Happy LGBT History Month! We are, of course, celebrating as we celebrate everything over here – with books! Specifically, with both fiction and nonfiction that pay tribute to LGBT history.
Fiction
Middle Grade
Alice Austen Lived Here by Alex Gino
Sam is very in touch with their own queer identity. They’re nonbinary, and their best friend, TJ, is nonbinary as well. Sam’s family is very cool with it… as long as Sam remembers that nonbinary kids are also required to clean their rooms, do their homework, and try not to antagonize their teachers too much.
The teacher-respect thing is hard when it comes to Sam’s history class, because their teacher seems to believe that only Dead Straight Cis White Men are responsible for history. When Sam’s home borough of Staten Island opens up a contest for a new statue, Sam finds the perfect non-DSCWM subject: photographer Alice Austen, whose house has been turned into a museum, and who lived with a female partner for decades.
Soon, Sam’s project isn’t just about winning the contest. It’s about discovering a rich queer history that Sam’s a part of — a queer history that no longer needs to be quiet, as long as there are kids like Sam and TJ to stand up for it.
The Civil War of Amos Abernathy by Michael Leali
Amos Abernathy lives for history. Literally. He’s been a historical reenactor nearly all his life. But when a cute new volunteer arrives at his Living History Park, Amos finds himself wondering if there’s something missing from history: someone like the two of them.
Amos is sure there must have been LGBTQ+ people in nineteenth-century Illinois. His search turns up Albert D. J. Cashier, a Civil War soldier who might have identified as a trans man if he’d lived today. Soon Amos starts confiding in his newfound friend by writing letters in his journal—and hatches a plan to share Albert’s story with his divided twenty-first century town. It may be an uphill battle, but it’s one that Amos is ready to fight.
Young Adult
Pulp by Robin Talley
In 1955, eighteen-year-old Janet Jones keeps the love she shares with her best friend Marie a secret. It’s not easy being gay in Washington, DC, in the age of McCarthyism, but when she discovers a series of books about women falling in love with other women, it awakens something in Janet. As she juggles a romance she must keep hidden and a newfound ambition to write and publish her own story, she risks exposing herself—and Marie—to a danger all too real.
Sixty-two years later, Abby Zimet can’t stop thinking about her senior project and its subject—classic 1950s lesbian pulp fiction. Between the pages of her favorite book, the stresses of Abby’s own life are lost to the fictional hopes, desires and tragedies of the characters she’s reading about. She feels especially connected to one author, a woman who wrote under the pseudonym “Marian Love,” and becomes determined to track her down and discover her true identity.
In this novel told in dual narratives, New York Times-bestselling author Robin Talley weaves together the lives of two young women connected across generations through the power of words. A stunning story of bravery, love, how far we’ve come and how much farther we have to go.
Buy it: Bookshop | B&N | Amazon
Right Beside You by Tucker Shaw
High school has just ended and Eddie is at a loss for what’s next. He had a falling out with his best friend, and he never really related to the rest of his peers in the sleepy Colorado town he calls home. The future is bleak.
Until his ancient and eccentric great aunt Cookie asks him to care for her in New York City as she recuperates from an illness. Eddie leaps at the opportunity. Soon after he arrives at her tiny Greenwich Village apartment, homebound Cookie asks Eddie to use her vintage polaroid camera to snap pictures of her favorite places she can no longer visit. But something’s unusual about this camera. When he takes a photo, he’s launched back in time to an entirely different New York of the early 20th century.
As Eddie explores the underground queer life of the 1930s, he discovers new undercurrents of his own identity. Not to mention a dangerously handsome boy in scuffed boots and tattered stovepipe trousers who keeps popping up in his visions of the past.
But when Eddie begins to develop a crush on the mercurial Francis, a cute baker named Theo enters the picture—and he’s in the present. Caught between timelines and feelings, Eddie must make a decision about what he’s willing to chase: his romantic fantasies of the past or a reality that might just be what he’s wanted all along.
Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian
It’s 1989 in New York City, and for three teens, the world is changing.
Reza is an Iranian boy who has just moved to the city with his mother to live with his stepfather and stepbrother. He’s terrified that someone will guess the truth he can barely acknowledge about himself. Reza knows he’s gay, but all he knows of gay life are the media’s images of men dying of AIDS.
