Must Read: LGBTQ+ Book List
Queer people have been fighting for representation since possibly the dawn of the media. When we got that representation, most people (myself included), were not quite satisfied. Yes, we can now see men loving men, women loving women and a lot more in between but there was one common factor; they were all white. Queer people of colour eventually took it into their own hands to create the representation we sourly lacked. They gave us the QTBIPOC representation we never knew we needed. We saw it in the L Word, Grey’s Anatomy, Orange Is The New Black, then Sense 8, Cemetery boys, The Bold Type, The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo, Black lightning, She Who Became The Sun, Elisa And Marcela, Euphoria, and a whole lot more. Today QTBIPOC and LGBTQ+ people still largely fight for representation but we’ve come a long way since the production code was created in 1930 and re-enforced in 1934 in an attempt to reduce the negative portrayals of homosexuality in media.
The Q26 has put together an extensive list of books written by and/or featuring QTBIPOC and LGBTQ+ characters or themes. These books will sink into your skin and make a home there. It’ll pull at your heartstrings and make you FEEL in a way that lingers.
Fiction
A Charm of Magpies Series by K.J. Charles
This series follows the adventures of Lord Crane (a once exiled aristocrat back to put his affairs in order after unexpectedly inheriting his family title) and Stephen Day (a practitioner of magic and a member of sort of magical enforcement agency) as they work together to solve crimes involving magic and practitioners
All Kinds of Other by James Sie
In this tender, nuanced coming-of-age love story, two boys—one who is cis, and one who is trans—have been guarding their hearts, until their feelings for each other give them a reason to stand up to their fears. Two boys are starting over at a new high school.
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Set in El Paso, Texas in 1987, the novel follows two Mexican-American teenagers, Aristotle "Ari" Mendoza and Dante Quintana, their friendship, and their struggles with racial and ethnic identity, sexuality, and family relationships.
Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel by Jacqueline Koyanagi
This is what you need to know about Ascension, in a nutshell: a main character who is a queer woman of colour, grappling with a debilitating chronic illness in a context of poverty, who has a difficult relationship with her sister and starts to fall in love with another awesome female character who is polyamorous.
Beyond the Black Door by A.M. Strickland
Beyond the Black Door is a young adult dark fantasy about unlocking the mysteries around and within us―no matter the cost... Everyone has a soul. Some are beautiful gardens, others are frightening dungeons. Soulwalkers―like Kamai and her mother―can journey into other people's souls while they sleep.
Bone House by K-Ming Chang
Bone House is a queer Taiwanese-American micro-retelling of Wuthering Heights, a love story and a ghost story simultaneously – it revolves around a young woman named Millet, who is of unidentifiable lineage, and her destructive romance with Cathy Chiu, modeled after Cathy from the original novel.
Café Con Lychee by Emery Lee
Theo and Gabi are not friends. Beyond their parents' restaurant rivalry, the two keep their distance on the soccer field until Gabi accidentally sprains Theo's wrist. However, when a new fusion café threatens to put both of their restaurants out of business, the two must work together to find a solution.
Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas
When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his true gender, Yadriel becomes determined to prove himself a real brujo. With the help of his cousin and best friend Maritza, he performs the ritual himself, and then sets out to find the ghost of his murdered cousin and set it free.
Cinderella is Dead by Kaylnn Bayron
It's 200 years after Cinderella found her prince, but the fairy tale is over. Teen girls are now required to appear at the Annual Ball, where the men of the kingdom select wives based on a girl's display of finery. If a suitable match is not found, the girls not chosen are never heard from again.
Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
In New York City, Yahaira Rios is called to the principal's office, where her mother is waiting to tell her that her father, her hero, has died in a plane crash. Separated by distance — and Papi's secrets — the two girls are forced to face a new reality in which their father is dead and their lives are forever altered.
