Pride Guide 2025 📚

queer books to buy or borrow this month

Jun 03, 2025

Timothée Chalamet leans on a stack of books and looks out a window in "Call Me By Your Name" (2017)

This one’s about more than supporting queer writers, authors, and other artists: Trump is putting American libraries in grave danger, particularly the ones serving indigenous communities and incarcerated people. Get connected to your local library and reach out to your federal reps in the to demand that crucial funding for the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) be restored.

Essay Collections

A twenty-something Girl Going Through It, the messy protagonist of Grace Byron’s debut novel, Herculine, has long looked up to NYC’s Hot Freelance Girls, her nickname for the trans women writers who enjoyed a brief window of upward mobility back in Obama-era Jezebel and Vice. Now, one of those women, the very non-fictional Harron Walker, has—after years of tantalizing us with profiles, interviews, and even serialized fiction—finally released her own debut (charmingly reviewed by Byron herself)1.

In Aggregated Discontent: Confessions of the Last Normal Woman, Walker’s dishy yet intellectual sense of humor is on full display with essays on a broad range of topics, from reproductive healthcare for trans people, to the artist Greer Lankton, to what it actually felt like to be one of those fabled Freelance Girls. My favorite is the unexpectedly emotional piece about her grandmother, a department store clerk who found herself helping men (alleged and otherwise) in discreet pursuit of feminine clothing that they weren’t ready or able to wear publicly. Often using personal anecdotes and pop culture as her entrée, Walker sifts the liberal marketing and fascist moral panic for real stories about people who, like her, are totally normal (!)—in the sense that they, like all of us, are deserving of curious and considered writerly attention, not propaganda.

While I haven’t yet read it, Zefyr Lisowski’s Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love is another collection to look out for. “Gripping as any horror movie,” says Rax King, Uncanny explores the complexities of gender, class, and power with readings of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Antichrist (2009), Longlegs (2024), Ginger Snaps (2000), and more. (Devon Price, whose meticulously insightful newsletter I very much admire, is listed among Uncanny’s references.)

Novels

Last year, I had the good luck to read some excellent new queer fiction, among them: the very impressive Ways and Means by Daniel Lefferts2; the brutally romantic Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (whose Nation piece on the ICE abduction of Turkish university student Rumeysa Ozturk left me in pieces); and the hair-raising Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin, the grand-dame of trans horror3, which literally made me cry (from sadness, not fear) five or six times.

I also read excellent older queer fiction, most memorably several books by the dearly departed Gary Indiana. Gone Tomorrow, which follows an American writer to the bizarre Colombian set of his director friend’s art film, wastes no time breeding nightmares with an opening scene where an airport cop beats someone to death. Resentment: A Comedy follows another writer to Los Angeles, where he and a few other gay guys make their intoxicated orbit around the trial of two Menendez-like prep-school brothers accused of slaughtering their sadistic parents. (I am not easily shocked, and yet both Gone and Resentment presented me with sexual scenes—one consensual, one not—so challenging I could feel my own artistic ambitions heaving themselves upward, like an orca out of the ocean.) Though rivetingly told and originally constructed (especially the choral Resentment, which literally circles the trial on the city’s dizzying freeway interchanges), these tragic yet acidly funny books inspire a profound depression—beneath which boils the same impotent fury that drives Indiana’s characters to booze, drugs, risky sex, violent relationships, callous venality, professional opportunism, and generally nihilistic behavior. Indiana’s bad feelings aren’t an acute but cleansing sadness. No, they stay with you, like wet shit in the groove of your sneakers. When he died, we lost a titan of American literature and reportage, period.

Last year, Bambi got real into Alan Hollinghurst, which spurred me to read more from a writer who’s become one of my favorite authors. With its incest-adjacent age-gap gay relationships, bucolic hustlers, and jubilant SoHo raves, The Spell is by far my rompiest Hollinghurst while retaining all the hallmarks of his pristine style. Hollinghurst writes perfectly; if I taught creative writing or English lit, I’d use him as an example of a writer who follows all the rules of the King’s English to tremendous effect4. That aside, his passions for elegant architecture, beautiful men, and depictions of a very English public school (and/but also very queer) social subtext unite in his unsurpassed literary experimentation with one of his favorite themes: the art of cruising.