Judy is an aspiring fashion designer who worships her uncle Stephen, a gay man with AIDS who devotes his time to activism as a member of ACT UP. Judy has never imagined finding romance…until she falls for Reza and they start dating.
Art is Judy’s best friend, their school’s only out and proud teen. He’ll never be who his conservative parents want him to be, so he rebels by documenting the AIDS crisis through his photographs.
As Reza and Art grow closer, Reza struggles to find a way out of his deception that won’t break Judy’s heart—and destroy the most meaningful friendship he’s ever known.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | B&N
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo
Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can’t remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.
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 Lily. With deportation looming over her father—despite his hard-won citizenship—Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.
Buy it: Bookshop | B&N | Amazon
Lion’s Legacy by L.C. Rosen
Seventeen-year-old Tennessee Russo’s life is imploding. His boyfriend has been cheating on him, and all his friends know about it. Worse, they expect him to just accept his ex’s new relationship and make nice. So when his father, a famous archaeologist and reality show celebrity whom he hasn’t seen in two years, shows up unexpectedly and offers to take him on an adventure, Tennessee only has a few choices:
1. Stay, mope, regret it forever.
2. Go, try to reconcile with Dad, become his sidekick again.
3. Go, but make it his adventure, and Dad will be the sidekick.
The object of his father’s latest quest, the Rings of the Sacred Band of Thebes, is too enticing to say no to. Finding artifacts related to the troop of ancient Greek soldiers, composed of one-hundred-and-fifty gay couples, means navigating ruins, deciphering ancient mysteries, and maybe meeting a cute boy.
But will his dad let Tennessee do the right thing with the rings if they find them? And what is the right thing? Who does queer history belong to?
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | B&N
Renegade Girls by Nora Neus (text) and Julie Robine (illustration)
Seventeen-year-old Helena “Nell” Cusack came to New York this summer looking for a story—a real story. She dreams of one day writing hard-hitting articles for the New York Chronicle, but so far she’s only managed to land a job as a lowly society reporter. That is, until Alice Austen strolls into her life, an audacious street photographer who encourages Nell to shake up polite society…and maybe also take a chance on love.
When her best friend, Lucia, is injured while working in a garment factory, Nell is determined to crack the story wide open. Posing as a seamstress, she reports on the conditions from the inside, making a name for herself as the Chronicle’s first ever stunt girl. But as Nell’s reporting gains momentum, so do the objections of those who oppose her. Will Nell continue to seek justice—even if it hurts her in the end?
Based on real-life stunt girl Nell Nelson and photographer Alice Austen, this tenderly drawn narrative is about bringing buried stories to light and the bravery of first love.
All Out ed. by Saundra Mitchell
Peek Inside the Anthology here.
Take a journey through time and genres and discover a past where queer figures live, love and shape the world around them. Seventeen of the best young adult authors across the queer spectrum have come together to create a collection of beautifully written diverse historical fiction for teens.
From a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood set in war-torn 1870s Mexico featuring a transgender soldier, to two girls falling in love while mourning the death of Kurt Cobain, forbidden love in a sixteenth-century Spanish convent or an asexual girl discovering her identity amid the 1970s roller-disco scene, All Out tells a diverse range of stories across cultures, time periods and identities, shedding light on an area of history often ignored or forgotten.
Buy it: Bookshop | B&N | Amazon | Powell’s
Adult
My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson
Born into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, Earl “Trey” Singleton III leaves his overbearing parents and their expectations behind by running away to New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. In the City, Trey meets up with a cast of characters that change his life forever―from civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, who he meets in a Harlem bathhouse, to his landlord, Fred Trump, who he clashes with and outfoxes. He volunteers at a renegade home hospice for AIDS patients, and after being put to the test by gay rights activist Larry Kramer and civil rights leader Dorothy Cotton, becomes a founding member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Along the way Trey attempts to navigate past traumas and searches for ways to maintain familial relationships―all while seeking the meaning of life in the midst of so much death.
Nearly Roadkill by Kate Bornstein and Caitlin Sullivan
This cyber-erotic romantic thriller, written by two queer icons in the 1990s, has been “rebooted” for today’s readers.
