The Best Queer Reads for Pride Month and Beyond

About five years ago, Rachel Krantz entered into her first non-monogamous romance. It was brand-new territory for her, so she did what any underpaid internet writer in the 21st century would do: she exhaustively documented every aspect of her relationship in hopes of eventually using the whole experience as writing material. Her archival impulses have paid handsome dividends—both for Krantz and for the rest of us. Both a memoir and a meticulously researched taxonomy of all the ways a person can be non-monogamous, Open is a sexy, moving, and unputdownable read.

Felker-Martin’s unapologetically trans debut novel—a post-apocalyptic horror story that offers a refreshingly queer riff on the tired “gender apocalypse” trope—has generated a lot of controversy, mostly among people who think that criticizing J.K. Rowling’s public displays of bigotry somehow amounts to a hate crime. What you won’t learn from the kerfuffle is what the book is about: a group of trans women and men who must harvest the organs of feral cis men in order to avoid suffering the same fate—all while outrunning murderous TERFs, billionaire survivalists, and their own inner demons.

A dark yet tender hybrid of metafiction and magical realism, Bad Girls tells the story of a makeshift family of trans sex workers—one of whom is Sosa Villada herself—in Córdoba, Argentina. When their matriarch discovers an abandoned baby crying in the cold, the girls adopt him and raise him as their own.

In Donaldson’s formally adventurous debut novel, Kip Starling, a young queer writer in Brooklyn, is writing a book about Mohammed el Adl, a young Egyptian man who in the early 20th century was E.M. Forster’s secret lover. At any rate, that’s what Kip is supposed to be doing—and he only has three weeks until the manuscript is due to his publisher. But as the parallels between Mohammed’s life and Kip’s own loom increasingly large, Kip begins to lose his grip on where the past ends and the present begins.

When Ellie asks her childhood best friend Robin—now a marriage-skeptical queer academic—to be the maid of honor in Ellie’s upcoming wedding, Robin reluctantly agrees. But as the festivities creep ever closer, Robin grows increasingly convinced that someone in the bridal party is out to get her. Following Laskey’s widely acclaimed 2020 debut Under the Rainbow, So Happy for You is a campy yet scathing indictment of the marriage industrial complex and the fraught intricacies of female friendship.

When Leah finally returns home from a catastrophic ocean-floor mission, her wife Miri is ecstatic—until Miri begins to suspect that Leah may have come back, well, wrong. With Leah home, Miri always imagined that their life together would go back to normal, but it soon becomes clear that nothing will ever be “normal” again. Acclaimed short story writer Armfield’s debut novel is a haunting story of loss, grief, and the horrors of the deep blue sea.

In this recession-set debut novel, first-generation immigrant Sneha is one of the lucky ones: she’s landed a well-paid, if grueling, corporate job right out of college; she’s making friends in her new city of Milwaukee; she’s even got a romance brewing with the mysterious and beautiful Marina. But when Sneha’s world is thrown into crisis, can her newfound community keep her afloat?

Immigration and LGBTQ rights activist Okporo was 26 years old when he was driven from his home in Abuja, Nigeria, for the sin of being gay. Seeking asylum, he fled to New York City just days before the 2016 presidential election—only to learn firsthand that the U.S. immigration system focuses far more of its attention on locking people up than on helping freed refugees acclimate to American society. At once a personal narrative and a call to action, Asylum documents Okporo’s experiences as a gay Black man in both Nigeria and the U.S. and demands us to do better by immigrants everywhere.

Hart’s searing debut tells the story of a life-altering romance between Mallory, a college freshman, and a married older woman whom she meets at the university’s gym. Still wading through her grief over her mother’s recent death, Mallory throws herself headlong into the all-consuming affair. Years after the relationship, Mallory must decide whether to remain isolated from the world or reckon with the truth of what the other woman meant to her.

