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.