Cool for the Summer by Dahlia Adler
Date Me, Bryson Keller by Kevin van Whye
Dauntless by Elisa A. Bonnin
Delilah Green Doesn't Care by Ashley Herring Blake
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Dread Nation by Justina Ireland
Dreadnought by April Daniels
Failure to Communicate by Kaia Sønderby
Far From You by Tess Sharpe
Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender
Fifteen Hundred Miles From the Sun by Jonny Garza Villa
Flip the Script by Lyla Lee
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
Gearbreakers by Zoe Hana Mikuta
God's Children Are Little Broken Things: Stories by Arinze Ifeakandu
Going Bicoastal by Dahlia Adler
Hani and Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating by Adiba Jaigirdar
Her Royal Highness (Royals, #2) by Rachel Hawkins
How to Be Remy Cameron by Julian Winters
I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston
I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver
If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo
Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao
Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera
Just Your Local Bisexual Disaster by Andrea Mosqueda
Kings of B’more by R. Eric Thomas
Kings, Queens, and In-betweens by Boteju, Tanya
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo
Legendborn Series by Tracy Deonn
Let’s Talk About Love by Claire Kann
Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian
Lunar Wolves Series by Kiki Burrelli
Love & Other Natural Disasters by Misa Sugiura
Loveless by Alice Oseman
Lumberjanes(Volumes 1-75) by ND Stevenson, Grace Ellis, Shannon Watters, Kat Leyh, Faith Erin Hicks + various writers
Meet Cute Diary by Emery Lee
Melissa by Ales Gino
Memorial by Washington, Bryan
Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker, Wendy Xu and Joamette Gil
My Heart to Find by Elin Annalise
Nevada by Imogen Binnie
Not Your Backup by C.B. Lee
No Other World by Rahul Mehta
Nothing Burns as Bright as You by Ashley Woodfolk
On The Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis
One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
Only On the Weekends by Dean Atta
Ophelia After All by Raquel Marie
Otherbound by Corinne Duyvis
Out On Good Behaviour by Dahlia Adler
Queens of Geek by Jen Wilde
Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
Right Where I Left You by Julian Winters
Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
She Drives Me Crazy by Kelly Quindlen
She Gets the Girl by Alyson Derrick and Rachael Lippincott
She Who Became The Sun by Shelley Parker-Chana
Shifters by Randy James
Starless by Jacqueline Carey
Survive the Dome by Kosoko Jackson
Symptoms Of Being Human by Jeff Garvin
Tailor-Made by Yolanda Wallace
The Art Of Starving by Sam J. Miller
The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta
The Bloodright Trilogy by Emily Skrutskie
The Burning Kingdoms series by Tasha Suri
The Chandler Legacies by Abdi Nazemian
The Colour Purple by Alice Walker
The Cybernetic Tea Shop by. Meredith Katz
The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi
The Dragori Series by Ben Alderson
The Falling in Love Montage by Ciara Smyth
The Henna Wars by Adiba Jaigirdar
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
The House Of Impossible Beauties by Cassara, Joseph
This Is Why They Hate Us by Aaron H. Aceves
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E.Schwab
The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes
The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali by Sabina Khan
The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen
The Mermaid, The Witch, And The Sea By Maggie Tokuda-Hall
The Passing Playbook by Isaac Fitzsimons
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The Stars And The Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus
The Summer of Everything by Julian Winters
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow
They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera
This Golden Flame by Emily Victoria
This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron
Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta
Upside Down by N.R. Walker. Jordan O'Neill
We Are Totally Normal by Rahul Kanakia
Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi
Written in the Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur
You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi
You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson
You’re the Only Friend I Need by Alejandro Heredia
Non-Fiction
A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
A History of My Brief Body is a meditation on grief, joy, love, and sex at the intersection of indigeneity and queerness.
A is for Activist by Innosanto Nagara
A is for Activist is an ABC board book written and illustrated for the next generation of progressives: families who want their kids to grow up in a space that is unapologetic about activism, environmental justice, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and everything else that activists believe in and fight for.
Ace by Angela Chen
Through a blend of reporting, cultural criticism, and memoir, Ace addresses the misconceptions around the “A” of LGBTQIA and invites everyone to rethink pleasure and intimacy. Journalist Angela Chen creates her path to understanding her own asexuality with the perspectives of a diverse group of asexual people.
All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-manifesto by George M Johnson
A New York Times Bestseller! From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.
