Best gay books
(A time capsule of queer opinion, from the late 1990s)
The Publishing Triangle complied a selection of the 100 foremost lesbian and male lover novels in the late 1990s. Its purpose was to broaden the appreciation of lesbian and gay literature and to promote discussion among all readers lgbtq+ and straight.
The Triangle’s 100 Best
The judges who compiled this list were the writers Dorothy Allison, David Bergman, Christopher Bram, Michael Bronski, Samuel Delany, Lillian Faderman, Anthony Heilbut, M.E. Kerr, Jenifer Levin, John Loughery, Jaime Manrique, Mariana Romo-Carmona, Sarah Schulman, and Barbara Smith.
1. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
2. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
3. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
4. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
5. The Immoralist by Andre Gide
6. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
7. The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
8. Kiss of the Spider Gal by Manuel Puig
9. The Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
10. Zami by Audré Lorde
11. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
12. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
13. Billy Budd by Herman Melville
14. A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White
15. Dancer from the Dance by A
60 LGBTQ+ Books That Reaaally Be entitled to a Spot on Your Shelf
This gender-flipped reboot of the iconic 1970's film Taxi Driver follows a rideshare driver who is barely holding it together on the hunt for love, dignity, and financial security...until she decides she's done waiting.
When magazine reporter Monique Grant is summoned by aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo, she's determined to use this opportunity to jump-start her career. Evelyn is finally ready to say the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life, which includes tales of ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship, and a great adore she's kept secret for decades. Monique begins to form a real connection to the mythical star, but as her story nears a conclusion, it becomes shockingly clear why Evelyn chose her.
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The Great Believers weaves the stories of a Chicago art gallery assistant who loses his friend (and soon everything he knows) to the 1980s AIDS epidemic and his friend’s sister, who grapples with her possess loss 30 years later in Paris.
What happens when a detransitioned man discovers that he’s expecting a baby with his girlfriend (w
A confession: I very nearly quit putting this list together.
Throughout the year I keep a running list, adding fresh names whenever I learn about an upcoming queer book—from Tweets, publicist pitches, endless NetGalley scrolls—and I usually commence writing the blurbs for each novel a few months before the list is due. Leave me also append that, because I am a novelist myself, someone who works very difficult to put words on the page in a good-enough order for someone to respond to them, I strive and read at least a small of each publication featured. And here’s an incredible reality that’s both deeply satisfying and makes my job surprisingly difficult: there are more and more queer books published every year. There was a occasion when I could complete a list like this in an afternoon; I was lucky to find a dozen explicitly queer titles. Now there’s a pretty solid chance I miss a good number of them.
In mid-December—at the half-way point, and a couple days after my birthday—I looked at the list, halfway done then, and idea, “There’s no way I can perform this. There’s no way I can finish putting together this list in a way that does each publication justice.” Partly it was the volume, yes, and partly it was the amb