Reading List while Waiting for Moffat and Gatiss to End the Hijacking of Sherlock S4 by “Fucking Psychopath” Mary Morstan (Unless We’d Rather Take Matters in Our Own Hands)
The asshole contract killer and S4 Story Teller is merrily partying in hell after her grand coup of fucking up the BBC series, tanking their ratings, and destroying the careers and reputations of those involved. Pity she dragged us all to hell with her after telling Sherlock to go to hell himself.
Below is a booklist to pack for the wait in hell until Mary Morstan (or whoever the fuck she is) is summarily fucked over by whomever dark lord runs the fiery pits.
From “The Vagina Monologues” to “The End of Eddy,” here are 25 books by and about LGB+ individuals that have shaped the queer lit genre.
20 Years of LGBTQ Lit: A Timeline
Once you have read James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” and Larry Kramer’s “Faggots,” both classic gay novels, here are 25 recent works that have shaped the LGBTQ literary genre over the last two decades.
1. THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES (1996)
Eve Ensler
At the time this series of monologues, performed as a one-woman show by the author, was released, they were viewed as revolutionary for their frank and sometimes disturbing discussion of topics like childbirth, rape, and lesbianism. They quickly became a hit, and remain a staple on college campuses and in theaters.
2. BILLY’S BOY (1997)
Patricia Nell Warren
This is the third book in Patricia Nell Warren’s series examining queer life in the sports world. Warren’s first, “The Front Runner,” about an athlete outed while on his way to the Olympics, became a New York Times best seller. “Billy’s Boy” can be read as a stand-alone book; it is about a teenager’s search to learn more about his dead gay father and his lesbian mother’s past, as he experiences his own sexual awakening.
3. THE HOURS (1998)
Michael Cunningham
Awarded the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, “The Hours” is a riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”. In fact, Woolf is one of the three characters the story follows, as we find her in a suburb of London in 1923, beginning to write the novel. Meanwhile Clarissa Vaughan lives in modern day New York City with her lover, Sally, and is planning a party in honor of her friend Richard, an AIDS-stricken poet who is set to receive an award. The third central character is Laura Brown, a pregnant housewife in the late 1940s who feels suffocated by her life. The women’s lives intersect in a surprising and beautiful way.
4. FIREBIRD (1999)
Mark Doty
Mark Doty’s gay coming-of-age memoir follows Doty and his family across the country as they move from Tucson, Ariz., to Sweetwater, Tenn., for his dad’s job as an Army engineer. “Firebird” explores his mother’s alcoholism, the challenges involved in being a “chubby smart bookish sissy with glasses and a Southern accent,” and how art saved him.
5. THE DANISH GIRL (2000)
David Ebershoff
In this fictionalized account of the surgical transition of the Danish painter Einar Wegener from man to woman, Ebershoff explores how the events might have affected Wegener’s family and life. The book was later turned into a movie starring Eddie Redmayne.
6. RUNNING WITH SCISSORS (2002)
Augusten Burroughs
Augusten Burroughs’s life takes a turn when his mentally ill mother decides to send him to live with his psychiatrist. Burroughs’s memoir recounts his dysfunctional upbringing—including his sexual initiation by a male former patient of his psychiatrist’s who was 20 years older. He comes out as gay during this time, to which one of the psychiatrist’s daughters responds, “Big deal.” Burrough’s memoir is considered one of the best in the genre.
7. SHE’S NOT THERE: A Life in Two Genders (2003)
Jennifer Finney Boylan
With irreverence and humor, Jennifer Finney Boylan, then an English professor at Colby College in Maine, recounts her transition, as well as how it affected and sometimes strained her relationships with friends and family. Of particular interest is her relationship with her colleague, Richard Russo, who wrote the afterward of the book and at one point tells her, “You’re asking me to accept a fundamental change in the one person in the world of whom I could honestly say, ‘I wish he would change nothing.’”
8. THE LINE OF BEAUTY (2004)
Alan Hollinghurst
This book, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2004, takes place in pre-AIDS London and follows Nicholas Guest after he is invited to stay in the mansion of his Oxford friend’s father, Gerald Fedden, MP. Grappling with feelings of inadequacy in the lavish “looking-glass world,” he discovers metropolitan gay life through a friendship with Leo, a civil servant.
9. THE MASTER (2004)
Colm Toibin
This novel, set between 1895 and 1899, treads the line between fiction and biography, exploring the later life of Henry James, the writer known as “The Master.” Colm Toibin imagines, with vivid detail, members of James’s circle—like his devoted manservant, Burgess Noakes—as well as James’s feelings of guilt, regret, and homosexual longing.
10. ACQUA CALDA (2005)
Keith McDermott
This novel by longtime theater actor Keith McDermott follows Gerald Barnett, a retired actor suffering from AIDS. When his former mentor, William Weiss, calls on him to participate in a final production, he hops a plane to Italy to join the cast. But while there, he is caught up in a romance and a frenzied schedule that cause him to neglect his medication, putting his health at risk leading up to opening night. McDermott captures theater life well, and infuses the book with an international cast of characters.
11. FUN HOME: A Family Tragicomic (2006)
Alison Bechdel
In this acclaimed graphic memoir, which was turned into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Alison Bechdel—a cartoonist also known for creating the Bechdel test, a standard for judging the quality of women’s onscreen roles—describes both coming out and coming to terms with her closeted gay father’s death.
