The Ultimate LGBTQ+ Pride Book List

James Baldwin’s groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love, set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris. With sharp probing insight, Giovanni’s Room tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that lays bare the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a “sun child” from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in America. Throughout her journey, Talusan shares poignant and powerful episodes of desirability and love that will remind readers of works such as Call Me By Your Name and Giovanni’s Room. Her evocative reflections will shift our own perceptions of love, identity, gender, and the fairness of life.

Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability.

Ten days after calling off her wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to Texas to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, she realized she’d almost signed up to live someone else’s life. Told with the late-night barstool directness of your wisest, most bighearted friend, The Crane Wife is a book for everyone whose life doesn’t look the way they thought it would; for everyone learning to find joy in the not-knowing; for everyone trying, if sometimes failing, to build a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a new sort of home, to live in.

Comedian Rob Anderson examines queer stereotypes and LGBTQ+ culture with humorous explanations borrowed from real principles across multiple fields of science.

At once razor-sharp, profoundly brave, and often very, very funny, the essays in Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing interrogate our notions of ecstasy, queerness, and what it means to live freely. Each piece is a reckoning: Of survival, identity, and how to reclaim one’s past when carving out a future.

Sparks fly between two women pitted against each other in this delectable new romantic comedy by Taleen Voskuni, author of Sorry, Bro. Sworn as enemies, Ellie and Vanya must compete against each other under their suspicious parents’ scrutiny, all while their feelings for each other heat to sizzling temps.

Unfolding over the course of nine days, and written with enormous heart, All My Mother’s Lovers is a meditation on the universality and particularity of family ties, grief, and generational divides, as well as a tender and biting portrait of sex, gender, and identity.

Informative, heartbreaking, and profoundly empowering, Tomorrow Will Be Different is Sarah McBride’s story of love and loss and a powerful entry point into the LGBTQ community’s battle for equal rights and what it means to be openly transgender. McBride weaves the important political and cultural milestones into a personal journey that will open hearts and change minds.

A staggering, tender epic about gay men in rural China and the women who marry them. Spanning three timelines — post-socialist China, 1980s Chinatown, and contemporary New York — Cinema Love is an “exceptional” and “moving” (Alice Hoffman) epic about men and women who find themselves in forbidden relationships; the weight of secrets; and the way memory forever haunts the present.

June 28, 2019 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which is considered the most significant event in the gay liberation movement, and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library’s archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots.

A surprising and moving story of two mothers, one difficult son, and the limitations of marriage, parenthood, and love. Blending warmth and wit with a candid take on queer family dynamics, With Teeth is a thought-provoking portrait of the delicate fabric of family — and the many ways it can be torn apart.

A “hilarious, tender, raw, and heart-stoppingly moving” (Amanda Eyre Ward) debut about a down-on-his-luck gay man working out how he fits into the world, making up for lost time, and opening himself up to life’s possibilities.

A coming-of-age comedy. A telenovela-worthy drama. A moving family saga. All in a phone call you won’t want to hang up on.

In her most revealing and powerful memoir yet, activist, speaker, and bestselling author, Glennon Doyle explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet others’ expectations and start trusting the voice deep within us.

A heart-wrenching, eye-opening, and giggle-inducing memoir about what it’s like to grow up not sure if you’re (a) a boy, (b) a girl, (c) something in between, or (d) all of the above.

An essential and revelatory coming-of-age narrative from a thrilling new voice, Rainbow Milk follows nineteen-year-old Jesse McCarthy as he grapples with his racial and sexual identities against the backdrop of his Jehovah’s Witness upbringing.

Patrick O’Hara is called back to his guncle duties … This time for a big family wedding in Italy. Gracing the page with his signature blend of humor and heart, Steven Rowley charms with a beloved story about the complicated bonds of family, love, and what it takes to rediscover yourself, even at the ripe age of fifty.

Two warriors shepherd an ancient god across a broken land to end the tyrannical reign of a royal family in this new epic fantasy from the author of The Vanished Birds. Both a sweeping adventure story and an intimate exploration of identity, legacy, and belonging, The Spear Cuts Through Water is an ambitious and profound saga that will transport and transform you — and is like nothing you’ve ever read before.

The essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change.