Angry Queer Somali Boy: A Complicated Memoir by Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali
Unmoored from his birth family and caught between twin alienating forces of Somali tradition and Western culture, Mohamed must forge his own queer coming of age. What follows in this fierce and unrelenting account is a story of one young man's nascent sexuality fused with the violence wrought by displacement.
Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory by Qwo-Li Driskill
This is a highly informative book about decolonisation, indigenous studies and queer theory. The author addresses gender as a structural system of oppression and a colonial imposition which was weaponized against Cherokee people to force them into Eurocentric categories.
Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon
In this installment, Beyond the Gender Binary, Alok Vaid-Menon challenges the world to see gender not in black and white, but in full color.
Butch Queens Up In Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit by Marlon M Bailey
Butch Queens Up in Pumps examines Ballroom culture, in which inner-city LGBT individuals dress, dance, and vogue to compete for prizes and trophies.
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a tool kit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind.
Claiming the B in LGBT by Juliet Kemp
Claiming the B in LGBTstrives to give bisexuals a seat at the table. This guidebook to the history and future of the bisexual movement fuses a chronology of bisexual organizing with essays, poems, and articles detailing the lived experiences of bisexual activities struggling against a dominant culture driven by norms of monosexual attraction, compulsory monogamy, and inflexible notions of gender expression and identity.
Dirty River by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
This passionate and riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it reveals how a disabled queer woman of color and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the past and, as the subtitle suggests, "dreams her way home."
Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and the Making of A Brown Queer Man by C. E. Gatchalian
In this beguiling book, an introverted, anxious, ambitious, artistically gifted queer Filipino-Canadian boy finds solace, inspiration, and a "syllabus for living" in art--works of literature and music, from the children's literary classic Anne of Green Gables to the music of Maria Callas
Embracing My Shadow: Growing Up Lesbian in Nigeria by Unoma Azuah
Embracing My Shadow traces Unoma Azuah's challenging growth as a lesbian in Nigeria and how she navigated the paths of abuse, ethnic discrimination and homophobia in a hyper-religious and patriarchal Nigerian society.
Exile and Pride by Eli Clare
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. This book by Eli Clare, explores the landscape of disability, class, queerness, and child abuse, telling stories that echo with the sounds of an Oregon logging and fishing town, and with the lively political debates of crip crusaders and transgender warriors.
Fat And Queer by TJ Ferentini
Celebrating fat and queer bodies and lives, this book challenges negative and damaging representations of queer and fat bodies and offers readers ways to reclaim their bodies, providing stories of support, inspiration and empowerment.
Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays by R. Eric Thomas
He writes about struggling to reconcile his Christian identity with his sexuality, about the exhaustion of code-switching in college, accidentally getting famous on the internet (for the wrong reason), and the surreal experience of covering the 2016 election as well as the seismic change that came thereafter.
I Hope We Choose Love by Tom Kha
It's an attempt to reframe how we think about justice and the meaning itself of healing in marginalized communities - where so many of us are traumatized, and it talks both about the concept of safety in the context of trauma and about the commodification of trauma in the Discourse™.
I'm Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya
A trans artist explores how masculinity was imposed on her as a boy and continues to haunt her as a girl--and how we might re-imagine gender for the twenty-first century.
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
Specifically, In the Dream House is a memoir of Machado's abusive relationship with an ex-girlfriend. Over the course of the memoir, Machado meets her girlfriend — referred to only as “the woman in the Dream House” — and finds herself rapidly infatuated, wooed, love bombed. And then, eventually, the abuse starts.
Me Hijra, Me Laxmi by Laxmi Narayan Tripathi
In this autobiography Me Hijra Me Laxmi, Laxmi talks about her journey from childhood to attaining fame as an artist. She is also an activist for the rights of the third gender. This is one the rare biographies of the LGBT community that intends to dispel many myths about them. More importantly, it gives an average reader a peep into their world.
Messy Roots by Laura Gao
Laura Gao's Messy Roots is about her life first as a small child in Wuhan, while her parents were going to college in the US, to when she came to live with them in Texas, and had to learn to fit into a new life there, in the very white part of town, where she was the only Asian.
