LGBTQ+ Pride: Fiction for Adults

Every June, LGBTQ+ Pride commemorates the Stonewall Uprising of 1969 and continues to celebrate and honor the LGBTQ+ community's joy, resilience, and resistance.  

For even more titles, check out our LGBTQ+ Fiction Core Collection.

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Shaw, M.

Your new favorite assortment of New Weird Lit stories about car-vampires, fascist deer, memory-devouring tree gods, and the torment matrix.

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Beagin, Jen

Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she affectionately refers to as Big Swiss, since she's tall, stoic, and originally from Switzerland. Greta is fascinated by Big Swiss's refreshing attitude toward trauma. They both have dark histories, but Big Swiss chooses to remain unattached to her suffering while Greta continues to be tortured by her past. One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss's voice at the dog park. In a panic, she introduces herself with a fake name and they quickly become enmeshed. Although Big Swiss is unaware of Greta's true identity, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she'll do anything to sustain the relationship.

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Fox, Leo

Your name is Lucille. You live on Girl Island, one of two islands created when the world was cleft in twain by an entity bigger and more powerful than you. But you have a secret. Your secret is that despite living on Girl Island, you are a boy. You fear deep down in your insides, that you may have been a boy for a very long time. And so you leave your home and your mother and begin the journey to Boy Island. Although it may be treacherous, it is the only way forward. A modern transgender fable in graphic novel form, Boy Island weaves its way along the path of becoming with humor and insight, channeled through Leo Fox's iconic art and storytelling style. Printed as a deluxe embossed hardcover.

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Davis, Jenny Fran

Sasha and Jesse are professionally creative, erotically adventurous, and passionately dysfunctional twentysomethings making a life together in Brooklyn. When a pair of older, richer lesbians-prominent news host Jules Todd and her psychotherapist partner, Miranda-invites Sasha and Jesse to their country home for the holidays, they're quick to accept. Even if the trip includes a third couple-Jesse's best friend, Lou, and their cool-girl flame, Darcy-whose It-queer clout Sasha ridicules yet desperately wants. As the late December afternoons blur together in a haze of debaucherous homecooked feasts and sweaty sauna confessions, so too do the guests' secret and shifting motivations. 

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Szabo, Sam

The definitive collection of Sam Szabo's "ETC" comics series, serving up a psychedelic stew of social satire and gonzo gender theory! The year is 2023. The astral plane has entered a tailspin. Fortunately, an ancient cosmological entity is on a mission to spread her fluidity across the galaxy. Our raw, uncut heroine roams the wasteland in defense of trans rights and trans wrongs. Will the Enlightened Transsexual convince humanity to chill out at last? Or will the planet choke on her filthy gags?

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Austin, Emily

Gilda, a twenty-something, atheist, animal-loving lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death. Desperate for relief from her panicky mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local Catholic church, and finds herself being greeted by Father Jeff, who assumes she's there for a job interview. Too embarrassed to correct him, Gilda is abruptly hired to replace the recently deceased receptionist Grace. In between trying to memorize the lines to Catholic mass, hiding the fact that she has a new girlfriend, and erecting a dirty dish tower in her crumbling apartment, Gilda strikes up an email correspondence with Grace's old friend. She can't bear to ignore the kindly old woman, who has been trying to reach her friend through the church inbox, but she also can't bring herself to break the bad news.

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North, Emet

Raffi works in an observational cosmology lab, searching for dark matter. Every chance they get, they escape to see Britt, a queer sculptor who fascinates them for reasons they can't understand. As Raffi's carefully constructed life begins to collapse, they dream of a universe where they mean as much to Britt as Britt does to them. Touring parallel worlds, Raffi reaches for a life that feels authentically their own. But Raffi's divergent existences all lead back to the summer of Britt: the terrible thing Raffi did and the guilt that continues to chase them across realities.

