Fifty-Nine Swans

hi there! happy to help. i’m by no means an expert but i can share what i’ve read with you :) 

in my bookshelves i have:

Mary Renault - i really can’t recommend her highly enough! she does queer Classical history - her trilogy about Alexander the Great is beautiful and gay as heck. i’d also recommend the Last of the Wine, which is about queer Athenians doing Athenian things. The Charioteer is a book by her that i’ve just started, about gay men in WWII. 

Christopher Isherwood’s stuff is REALLY GOOD imo- he wrote A Single Man, the Berlin Stories and more 

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin - v important series of nine novels about queer people in 70s/80s San Francisco, some of the first books to deal with AIDS as a subject matter 

Maurice by E.M Forster (OR watch the movie w/a young, naked and handsome Robert Graves)

Orlando by Virginia Woolf - ONE OF THE BEST THINGS nd explores gender and sexuality throughout history. a really cool book. 

Sarah Waters - lesbians throughout history, Fingersmith is the most famous, she also wrote Tipping the Velvet, which is about drag kings,  and The Night Watch, which is about sad queers in post-WWII Britain 

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson 

the Line of Beauty, about a gay man at Oxford in the 80s, and the Swimming-Pool Library, about a slutty British aristocrat in 1980s London - tbh everything Hollinghurst writes is queer as heck 

Death in Venice - Thomas Mann - lowkey queer but a classic. 

the Picture of Dorian Grey obvs - gotta love Wilde 

the Song of Achilles by Madeleine Miller - i don’t personally like the way she portrays Achilles & Patroclus’ relationship, but that’s just me - i know a lot of ppl really enjoyed this and it got them into Classical history, which is a great thing!

Memoirs of a Byzantine Eunuch by Christopher Harris (omg this is such a trashy book i love it tho) 

Earthly Joys by Philippa Gregory (a secret fave) - this is a book about the gardener John Tradescant and how he falls HARD for the Duke of Buckingham, James I’s lover and the most beautiful man in Europe. read if you like 17th century Europe and gardening. 

i’d really recommend the original short story of Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx, if you’ve not read it 

anything by Yukio Mishima!! i’m reading Forbidden Colours atm

books i’ve not read yet but have had recced to me: 

Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller - lesbians in 19th America who enter into a Boston marriage 

the Man who Fell in Love with the Moon by Tom Spaunbauer - about a bisexual Native American 

Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge- about a bisexual English surgeon who gets involved in the Crimean War

A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess - about Christopher Marlowe, i want to read this asap  

At Swim, Two Boys by Jim O’Neill - gay Irish lads in 1916, against the backdrop of the Irish uprising against the British 

also if you want books with good insights on queer history, i’d recommend reading some academic history books - some i’ve got are: 

the Greeks and Greek Love - James Davidson 

Same-Sex Unions in PreModern Europe by John Boswell - got this for like 2 quid on Amazon and it is so interesting 

A History of Homosexuality in Europe by Florence Tamagne 

Homosexuality in the Priesthood and the Religious Life by Jeannine Gramick- another really interesting Amazon find 

Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality by John Boswell

Beloved and God: the Story of Hadrian and Antinous by Royston Lambert 

I’ve also got some books on Sappho and Catullus that talk about their queerness, but they’re books of poems, not history books. Roman and Greek poets were queer as heck and i’m sure there are some great books about it - if not i’d better write some.