My Sister: How One Sibling's Transition Changed Us Both by Selenis Leyva
This book is the story of Marizol Leyva, of her childhood as a foster child, raised by the Leyva family, raised as a boy, the gender assigned at birth. It is her story of self-discovery, of coming, eventually, to understand that she identified herself as female, an her decision to transition to life as a trans-woman.
Naturally Tan by Tan France
In this heartfelt, funny, touching memoir, Tan France tells his origin story for the first time. With his trademark wit, humour, and radical compassion, Tan reveals what it was like to grow up gay in a traditional South Asian family, as one of the few people of colour in South Yorkshire, England.
Queer Sex by Juno Roche
The MTF transgender author explores her own relationship to her post-transition sexuality through interviews with other trans, non-binary, and queer people. A groundbreaking exploration of the ways nonconforming people reframe and redefine sex. Many thanks to Roche for this wonderful book!
Queering Anarchism by C.B. Daring
Queering Anarchism brings together a diverse set of writings, ranging from the deeply theoretical to the playfully personal, that explore the possibilities of the concept of "queering," turning the dominant, and largely heteronormative, structures of belief and identity entirely inside out.
Sissy by Jacob Tobia
Sissy is a complex, introspective piece about gender and sexuality and how society's view can impact self-worth. Jacob Tobia recounts experiences throughout their life that have impacted them in the manner of their gender and sexuality and their self acceptance of themself.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lord
It describes Lorde's early experiences with negative white reactions to her Blackness and conveys the harmful impacts of internalized racism and sexism on self-esteem and relationships between Black women.
She Called Me Woman: Nigeria's Queer Women Speak by Azeenarh Mohammed and Chitra Nagarajan
The book takes the form of an anthology of personal accounts from Nigerian women – both cis and trans – living within and outside Africa. This statement alone shows how forward-thinking the book is, attempting to broach a topic that as yet remains a dead topic in much of Africa: that of being transgender.
Socialist Realism by Trisha Low
In an aside in Trisha Low's new book-length essay, Socialist Realism, Low recounts how architect Richard Neutra handed out psychiatric surveys to his clients, hoping that he might design a healing space to reflect their innermost psychic penchants and patterns.
The Trans Partner Handbook by Jo. Green
Topics include disclosure, mental health, coming out, loss and grief, sex and sexuality and the legal, medical and social practicalities of transitioning. In this essential guide, people whose partners are across the transgender spectrum speak out on their own experiences with personal advice and support for others.
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by Charlene A Carruthers
“Unapologetic is as much a narrative about collective youth-driven organizing by those affiliated with the current Movement for Black Lives as it is a story about how one young Black woman from the South Side of Chicago found herself leading one of the most consequential formations of the past decade.
We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir by Samra Habib
Habib recounts her childhood as an Ahmadi Muslim in Pakistan, where her family had to hide to stay safe in the face of Islamic extremists and then how this pattern of hiding combined with sexism and homophobia followed her to Canada, where she felt forced to hide her femininity and queerness.
Whole Lesbian Sex Book by Felice Newman
First published in 1999, it's been lauded for its thoroughness, enthusiastic tone, and creative, nonjudgmental approach to lesbian sex in all its rich variety.
Poetry
Bodymap: Poems by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
In this volume, Leah Lakshmi maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim and deserve.
Mother Tongue by Chaelee Dalton
“In Mother Tongue, Chaelee Dalton trains their exacting eye and lyricism to capture the multiple sites of disruption and rupture that exist when one is born in one country and then adopted into another.
Muscle Memory by Kyle Carrero Lopez
Kyle Carrero Lopez’s MUSCLE MEMORY covers money & work, Blackness & anti-blackness, the art world, queerness, & violence—governmental to interpersonal—as it swerves through its colourful landscape.
QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology by Raymond Luczak
A Queer Disability Anthology proves that intersectionality isn’t just a buzzword.
It’s a penetrating and unforgettable look into the hearts and souls of those defiant enough to explore their own vulnerabilities and demonstrate their own strengths.
