#Lgbt novels

[perfectlyripeclementine]

queer novel masterlist

cleaning up that post i've got running with books that touch on queerness. these are not organized in any particular fashion, or gathered along any particular theme. these are just gay novels i've either read and enjoyed or would like to read. blurbs are the books' own descriptions of themselves. not all these blurbs mention the queer stuff, but trust, if it's on this list it's in there. last updated 9 dec 23.

lists: sapphic books by Palestinian authors; butch memoirs; another list of masc, butch and stud books; a digital library of trans-related content; free access to the works of Leslie Feinberg.

After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz. "“The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho,” so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths: in 1892, Rina Faccio trades her needlepoint for a pen; in 1902, Romaine Brooks sails for Capri with nothing but her clotted paintbrushes; and in 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: “I want to make life fuller and fuller.” Writing in cascading vignettes, Selby Wynn Schwartz spins an invigorating tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives. A luminous meditation on creativity, education, and identity, After Sappho announces a writer as ingenious as the trailblazers of our past."

All Boys Aren't Blue, George M. Johnson In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson's All Boys Aren't Blue explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia.

The works of Dionne Brand: In Another Place, Not Here. Beautiful and meticulously wrought, set in both Toronto and the Caribbean, this astonishing novel gives voice to the power of love and belonging in a story of two women, profoundly different, each in her own spiritual exile.

Love Enough. In Love Enough, the sharp beauty of Brand's writing draws us effortlessly into the intersecting stories of her characters caught in the middle of choices, apprehensions, fears. Each of the tales here—June's, Bedri's, Da'uud's, Lia's opens a different window on the city they all live in, mostly in parallel, but occasionally, delicately, touching and crossing one another. Each story radiates other stories. In these pages, the urban landscape cannot be untangled from the emotional one; they mingle, shift and cleave to one another.

The young man Bedri experiences the terrible isolation brought about by an act of violence, while his father, Da'uud, casualty of a geopolitical conflict, driving a taxi, is witness to curious gestures of love and anger; Lia faces the sometimes unbridgeable chasms of family; and fierce June, ambivalent and passionate with her string of lovers, now in middle age discovers: "There is nothing universal or timeless about this love business. It is hard if you really want to do it right." Brand is our greatest observer—of actions, of emotions, of the little things that often go unnoticed but can mean the turn of a day. At once lucid and dream-like, Love Enough is a profoundly modern work that speaks to the most fundamental questions of how we live now.

What We All Long For. Tuyen is an aspiring artist and the daughter of Vietnamese parents who've never recovered from losing one of their children while in the rush to flee Vietnam in the 1970s. She rejects her immigrant family's hard-won lifestyle, and instead lives in a rundown apartment with friends—each of whom is grappling with their own familial complexities and heartache.

By turns thrilling and heartbreaking, Tuyen's lost brother—who has since become a criminal in the Thai underworld—journeys to Toronto to find his long-lost family. As Quy's arrival nears, tensions build, friendships are tested, and an unexpected encounter will forever alter the lives of Tuyen and her friends. Gripping at times, heartrending at others, What We All Long For is an ode to a generation of longing and identity, and to the rhythms and pulses of a city and its burgeoning, questioning youth.

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts, Soraya Palmer. Sisters Zora and Sasha Porter are drifting apart. Bearing witness to their father’s violence and their mother’s worsening illness, an unsettled Zora escapes into her journal, dreaming of being a writer, while Sasha discovers sex and chest binding, spending more time with her new girlfriend than at home.

But the sisters, like their parents, must come together to answer to something more ancient and powerful than they know—and reckon with a family secret buried in the past. A tale told from the perspective of a mischievous narrator, featuring the Rolling Calf who haunts butchers, Mama Dglo who lives in the ocean, a vain tiger, and an outsmarted snake, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts is set in a world as alive and unpredictable as Helen Oyeyemi’s.

Telling of the love between sisters who don’t always see eye to eye, this extraordinary debut novel is a celebration of the power of stories, asking, What happens to us when our stories are erased? Do we disappear? Or do we come back haunting?

Before We Were Trans, Kit Heyam. Today’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people’s lives.     Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance.��Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.  

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Lillian Faderman. As Lillian Faderman writes, there are "no constants with regard to lesbianism," except that lesbians prefer women. In this groundbreaking book, she reclaims the history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks to more recent diverse lifestyles. She draws from journals, unpublished manuscripts, songs, media accounts, novels, medical literature, pop culture artifacts, and oral histories by lesbians of all ages and backgrounds, uncovering a narrative of uncommon depth and originality.

note from roo: essay in this about how queer white women engaged with Harlem should be essential reading for white queers who enter spaces (like drag spaces, ballroom spaces etc) that are informed by Black culture.

Land of Milk and Honey, C Pam Zhang. A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world's troubles.

There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef's boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.

Grievers and Maroons by adrienne maree brown. Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function. Dune’s mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks—in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life—casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit’s hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it. In anguish, she follows in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit’s history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts the model off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.

