by Defne Sam Alkan
Here’s something they don’t always teach you about Stonewall.
The riots that started the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement—the ones we talk about every June, the ones that turned a police raid into a revolution—were led by Black trans women and queer people of color. Marsha P. Johnson. Sylvia Rivera. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy. Their names don’t always make it into the history books, but without them, there’s no Pride. Not as we know it.
I think about that a lot when I’m making lists like this. Because for too long, LGBTQ+ stories have centered white perspectives. White authors. White characters. White struggles. And those stories matter—all stories matter—but they’re not the whole picture. They never were.
This list is twenty books by BIPOC LGBTQ+ authors. Some are contemporary, some are classics. Some will break your heart. Some will put it back together. All of them are written by people who exist at the intersection of multiple identities—queer and Brown, trans and Indigenous, nonbinary and Asian—and who refuse to let any part of themselves be erased.
Read them in June. Read them in January. Read them whenever you need to remember that queer liberation has always been led by people of color, and that the fight isn’t over until all of us are free.
FICTION
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
This isn’t really a novel. It’s a letter. A son writing to his mother, who can’t read. He tells her about their life, about Vietnam, about growing up in Hartford, about falling in love with a boy named Trevor. He tells her things he could never say out loud.
Vuong is a poet first, and it shows on every page. The prose is luminous, careful, devastating. He writes about race and class and addiction and desire. He writes about what it means to be queer in a family that doesn’t have language for that. He writes about love that can’t save anyone but tries anyway.
The title comes from a line in the book: “In the body, where everything has a price, I was alive for a while, and briefly, on earth, we were gorgeous.”
–Author: Ocean Vuong
–Year: 2019
The Thirty Names of Night
Five years after his grandmother’s death, a Syrian American trans boy finds her journal. It’s written in Arabic, a language he’s lost. As he translates it, he uncovers a hidden history—of his grandmother’s art, of a vanished bird species, of queer and trans ancestors who lived and loved in secret.
The novel moves between present-day New York and early twentieth-century Syria, between a trans boy finding himself and the stories of those who came before. Joukhadar weaves in real historical figures—Lutzah, a Syrian trans woman who performed in Cairo in the 1900s—and imagines the lives they might have lived.
This is a book about inheritance. About the ways we carry our ancestors with us, even when we don’t know their names.
–Author: Zeyn Joukhadar (Syrian American)
–Year: 2020
Detransition, Baby
Reese and Amy were together for years, until Amy detransitioned and became Ames. Now Ames has gotten a cis woman pregnant, and he has an idea: what if the three of them raise the baby together?
The premise sounds like a sitcom. The execution is anything but. Peters writes with sharp, ruthless intelligence about womanhood, transness, motherhood, and the impossible standards we hold each other to. It’s funny and painful and never takes the easy way out.
For BIPOC LGBTQ+ literature specifically, keep reading. There are more on this list that center BIPOC voices directly.
–Author: Torrey Peters (American, trans)
-Year: 2021
Cemetery Boys
Yadriel has always known he’s a brujo—a male witch with the power to heal and summon spirits. His traditional Latinx family won’t accept him because he’s trans, so he sets out to prove himself by performing the ritual and summoning the ghost of his murdered cousin. Instead, he summons Julian Diaz, the school’s resident bad boy, who refuses to go quietly into the afterlife.
This is YA, but don’t let that fool you. Thomas writes with warmth and wit about identity, family, and the ways we fight to be seen as who we really are. Julian is charming and chaotic and exactly the kind of love interest you’ll fall for. Yadriel is stubborn and brave and trying so hard to be enough.
The romance is tender. The magic is fun. The trans representation is written by a trans author who knows what he’s doing.
–Author: Aiden Thomas (Latinx, trans)
-Year: 2020
The Stars and the Blackness Between Them
Audre is sent from Trinidad to Minneapolis after her mother catches her with a girl. Mabel is a Black American girl navigating her own questions about identity, desire, and the future. When they meet, something clicks.
The novel is told in alternating perspectives, with Petrus’s prose slipping into poetry when the emotions get too big to contain in sentences. It’s about first love and home and the fear of losing both. It’s also about astrology and ancestors and the ways we’re all connected across distance and time.
