Classic gay literature
Visibility. It’s one of the most decisive needs of the queer community. To be understood, to be accepted, the LGBTQIA+ community needs first to be seen. This has meant that centuries of authors writing about the experiences, love, and pain of the lgbtq+ community have been crucial in making progress towards a radical acceptance.
From the delicate art shape of the semi-autobiographical novel — a life story veiled behind fictional names and twists — to the roar of poetry to a deep dive into the history that has too often been erased and purged, gay literature has helped to challenge, advance , and shape generations of readers.
As a pansexual, demisexual cis woman on my way into another Pride Month, researching and crafting this list was a singular pleasure. I have many books to set on hold at my local library. Many stories to encounter. Many histories to educate myself on.
Because homosexual texts help to increase our noticeability to the “outside” world, but they also increase internal visibility and acknowledgment. Today, transphobia is rampant among the queer community, and there are still plenty of issues (biphobia, acephobia), histories, and experiences that the best-educated lgbtq+ pers
From Sappho to Stonewall, and beyond: how fiction tells Diverse history
Fiction tells us so much about the time we live in – and LGBTQ+ writers have been writing since the ahead days of literature. Their stories contain often, but not always, been marginalised, but they possess always said something about the era in which they were first told or published. Here, we take a look at the evolution of gender non-conforming fiction across the ages – for brevity’s sake, focusing on the Western world – and what it reflects about that moment in history, from Sappho, to Stonewall, and beyond.
Queer stories in antiquity
Madeline Miller’s 2011 hit The Song of Achillesis a moving gender non-conforming retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of new prince Patroclus that simultaneously reflects identity festival in same-sex relationships (Achilles remains adamant throughout that he and Patroclus be seen together) and modern anxieties about romantic relationships and masculinity – how men can be gentle, how to manage family expectations.
But being gender non-conforming wasn’t always coded as different, and many myths don’t require retelling: even before the printed word, ancient mythology and religious narratives were rife with r
Brilliant LGBTQ+ books you may not have discovered yet
Books have the power to make you feel favor you belong to something bigger, and that's particularly relevant to LGBTQ+ literature. These are groundbreaking books that celebrate otherness and queerness, and make you feel a part of something. Most importantly, they are about love. They are about being utterly and uniquely yourself.
This tracking list of must-read Queer fiction and non-fiction doesn’t seek to provide a detailed account of the queer canon, but rather to give you a starting point, or an ‘I need to study that again’ moment, or simply to remind you that there are lots of other people in this world who felt the same strange thrust in the gut when they read Giovanni’s Room, or Genet, or Hollinghurst for the first time, or who recognised the oddly liberating sorrow of Jeanette Winterson’s coming-out-gone-wrong in Why Be Glad When You Could Be Normal?, or enjoyed the comforting company of group in the inhabitants of Armistead Maupin’s San Francisco.
To nab a phrase from Allen Ginsberg, we’re "putting [our] queer shoulder to the wheel", and we’d very much like for you, wherever you
(A time capsule of queer belief, from the late 1990s)
The Publishing Triangle complied a selection of the 100 best lesbian and gay novels in the adv 1990s. Its purpose was to broaden the appreciation of woman-loving woman and gay literature and to promote discussion among all readers lgbtq+ and straight.
The Triangle’s 100 Best
The judges who compiled this list were the writers Dorothy Allison, David Bergman, Christopher Bram, Michael Bronski, Samuel Delany, Lillian Faderman, Anthony Heilbut, M.E. Kerr, Jenifer Levin, John Loughery, Jaime Manrique, Mariana Romo-Carmona, Sarah Schulman, and Barbara Smith.
1. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
2. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
3. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
4. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
5. The Immoralist by Andre Gide
6. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
7. The Adv of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
8. Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig
9. The Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
10. Zami by Audré Lorde
11. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
12. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
13. Billy Budd by Herman Melville
14. A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White
15. Dancer from the Sway by A