Read With Pride: My 2023 Pride Month Reading List
Not every act of defiance requires a protest. In fact, one of the most radical things you can do to support and honor the LGBTQIA+ community during Pride Month is to read.
Why? Because many books featuring queer stories have been deemed a threat to children and teens across the United States. Therefore, actively seeking them out — and celebrating them — is one way to challenge the morality police while elevating the voices of an increasingly marginalized group of people.
There is no way I’ll actually read 20 books in June, but I had a difficult time narrowing down my list, because there are so many perspectives to hear and learn from. My goal is to at least read one book from each category.
What are you reading during Pride Month?
New Releases
The Celebrants by Steven Rowley (released May 30, 2023)
Goodreads Average Rating: 4.06
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Why I’m Reading It: I liked, but didn’t love, Rowley’s “The Guncle,” so I wasn’t clamoring to read this book until the premise hit close to home. For the past decade I’ve spent an annual weekend with my best friends from college, and it’s become one of my favorite, and most important, activities each year.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: Over the years a group of college friends have reunited in Big Sur to honor a decades-old pact to throw each other living “funeral” celebrations. This is a deeply honest tribute to the growing pains of selfhood and the people who keep us going with Rowley’s signature humor and heart.
The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor (released May 23, 2023)
Goodreads Average Rating: 3.79
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Why I’m Reading It: It takes place in Iowa City, and one of the reading challenge badges from my local library is to read a book set in Iowa. Honestly, not everything worked for me in Taylor’s debut “Real Life,” but I’m a sucker for stories set in the Midwest, and I think he has a lot of literary potential.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. As each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives — a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.
Literary Fiction
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Goodreads Average Rating: 3.97
Format: eBook (personal library)
Why I’m Reading It: What constitutes womanhood is at the center of many political debates, so this story is timely and necessary. Plus, it has the added benefit of Peters’ own experiences.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: A whipsmart debut about three women — transgender and cisgender — whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex.
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Goodreads Average Rating: 3.85
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Why I’m Reading It: Fun fact: the vastness of the ocean and space absolutely terrify me, so I’m intrigued by this genre-melding sapphic love story of deep sea exploration gone wrong.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: 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.
Contemporary Fiction
The Atmospherians by Isle McElroy
Goodreads Average Rating: 3.47
Format: Audiobook (personal library)
Why I’m Reading It: While its rating gives me pause, I do love satire and since what resonates is subjective, I’m going in with an open mind. Plus, I won a copy of non-binary author McElroy’s debut from Buzzfeed Books two years ago; it’s time to give it a go.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: Sasha Marcus was once the epitome of contemporary success: an internet sensation, social media darling, and a creator of a high profile wellness brand for women. But a confrontation with an abusive troll has taken a horrifying turn, and now she’s at rock bottom. She’ll try to restore her reputation by becoming the face of his new business venture, The Atmosphere: a rehabilitation community for men.
Tell Me How to Be by Neel Patel
Goodreads Average Rating: 4.20
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Why I’m Reading It: I’m now realizing that much of my reading list is about giving authors a second chance. Patel, whose short story collection “If You See Me Don’t Say Hi” was recursive and mediocre at best, won raves for this layered family drama about an Indian American son and his mother reconciling with the past.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: Lost in the jungle of Los Angeles, Akash Amin is filled with shame. Shame for liking men. Shame for wanting to be a songwriter. Shame for not being like his perfect brother. Shame for his alcoholism. And most of all, shame for what happened with the first boy he ever loved. When his mother tells him she is selling the family home, Akash must return to Illinois to confront his demons and the painful memory of a sexual awakening that became a nightmare.
Historical Perspectives
Greenland by David Santos Donaldson
Goodreads Average Rating: 3.86
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Why I’m Reading It: A fascinating blend of fact and fiction, this was rather divisive when it made the rounds on #Bookstagram last year, yet the opportunity to learn about E.M. Forster’s clandestine relationship with Mohammed el Adl in 1919 is too intriguing to pass up.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: In 1919, Mohammed el Adl, the young Egyptian lover of British author E. M. Forster, spent six months in a jail cell. A century later, Kip Starling has locked himself in his Brooklyn basement study with a pistol and twenty-one gallons of Poland Spring to write Mohammed's story.
Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust by W. Jake Newsome
Goodreads Average Rating: 4.57
Format: Hardcover (personal library)
Why I’m Reading It: What’s Pride Month without a little history? The pink triangle was used to discriminate against homosexuals in Nazi Germany, but it later became a symbol of gay activism in the 1980s. Given the rise in antisemitism, Holocaust denial and anti-gay legislation there is power in learning how we’ve reclaimed our past.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: Newsome provides an overview of the Nazis' targeted violence against LGBTQ+ people and details queer survivors' fraught and ongoing fight for the acknowledgement, compensation, and memorialization of LGBTQ+ victims. Within this context, a new generation of queer activists has used the pink triangle as the visual marker of gay liberation, seeking to end queer people's status as second-class citizens by asserting their right to express their identity openly.
Poetry
Pilgrim Bell: Poems by Kaveh Akbar
Goodreads Average Rating: 4.26
Format: Paperback (personal library)
Why I’m Reading It: One of my best friends gifted me a copy of this slim collection after it “captivated and transported” him.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: Akbar’s second collection takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed.
Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
Goodreads Average Rating: 4.21
Format: eBook (library loan)
Why I’m Reading It: While I struggled with Vuong’s second poetry collection, “Time Is A Mother,” it did little to tamper my enthusiasm for him as an artist. It’s high time to visit the publication that put him on the map.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial "big" — and very human — subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia.
Memoirs & Essays
Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby
Goodreads Average Rating: 3.83
Format: eBook (personal library)
Why I’m Reading It: I’ve heard great things about Irby’s relatable humor, and the title alone is enough to make me pick this up, but it’s really the subject matter — aging, long-term same sex relationships and Midwest living — that gives me hope this will resonate on more than just the surface level.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: Irby is turning forty, and increasingly uncomfortable in her own skin. She has left her job as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic, has published successful books and is courted by Hollywood, left Chicago, and moved into a house with a garden that requires repairs and know-how with her wife and two step-children in a small white, Republican town in Michigan where she now hosts book clubs. This is the bourgeois life of dreams.
How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones
Goodreads Average Rating: 4.28
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Why I’m Reading It: Almost universally beloved by friends who have read it, Jones’ memoir is another opportunity to experience a queer coming out story vastly different from my own.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: Haunted and haunting, Jones’s memoir tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another — and to one another — as we fight to become ourselves.
Young Adult
Brave Face by Shaun David Hutchinson
Goodreads Average Rating: 4.41
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Why I’m Reading It: This was recommended to me soon after finishing Mike Curato’s “Flamer,” a graphic novel I adored. Even as an adult, these stories of coming out and personal acceptance still resonate because they often help you process feelings that were long repressed.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: Hutchinson was nineteen. Confused. Struggling to find the vocabulary to understand and accept who he was and how he fit into a community in which he couldn’t see himself. The voice of depression told him that he would never be loved or wanted, while powerful and hurtful messages from society told him that being gay meant love and happiness weren’t for him.
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Goodreads Average Rating: 3.95
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Why I’m Reading It: While it has recently taken BookTok by storm, this slim time travel novel has been on my radar since 2019 when it was nominated for a Goodreads award for best science fiction. While not my usual genre — and the rival agents turned lover narrative is overused, sure — rarely do we get a queer lens on these mainstream stories.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.
Classic Literature
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Goodreads Average Rating: 4.08
Format: eBook (personal library)
Why I’m Reading It: Back when I was lucky to finish one book a year, I adored Tom Ford’s film adaptation of this seminal work of gay fiction by Isherwood, one of the titans of the genre. It’s time to give the source material a read.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his partner, determined to persist in the routines of his daily life. An Englishman and a professor living in suburban Southern California, he is an outsider in every way, and his internal reflections and interactions with others reveal a man who loves being alive despite everyday injustices and loneliness.
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
Goodreads Average Rating: 4.01
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Why I’m Reading It: While more recently recast as “Carol,” thanks to Todd Haynes’ 2015 adaptation, “The Price of Salt” is the rare mainstream lesbian romance novel from the 1950s that has endured. Plus, I’ve never read anything by Highsmith (although this was originally published under a pseudonym), who was more well-known for her suspense and mystery novels, like “Strangers on a Train” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: The story of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose salvation arrives one day in the form of Carol Aird, an alluring suburban housewife in the throes of a divorce. They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol into a choice between her daughter and her lover.
Mystery/Thriller
These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever
Goodreads Average Rating: 4.01
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Why I’m Reading It: Whenever something is described as “Hitchcockian” my ears perk up. Two Bookstagrammers, whose reviews I trust, each gave this a stellar rating for its slowly building psychological horror.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: When Paul and Julian meet as university freshmen in early 1970s Pittsburgh, they are immediately drawn to one another. As their friendship spirals into an all-consuming intimacy, Paul is desperate to protect their precarious bond, even as it becomes clear that pressures from the outside world are nothing compared with the brutality they are capable of inflicting on one another.
Yes, Daddy by Jonathan Parks-Ramage
Goodreads Average Rating: 3.61
Format: eBook (personal library)
Why I’m Reading It: When it comes to love it or loathe it books, especially those that tinge horror, I usually end up loving what everyone else despises. We’ll see if this tale of obsession, abuse and power resonates.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: “Yes, Daddy” follows an ambitious young man who is lured by an older, successful playwright into a dizzying world of wealth and an idyllic Hamptons home where things take a nightmarish turn.
Banned Books
Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison
Goodreads Average Rating: 3.84
Format: eBook (personal library)
Why I’m Reading It: One benefit of people banning books is that it has exposed me to several titles I was previously unaware existed. Enter Evison’s “Lawn Boy,” which has been challenged for queer content deemed sexually explicit. I have to temper how many young adult books I read in a year, or I start to judge them unfairly, but I’m intrigued by this working-class story.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: For Mike Muñoz, a young Chicano living in Washington State, life has been a whole lot of waiting for something to happen. Not too many years out of high school and still doing menial work — and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew — he knows that he's got to be the one to shake things up if he's ever going to change his life.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
Goodreads Average Rating: 4.08
Format: eBook (library loan)
Why I’m Reading It: It’s embarrassing that I haven’t read this seminal work of queer nonfiction by Bechdel, one of the world’s most prominent cultural critics and cartoonists. I saw the musical adaptation of this years ago and found it a bit too quirky, but I’m excited to try the source material none-the-less.
What It’s About [adapted from the dustjacket]: Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.
Looking for even more titles? View my reading list and recommendations from 2022, 2021 and 2020. Plus, a little read this/not that comparison.
