electrifying and even sometimes too intense, with the book’s title a nod to the plan to previously travel in “separate rooms.” New love and possibility seem elusive to Leo as he makes his way through Germany and Italy, forced to confront his own devastating solitude. Separate Rooms, in chronicling Leo’s search for certainty at a time of devastating directionlessness, proves one moving story on mourning love as a queer person. The novel’s author, Pier Vittorio Tondelli, sadly died of AIDS in 1991, a year before the book received its English translation.
Love in Exile by Shon Faye
Love in Exile sees Shon Faye recounting recovering from “lovesickness, [which] devoured me from the inside out” as a 30-something trans woman searching for lasting companionship. The author of The Transgender Issue here unpacks the jaded and melancholic emotions that have haunted her since her young adult life as someone grappling with their gender dysphoria. Across chapters examining issues like addiction, motherhood and casual sex, Faye brings vulnerability and honesty to a larger narrative on the search for love, from within ourselves and from a life partner. There’s no neat ending here as readers learn Faye has suffered another devastating heartbreak while writing the book. But its teachings of seeking kindness and celebrating autonomy is a bittersweet lesson: many know the search for love as a queer person is a battleground that can wound more often than it can save.
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
Queer poet Ocean Vuong’s latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, may open with a disarming moment of self-destruction. But it soon becomes an elegiac work on the redemptive power of human connection, especially in the face of long-buried trauma. It follows Hai, a troubled 19-year-old teenager, fresh out of rehab for an opioid problem, who forms a bond with an elderly Lithuanian woman suffering dementia. After she invites Hai to stay with her, he becomes her live-in carer; the experience of bathing and feeding her calms the chaos and feelings of hopelessness besieging him inside. With majesty and melancholy, Vuong creates a world where two souls form a rare kinship that helps both hold on longer to this world thanks to the other’s quiet but powerful presence. Kindness and compassion unite these people from America’s sidelines to help each other survive their inescapable loneliness.
Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan
Being both a poet and a legal consultant means that Disappoint Me’s protagonist Max has an exacting way with words. The novel follows the trans woman as she returns to London from Hong Kong to find work and romantic fulfillment. Max soon meets Vincent, a cisgender lawyer who makes her smitten until the messiness of modern dating and his carelessness with language undoes their courtship. Max wants to experience “good old-fashioned heteronormativity” in her quest for romance, but language proves part of the fallout attempting to maintain the ruse. Words can inspire and demoralize all at once, proving devastating when weaponized around queer identity. Disappoint Me avoids clear-cut depictions of love to show millennial messiness and existential angst together in a riveting tale of finding lasting companionship. Despite the title, it’s unlikely to disappoint.
Deep House by Jeremy Atherton Lin
Jeremy Atherton Lin, the writer of the celebrated cultural history Gay Bar, returns with a stirring love story set against the Defense of Marriage Act, 1990s laws which set marriage as between one man and one woman. It was a dancefloor rendezvous in London that spilled over the Atlantic, with Lin returning to the U.S. while his lover remained in the U.K. Deep House sees the pair attempt to solidify their relationship while America negates their union socially, economically and legally. The book pairs backstories of pioneering queer people who pursued marriage equality (like an American couple who filed the first legal case in 1979 to seek a same-sex marriage) alongside charged vignettes of passion found in sexual embrace. Given Lin’s partner was sometimes undocumented in the U.S. during their years together, Deep House comes at a particularly apt time under the Trump administration’s ruthless anti-immigration agenda.