In the second installment of the Grievers trilogy, adrienne maree brown brings to bear her background as an activist rooted in Detroit. The pandemic of Syndrome H-8 continues to ravage the city of Detroit and everyone in Dune's life. In Maroons, she must learn what community and connection mean in the lonely wake of a fatal virus. Emerging from grief to follow a subtle path of small pleasures through an abandoned urban landscape, she begins finding other unlikely survivors with little in common but the will to live. Together they begin to piece together the puzzle of their survival, and that of the city itself.

Elastoe, Darcie Little Badger. "Elatsoe—Ellie for short—lives in an alternate contemporary America shaped by the ancestral magics and knowledge of its Indigenous and immigrant groups. She can raise the spirits of dead animals—most importantly, her ghost dog Kirby. When her beloved cousin dies, all signs point to a car crash, but his ghost tells her otherwise: He was murdered. Who killed him and how did he die? With the help of her family, her best friend Jay, and the memory great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother, Elatsoe, must track down the killer and unravel the mystery of this creepy town and it’s dark past. But will the nefarious townsfolk and a mysterious Doctor stop her before she gets started? A breathtaking debut novel featuring an asexual, Apache teen protagonist, Elatsoe combines mystery, horror, noir, ancestral knowledge, haunting illustrations, fantasy elements, and is one of the most-talked about debuts of the year."

Sordidez, by E.G. Condé "In the ruin created by climate disaster and a devastating civil war, survivors in Puerto Rico and the Yucatán peninsula struggle to rebuild their communities and heal their lands, but powerful forces from abroad plot against them. Desperate for answers, Puerto Rican journalist Vero Diaz seeks the counsel of the Maya revolutionary known as the Loba Roja, triggering a chain of events that will forever reshape his destiny and the fate of the Caribbean world."

When They Tell You To Be Good, by Prince Shakur "When They Tell You to Be Good charts Shakur’s political coming of age from closeted queer kid in a Jamaican family to radicalized adult traveler, writer, and anarchist in Obama and Trump’s America. Shakur journeys from France to the Philippines, South Korea, and elsewhere to discover the depths of the Black experience, and engages in deep political questions while participating in movements like Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock. By the end, Shakur reckons with his identity, his family’s immigration, and the intergenerational impacts of patriarchal and colonial violence."

My Government Means to Kill Me, Rasheed Newson "Earl "Trey" Singleton III arrives in New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. Born into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, at 17, he is ready to leave his overbearing parents and their expectations behind.

In the city, Trey meets up with a cast of characters that changes his life forever. He volunteers at a renegade home hospice for AIDS patients, and after being put to the test by gay rights activists, becomes a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Along the way Trey attempts to navigate past traumas and searches for ways to maintain familial relationships—all while seeking the meaning of life amid so much death.

Vibrant, humorous, and fraught with entanglements, Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me is an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story that lends itself to a larger discussion about what it means for a young gay Black man in the mid-1980s to come to terms with his role in the midst of a political and social reckoning."

Where There Was Fire, John Manuel Arias Costa Rica, 1968. When a lethal fire erupts at the American Fruit Company’s most lucrative banana plantation burning all evidence of a massive cover-up, and her husband disappears, the future of Teresa’s family is changed forever.

Now, twenty-seven years later, Teresa and her daughter Lyra are picking up the pieces. Lyra wants nothing to do with Teresa, but is desperate to find out what happened to her family that fateful night. Teresa, haunted by a missing husband and the bitter ghost of her mother, Amarga, is unable to reconcile the past. What unfolds is a story of a mother and daughter trying to forgive what they do not yet understand, and the mystery at the heart of one family’s rupture.

Brimming with ancestral spirits, omens, and the anthropomorphic forces of nature, John Manuel Arias weaves a brilliant tapestry of love, loss, secrets, and redemption in Where There Was Fire.

[mable-stitchpunk]

As the holiday season approaches, I gotta know-

Where can we purchase your books? Are they still on sale?

Yes! 8D They both are! I mean, they're for sale currently, and they'll be going on sale very soon. At least the Kindle versions. I'm so glad to hear you're interested!

Here's links to both books!

A Fool's Endeavor:

You may notice, but I got a new cover done for A Fool's Endeavor! ^_^ I know it seems a little too late to update it, but I just wanted to do it because I wasn't super happy with the Amazon Cover Creator cover. Here's the new cover:

A Fool's Golden Cage:

Beloved sequel, not much more description is needed. XD Here's its cover for comparison.

Now I HAVE been working on the next sequel. the third book, A Lost Fool's Paradise. It was just slowed down once I began doing the whole Youtube thing- but it is going well! Too early to feel comfortable showing anything as it might be, at the least, another year off.

Though I can confirm that Princess Vivianne and Alchemist Coffcord get larger roles. ;)

Now, on Black Friday, November 24th, both books- A Fool's Endeavor and A Fool's Golden Cage- will be on a Countdown deal. An Amazon countdown deal is where they start out at .99 cents and over the next couple of days return to their original prices.

