LGBTQ+ Identity

Giovanni’s Room

James Baldwin · 1956

Baldwin’s second novel — about an American man in Paris unable to accept his love for another man — is one of the most devastating accounts in literature of what it costs to refuse your own identity. Written in 1956 and still completely contemporary, it is essential reading for anyone who has ever tried to be someone they are not, and for anyone who knows the cost of that trying.

Fun Home

Alison Bechdel · 2006

Bechdel’s graphic memoir about coming out as a lesbian while simultaneously discovering that her father had kept his own homosexuality secret is a formally extraordinary book about family, secrets, and the relationship between the stories we tell and the selves we become. It is funny, sad, and one of the most intelligent memoirs of the last thirty years.

Detransition, Baby

Torrey Peters · 2021

Peters’s novel — about trans women, detransition, and unconventional family-making — is one of the freshest and most honest books about trans experience in recent fiction. It takes its characters seriously as full human beings rather than symbols, and it is extraordinarily funny. For trans readers in particular, it offers the rare gift of recognition.

Stone Butch Blues

Leslie Feinberg · 1993

Feinberg’s semi-autobiographical novel about a butch lesbian growing up in the 1950s and 60s is one of the foundational texts of queer literature — a book about survival, community, and the cost of existing outside the categories your culture provides. It remains one of the most important accounts of gender non-conformity ever written.

The Price of Salt

Patricia Highsmith · 1952

Published under a pseudonym when Highsmith feared career damage, this was one of the first lesbian novels in which both women survive the ending — radical in 1952 and quietly extraordinary still. The fact that Carol and Therese are allowed to choose each other, without tragedy as the price, felt like a revelation to generations of readers who were used to paying for queer love with death or exile.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong · 2019

Vuong’s debut novel — a letter from a queer Vietnamese-American son to his illiterate mother — circles the impossible task of explaining yourself to someone who cannot read you, in more than one sense. His prose is among the most beautiful of his generation, and the book’s exploration of queer identity within family, trauma, and immigrant experience has no real equivalent in contemporary fiction.

Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides · 2002

Cal narrates the story of his Greek-American family across three generations and two continents, slowly working toward the discovery of his own intersex identity and the long, difficult work of understanding what that means for who he is and who he is allowed to be. Eugenides writes identity not as a fixed thing to be found but as something lived and negotiated over an entire life.