L.A.-born, Tucson-based Gutiérrez’s first essay collection is deeply queer and deeply Southwestern. Divided into three sections—love, land, and labor—the pieces in this book range in topic from the scars of a failed romance to the emotional significance and commodification of adobe. These seemingly disparate topics come together seamlessly in Gutiérrez’s capable hands, resulting in a literary topography of identity and belonging.

In a world of man-made climate disaster, Willa clings to hope. Even when her involuntary guru—the renowned Harvard professor Sylvia Gill—betrays her, Willa takes her cue from a book in Sylvia’s library called Living the Solution. Before long, she flies to the Bahaman island of Eleutheria to join its author in his quest to fight climate change, but what she finds there is a cult of eco-warriors in disarray. Hyde’s first novel is a delightfully queer entry into the burgeoning genre of climate fiction.

For the nearly 50 years that the Women’s House of Detention stood in Greenwich Village, it housed women and trans people who had committed the crimes of being politically outspoken, poor, or gender nonconforming. By delving into the history and lives of this forgotten community, historian Ryan makes “a uniquely queer case for prison abolition.”

YA categorization aside, queer readers of all ages should make a beeline for this big-hearted story of first love and finding oneself. After being outed at her old school, Yami is determined not to let the white, rich kids at her Slayton Catholic find out she’s gay. But that plan gets a lot more complicated when she meets the only out queer person at her new school: the frustratingly adorable, clever, and talented Bo.

Eve, the protagonist and narrator of Fishman’s first novel, is completely in love with Romi, her doting, practically perfect girlfriend of two years. So there’s no reason for Eve to go posting nudes online in search of validation, right? But she does anyway, and that’s how she becomes entangled with nervous, beautiful Olivia and the intensely charismatic Nathan. What starts as occasional trysts with the couple eventually grows into something more complex and emotionally fraught, leading Eve to reevaluate her own relationship to sex and power.

When the unnamed queer narrator of Songsiridej’s debut meets the much-older choreographer at an artists’ residency, she is initially repulsed by his loud, domineering manner. But a chance encounter back in Boston erupts into an all-consuming affair that sparks the question of what it really means to have agency in a relationship.

Kadlec’s memoir-in-essays traces her journey from good Midwestern evangelical girl to public (and very online) queer community advocate. From chapter to chapter, she deftly moves between topics both cultural—like celebrity purity culture—and deeply personal, such as her now-ended youthful marriage to a pastor’s son.

For her first adult novel, sapphic YA author extraordinaire LaCour spins a sweeping tale of star-crossed queer love between two young women who have found themselves adrift amid the sprawl Los Angeles. When florist Emilie and bartender Sara first meet while both working at the restaurant Yerba Buena, the spark is immediate. But can their love survive their pasts catching up to them?

The Song of Achilles but make it trans—literally: Deane’s electrifying novel reimagines Achilles as a trans woman who has fled her home to live as a woman under the care of the kallai, the transgender priestess of Aphrodite. But Odysseus and the gods have other plans, and in exchange for the woman’s body of her dreams, Athena compels Achilles to seek glory in war against the Hittites—even if it means invoking the wrath of the cruel, immortal Helen.

When the final four women in a Bachelor-esque dating competition arrive in the wooded wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, they expect the usual reality TV shenanigans: sleep deprivation, producer manipulation, too much alcohol. Instead, they find Patricia, a local living alone in the woods who is desperate for connection. The result: a delightfully unhinged and irrepressibly queer romp through American media culture and genre convention.

After nearly 20 years of living in a men’s prison as a trans woman, Carlotta Mercedes is released on parole and returns to her native New York City—only to find it very much changed from what she remembers. On her own in post-gentrification Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Carlotta struggles to reconcile with her son and reunite with a family that seems unwilling to accept her for who she truly is. Hannaham’s follow-up to his PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Delicious Foods is at once a sweeping love letter to Brooklyn and an unforgettable condemnation of the prison industrial complex.