LGBTQ+ Pride: Books for Adults

Pride Month is held annually in June, celebrating and honoring the LGBTQ+ community, and in commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. Our staff have selected a list of titles by and about LGBTQ+ folx.

See all titles in this list in our catalog. 

Fiction | Nonfiction


 

Fiction

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Allison, Dorothy

Bone, an illegitimate child in a family of social outcasts, sees her mother's happiness with her new husband and will not tell when the stepfather begins abusing her in the 1950s.

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Whitehead, Joshua (ed.)

This exciting and groundbreaking fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer) Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism's histories. [...] Love after the End demonstrates the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms we have all been dreaming of since 1492.

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Bechdel, Alison

In Alison Bechdel's hilariously skewering and gloriously cast new comic novel confection, a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel, running a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont, is existentially irked by a climate-challenged world and a citizenry on the brink of civil war. She wonders: Can she pull humanity out of its death spiral by writing a scathingly self-critical memoir about her own greed and privilege?

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Bornstein, Kate

In this rowdy cyber-romance originally written in the 1990s, two people meet online and fall in love in every guise they can manage. As Scratch and Winc go from anonymous lovers to accidental heroes and gender outlaws, they expose the shadowy Web stretched between technology and capitalist greed, nearly becoming roadkill on the internet superhighway. With a little help from their friends including a brave teenager and a mysterious hacker, these darling rebels fight government intervention and find chosen family in this eerily prescient tale.

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Delgado Lopera, Julian

In this novel told in Spanglish, fifteen-year-old Francisca is uprooted from her life in Bogotá, Colombia, and moves with her family to Miami, Florida, where she is ushered into an evangelical church and falls in love with the pastor's daughter.

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Eisenberg, Emma Copley

Bernie is a talented young photographer who has quit taking photographs in favor of drinking and drifting around Philadelphia. Leah is an ambitious yet flailing grad student and journalist who must know the answer to every question. When Bernie replies to Leah's ad for a new housemate, they tentatively begin the kind of uncategorizable, queer relationship that can only flourish between two people who deeply understand each others' dreams and dissatisfactions.

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Fagan, Kate

Cate Kay knows how to craft a story....[S]he's one of the most successful authors of her generation. The thing is, Cate Kay doesn't really exist. ...Her real identity had been a closely guarded secret, until now. As a young adult, she and her best friend Amanda dreamed of escaping their difficult homes and moving to California to become movie stars. But the day before their grand adventure, a tragedy shattered their dreams and Cate has been on the run ever since, taking on different names and charting a new future. But after a shocking revelation, Cate understands that returning home is the only way she'll be a whole person again.

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Franklin, Tee

When Hazel Johnson and Mari McCray met at church bingo in 1963, it was love at first sight. Forced apart by their families and society, Hazel and Mari both married young men and had families. Decades later, now in their mid-'60s, Hazel and Mari reunite again at a church bingo hall. Realizing their love for each other is still alive, what these grandmothers do next takes absolute strength and courage. 

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Gailey, Sarah

Esther is a stowaway. She's hidden herself away in the Librarian's book wagon in an attempt to escape the marriage her father has arranged for her--a marriage to the man who was previously engaged to her best friend. Her best friend who she was in love with. Her best friend who was just executed for possession of resistance propaganda. The future American Southwest is full of bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies on horseback trying to do the right thing.

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Gamez, Gabriella

Librarian Angela Gutierrez has never been kissed. But after posting a video about her late bloomer status and ace identity, she's finally ready to get some firsts out of the way. Using her new influencer status to come up with a scavenger hunt idea in which the winner earns her first kiss, Angela realizes she may need some help to pull off the event. Enter Krystal Ramirez, hot bartender and Angela's unrequited crush of five years. Despite vowing that romantic love isn't for her, Krystal seems awfully determined to help Angela pull off the scavenger hunt and find true love.

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Hamilton, Emily

So, here's the thing: Cleo and her friends really, truly didn't mean to steal this spaceship. They just wanted to know why, twenty years ago, the entire Providence crew vanished without a trace. But then the stupid dark matter engine started all on its own, and now these four twenty-somethings are en route to Proxima Centauri, unable to turn around, and being harangued by a snarky hologram that has the face and attitude of the ship's missing captain, Billie.

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Ishihiro, Lindsay

Imogen is a stay-at-home mom whose life gets turned upside down when Alex, a single mom, moves in next door, sparking a fast friendship and budding middle age romance.

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Jimenez, Simon

Two warriors shepherd an ancient god across a broken land to end the tyrannical reign of a royal family in this new epic fantasy from the author of The Vanished Birds.

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Lackey, Mercedes.

Chronicles the story of the most powerful Herald-Mage ever born, tracing his growth from youthful arrogance to a position of power and maturity in the kingdom of Valdemar.

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Min, Dolki

Min's haunting debut novel is part psychological thriller, part searing critique of the social structures that marginalize the queer, disabled, and nonconformist. Walking Practice uncovers humanity in who we consider to be alien, and how alienation can shape the human experience.

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Nagata, Kabi

The heart-rending autobiographical manga that's taken the internet by storm! My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is an honest and heartfelt look at one young woman's exploration of her sexuality, mental well-being, and growing up in our modern age. Told using expressive artwork that invokes both laughter and tears, this moving and highly entertaining single volume depicts not only the artist's burgeoning sexuality, but many other personal aspects of her life that will resonate with readers.

