LGBTQIA+ Classics

Kristin Kristin

From Torrey Peters Detransition, Baby to Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Bryan Washington’s Memorial there are too many recent books to list regarded as modern classics. So far, the 2000s have gifted us a plethora of amazing and award-winning novels detailing LGBTQIA+ experiences. These stories are often inspired by authors and books that did not garner the acclaim they deserved in their time due to homophobia, oppression, and the threat of violence towards their creators. These picks take a deeper dive into queer classics in fiction. From the well-known like James Baldwin, to books only now receiving the attention they deserve, this list highlights pioneering LGBTQIA+ stories.  

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In the Catalog

B-boy Blues

B-boy Blues

A Seriously Sexy, Fiercely Funny, Black-on-Black Love Story

James Earl Hardy

Hardy’s debut novel about the lives of black gay men in New York City is unabashedly and unapologetically written for the African-American male.

From the Catalog
From Hoopla
Gentleman Jigger

Gentleman Jigger

A Novel of the Harlem Renaissance

Richard Bruce

Step into the Jazz Age with a novel of queer Black life, set amid the artistic rebellion of the Harlem Renaissance.

From the Catalog
From Hoopla
Giovanni's Room

Giovanni’s Room

James Baldwin

In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.

From the Catalog
From Libby
If Not, Winter

If Not, Winter

Fragments of Sappho

Sappho

Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos from about 630 B.C. She was a musical genius who devoted her life to composing and performing songs. Of the nine books of lyrics Sappho is said to have composed, none of the music is extant and only one poem has survived complete. All the rest are fragments. In ‘If not, winter’ Carson presents all of Sappho’s fragments in Greek and in English.

From the Catalog
Maurice

Maurice

A Novel

E. M. Forster

Written during 1913 and 1914, immediately after “Howards End,” and not published until 1971, Maurice was ahead of its time in its theme and in its affirmation that love between men can be happy.

From the Catalog
From Libby
Nightwood

Nightwood

Djuna Barnes

Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, “Nightwood” still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936.

From the Catalog
From Libby
From Hoopla
Orlando

Orlando

A Biography

Virginia Woolf

The fictional portrait of Woolf’s close friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, the hero Orlando is a young nobleman in Elizabethan England, a dreamy and romantic youth who wakes up one day to find himself transformed, astonishingly, into a woman.

From the Catalog
From Libby
From Hoopla
Romance in Marseille

Romance in Marseille

Claude McKay

The pioneering novel of physical disability, transatlantic travel, and black international politics. A vital document of black modernism and one of the earliest overtly queer fictions in the African American tradition. Published for the first time.

From the Catalog
From Libby
From Hoopla
Rubyfruit Jungle

Rubyfruit Jungle

Rita Mae Brown

In bawdy, moving prose, Rita Mae Brown tells the story of Molly Bolt, the adoptive daughter of a dirt-poor Southern couple who boldly forges her own path in America. With her startling beauty and crackling wit, Molly finds that women are drawn to her wherever she goes-and she refuses to apologize for loving them back.

From the Catalog
From Libby
From Hoopla
Stone Butch Blues

Stone Butch Blues

A Novel

Leslie Feinberg

“Stone Butch Blues,” Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 first novel, is widely considered in and outside the U.S. to be a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender.

From the Catalog
The Thief's Journal

The Thief’s Journal

Jean Genet

Writing in the intensely lyrical prose style that is his trademark, the man Jean Cocteau dubbed France’s “Black Prince of Letters” here reconstructs his early adult years — time he spent as a petty criminal and vagabond, traveling through Spain and Antwerp, occasionally border hopping across the rest of Europe, always one step ahead of the authorities.

From the Catalog
From Hoopla
Zami, A New Spelling of My Name

Zami, A New Spelling of My Name

Audre Lorde

“Zami: A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers.” In Lorde’s experimentally written novel, she interweaves the personal into a narrative that shares the story of how Lorde became a driving force in literature and LGBTQIA+ activism.

From the Catalog
From Libby