Trying to list the very best LGBTQ+ books—or even the LGBTQ+ authors who have changed my life—is, it turns out, a near-painful task. As a lifelong book nerd who came out in my mid-20s and promptly set out to devour every book I’d missed about queer and trans culture, I can attest that it is, in fact, impossible to read everything. That said, it’s a lot easier to be out and proud when you have some of the greatest writers and thinkers in literary history figuratively holding your hand.
To that end, Vogue has rounded up 27 of the greatest books of all time by queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming writers. Whether you’re an queer-fiction pro revisiting old favorites or a newly out member of the community looking to brush up, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll find at least one book on this list to treasure.
Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)
Not only was this book inspired by the tumultuous life of Woolf’s longtime lover Vita Sackville-West, but it’s also considered to be one of the earliest examples of trans fiction. In the novel, a British nobleman undergoes a sex change, and proceeds to live for more than 300 years without aging. (Nonbinary actor Emma Corrin starred in a London stage adaptation of the book in 2022, bringing new life to Woolf’s century-old tale.)
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (1952)
If you tend to watch Todd Haynes’s 2015 film Carol each Christmas, you a) are most definitely gay and b) probably already have some familiarity with the source material: Highsmith’s 1950s romance novel follows two women in what one might call an age-gap relationship as they take a cross-country road trip and try to figure out what they mean to one another.
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956)
Arguably the best-known and most enduring portrait of Black queer masculinity in Western literature, this novel concerns itself primarily with the life of David, an American who becomes entangled in an affair with an Italian man he meets at a Parisian gay bar. (Anecdotally, one of my all-time favorite quotes about the nature of belonging comes from Giovanni’s Room: “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”)
The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell (1977)
Part gay manifesto, part collection of fantasitcal vignettes, Mitchell’s book is one of the defining pieces of 1970s queer literature. Originally self-published, it was out of print for years before its first republication in 2016. (It’s worth trying to track down a copy of the 2019 reissue, however, which was put out by Nightboat Books and features a stunning preface by artist Tourmaline.)
The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)
If you’ve only ever seen the 1985 Spielberg film of the same name (or the 2023 version, directed by Blitz Bazawule), it’s definitely worth reading Walker’s original depiction of the long-standing and richly, gorgeously queer bond between protagonist Celie and her fiercely independent, wildly rebellious “friend” Shug Avery. (Spielberg has admitted that he could have depicted Celie and Shug’s relationship more thoughtfully onscreen, but at least we’ll always have the book.)
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde (1982)
This biomythography by Lorde—one of history’s leading Black lesbian and feminist thinkers—takes its name from a Caribbean word for what Lorde describes as “women who work together as friends and lovers.” The author’s description of pursuing queer love and finding her community amid the lesbian scene of Cuernavaca, Mexico, during the Cold War era is impossible to forget.
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (1992)
The Southern queer experience (if, indeed, there is such a unified thing) often gets short shrift in the dominant literary fold, but Allison’s semi-autobiographical novel—a moving and often painful coming-of-age story about surviving poverty, violence, and familial abuse—is richly worth reading for its depiction of the lesbian struggle in 1950s South Carolina.
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (1993)
The proof of Feinberg’s staunch commitment to social justice and queer and trans liberation is, in some ways, encapsulated by the fact that hir autobiographical novel is available for free on Feinberg’s own website, making this story about the often-simultaneous violence and joy faced by gender-nonconforming individuals available to the young members of the LGBTQ+ community who might most need to read it.
Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles (1994)
“Apart from the fact of trying to figure out if Chelsea Girls is a novel or a memoir or a collection of stories (or whether it’s really even a book at all), I think I mainly want to tell you that in the time of the writing of Chelsea Girls—which was long: 1980 to 1993 was the actual time of the composition of the thing—I mainly needed to say what I thought was real,” Myles has written of this groundbreaking work about queerness, lust, violence, and desire in the East Village.
Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai (1994)
This Sri Lanka-set coming-of-age memoir has a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction to its name, and rightfully so; Selvadurai’s depiction of gay protagonist Arjie Chelvaratnam’s journey toward personal and societal acceptance within his wealthy Tamil family against the backdrop of the anti-Tamil “Black July” pogroms of 1983 is intensely affecting.
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (2006)
If you’ve ever heard a rendition of “Ring of Keys” at queeraoke and wanted to know the story behind it, look no further than Bechdel’s graphic memoir, which finds her younger self trying to work up the courage to come out and find queer love and creative fulfillment while grieving the unexpected loss of her father—himself a closeted gay man—to suicide.
Nevada by Imogen Binnie (2013)
Described by author Isle McElroy as “a novel that made the trans experience a human experience, showing that we are just as lovable and maddening and real as any other complicated subject in fiction,” Nevada—Binnie’s chronicle of a trans woman living in Brooklyn who embarks on a West Coast road trip—has been widely credited with ushering in a sea-change in trans literature.
Redefining Realness by Janet Mock (2014)
Queer and trans memoirs are a booming genre today, but when Mock first released Redefining Realness in 2014, it stood apart as one of the few mainstream personal literary narratives centered around a Black trans woman’s journey toward self-discovery and the healing power of a like-minded community. (Luckily, it has since been joined on its shelf by Raquel Willis’s memoir, The Risk It Takes to Bloom, among others.)
