As June is the official Pride month- set up to recognise the impact of members of the LGBTQ+ community, I thought it would be good to share some recommendations of books to read by or about members of the community.
I have mentioned many times that I love the Tales of the City series by Armistead Maupin, which I felt gave me an introduction into the varied rainbow of identities within the LGBTQ+ community (whilst of course being endlessly entertaining, funny, and at times poignant- like all good fiction, really.)
I also enjoy the writing of Michael Cunningham (most famously of The Hours), but I also enjoyed By Nightfall.
I wrote last year about Rita Mae Brown’s Ruby Fruit Jungle, one of the earliest fictional bildungsroman novels of a young woman’s coming-of-age encounter with lesbianism, as well as Carol (originally published as The Price of Salt) by Patricia Highsmith.
And of course, any scholar of modernist women’s studies cannot forget Virginia Woolf’s love letter to Vita Sackville-West in the form of Orlando, (which I discussed in Sunday’s essay), a sweeping novel in which an ambiguous narrator’s gender identity changes throughout time as the differences in their experience of the world are revealed.
My teenager loves Alice Oseman’s novels (several of which I have also read), including Heartstopper (I challenge you to watch the Netflix series without tearing up!) and Loveless, which examines asexuality. Oseman has even been given her own pop-up shop in London this summer.
But this led me to wonder: do you have any good recommendations of contemporary (or classic) LGBTQ+ writing?
Please share any and all books you would recommend so that we can all add them to our TBR piles this Pride month! 😀
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Anything by Alison Bechdel! I’d also mention the ones that made it into movies like Blue is the warmest colour (a graphic novel), and Call me by your name. The short story that led to Brokeback Mountain is also unforgettable.
Alan Hollinghurst is a wonderful writer - I started with The Line Of Beauty when it won the Booker Prize, and loved it so much I've since read pretty much all his books. The Swimming Pool Summer stood out for me too, but if you enjoy literary fiction seek him out.