12. TRANSPARENT: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers (2007)
Cris Beam
In this well-reported work of narrative nonfiction, Cris Beam follows the lives of a group of four teenage transgender girls: Christina, Dominique, Foxxjazell, and Ariel. With sensitivity and a deep connection to the girls, Beam describes their struggles with transitioning and how they reconcile them with more familiar teenage concerns like crushes and cliques.
13. BLUE BOY (2009)
Rakesh Satyal
Kiran Sharma, a 12-year-old gay Indian-American boy, chooses ballet over basketball and wears his mother’s perfume to school, becoming a social outcast and upending his parents’ expectations. Then, one day, Kiran starts to think that he might be a descendant of Krishna, a Hindu god, and starts to model his life after him. This debut novel is a beautiful twist on the gay coming-of-age story.
14. JUST KIDS (2010)
Patti Smith
Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for nonfiction, this memoir documents Smith’s relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, a photographer later known for his sadomasochistic imagery, before he came out as gay. It evocatively captures the time when they were a young couple, both unknown and on the brink of fame.
15. WE THE ANIMALS (2011)
Justin Torres
This semi-autobiographical novel is about a 7-year-old boy and his two brothers, all trying to find their place in upstate New York, where they do not fit in with the white working-class children. They are mixed race (their father is Puerto Rican and their mother white.) On the narrator’s seventh birthday, his mother is recovering in bed from a severe beating by their abusive father—and their family troubles bring the boys closer together. Yet while the book starts in the third person, “we” turns to “I” and “they” as the narrator’s sexuality distances him from his brothers, who smell his “sharp, sad, pansy scent.”
16. WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL? (2012)
Jeanette Winterson
The author, acclaimed for her autobiographical first novel, “Oranges are Not the Only Fruit,” places her mother, “Mrs. Winterson,” at the center of the narrative in this memoir. Her mother is a religious zealot who mistreats her gay adoptive daughter with beatings or by locking her out of the house all night. “Why Be Happy” tells the story of Winterson’s troubled childhood and her journey to overcome her trauma.
17. HOW TO BE GAY (2012)
David M. Halperin
In this provocative book, the author, a professor of history and sexuality theory at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, argues that it is not only their sexual preferences that distinguish gay men from straight ones, but also their culture, including “diva worship” and “adoration of glamour.” The book is based on a class Halperin taught, in which he explored how gay men develop “a conscious identity, a common culture, a particular outlook on the world, a shared sense of self.”
18. MY EDUCATION (2013)
Susan Choi
This novel starts when 21-year-old Regina seems set to begin an affair with her literature professor, Nicholas Brodeur. But the familiar story takes a turn when Regina becomes interested, instead, in Brodeur’s wife, Martha, and kisses her after a dinner party. This smart exploration of bisexuality follows a series of relationships and sexual encounters that explore the complexity of the characters’ desires.
19. VERY RECENT HISTORY: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City (2013)
Choire Sicha
This book, presented as nonfiction, is set in the recent past in New York City and follows a group of young gay men—though the word gay is never used—as they date, drink, and navigate the complexities of work and finding love in New York City. It reads like a modern fable.
20. REDEFINING REALNESS: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, and So Much More (2014)
Janet Mock
In her first memoir, Janet Mock describes coming of age and transitioning as a young transgender girl. She gives insight into the experiences and challenges of transgender women with unflinching honesty.
21. A LITTLE LIFE (2015)
Hanya Yanagihara
This exquisite, emotional novel by Hanya Yanagihara, editor-in-chief of T Magazine, follows four men over two decades of friendship—from their time as college students at a Massachusetts school and into adulthood in New York. The book’s central character is Jude, who has a troubled past that unfolds slowly; Yanagihara provides sharp insight into his struggles as a disabled gay man.
22. UNDER THE UDALA TREES (2015)
Chinelo Okparanta
This story, set during a brutal civil war in Nigeria in the late 1960s, starts when Ijeoma, whose father is killed in an air raid and whose mother is so affected she cannot care for her child, is sent to live with her mother’s friend in another town. There Ijeoma meets another girl, Amina, and they fall in love. This is a story of queerness in a society where it needs to be hidden, and an account of how their love story plays out after they are yanked apart.
23. THE ARGONAUTS (2015)
Maggie Nelson
At the same time the author was experiencing the bodily changes that come with pregnancy, her partner, Harry Dodge, an artist who identifies as neither male nor female, was starting testosterone injections. In this gender-bending memoir, Maggie Nelson writes about the way both their bodies were changing, and about the intricacies of building her queer family.
24. HERE COMES THE SUN (2016)
Nicole Dennis-Benn
This book takes place in Jamaica’s Montego Bay, but it’s hardly a beach novel. It centers on Margot, a 30-year-old front desk receptionist at the Palm Star Resort who will do anything to get ahead, even recruit women for a high-end prostitution ring or start rumors about a colleague’s sexuality (despite her own love for another woman). The characters are memorable and complex, and the author poignantly explores the dynamics of sexuality in Jamaica.
25. THE END OF EDDY (2017)
Édouard Louis
Though the book was originally published in France in 2014, it was translated to English only this year. In this disturbing and deeply moving autobiographical novel, Édouard Louis introduces Eddy, a young gay boy living in a decaying manufacturing town, and describes his experience of growing up poor and gay, which included disturbing and violent bullying. [x]
Happy summer reading! 🏳️🌈📚🤓📖👨❤️👨🔥😎💖
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