And two novels I haven’t read yet: Passing Through a Prairie Country by Dennis E. Staples intrigues with haunted casinos, and Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyen, a satire following two Asian-American trans women into the world of men’s pro indoor volleyball, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Stories

You know I adored Torrey Peters’ new book, Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories, which I wrote about here. You may not know that I also adored Realistic Fiction, the debut collection by Anton Solomonik, which I was thrilled to blurb:

Realistic Fiction refuses to be normal. This truly original collection of short stories delights with disorienting humor, fascinating characters, and the enthusiastic plumbing of masculinity's many mysteries, from local politics to cross-dressing to Magic: The Gathering. Low affect yet high-fidelity, Fiction is giving Thomas Bernhard meets Dennis Cooper meets, I wanna say, Robert Walser? (While we're comparing, it's rare to find short stories as tightly moving as the Borgesian "August, 1962.")

Anton is great. I love transmasculine writers and wish there were more of us! If you have recommendations, please send them my way.

Memoir & Non-Fiction

It’s been a hard year. When feeling failed by cis people, I’ve found encouragement in the work of smart, brave, and creative trans writers, academics, and organizers who are applying their expertise as survivors to the $64,000 question: what could trans futures look like?

With her second memoir, Trauma Plot, Jamie Hood seeks meaning after debilitating misogynist violence5. With A Short History of Trans Misogyny, Jules Gill-Peterson asks, “How might trans women lead a coalition in the name of femininity, not to replace or even define other kinds of women, but to show what the world might look like for everyone if it were hospitable to being extra and having more than enough?” With Love in a Fucked Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell, Together, Dean Spade has written the self-help book that you simply must read if you’ve ever felt that your politics were crystal-clear everywhere except in your closest relationships. Are you always attracted to people who are “bad” for you? Has anyone ever told you that you’re terrible with conflict? Do you pride yourself on your boundaries, yet never seem to get ahold of the intimacy you crave? Are you polyamorous but struggle with jealousy? Has a betrayal by a friend, a lover, or even your entire community made you feel like you’ll never trust again? READ THIS BOOK.

Poetry

Even though Nes and I arrived early to the Poetry Project event for Essex Hemphill’s Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems (edited by John Keene and Robert F. Reid-Pharr), we ended up sitting on the floor against the back wall, leaning against each other. We listened to readings uproarious and tender from late poet’s family, friends, and mentees, then watched a projected video recording of the poet himself reading “Cordon Negro” and other poems a few short years before his death. Through my tears, I jotted this down: “Consider hatred / to be this: / the absence of everything.”6

Newsletters

For funny, informative, real slices of gay life, you can’t get much better than Maddy Court’s newsletter, TV Dinner. Subscribe for her advice column, stick around for her observations about books, movies, food, and the trials and tribulations of fostering incontinent puppies. Lately, she’s been sharing fun facts about Shakers, the eighteenth-century religious sect that went extinct in large part because they believed in celibacy (Fact: they thought shortcuts were morally wrong! Fact: they invented condensed milk! ).

TV Dinner is such a treat. I happily subscribe to a lot of newsletters, but there are few of them that I always read, every time, no matter what.

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After a cop murdered Rodney Hinton Jr.’s teenage son, Hinton allegedly took action. Get a free month of subscriber-only DAVID content when you screenshot your donation of any amount to his legal fund.

Not every writer or book I will be recommending in this newsletter is queer, but I loathe “LGBTQIA” and its variants for most use cases. Like, at my job I can call myself “LGBT,” which functionally means nothing, but not “fag,” which is what I actually am? My first instinct was to use “gay,” which is my preferred shorthand for non-cishet (another clunker) life and culture, but “queer” is probably the more popular solution to categorizations of this kind.

Read my review here.

As an essentially monolingual person (I can get around with some high school Spanish, but I’m not winning any Scrabble games), I have no choice but to love English with my whole heart. Reading widely in my mother tongue and in translation, studying grammar, and exposing myself to other art forms has, I hope, taught me to appreciate its strengths without chauvinism, its weaknesses with compassion, and its role in Anglophone colonialisms with perspective, if not forgiveness.