How serendipitous for us queers who love to read that October is LGBT History Month and National Book Month. What better way to celebrate than reading books by queers for queers? Answer: there is none. This list is ordered by publication year, from 1928 to 2017, to provide a sense of how queer literature has progressed throughout the years. I’ve also linked queer bookstores you can support by buying these books, but don’t forget to search your local libraries as well! Libraries are one of the most important free resources we have—don’t let them go to waste.
Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf
Tired of not seeing queer representation in the classics? Virginia Woolf has had you covered for nearly 100 years. Orlando tells the story of a young man, Orlando, who wakes up one day in a woman’s body. But this could never happen, so why is it subtitled “a biography?” Well, it’s a fictionalized biography of her lover, Vita Sackville-West, spanning 300 years. Orlando is a love letter, the longest, and certainly one of the most beautifully written.
Orlando wakes up a woman, and Woolf walks us through all of the discoveries and relationships she makes in her typical flowery language and long, breathless run-ons. This is definitely a book to read twice if you want to catch all of the wondrous details, which are entirely too much to write here.
Buy it from A Room of One’s Own, named after Woolf’s famous essay, a queer bookstore located in Madison, WI.
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
Zami is a sexual coming of age memoir. Never heard of a biomythogrpahy? I hadn’t either, until I read this. Zami is Audre Lorde’s creation of the genre; a combination of history, biography, and myth. Much of the book is dedicated to the women that Lorde knew and loved (and perhaps hated) throughout her life. Lorde details her experiences as a child, a teenager, of her working life, and her time in Mexico, where she goes to escape McCarthyism.
Make your purchase at Bluestockings Cooperative, a “collectively-run activist center, community space and feminist bookstore that offers mutual aid, harm reduction support, non-judgmental resource research and a warming/cooling place that is radically accepting of all genders, cultures, expansive sexualities and identities.” I think Lorde would have loved Bluestockings.
Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette
Tragic, haunting, unforgettable, Paul Monette’s AIDS memoir will stick with you for a long, long time. If you want a book that will make you sob, that you’ll feel in your bones, this is the one for you. Monette tells the story of his and his partner, Rog’s love and life as Rog get sick with HIV and dies from AIDS. For young people like me who have been unaffected by it, the AIDS epidemic is one of recent history’s scariest stories. I don’t mean to put it so lightly. It was a terrible time in LGBTQ history; but this story is not one of it’s horrors and the death surrounding the time; it is one of love, passion, and solidarity.
Get it from Philly AIDS Thrift @ Giovanni’s Room, “the oldest & very best LGBTQ & feminist bookstore in the country.”
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
A collection of short stories and a collection of genres within them. Carmen Maria Machado expertly, and at times, not-so-expertly (read: “Especially Heinous”) combines horror with comedy with physiological realism with fantasy. Machado’s debut is all about women and their physical bodies. Within its eight stories, Her Body and Other Parties contains queerness, feminism, sex, and social commentary that left me thinking what the fuck. Holy shit. My favorite story to come back to is “The Husband Stitch.” It is a retelling of a story I was familiar with in my childhood: “The Green Ribbon.” Some of my other favorites are “Eight Bites,” a chilling critique on diet culture, and “Inventory,” wherein the narrator remembers all of her past sexual partners against the backdrop of a plague.
Get it from Charis, an independent feminist bookstore.
RED INC. 