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Isaki, Uta

A poignant coming-of-age story about a young woman coming into her own as she discovers her identity as aromantic asexual. When it comes to love, high schooler Chika wonders if she might be an alien. She's never fallen for or even had a crush on anyone, and she has no desire for physical intimacy. Her friends tell her that she just 'hasn't met the one yet,' but Chika has doubts...It's only when Chika enters college and meets peers like herself that she learns there's a word for what she feels inside--asexual--and she's not the only one. After years of wondering if love was the answer, Chika realizes that the answer she long sought may not exist at all--and that that's perfectly normal.

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Whitehead, Joshua

Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Jonny's world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages - and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home for his step-father's funeral, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.

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Sámano Córdova, Gerardo

Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago's lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family's decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses--though curbed by his biological and chosen family's communal care--threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life.

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Hoke, Henry

A novel narrated by a queer and hungry mountain lion living in the drought-devastated land beneath the Hollywood sign.

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Armfield, Julia

Leah is changed. Months earlier, she left for a routine expedition, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp. By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Our Wives Under the Sea is a genre-bending exploration of the depths of love and grief at the heart of a marriage.

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Allen, Samantha

When the final four women in competition for an aloof, if somewhat sleazy, bachelor's heart arrive on a mysterious island in the Pacific Northwest, they mentally prepare themselves for another week of extreme sleep deprivation, invasive interviews, and of course, the salacious drama that viewers nationwide tune in to eagerly devour.... Enter Patricia, a temperamental, but woefully misunderstood local, living alone in the dark, verdant woods and desperate to forge a connection of her own. As the contestants perform for the cameras that surround them, Patricia watches from her place in the shadows, a queer specter haunting the bombastic display of heterosexuality before her. But when the cast and crew at last make her acquaintance atop the island's tallest and most desolate peak, they soon realize that if they're to have any hope of making it to the next Elimination Event, they'll first have to survive the night.

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Boydell, Remy

A surprisingly honest and touching account of a trans girl surviving through sex work in Seattle.

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Kann, Claire

Thirty, flirty, and asexual, Joy is secretly in love with her best friend, Malcolm, but she's never been brave enough to say so. When he unexpectedly announces that he's met the love of his life-and no, it's not Joy-she's heartbroken. Malcolm invites her on a weekend getaway, and Joy decides it's her last chance to show him exactly what he's overlooking. But maybe Joy is the one missing something...or someone...and his name is Fox. Fox sees a kindred spirit in Joy-and decides to help her. He proposes they pretend to fall for each other on the weekend trip to make Malcolm jealous. But spending time with Fox shows Joy what it's like to not be the third wheel, and there's no mistaking the way he makes her feel. Could Fox be the romantic partner she's always deserved?.

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Killjoy, Margaret

In the first novel in the Daughters of the Empty Throne trilogy, Lorel, a young trans girl, disguises herself in order to join a coven of witches and travels the kingdom in search of a solution to the magical blight that plagues it.

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Parker-Chan, Shelley

In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family's eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness, everyone is mystified as to how it will come to pass. The fate of nothingness received by the family's clever and capable second daughter, on the other hand, is only as expected. When a bandit attack orphans the two children, though, it is Zhu Chongba who succumbs to despair and dies. Desperate to escape her own fated death, the girl uses her brother's identity to enter a monastery as a young male novice. There, propelled by her burning desire to survive, Zhu learns she is capable of doing whatever it takes, no matter how callous, to stay hidden from her fate. 

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Solomon, Rivers

Vern gives birth to twins and raises them away from the influence of the outside world. But something is wrong-not with them, but with her own body...A genre-bending work of Gothic fiction that wrestles with the history of American racism.

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Peters, Torrey

Join us for an author talk by Torrey Peters on June 20. Registration is required. Learn more and register here.

In this collection of one novel and three stories, ... Peters's keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing. In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

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King-Miller, Lindsay

During a Pride celebration, Wendy notices the beginning of an infection that seems to be turning people into zombies. She and others from the local queer community must team up (despite interpersonal tension) to try and stop the outbreak, discover its source, and survive.

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Lorde, Audre.

The poet Audre Lorde depicts her life and examines the influence of various women on her development.

Summaries provided by DPL's catalog unless otherwise noted. Click on each title to view more information.