In this rowdy cyber-romance originally written in the 1990s, two people meet online and fall in love in every guise they can manage. As Scratch and Winc go from anonymous lovers to accidental heroes and gender outlaws, they expose the shadowy Web stretched between technology and capitalist greed, nearly becoming roadkill on the internet superhighway. With a little help from their friends including a brave teenager and a mysterious hacker, these darling rebels fight government intervention and find chosen family in this eerily prescient tale.
The 30th anniversary “reboot” edition includes an updated lens for today’s readers, as GenZ investigative journalist Drew uncovers what just might be the greatest queer love story of all time. Like Octavia Butler’s PARABLE OF THE SOWER, Margaret Atwood’s A HANDMAID’S TALE, and George Orwell’s 1984, the return of NEARLY ROADKILL is right on time with urgent lessons for our contemporary landscape.
Lavender House by Lev A.C. Rosen
When you’re a cop in 1952 and your colleagues bust you in a raid on a gay bar, your career options become extremely limited. Former San Francisco Police Inspector Evander Mills’ retirement plan is to drink until his money is gone, then pitch himself into the bay. Until a widow sits down next to Andy at the bar and offers him a private gig―find out what happened to her wife.
Persuaded to take the case, Andy accompanies the widow to Lavender House, the family seat of recently deceased Irene Lamontaine, head of the Lamontaine Soap empire. At this secluded estate, where none of the residents, or the staff, need to hide their identities, Andy finds a bewitching freedom.
He also immediately finds himself a pawn in a family game of old money, subterfuge, and jealousy―and Irene’s death was only the beginning. The gates of Lavender House can’t lock out the real world, and it turns out that not even a soap empire can keep everyone clean.
Let’s Get Back to the Party by Zak Salih
Set in the year between the 2015 Supreme Court marriage equality ruling and the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre, Let’s Get Back to the Party explores the intertwined lives of two gay men named Sebastian Mote and Oscar Burnham: estranged childhood friends who reconnect as adults in Washington, DC.
Thirty-somethings who came of age after the AIDS crisis but before the current era where they might have had the comfort of an out adolescence, the two have grown into very different men. Sebastian, a straitlaced suburban high school teacher mourning the end of a long-term relationship, finds his orderly lifestyle threatened by the appearance of Arthur Ayer, a gay student so comfortable in his own skin that Sebastian finds himself dangerously obsessed with the teenager. Oscar, furious and defiant in the face of what he sees as the death of queer culture, begins a confusing relationship—is it friendship or something more?—with once-eminent novelist Sean Stokes, known for graphic stories of pre-AIDS hedonism. Alternating chapters from Sebastian and Oscar’s points of view, Let’s Get Back to the Party recounts their mirrored struggles with generational envy, cultural identity, the traumas of history, and, ultimately, each other.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | B&N
After Sappho by Shelby Wynn Schwartz
“The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho,” so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths: in 1892, Rina Faccio trades her needlepoint for a pen; in 1902, Romaine Brooks sails for Capri with nothing but her clotted paintbrushes; and in 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: “I want to make life fuller and fuller.”
Writing in cascading vignettes, Selby Wynn Schwartz spins an invigorating tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives. A luminous meditation on creativity, education, and identity, After Sappho announces a writer as ingenious as the trailblazers of our past.
There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood by Rasheed Newson (June 2, 2026)
Xavier C. Barlow, one of Hollywood’s young Black stars taking the industry by storm in the late 1950s, is Skyline Studios’s ambitious attempt to rival Sidney Poitier’s burgeoning success. His arrival into the industry is calculated, his charm is magnetic, and his seductive screen presence appeals to both audiences and celebrities across generations.
But years later, after Xavier dies at the height of his fame, Aaron Touissant—Skyline’s designated backlot fixer who helps the studio’s stars stay as deep in the closet as humanly possible—is finally ready to expose the powerful culprits responsible for his untimely death.
Nonfiction
Young Adult
Hick by Sarah Miller
Lorena Hickok came from nothing. She was on her own from the age of 14, cooking and scrubbing for one family after another as she struggled to finish school. But the girl who secretly longed for affection discovered she had a talent with words.
