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Despite being more common, LGBT books (with LGBTQIA+ themes or characters) still do not gain the attention they deserve in the publishing market. To change this scenario, it is important to take a close look at what has already been produced around this theme (in lgbt films and lgbt series as well). To that end, here’s a list of 25 LGBT books you need to know. Good reading!
1. Girl, woman, others
In this book, Bernardine Evaristo weaves together the story of 11 black women and one non-binary person. They all fall somewhere on the queer spectrum, and while this is a very obvious focus of the narrative, it’s also important to have the generational clash that exists between many of these women. This greatly affects how each one lives their sexuality, and it is one of the aspects that makes this book unavoidable both among LGBT books and in literature in general.
2. The love of single men
Victor Heringer builds this book from a very common and beloved format of literature: the formation novel (in English, coming of age). This type of book talks about the process of maturing and discovering a character. In this case, it is the process of self-discovery of a boy who finds himself in love with a boy his father brings home, without a clear explanation of why. The inner conflicts and pain are poetically explored and the ending is sad and emotional.
3. blackberry
Natália Borges Polesso, author of Amora, Control and The extinction of bees, has a writing project. She decided that she would only write about lesbian women, who she believes are underrepresented in literature. And she does it with great propriety. Amora, for example, is a collection of short stories about female self-discovery, and goes through several women, of various ages and life contexts. What unites them? The fact that they love other women.
4. Guadeloupe
Those who like comics will find that there are also LGBT books in this format. Guadalupe, by Angélica Freitas and Odyr, is a graphic travel novel in which Guadalupe and Minerva (her transvestite aunt) travel from Mexico City to Oaxaca to fulfill the last wish of Elvira, Guadalupe’s intrepid grandmother. The story, fun and scary, also dialogues with Aztec mythology to create a very unusual adventure.
5. Fun home: a family tragicomedy
Another important comic in LGBT literature is this work by Alison Bechdel, a landmark in the union between comics and autobiographical narratives. In it, shortly after revealing to the family that she is a lesbian, the narrator receives the news of her father’s death, in circumstances that could indicate a suicide. This raises several memories and reflections on sexuality, family relationships, and love, in a reconnection with the enigmatic father who, at the beginning of the story, already becomes unreachable.
6. The Park of the Magnificent Sisters
Another book with an autobiographical feel is this one, by Argentine transsexual author Camila Sosa Villada. The magnificent sisters park tells, with a tone of magical realism, about Camila’s experience when she moved to the city of Cordoba to study at the university, and started to attend Sarmiento Park at night, as a transvestite. There, she was taken in by a group of transvestites from the park, and felt that she had found her place of belonging in the world.
7. Death in Venice
Thomas Mann tells the story of the writer Gustav von Aschenbach, who, on a trip to Venice, finds himself hypnotized by the beauty of the young Polish man Tadzio. The novel also brings autobiographical traits, even if not so evident, and still addresses the relationship between artist and society.
8. Prostitutes in paradise
João Silvério Trevisan is a great reference in studies and texts on homosexuality in Brazil – especially in the case of male homosexuality. In this book, he engages in a dialogue with various fields of art and culture in Brazil to compose a study on homoaffectivity in the country.
9. Giovanni’s Room
The second book by James Baldwin, this classic of LGBT literature deals with a bisexual relationship when it tells about the character David, a young American in Paris waiting for his girlfriend, Hella, who is in Spain. While she, in Spain, ponders whether or not she should marry David, he, in Paris, meets Giovanni, an Italian waiter with whom she falls in love.
10. With sleepy weapons
In yet another formative novel that appears on this list, Carola Saavedra presents the story of three women, Anna, Maike and an unnamed character. Their stories are not intertwined, yet they are deeply related and filled with discoveries about life, sexuality and identity.
11. Chlorine
Constantine, the narrator of this book, is already dead at the beginning of the story. From limbo, he recalls important facts of his life – permeated by the secrets and anxieties of being a homosexual “in the closet”. The story goes through the description of his double life, divided between a marriage with a woman, with whom he had two children, and his furtive encounters with men. Alexandre Vidal Porto, the author of this book, still has at least one more work in which he brings a homosexual character, the novel Sérgio Y. vai à América.
12. We all loved cowboys
Carol Bensimon tells, in this novel, the story of Cora and Julia, very close friends during college, who move away at the end of it and meet again many years later. In this reunion, the two have to deal with affections and feelings for which they had never given much space.