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Patel, Vaishnavi

Kalki Divekar grows up a daughter of Kingston--a city the British built on the ashes of Bombay. The older generation, including her father, have been lost to the brutal hunt for rebels. Young men are drafted to fight wars they will never return from. And the people of her city are more interested in fighting one another than facing their true oppressors. When tragedy strikes close to home, Kalki begins to play a dangerous game with small acts of resistance, tempered by cautious, level-headed Yashu and fortified by Fauzia, whose dreams of the future awaken Kalki's heart. Together, they found Kingston's new independence movement ...

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Rowser, Jamila

Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith originally kickstarted their critically acclaimed, award-winning slice of life mini comic, Wash Day... Wash Day Diaries includes an updated, full color version of this original comic--which follows Kim, a 26-year-old woman living in the Bronx--as the book's first chapter and expands into a graphic novel with short stories about these vibrant and relatable new characters. In expanding the story of Kim and her friends, the authors pay tribute to Black sisterhood through portraits of shared, yet deeply personal experiences of Black hair care. 

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Sanchez, Santiago Jose.

A novel by a brilliant new voice, Hombrecito is a queer coming-of-age story about a young immigrant's complex relationships with his mother and his motherland.

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Schwartz, Selby Wynn

Writing in cascading vignettes, Selby Wynn Schwartz spins an invigorating tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives. A luminous meditation on creativity, education, and identity, After Sappho announces a writer as ingenious as the trailblazers of our past.

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Soler, Sara

"What happens when the life you thought you had does a 180 turn? Everything, and yet...nothing. Us is Sara and Diana's love story, as well as the story of Diana's gender transition. Full of humor, heartache, and the everyday triumphs and struggles of identity, this graphic memoir speaks to changing conceptions of the world as well as the self, at the same time revealing that some things don't really have to change. Written, drawn, and colored by Sara Soler, with English translation by Silvia Perea Labayen and letters by Joamette Gil.

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Tai, Tara

Cat Li cares about two things: video games and swoony romances. The former means there hasn't been much of the latter in her (real) life, but when she lands her dream job writing the love storylines for Compass Hollow--the next big thing in games--she knows it's all been worth it. Then she meets her boss: the infamous Andi Zhang, who's not only an arrogant hater of happily-ever-afters determined to keep Cat from doing her job--but also impossibly, annoyingly hot.

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Tingle, Chuck

A searing and earnest horror debut about the demons the queer community face in America, the price of keeping secrets, and finding the courage to burn it all down. Welcome to Neverton, Montana: home to a God-fearing community with a heart of gold. Nestled high up in the mountains is Camp Damascus, the self-proclaimed 'most effective' gay conversion camp in the country. Here, a life free from sin awaits. But the secret behind that success is anything but holy. And they'll scare you straight to hell.

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Todd, Milo

In 1932 Berlin, Bertie, a trans man, and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin's thriving queer community. An employee of the renowned Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexual Science, Bertie works to improve queer rights in Germany and beyond, but everything changes when Hitler rises to power.

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Zanfardino, Iolanda

Dr. Magdalene Traumer, a brilliant scientist with the noble dream of saving the world, meets Dorian Wildfang, a free-spirited wanderer who fears nothing--except her own destiny. Together, they embark on a wild adventure across Europe, chasing a mission that proves that life is about the journey and not the destination. Along the way, these seemingly polar opposite companions find common ground on a journey that sparks an unexpected romance as they navigate the complexities of self-discovery and the challenges of a world on the brink of chaos.


 

Nonfiction

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H, Lamya

Spanning childhood to an elite college in the US and early adult life in New York City, each essay places Lamya's struggles and triumphs in the context of some of the most famous stories in the Quran. She juxtaposes her coming out with Musa liberating his people from the Pharoah; asks if Allah, who is neither male nor female, might instead be nonbinary; and, drawing strength from the faith and hope of Nuh building his ark, begins to build a life of her own-all the while discovering that her identity as a queer, immigrant devout Muslim is, in fact, the answer to her quest for safety and belonging.

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Hailey, Leisha

In the early 2000s, Kate Moennig and Leisha Hailey -- both young artists trying to figure it all out -- met at auditions for an unknown little TV show. Given that it was a show about lesbians living in Los Angeles, with the first ever ensemble cast of openly queer female characters, Kate and Leisha knew the project was going to be unlike anything else out there -- that is, if it even got picked up. Then, one million people watched the premiere. The show, which came to be called The L Word, turned into a trailblazing phenomenon.

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Kaishian, Patricia Ononiwu

Growing up, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her--and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.

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Pratt, Minnie Bruce

S/HE challenges repressive frames of respectability and womanhood, tracing Pratt's circuitous path through sex, gender, and sexuality. S/HE also narrates one of the great love stories of the twentieth century, providing an intimate portrayal of how Pratt and Leslie Feinberg met, fell in love, and built a life together.

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Rocero, Geena

As a young femme growing up in Manila in the 1990s, Geena Rocero endured shouts of bakla, bakla!, a Filipino taunt aimed at her feminine sway, whenever she left the little universe of her eskinita. Eventually she found her place in trans pageants, events as widely attended and culturally significant as a national sport, going to high school by day and competing by night. When her competitors denigrated her with the nickname "horse barbie," due to her statuesque physique, tumbling hair, long neck, and dark skin, she leaned into the epithet, stepping onto stage with an undeniable charisma-part equine and all fashion.

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Snorton, C. Riley

The first-ever Black history to center queer voices, this landmark study traces the lives of LGBTQ+ Black Americans from slavery to present day.

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Tourmaline

"Black trans luminary Tourmaline brings to life the first definitive biography of the revolutionary activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the most important and remarkable figures in LGBTQ+ history, revealing her story, her impact, and her legacy. Through nearly two decades of research, Tourmaline brings this fabulous, scandalous, essential justice warrior to life in full color, for the first time.

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