–Author: Junauda Petrus (Black, queer)
-Year: 2019
Juliet Takes a Breath
Juliet leaves the Bronx for Oregon, land of white feminists and granola, to intern with her favorite author—a white woman who wrote a book about coming out that changed Juliet’s life. What follows is a summer of disillusionment and discovery, as Juliet realizes that the feminism she admired doesn’t always make space for her as a Puerto Rican lesbian.
Rivera writes with humor and heart about the messiness of activism, the complexity of family, and the joy of finding your people. Juliet is messy and loud and wrong sometimes, and that’s what makes her real.
–Author: Gabby Rivera (Puerto Rican, queer)
–Year: 2016 (2020 edition with intro by Roxane Gay)
How we Fight for our Lives
Technically a memoir, but I’m putting it here because it reads like a novel—sharp and propulsive and impossible to put down. Jones traces his coming-of-age as a young Black gay man in the South, moving through vignettes that build into something larger than the sum of their parts.
He writes about his mother, his lovers, his body. About grief and desire and the ways we learn to survive. About what it means to fight for your life when the world wants you gone.
Ta-Nehisi Coates called it “a memoir for our times.” That’s true, but it’s also just a stunning piece of writing.
–Author: Saeed Jones (Black, gay)
–Year: 2019
The Sunbearer Trials
Teo is a Jade semidiós, which means he’s not powerful enough to be chosen for the Sunbearer Trials—the competition where ten semidioses compete to replenish the sun’s power, and the loser gets sacrificed. Then Sol, the sun god, does something unprecedented: he picks two Jades. Teo and thirteen-year-old Xio must now compete against Gold opponents who are stronger, more experienced, and better trained.
The world is inspired by Mexican culture and mythology, and Thomas builds it with care. Teo is trans, and his identity is woven into the story without being the whole story. There are trials, yes, but also friendship and rivalry and the terror of possibly dying.
–Author: Aiden Thomas (Latinx, trans)
–Year: 2022
Felix Ever After
Felix Love has never been in love. He’s also never had his deadname posted publicly by an anonymous troll, but that changes when someone creates a gallery of his pre-transition photos alongside his current ones. Felix wants revenge. What he gets is a summer of self-discovery, complicated feelings, and the realization that he might not know himself as well as he thought.
Callender writes with empathy and insight about the messiness of being young and trans and Black and figuring out what you want. Felix is prickly and vulnerable and sometimes his own worst enemy. He’s also impossible not to root for.
–Author: Kacen Callender (Black, trans, nonbinary)
–Year: 2020
The Black Flamingo
A novel in verse about Michael, a mixed-race gay boy growing up in London. He doesn’t fit in anywhere—not with his Greek family, not with his Black friends, not with the white kids at school. Then he finds the Drag Society at university, and everything changes.
Atta is a poet, and the verse form lets him move through time and emotion with a lightness that prose couldn’t carry. Michael’s journey toward becoming the Black Flamingo—his drag persona, his full self—is specific and universal at the same time.
As a note, the audiobook, read by Atta, is exceptional.
–Author: Dean Atta (Black, Greek Cypriot, gay)
–Year: 2019
Jonny Appleseed
Jonny is a Two-Spirit Indigiqueer young man living in the city, scraping by through sex work and whatever else he can find. When his stepfather dies, he needs to raise money to go home to the reservation. The novel follows him over the days leading up to his return, weaving between past and present, trauma and joy.
Whitehead writes with ferocity and tenderness. Jonny is crude and vulnerable and beautiful and broken. His body is a site of both violence and pleasure, both pain and power. The novel refuses to look away from any of it.
–Author: Joshua Whitehead (Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit)
–Year: 2018
We Do This ‘Til We Free Us
Another nonfiction entry, but essential. Kaba is an organizer and educator who has spent decades working toward abolition—the dismantling of prisons and police and the systems that uphold them. This collection brings together her writing on transformative justice, mutual aid, and the long work of building a world where everyone can be free.
Kaba writes with clarity and urgency. She’s not interested in theory for its own sake; she wants to know what we can actually do, right now, to make things better. The answer, it turns out, is a lot.
–Author: Mariame Kaba (Black, queer)
–Year: 2021
Leave a Reply