13. Queer
William Burroughs wrote this book in 1952, but it was not published until more than three decades later, due to its explicit homosexual themes. The story takes place in Mexico City and follows William Lee, the author’s alter ego, who tries to overcome a drug withdrawal crisis with alcohol and an obsessive crush on Eugene Allerton. The frantic and visceral narrative follows the two men on a journey through Latin America, in a road trip tone a little in the style of the beat generation.
14. Conversations between friends
Sally Rooney’s debut novel, Conversations Between Friends tells the story of Frances, a twenty-one-year-old student (and writer) who performs her poetry in public with Bobbi, her ex-girlfriend and best friend. The two get close to the couple Melissa and Nick, with Bobbi falling in love with Melissa and Frances, with her husband. The book deals with the passions and dangers of youth, especially from the complex relationships that are established between these four characters, increasingly entangled.
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15. Eddy’s End
Another book with autobiographical traits, The End of Eddy, by Édouard Louis, reveals the conservatism and prejudice of society in the French countryside by showing the homophobia faced with a boy in the wake of his sexuality living in a small working-class town.
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16. Stella Manhattan
In this book, Silviano Santiago tells the story of Eduardo da Costa e Silva, Stella Manhattan’s official identity. He is an employee of the Brazilian Consulate in the United States who lives, in New York in the 1970s, a plot of sex scandal and political intrigue. In an engaging narrative, the book is a pioneer in approaching the more politicized side of the trans universe.
17. Ricardo and Vânia
In this book-report, Chico Felitti investigated for four months the life of Ricardo Correa da Silva and his girlfriend Vânia Munhoz (formerly Vagner), a Brazilian transsexual living in Spain. The book shows how Ricardo, a popular hairdresser in the 1970s and 1980s, ended up becoming an urban legend after the unsuccessful reshaping of his face with plastic surgery. These surgeries earned him the offensive nickname “Fofão da Augusta”, as he roamed the region of Rua Augusta and Paulista, where he led a troupe of clowns, distributed pamphlets and begged for alms.
18. The portrait of Dorian Gray
Despite not being overtly homosexual, this book, published in 1891 by Oscar Wilde, needs to be on this list for its importance in relation to the mixture of literature and the author’s life. This is because, at the time, the book was used against the author and earned him lawsuits and two years in prison for indecent exposure. In the book, the character Dorian Gray leads a double life between virtue and hedonism, all wrapped up in deep philosophical reflections, sarcasm and a refined sense of humor.
19. I wish you were here
Fernando Scheller recreates in this novel the Rio de Janeiro of the 1980s, with all its energy and contradiction. The cultural effervescence of the time goes hand in hand with political instability, the increase in crime and the advance of the AIDS epidemic. In the midst of it all, five characters from very different universes – but all connected and living close to each other – live their questions related to love, sexuality, insecurities, pain and the constant need to find their own place in the world.
20. Red’s Autobiography: A Novel in Verses
In this book, Canadian Anne Carson recounts the Greek myth of Geryon, a red monster whom Heracles (Hercules) had to defeat in the fulfillment of one of his twelve labors, in the contemporary world. Gerião thus becomes a sensitive boy (and later a boy), who suffers prejudice for being a red boy and becomes involved in a complex and intense love relationship with Heracles. One of the most innovative LGBT books on this list, it still earns points for being a novel in verse, a format widely used in antiquity, which returns with force in contemporary literature.
21. The word that remains
Stênio Gardel brings to this novel the story of Raimundo, an illiterate man decides to learn to read and write at the age of 71, in order to read the letter left to him by Cicero, his youthful love, more than fifty years before, when the hidden love of the two was discovered.
22. Kind of like a love story
In this book, Abdi Nazemian tells the story of the young Iranian Reza, who moves to New York in 1989 with his mother to live with his stepfather and his son. At the new school, Reza meets Judy, whose biggest idol is her uncle Stephen, a gay man, HIV positive and activist against the disease. Reza and Judy begin a small relationship, but Reza can’t help but feel feelings for Art, Judy’s best friend and the only openly gay boy in school. In yet another book about self-discovery, Reza begins to understand what kinds of challenges he will have to deal with when coming out and fighting to exist as he really is.
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23. The Ministry of Absolute Happiness
In this book, Indian writer Arundhati Roy tells the story of young Aftab, who later becomes the beautiful Anjum. The book stitches together complex and extremely human lives, showing characters who were rescued by love and hope after being destroyed by the world in which they live. This novel enters this list of LGBT books also for bringing a perspective of the reality of this community in a country very different from Brazil, which helps to give a perspective on the LGBTQIA+ issue also around the world.
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