The ReadDown

The Ultimate LGBTQIA+ Pride Book List

One way to fight for equal rights for LGBTQIA+ communities is to make sure their voices are heard! So let’s start reading. This list was curated by the Penguin Random House LGBT Network and ranges from literary fiction to science fiction, among others.

To celebrate World Pride listen to Under One Roof: Stories of Pride, a podcast featuring several of the celebrated LGBTQIA+ authors featured on this list. Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Penguin Random House’s LGBTQIA+ Network supports the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund Inc. If you’d like to make a donation, please click here.

1

We Are Everywhere

by Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown

A rich and sweeping photographic history of the Queer Liberation Movement, from the creators and curators of the massively popular Instagram account @lgbt_history, released in time for the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.

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2

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

Poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are.

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3

The Clancys of Queens

by Tara Clancy

Fifth-generation New Yorker, third-generation bartender, and first-generation author Tara Clancy was raised in three wildly divergent homes: a converted boat shed in working class Queens, a geriatric commune of feisty, Brooklyn-born Italians, and a sprawling Hamptons estate she visited every other weekend. This childhood triptych comes to life in The Clancys of Queens, an electric, one-of-a-kind memoir.

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4

Boy Erased

by Garrard Conley

Through an institutionalized Twelve-Step Program, Garrad Conley was supposed to emerge heterosexual. Instead, even when faced with a harrowing and brutal journey, Garrard found the strength and understanding to break out in search of his true self and forgiveness.

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5

Modern HERstory

by Blair Imani

An inspiring and radical celebration of 70 women, girls, and gender nonbinary people who have changed–and are still changing–the world, from the Civil Rights Movement and Stonewall riots through Black Lives Matter and beyond.

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6

Confessions of the Fox

by Jordy Rosenberg

Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess were the most notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers of eighteenth-century London. Yet no one knows the true story; their confessions have never been found. Until now. Reeling from heartbreak, a scholar named Dr. Voth discovers a long-lost manuscript—a gender-defying exposé of Jack and Bess’s adventures. Is Confessions of the Fox an authentic autobiography or a hoax? As Dr. Voth is drawn deeper into Jack and Bess’s tale of underworld resistance and gender transformation, it becomes clear that their fates are intertwined—and only a miracle will save them all.

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7

The Bold World

by Jodie Patterson

Inspired by her transgender son, activist Jodie Patterson explores identity, gender, race, and authenticity to tell the real-life story of a family’s history and transformation.

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8

Tomorrow Will Be Different

by Sarah McBride

Before she became the first transgender person to speak at a national political convention in 2016 at the age of twenty-six, Sarah McBride struggled with the decision to come out—not just to her family but to the students of American University, where she was serving as student body president. She’d known she was a girl from her earliest memories, but it wasn’t until the Facebook post announcing her truth went viral that she realized just how much impact her story could have on the country.

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9

Sissy

by Jacob Tobia

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.

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10

Sister Outsider

by Audre Lorde

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.

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11

Rubyfruit Jungle

by Rita Mae Brown

In bawdy, moving prose, Rita Mae Brown tells the story of Molly Bolt, the adoptive daughter of a poor Southern couple who boldly forges her own path in America. With her startling beauty and crackling wit, Molly finds that women are drawn to her wherever she goes—and she refuses to apologize for loving them back.

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12

Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

A warm, intimate account of the love between Eleanor Roosevelt and reporter Lorena Hickok—a relationship that, over more than three decades, transformed both women’s lives and empowered them to play significant roles in one of the most tumultuous periods in American history.

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13

When Katie Met Cassidy

by Camille Perri

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

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14

The Gods of Tango

by Carolina De Robertis

Absolutely stunning novel about early 20^th century Argentina, the history of tango, gender politics, sexuality, and same-sex romance.

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15

On Being Different

by Merle Miller

Originally published in 1971, Merle Miller’s On Being Different is a pioneering and thought-provoking book about being homosexual in the United States.

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16

Take Me With You

by Andrea Gibson

Andrea Gibson explores themes of love, gender, politics, sexuality, family, and forgiveness with stunning imagery and a fierce willingness to delve into the exploration of what it means to heal and to be different in this strange age.

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17

The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

by Anna North

Winner of the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction, gripping and provocative, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark is a haunting story of fame, love, and legacy told through the propulsive rise of an iconoclastic artist.

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18

The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

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.

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19

Radical Hope

by

Provocative and inspiring, Radical Hope offers readers a kaleidoscopic view of the love and courage needed to navigate this time of upheaval, uncertainty, and fear, in view of the recent US presidential election.

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20

Gender Outlaw

by Kate Bornstein

On one level, Gender Outlaw details Bornstein’s transformation from heterosexual male to lesbian woman, from a one-time IBM salesperson to a playwright and performance artist. But this particular coming-of-age story is also a provocative investigation into our notions of male and female, from a self-described nonbinary transfeminine diesel femme dyke who never stops questioning our cultural assumptions.

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21

A Brief History of Seven Killings

by Marlon James

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.

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22

The Danish Girl

by David Ebershoff

Uniting fact and fiction into an original romantic vision, The Danish Girl eloquently portrays the unique intimacy that defines every marriage and the remarkable story of Lili Elbe, a pioneer in transgender history, and the woman torn between loyalty to her marriage and her own ambitions and desires.

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23

The Sunlight Pilgrims

by Jenni Fagan

Written in incandescent, dazzling prose, The Sunlight Pilgrims is a visionary story of courage and resilience in the midst of nature’s most violent hour. Features Estella, a twelve-year old transgender girl attempting to survive the dystopian landscape with her mother.