That talent allowed Hick to carve out a place for herself in the male-dominated newsrooms of the Midwest where she earned bylines on everything from football to opera to politics. By age 35 she’d become one of the Associated Press’s top reporters.
At the moment her career was taking off, Hick was assigned to cover Eleanor Roosevelt during FDR’s presidential campaign. By the close of 1932, Hick was head over heels in love with the wife of the president-elect. And her life would never be the same.
Acclaimed author Sarah Miller read the 3500 letters that exist between Lorena Hickock and Eleanor Roosevelt to reconstruct their friendship and love, and bring Hick’s story to a new generation.
Adult
Flamboyants: the Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I’d Known by George M. Johnson, illustrated by Charly Palmer
In Flamboyants, George M. Johnson celebrates writers, performers, and activists from 1920s Black America whose sexualities have been obscured throughout history. Through 14 essays, Johnson reveals how American culture has been shaped by icons who are both Black andQueer – and whose stories deserve to be celebrated in their entirety.
Interspersed with personal narrative, powerful poetry, and illustrations by award-winning illustrator Charly Palmer, Flamboyants looks to the past for understanding as to how Black and Queer culture has defined the present and will continue to impact the future. With candid prose and an unflinching lens towards truth and hope, George M. Johnson brings young adult readers an inspiring collection of biographies that will encourage teens today to be unabashed in their layered identities.
A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski
American history abounds with unknown or ignored examples of queer life, from the ineffectiveness of sodomy laws in the colonies to the prevalence of cross-dressing women soldiers in the Civil War and resistance to homophobic social purity movements. Bronski highlights such groundbreaking moments of queer history as:
• In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage.
•Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to “Publick Universal Friend,” refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in upstate New York.
• In the mid-19th century, internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized “female marriage.”
• in the late 1920s, Augustus Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter.
Informative and empowering, this engrossing and revelatory treatise emphasizes that there is no American history without queer history.
Forbidden Desire by Sindu Rajasekaran
Before the British colonised the Indian subcontinent, it was largely protofeminist and queer.
People from across the socio-economic spectrum explored and expressed their gender and sexuality in myriad ways. But to prudish Victorian eyes, this was scandalous. The Empire consistently curtailed Indian (wo)mxn’s sexual agency and the freedoms of sexual minorities. All desire outside the heteronormative was marked as aberrant and sexually unchaste.
Colonial authorities passed a posy of laws to criminalise sexually agentive (wo)mxn and queer folks. From nautch dancers to courtesans, effeminate mxn, masculine womxn, trans and queer persons, even ascetic renunciants were classified as ‘sexual deviants’. Old prejudices were mapped onto new ones. Colonial India, in effect, amalgamated ancient and medieval fundamentalist codes of heteronormativity with Victorian attitudes towards sex.
Drawing from a wide range of disciplines including feminist historiography, anthropology, histories of sexuality, South Asian queer theory, decolonial and subaltern studies, the history of medicine, legislative history, and informed by the author’s primary archival research, Forbidden Desire aims to undo the deleterious effects of British colonialism on India’s rich queer past.
Queer Moderns: Max Ewing’s Jazz Age New York by Alice T. Friedman
In Queer Moderns, Alice Friedman tells the fascinating story of the queer avant-garde of the 1920s and ’30s in New York, Paris, and Venice, as seen through the eyes of Max Ewing (1903–1934), a young musician, photographer, and man-about-town who, although virtually unknown today, moved in extraordinary circles. In his photographs and letters, we meet the rising stars of modern art, music, dance, and literature and enter a world of interracial friendship, “queer space,” and experimentation that shone brightly before being swept away by the Depression. It is a remarkable story that reveals that the history of modernism is more queer and more Black than previously recognized.
In the 1920s, Ewing became part of an international coterie of artists led by Carl Van Vechten and Muriel Draper. In Europe, he was entertained by Gertrude Stein, met Stravinsky, and took a road trip with Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney. In 1928, in a closet in his apartment, Ewing created the Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits, an installation of photos of his favorite celebrities—Black and white, clothed and nude. For his Carnival of Venice, he took portraits of more than a hundred friends—including Paul Robeson, Berenice Abbott, Isamu Noguchi, Agnes de Mille, and E. E. Cummings—posed in front of a backdrop of Saint Mark’s Square.
