Here are 15 books you should read this Pride Month
06/22/24
15 books to get you started reading this Pride Month
Ten Speed Press, Crown, Penguin Books
Whether you like fiction, nonfiction, historical fiction, biographies, or memoirs, our Pride Month picks have you covered.
These 15 books don't just span a range of genres, but also cover the many intersections of LGBTQ+ identity. Race, class, gender, health, immigration status, or housing status are all addressed. And these books are all contemporary having been published within the past five years.
While this list is by no means exhaustive, here are some picks to get you started this month if you're LGBTQ+ and looking to get into the spirit, or if you're not and you want to learn more.
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The T in LGBT: Everything You Need to Know About Being Trans
Sourcebooks
This bestseller from Jamie Raines weaves the YouTube star's experience of transitioning with accounts from other transgender people. It aims to educate readers on "so many topics surrounding gender identity: realizing you're trans, starting hormones, considering surgery, and everything in between."
Making Room: Three Decades of Fighting for Beds, Belonging, and a Safe Place for LGBTQ Youth
Convergent Books
Published in May, Carl Siciliano's hard-hitting novel documents his experience working with LGBTQ+ youth in New York City during the AIDs epidemic. It also honors the Black nonbinary youth whose murder drove his fight.
We Are Everywhere
Ten Speed Press
Published in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, We Are Everywhere by Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown provides a detailed photographic history of the Queer Liberation Movement.
Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring
Harper
New York City-based artist Keith Haring was known for creating bold linework prints to inspire change at the height of the AIDs epidemic. Brad Gooch's 2024 biography of Haring explores the figure's legacy in both art and activism.
All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
George M. Johnson's powerful 2020 memoir "weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys," exploring topics like "gender identity, toxic masculinity, brotherhood, family, structural marginalization, consent, and Black joy."
Gender Queer: A Memoir
Oni Press
Gender Queer is currently the most banned book in the United States. What started as a way for author Maia Kobabe to explain nonbinary and asexual identity is now one of the most influential books of the 21st century.
Your Driver Is Waiting
Doubleday
Brimming with social satire, Priya Guns's novel takes on race, class, and allyship as it follows a young Sri Lankan ride-share driver who falls for a rich, white customer.
Nightcrawling
Vintage
Nightcrawling follows a young Black woman living in Oakland who's forced to turn to prostitution to survive before she becomes entangled in a police scandal. Leila Mottley's 2022 novel explores the injustices of poverty, racism, sexism, and the criminal justice system.
The Grief Keeper
Nancy Paulsen Books
Alexandra Villasante's 2019 Young Adult novel follows an undocumented immigrant as she undergoes a risky new experiment for the chance of staying in the country, becoming a "grief keeper" take on someone else's shame, regret, anxiety, and grief.
Cantoras
Vintage
Beginning in Uruguay in the 1970s where homosexuality is criminalized, five women return to the same cape to meet in secret over three decades in Carolina De Robertis's brilliant 2020 novel.
Finding Latinx
Vintage
Stories from Afrolatino, Indigenous, Muslim, queer, and undocumented voices converge in this powerful collection from Paola Ramos. The essays shine a light on the experiences of those who "have been chronically overlooked in how the diverse population of almost sixty million Latinos in the U.S. has been represented."
I Will Greet the Sun Again
Hogarth
Just published on June 4 of this year, Khashayar J. Khabushani's novel explores what it means to be queer and Muslim as it follows a young Iranian immigrant and his family as they struggle to make ends meet.
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Penguin Books
Ocean Vuong's 2021 novel explores race, class, masculinity, addiction, violence, and trauma. Written as "a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read" the book follows the love between a single mother and her son living in Vietnam.
Legendary Children
Penguin Books
If you're a fan of RuPaul's Drag Race, Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez's 2020 guide dives into LGBTQ+ history through how it's presented on the hit reality show, which the authors believe has become a "museum of queer cultural and social history."
Tomorrow Will Be Different
Crown
Though Tomorrow Will Be Different is a memoir and more. Deleware Sen. Sarah McBride also encapsulates the fight for LGBTQ+ equality. The book features a forward by President Joe Biden who wrote, "If you’re living your own internal struggle, this book can help you find a way to live authentically, fully, and freely."
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