Mean by Myriam Gurba (2017)
Gurba’s identity as a queer, mixed-race Chicana permeates her fascination with meanness as a cultural trope, an art form, and a kind of saving grace, leading to such delicious observations as: “Being mean to boys is fun and a second-wave feminist duty. Being rude to men who deserve it is a holy mission. Sisterhood is powerful, but being a bitch is more exhilarating. Being a bitch is spectacular.”
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi (2018)
Igbo religious deities, modern-day sexual trauma, splintered selves, and anxiety-riddled spirals come together in this debut novel from Emezi, one of Nigeria’s best-known and most widely read nonbinary authors. A TV adaptation is allegedly in the works from FX, suggesting that protagonist Ada’s story may soon transcend the page.
How to Write An Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee (2018)
Chee paints an unforgettable portrait of his life as “a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend” in this collection of essays, which touches upon everything from grieving the loss of too many friends to AIDS to tarot-reading to attempting to make it in New York City by cater-waitering at conservative cocktail parties (and much more that you’ll have to crack the book’s bright red spine to discover for yourself).
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe (2019)
In a world where trans and gender-nonconforming identities are still criminalized, Kobabe’s illustrated account of their life as a nonbinary person living in contemporary America balances deeply necessary social context with narrative specificity and visual appeal. (If the execrable hate group Moms For Liberty is trying to ban it, you know it must be worth reading.)
The Stonewall Reader, ed. New York Public Library and Jason Baumann (2019)
The Stonewall riots of 1969 are frequently cited as a flashpoint in American queer and trans history, but this deep dive into the vibrant LGBTQ+ culture that led to Stonewall adds a new layer of complexity to the event with first-person accounts and diary entries from activists representing groups including the Mattachine Society NY, the Gay Activists Alliance, and the Gay Liberation Front.
In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (2019)
In this lyrical and deeply moving memoir, Machado plumbs the depths of lesbian and bisexual history to find context for her own experience falling in love and attempting to build a life with an erratic and increasingly abusive female partner. Her story feels full of potential to help fellow queer sufferers of intimate partner violence know that they aren’t alone with their pain, no matter how great it may be.
We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, ed. Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma (2019)
Sullivan’s meticulously maintained journals (in which he first began recording the details of his life at age of 11) serve as the basis for this unmissable and wide-ranging collection, which paints a vivid portrait of a trans gay man’s quest for love, revolution, and self-understanding in San Francisco across the second half of the 20th century. If you’ve ever wanted to better understand transmasculine identity, this is most definitely the book for you.
Las Malas by Camila Sosa Villada (2019)
“I think [Las Malas] is a masterpiece,” Love the World or Get Killed Trying author Alvina Chamberland told Vogue in May, and it’s not hard to see why. The fairytale-slash-horror-story revolves around a group of Latin American trans women who perform street-based sex work in an Argentinean park, weaving magical realism into a biting portrait of the modern world.
Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin (2021)
If you’ve ever heeded the band Muna’s call to “dance in the middle of a gay bar,” this expert combination of memoir and cultural history—which is at once a response to the closure of many LGBTQ+ establishments across America and a joyful reminder to keep patronizing the remaining physical places that make us feel most queer and most alive—might just be your ideal going-out book.
You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat (2021)
A young Palestinian-American woman makes her way from Bethlehem to Brooklyn and delves into her first serious queer romance in this gorgeously written debut novel that deals expertly with its protagonist’s exploration of love, lust, bisexual identity, internalized homophobia, disordered eating, healing from trauma, and so much more.
Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (2022)
Sullivan’s protagonist, Malaya Clondon, is a fat Black girl in a rapidly gentrifying New York City that would prefer her smaller. This central tension—as well as the schism between her mother’s strict food rules and Malaya’s own growing appetite for food, community, and queer love—animates the book thoroughly and unforgettably, leaving this fat, queer reader wishing she’d come across Big Girl much earlier in life.
Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H (2023)
Two decades after the publication of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, author Lamya H provides a memoir-in-essays that speaks to a different, though no less vital, facet of queer and trans identity. Hijab Butch Blues is steeped in the author’s experience as a gender-nonconforming, queer and nonbinary young person studying the Qu’ran in an attempt to find a place for themselves and their various identities within Islam.
The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor (2023)
Chosen family can get short shrift in mainstream American society, but it’s long been one of the animating forces of LGBTQ+ life. Taylor places it at the front and center of this crackling campus novel that interrogates the ways in which young people live—together, separately, and everything in between—when the question of who they will become looms larger than almost anything else in their day-to-day existences.
A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson (2024)
Anyone hoping to gain a greater understanding of the heavy and systemic sociocultural forces that make this world deeply unsafe for trans women, and particularly trans women of color, would do well to spend some time with A Short History of Trans Misogyny. In this recently released yet already culturally indelible book, Gill-Peterson surveys trans communities around the world and provides a history of anti-trans hatred that is both unique and vital in its specificity.