Like a character from a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ewing joined the party and then died tragically, unable to accept the end of his era or the lost dream of a new way of living. His story sheds new light on modernism and an artistic milieu that was ahead of its time.
Thank you for Calling the Lesbian Line by Elizabeth Lovatt
An author creates a narrative blend of history, cultural criticism, and memoir in celebration of everyday queer women, based on a lesbian helpline that existed in North London in the nineties.
With warmth and humour, Elizabeth Lovatt reimagines the women who called and volunteered for the Lesbian Line in the 1990s, whilst also tracing her own journey from accidentally coming out to disastrous dates to finding her chosen family. With callers and agents alike dealing with first crushes and break-ups, sex and marriage, loneliness and illness, this is a celebration of the ordinary lives of queer women.
Through these revelations of the complexities, difficulties and revelries of everyday life, Lovatt investigates the ethics of writing about queer ‘sheros’ and the role living-history plays in the way we live today. What do we owe to our lesbian forebears? What can we learn from them when facing racism, transphobia and ableism in the community today?
Steeped in pop culture references and feminist and queer theory, Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line is a timely and vital exploration of how lesbian identity continues to remake and redefine itself in the 21st century, and where it might lead us in the future.
When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan
Hugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer is a groundbreaking exploration of the LGBT history of Brooklyn, from the early days of Walt Whitman in the 1850s up through the queer women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and beyond. No other book, movie, or exhibition has ever told this sweeping story. Not only has Brooklyn always lived in the shadow of queer Manhattan neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Harlem, but there has also been a systematic erasure of its queer history—a great forgetting.
Ryan is here to unearth that history for the first time. In intimate, evocative, moving prose he discusses in new light the fundamental questions of what history is, who tells it, and how we can only make sense of ourselves through its retelling; and shows how the formation of the Brooklyn we know today is inextricably linked to the stories of the incredible people who created its diverse neighborhoods and cultures. Through them, When Brooklyn Was Queer brings Brooklyn’s queer past to life, and claims its place as a modern classic.
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton
The story of Christine Jorgensen, America’s first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives—ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence.
Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials—early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films—Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the “father of American gynecology,” to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible.
Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of “cross dressing” and canonical black literary works that express black men’s access to the “female within,” Black on Both Sides concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don’t Cry out of narrative convenience. Reconstructing these theoretical and historical trajectories furthers our imaginative capacities to conceive more livable black and trans worlds.
The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports by Michael Waters
The story of the early trans athletes and Olympic bureaucrats who lit the flame for today’s culture wars.
In December 1935, Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes.
In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany’s atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC’s nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender.
Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion by Eleanor Medhurst
The way we dress can show or hide who we are; make us fit in, make us stand out, or make our own community. Yet “lesbian fashion” has been strangely overlooked. What secrets can it reveal about the lives and status of queer women through the ages?
The lesbian past is slippery: often deliberately hidden, edited or left unrecorded. “Unsuitable” restores to history the dazzlingly varied clothes worn by women who love women, from top hats to violet tiaras. This story spans centuries and countries, from “Gentleman Jack” in nineteenth-century Yorkshire and Queen Christina of seventeenth-century Sweden, to Paris modernism, genderqueer Berlin, butch/femme bar culture and gay rights activists–via drag kings, “Vogue” editors and the Harlem Renaissance.
This book is a kaleidoscope of the margins and the mainstream, celebrating trans lesbian style, Black lesbian style, and gender nonconformity. You don’t have to be queer or fashionable to be enthralled by this hidden history. “Unsuitable” lights it up for the world to see, in all its finery.
Buy it: Amazon
Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution by David Carter
In 1969, a series of riots over police action against The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, changed the longtime landscape of the homosexual in society literally overnight. Since then the event itself has become the stuff of legend, with relatively little hard information available on the riots themselves. Now, based on hundreds of interviews, an exhaustive search of public and previously sealed files, and over a decade of intensive research into the history and the topic, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution brings this singular event to vivid life in this, the definitive story of one of history’s most singular events.