From bestselling author R. O. Kwon, an exhilarating, blazing-hot novel about a woman caught between her desires and her life. Vital, bold, powerful, and deeply moving, Exhibit asks: How brightly can you burn before you light your life on fire?

This coming-of-age queer love story is a sharply observed and intimate story of grief and healing, doubt and self-acceptance, set in the glamorous but grueling world of international modeling. Body Grammar shines with the anxieties of finding your place in the world and the heartbreaking beauty of pursuing love.

By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.

A photographic celebration of the love and relationships of queer people of color. This singular, moving collection offers an intimate look at what it means to live at the intersections of queer and POC identities today, and honors an inclusive vision of love, affection, and family across the spectrum of gender, race, and age.

Set in contemporary suburban Japan, Our Colors is the story of Sora Itoda, a sixteen-year-old aspiring painter who experiences his world in synesthetic hues of blues and reds and is governed by the emotional turbulence of being a teenager. Our Colors is a mesmerizing coming-of-age and coming-out graphic novel by the genius writer-artist of the Eisner Award-winning breakout hit My Brother’s Husband.

A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence.

A burned-out bisexual confronts old demons, her estranged chosen family, and the ex she maybe shouldn’t have walked away from when she attends her five-year college reunion.

A fun, sweet, sexy, romantic comedy about two women who fall in love.

A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system — the debut of a blazingly original voice that “bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole” (Tommy Orange, bestselling author of There There).

As Bette approached thirty, she realized something big: She’s into women. And then she fell for Mei, who’s entirely perfect. Until, out of the blue, Mei suggests they take a break. She wants Bette to have the opportunity she missed out on in her twenties: To explore the queer dating scene, and then return certain about their future, her desires, and herself. Often heady and thrilling, occasionally cringe, Bette’s odyssey will take her to some unexpected places. But with her new friend, the gorgeous and self-assured Ruth, as her dating guide, Bette can’t possibly fail. Right?

This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can’t reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.

Levy chronicles the adventure and heartbreak of being, in her own words, “a woman who is free to do whatever she chooses.” Her story of resilience becomes an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture, of what has changed — and of what is eternal.

Tripping Arcadia is a page-turning and shocking tale with an unforgettable protagonist that explores family legacy and inheritance, the sacrifices we must make to get by in today’s world, and the intoxicating, dangerous power of wealth.

From the beloved author of The Old Place comes a tender, funny, and fresh novel about a gay writer in New York City whose life is irrevocably altered, and then again thirty years later.

From the singular voices behind Tom and Lorenzo comes the ultimate guide to all-things RuPaul’s Drag Race and its influence on modern LGBTQ culture. Legendary Children centers itself around the idea that not only is RuPaul’s Drag Race the queerest show in the history of television, but that RuPaul and company devised a show that serves as an actual museum of queer cultural and social history, drawing on queer traditions and the work of legendary figures going back nearly a century.

From a pioneering advocate for LGBTQ+ youth, a gripping, impassioned account of how an unhoused queer youth’s murder compelled him to create the nation’s largest housing program for homeless LGBTQ+ teens.

America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like seventeen-year-old Lily Hu. With deportation looming over her father, Lily will risk everything to let her love see the light of day.

One weekend. The elite underbelly of a Nigerian city. A party that goes awry. A tangled web of sex, lies, and corruption that leaves no one unscathed. A thrilling new novel from the bestselling, award-winning, visionary Akwaeke Emezi.

Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize, Marlon James combines masterful storytelling with his unrivaled skill at characterization and his meticulous eye for detail to forge a novel of dazzling ambition and scope.

All Down Darkness Wide is a perceptive and unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender and honest portrayal of what it’s like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one’s deep depression. As lives are made and unmade, this memoir asks what love can endure and what it cannot.

Gender Outlaw was decades ahead of its time when it was first published in 1994. Now, some thirty-odd years later, this book stands as both a classic and a still-revolutionary work — one that continues to push us gently but profoundly to the furthest borders of the gender frontier.

A novel by a brilliant new voice, Hombrecito is a queer coming-of-age story about a young immigrant’s complex relationships with his mother and his motherland.