The deal will be going on between the 24th and 30th, BUT on the 24th both books will be a dollar each! 8D

...And yes, I might have spontaneously decided to do this because of the interest in the books. XD But I hope you get to read them! Jester Lure is my baby both figuratively and (kinda) literally, and I like showing him off to whoever's around. 🃏

[sapphic-book-tournament]

[cheyenneisles]

Searching for a new read? LGBTQ+ characters? Drama? Historical fiction? Well, look no further!

"Beards" is a new novel revolving around the complicated lives of two same-sex couples in the 1950s.

[malicious-code-103]

Follow non-binary Baxley through infinite hallways, never-ending staircases, and deep tunnels of the monster-infested Complex as they struggle to find their missing family on the bottom floor!

Boxes is an 18+ surreal horror novel!

Purchase Link 📦 Trigger Warnings

[rotten-whispers]

This holiday season please consider getting one of my novels!:

Boxes: Nonbinary Baxley is abandoned to a facility overrun with monsters, and must escape.

Tales from a Mall: Ferrets have mechanical attachments, people have tails, and bones are no longer purely internal!

[liongoatsnake]

As a queer pagan who practices ancestor veneration, David Levithan's Two Boys Kissing always feels almost like reading a religious experience.

Like, you know how there are novels written for Christians and meant to be very impactful for their faith? A religious experience found within the pages of a story?

Reading Two Boys Kissing feels like that as a queer pagan.

[writeblrfantasy]

if i were to self publish something, what would you be most interested in reading first:

The Red King's Mystical Suitors: a fantasy romance novel about the three men in contest to become the king's husband, plus another secret admirer--the king's bodyguard. For fans of Megan Derr's Tales of the High Court.

My Mr. Adlay: a romance novella about a valet struggling with feelings for his employer, a rich gentleman. Heavily inspired by the Jeeves & Wooster series by P.G. Wodehouse.

As the Sea Horn Blows: a fantasy romcom novel about a traumatized businessman falling for the therapist he didn't ask for; his infuriating professional and personal rival. Features the grumpy/sunshine trope.

please let me know!

[oldschoolvillageidiot]

I can poll now! So..

If you voted yes, you might want to check out my upcoming novel, No Smoke Without Flames! It features a lesbian firefighter who is happily married to a woman, and what happens when she and her wife meet and start falling for another woman. Polyamory. The answer is they decide to become poly. Spoiler. 😁

Coming March 1 in ebook and paperback!

[tooth-with-eyes]

[raemcdaniel-author]

My new book is out!

It's finally here! My newest book in a new genre!

I’m excited and proud to announce that Sol’s Ruin: Out from the Under Book 1 is now available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited! Also available in paperback and hardcover (very soon!) Get your Kindle copy now for a reduced price until November 23rd! Here’s the link! I hope you enjoy it! Thanks for going on this journey with me! Rae

[tomomoke]

Happy pride month 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

[jesncin]

Happy Pride! Now that Lunar Boy (our middle grade graphic novel) is out, we wanted to share our thought process behind queer vocabulary in media. The constant censorship, imposed western biases on queer culture, and what it means to introduce queer vocabulary to a young audience.

Check out Lunar Boy wherever american graphic novels are sold, or check it out at a library!

[makingqueerhistory]

Liberated: The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun

Kaz Rowe

At the turn of the 20th century in Nantes, France, Lucy Schwob met Suzanne Malherbe, and lightning struck. The two became partners both artistically and romantically and transformed themselves into the creative personas Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Together, the couple embarked on a radical journey of Surrealist collaboration that would take them from conservative provincial France to the vibrancy of 1920s Paris to the oppression of Nazi-occupied Jersey during World War II, where they used art to undermine the Nazi regime. Cahun and Moore challenged gender roles and championed freedom at a time when strict societal norms meant that the truth of their relationship had to remain secret. Featuring 10 photographs by Cahun and Moore, this graphic biography by cartoonist Kaz Rowe brings Cahun's inspiring story to life.

(Affiliate link above)

[skeletonmob]

Second attempt at trying to advertise my game! More details under the cut.

Old Haunts

Old Haunts - DEMO

For the past few years, Hunter Greene has been saving money for his transition. But his dreams are dashed just as he approaches the finish line, when the powers that be block the biotech company that he was going to transition with. All hope is not lost however, as his manager, a robot named Aster, has been brewing something behind the scenes for quite a while now . . .

Old Haunts is a choose your own adventure style visual novel set in an alternate, cyberpunk-esque present. There are a total of six different endings, each route taking about 3-4 hours to play through, depending on how fast you read. I wanted to do multiple things with this project. Including commenting on the current wave of transphobia in our society and also try my hand at making a proper choose your own adventure style game. Something that didn't boil down to 'do you want to be a good person and rescue the puppy? or do you want to be a bad person and murder the puppy?'.

[beastgoddk]

Wrote down some thoughts about Girls' Monachopsis development. Sincere thank you to weird freaks for enjoying this game. https://lunaticker.itch.io/girls-monachopsis/devlog/809599/girls-monachopsis-developer-ramblings