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24

Ask a Queer Chick

by Lindsay King-Miller

This guide to sex, love and life for girls who like girls is useful whether you’re a lady-dating veteran or still trying to come out to yourself.

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25

Stung with Love

by Sappho

The entire surviving collection of poems by intellectual lesbian poet, Sappho.

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26

How to Survive a Summer

by Nick White

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.

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27

Days Without End

by Sebastian Barry

From the two-time Man Booker Prize finalist Sebastian Barry, “a master storyteller” (Wall Street Journal), comes a powerful new novel of duty and family set against the American Indian and Civil Wars.

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28

The Animators

by Kayla Rae Whitaker

In the male-dominated field of animation, Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses are a dynamic female duo, with the friction of their differences driving them.

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29

Speak Now

by Kenji Yoshino

A renowned legal scholar tells the definitive story of Hollingsworth v. Perry, the trial that will stand as the most potent argument for marriage equality.

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30

Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

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

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31

Becoming Nicole

by Amy Ellis Nutt

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.

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32

The Afterward

by E.K. Johnston

In a tale both sweepingly epic and intensely personal, Kalanthe and Olsa fight to maintain their newfound independence and to find their way back to each other.

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33

Believe Me

by Eddie Izzard

Writing with the same candor and insight evident in his comedy, he reflects on a childhood marked by the loss of his mother, boarding school, and alternative sexuality.

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34

Party of One

by Dave Holmes

Dave Holmes has spent his life on the periphery, nose pressed hopefully against the glass, wanting just one thing: to get inside. At his all-boys high school and Catholic college, he was the closeted gay kid surrounded by crush-worthy straight guys.

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35

Forcing the Spring

by Jo Becker

A groundbreaking work of reportage by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jo Becker, Forcing the Spring is the definitive account of five remarkable years in American civil rights history, when the United States experienced a tectonic shift on the issue of marriage equality.

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36

The Great Believers

by Rebecca Makkai

The Great Believers is a dazzling novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago during the AIDS epidemic and in contemporary Paris.

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37

Tell the Wolves I’m Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

An emotionally charged coming-of-age novel, Tell the Wolves I’m Home is a tender story of love lost and found, and of two lonely people who become the unlikeliest of friends.

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38

The Paying Guests

by Sarah Waters

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

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39

The Grief Keeper

by Alexandra Villasante

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

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40

The New Old Me

by Meredith Maran

After the death of her best friend, the loss of her life’s savings, and the collapse of her happy marriage to her wife, Meredith Maran is determined to rebuild not only her savings but also herself.

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41

Empire of Self

by Jay Parini

Biographer Jay Parini draws on decades of friendship with the inimitable Vidal to create this wonderfully readable, affectionate portrait of the notoriously difficult intellectual’s life in the limelight.

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42

Stuck in the Middle with You

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Jennifer Finney Boylan has seen parenthood from both sides of the gender divide. Through both her own story and incredibly insightful interviews with others, Jenny examines relationships between fathers, mothers, and children; people’s memories of the children they were and the parents they became; and the many different ways a family can be.

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43

The Lauras

by Sara Taylor

Sara Taylor brings the American landscape to vivid life in an unforgettable road novel that strikes at the heart of a mother-child bond and the exploration of gender identity.

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44

The Best Little Boy in the World Grows Up

by Andrew Tobias

The classic account of growing up gay in America.

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45

Planetfall

by Emma Newman

After the death of her female lover, Renata Ghali continues to search for their shared vision of a world far beyond earth. A planet promising to reveal the truth about our place in the cosmos, untainted by overpopulation, pollution, and war.

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46

Prudence

by David Treuer

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.

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47

James Merrill

by Langdon Hammer

Langdon Hammer has given us the first biography of the poet James Merrill (1926–95), whose life is surely one of the most fascinating in American literature. It is the story of a gay man inventing his identity against the grain of American society during the eras of the closet, gay liberation, and AIDS.

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48

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

by Samantha Irby

“bitches gotta eat” blogger and comedian Samantha Irby discusses many topics- from awkward sexual encounters to why she should be the next Bachelorette.

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49

Boy Meets Boy

by David Levithan

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.

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50

The Naked Civil Servant

by Quentin Crisp

A comical and poignant memoir of a gay man living life as he pleased in the 1930s.

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51

Before Everything

by Victoria Redel

A celebration of friendship and love between a group of women who have known each another since they were girls.

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52

A House Among the Trees

by Julia Glass

When the revered children’s book author Mort Lear dies accidentally at his Connecticut home, he leaves his property and all its contents to his trusted assistant, Tomasina Daulair, who is moved by his generosity but dismayed by the complicated and defiant directives in his will. witness not just to his daily routines but to the emotional fallout of his strange boyhood and his volatile relationship with a lover who died of AIDS.

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53

The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

Greer Kadetsky is a shy college freshman when she meets the woman she hopes will change her life. Charming and wise, knowing and witty, Meg Wolitzer delivers a novel about power and influence, ego and loyalty, womanhood and ambition.

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54

My Two Moms

by Zach Wahls

A resounding testament to the power of family and a reassurance that there is no wrong way to be who you are.

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55

A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

A profoundly moving novel about four college friends working in New York City’s art and theatre scenes over several decades. Their relationships change and develop deeply over the years, but remain centered around the talented young lawyer, Jude, whose childhood horrors have haunted him into adulthood.

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