When Edward Enninful became the first Black editor-in-chief of British Vogue, few in the world of fashion wanted to confront how it failed to represent the world we live in. But Edward, a champion of inclusion throughout his life, rapidly changed that. A Visible Man traces an astonishing journey into one of the world’s most exclusive industries. Edward candidly shares how as a Black, gay, working-class refugee, he found in fashion not only a home, but the freedom to share with people the world as he saw it.

A searing novel centering around a gay-to-straight conversion camp in Mississippi and a man’s reckoning with the trauma he faced there as a teen.

An evocative coming-of-age memoir — the story of the education of a wayward wild child and acidhead who, searching for meaning and purpose, found refuge in the demimonde of the ruined but magical metropolis that was New York City in the 1970s.

Juliet Milagros Palante is a self-proclaimed closeted Puerto Rican baby dyke from the Bronx. Only, she’s not so closeted anymore. Not after coming out to her family the night before flying to Portland, Oregon, to intern with her favorite feminist writer. In a summer bursting with queer brown dance parties, a sexy fling with a motorcycling librarian, and intense explorations of race and identity, Juliet learns what it means to come out — to the world, to her family, to herself.

A tale of genius in which Thomas Mann explores a gay artist’s relation to life.

A debut book from Entertainment Weekly writer and former Out magazine editor Lester Fabian Brathwaite, Rage is a darkly comedic exploration of Blackness, queerness, and the American Dream, at a time when creative anger feels like the best response to inequality.

The inspiring true story of a transgender girl, her identical twin brother, and an ordinary American family’s extraordinary journey to understand, nurture, and celebrate the uniqueness in us all.

A vital and inspiring work of reportage, Finding Latinx calls on all of us to expand our understanding of what it means to be Latino and what it means to be American. The first step towards change, writes Ramos, is for us to recognize who we are.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Boy Erased, an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the love story between two men in Puritan New England.

As in Nigeria, vagabonds are those whose existence is literally outlawed: The queer, the poor, the displaced, the footloose and rogue spirits. Eloghosa Osunde’s brave, fiercely inventive novel traces a wild array of characters for whom life itself is a form of resistance. As their lives intertwine, vagabonds are seized and challenged by spirits who command the city’s dark energy. Blending unvarnished realism with myth and fantasy, Vagabonds! is a vital work of imagination that takes us deep inside the hearts, minds, and bodies of a people in duress — and in triumph.

The complex story of an illicit lesbian relationship in post-First World War London by Man Booker-nominated Sarah Waters.

The Grief Keeper is a tender tale that explores the heartbreak and consequences of when both love and human beings are branded illegal.

In this unforgettable debut novel, twenty-seven-year-old Tessa, pregnant with her third child and living in a trailer on her mother-in-law’s property, encounters the woman she used to love — leading Tessa to question the very foundations of the life she’s built.

A classic runaway-train narrative, full of exquisite escalations, edge-of-your-seat thrills, and oh-my-god twists. P. J. Vernon’s Bath Haus is a scintillating thriller with an emotional punch, perfect for readers curious for their next must-read novel.

A haunting and unforgettable novel about love, loss, race, and desire in World War II–era America. Awaiting Frankie Washburn at home for one last visit before he goes to the war, are his family and Billy, the childhood friend who over the years has become something much more intimate.

Minor leagues. Major chemistry. “A queer sports romance and a triumphant debut … a heartstring-pulling tale of two minor-league baseball rivals who realize they play much better together” (Elle). This romance reveals what’s possible when we allow ourselves to want something enough to swing for the fences.

From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself — a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first century America.

Boy Meets Boy is a happy, meaningful romantic comedy about finding love, losing love, and doing what it takes to get love back into this crazy-wonderful world.

In defiance of the brutal military government that took power in Uruguay in the 1970s, and under which homosexuality is a dangerous transgression, five women miraculously find one another — and, together, an isolated cape that they claim as their own. Over the next thirty-five years, they travel back and forth from this secret sanctuary, sometimes together, sometimes in pairs, with lovers in tow or alone. Throughout it all, they will be tested repeatedly — by their families, lovers, society, and one another — as they fight to live authentic lives. A groundbreaking, genre-defining work, Cantoras is a breathtaking portrait of queer love, community, forgotten history, and the strength of the human spirit.