Pride month is celebrated at different times around the country and the world, but here in NYC, it’s in June to commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall riots. I actually first learned about Stonewall from a novel I read in college because I had zero exposure to queer history prior to that, and granted, it was the ‘90s, but I think this speaks to both the need for more inclusive history curriculum in high school as well as the importance of fiction, but I digress. I have assembled a list of LGBTQ+ books I read recently that I recommend!

[Quick note: This list is light on sapphic stories, for no real reason other than that this is just a list of books with LGBTQ+ characters that I’ve read in the last 2 months or so. My local library branch has a bunch of romances featuring lesbians who play sports, so I should really rectify this. But I wanted to acknowledge a shortcoming on the list up front.]

Anyway, some books: 

Winging It With You by Chip Pons
This is a really fun romance novel in which strangers pretend to be boyfriends for a reality competition show that is basically The Amazing Race and, oops, fall in love for real along the journey. (I will say, it feels unlikely that Asher’s actual boyfriend would dump him at the airport, which is how Asher ends up needing a new partner for the show and meeting sexy pilot Theo, who is coincidentally getting forced to take a vacation and is thus available to film a reality show. It’s worth it to just roll with the story, though.) I listened to this one in audio and thought the narration was excellent.

Thirty Love by Tom Vellner
Old friends turned competitors play tennis and fall in love. I know very little about tennis, but all the great tennis detail in this novel was a bonus for me. I love an immersive setting. Do I know what all the tennis terms mean? No clue. Will I ever understand tennis scoring? Doubtful. But I could follow what was going on in context and this feels like a novel written by a true fan, which I appreciate.

Last First Kiss by Julian Winters
Very sweet friends-to-lovers romance. Jordan is “figuring himself out,” meaning he doesn’t understand his own sexual identity because he’s very rarely attracted to other people. One person he is attracted to—and how!—is his old friend Jamie, with whom things are awkward after they almost-kissed last summer. Jordan is an event planner who is tasked with planning a big wedding in which Jamie is the man of honor, which puts them back in each other’s proximity. (This book is set in Atlanta and Winters does a great job integrating the setting, which maybe seems like a minor thing, but again, I love an immersive setting. I’ve been to Atlanta a few times, and the city really comes alive in this book.)

Disco Witches of Fire Island by Blair Fell
I’d classify this as a literary romance, or a literary novel with magical realism and romantic elements, which is to say, there’s too much going on for it to really be a genre romance, and the romance plot doesn’t really get rolling until the second half of the book, but there is happy ending (which is maybe a spoiler, but given that the novel is set at the peak of the AIDS crisis, I thought it was worth mentioning). It’s 1989, and Joe is struggling to move on from the death of his boyfriend of AIDS. He lets his best friend talk him into spending a summer on Fire Island as a bartender, and Joe ends up staying in the attic of two gay house cleaners/roommates who act strangely sometimes but make Joe feel safe (they are two of the titular Disco Witches). Joe also keeps seeing a very sexy man who vanishes before Joe can talk to him who may or may not be an omen that something terrible is about to happen. He clashes with a ferry worker, Fergal, who may or may not be a demigod, but then one night they kiss. Joe and Fergal’s relationship is a bit insta-love, but it’s of a piece with some of the mystical goings on in the novel. It’s a sad read in places—AIDS hangs over the whole story—but I thought the ending was beautiful.

Canon by Paige Lewis
This book is hard to describe; it’s a weird literary fantasy written in an unconventional way in which there is a Bad Guy named Duncan who must be stopped, so God recruits Yara, our nonbinary protagonist, to go on a quest in order to gain the skills they need to kill Duncan. They travel via a whale who might be the reincarnation of Jacques Cousteau, and they have a newt sidekick who changes color to detect lies. It’s odd and funny and delightful. Meanwhile, the Prophet Adrena decides to take on Duncan herself, so she teams up with a general named Harpo to get his army prepared for battle. This one’s not a romance, although Adrena falls in love with a female pop star she meets at a mall. It’s a very strange book, but it’s satirical and funny and imaginative in a great way. I’ve never really read anything like it.

 Also very weird:

Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die by Greer Stothers
Sir Cameron is a handsome, privileged knight whom nobody likes, and when a prophecy is made saying that the only way to rid the land of the evil sorcerer Merulo is to kill Cameron, he runs away. He’s not a very good knight, but he does enjoy living, so he goes to Merulo for help, since it’s also in Merulo’s interest to keep Cameron alive. And that’s when things start getting very weird. Merulo keeps transmogrifying Cameron into other creatures (mostly animals, but Cameron is also a woman for a few chapters). Merulo bossing Cameron around turns Cameron on. Who the real villain is becomes an open question. The ending is bonkers (complimentary). I don’t think this book is going to be for everyone—there’s a frankness in the language that might make some readers uncomfortable, Cameron and Merulo’s relationship is more sexual than romantic—but if you want a twisty, imaginative story, give it a shot.

 BONUS YA CORNER:

I’m currently writing my first YA novel, so I’ve picked up some other YA contemporaries as “market research,” even though I’m not normally a YA reader. Here are a few good ones.

The Breakup Lists by Adib Khorram
I’ve read, I think, all of Khorram’s adult books to date, and they read very “YA writer’s first foray into writing adult books” to me for reasons I can’t quite put a finger on (something about voice/tone) but Khorram’s voice feels right at home in YA, and I thought this book was cute and charming. Jackson has a crush on Liam but so does Jackson’s sister, Jasmine. Jasmine is dramatic. Jackson helps her get over her long string of exes by making “breakup lists” for her—basically, lists of everything bad about her exes that she can read when she starts feeling sad about the relationships ending. She briefly dates Liam, who breaks up with her, so Jackson makes a list for Liam but then starts making out with Liam in secret. If you’ve seen that episode of Friends when Ross makes pro/con lists for Julie and Rachel, you can guess how that goes. Bonus: Jackson and Liam bond while working together on the school musical, Jesus Christ Superstar, one of my all-time faves but also a rather controversial choice for a high school. (My high school would have never.)

Skater Boy by Anthony Nerada
This is maybe one of the best portrayals of what it’s like to be a teenage boy I’ve ever read. Well, I guess I can’t know what that’s like, but I have two younger brothers and we’re all still close, so I could infer some things. But Wes has been pigeon-holed as a bad boy at his school and feels pressure to maintain that image, but he’s on thin ice at school and may not graduate. Things get even more dicey when Wes meets and develops a crush on and starts spending time with a ballerino, which changes everything for him and puts him at odds with his best friends. The main thing Wes grapples with is that he’s angry all the time, something that seems pretty common for teenage boys out here in the real world but that I don’t think we see in YA books that often.

BONUS NONFICTION CORNER:

Queer Enlightenments by Anthony Delaney (published as Queer Georgians in the UK)
This is essentially a book for everyone who thinks the queer characters in Bridgerton are ahistorical, because they are most definitely not. This is a really interesting book about the lives of everyday queer people in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries in the UK that I thought was fascinating!

And those are my recs! Quick reminder that my historical romance trilogy is now all published, and though the primary relationship in each book is a m/f romance, there’s a m/m subplot that spans all three books, and I put these poor men through the emotional wringer in Book 3, so if you want some angst and yearning, I got you. Start with I Never Forget a Duke!

And Happy Pride!