Here lies my booklist of anything LGBTQIA2S+ for my queer summer reading goals! It is important to me to be inclusive and diverse with my picks, though queerness is as expansive as the universe, so there’s no single list that covers it all! That’s fine, it just means more lists for this Virgo!

CONTENT WARNING / TRIGGER WARNING: Reader beware! There is a lot of sensitive, challenging, or potentially triggering content within these works. I strongly recommend you check out the individual content warnings on the respective work’s Storygraph page linked to their title.

Poetry: Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse—Anne Carson, 160 pgs, 1998

Based on an ancient Greek myth, this coming-of-age story is a novel and a poem. It is told from the point of view of a boy, who is also a red monster with wings, named Geryon who finds solace in his camera and Herakles after escaping his brother and mother.

One of my all-time favorites; I’ve read it many times over.

Poetry: Night Sky with Exit Wounds—Ocean Vuong, 89 pgs, 2016

Ocean Vuong’s first full-length collection explores romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. Full of rich imagery and sudden drops into white-hot surges of emotion, this collection is full of love, light, and loss.

Nonfic: The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures—Dossie Easton, Janet W. Hardy, 299 pgs, 1997

Does monogamy seem like an outdated concept to you? Or do you just want to spice up your sex life? The Ethical Slut explores the ways in which singles or couples can be ethical and emotionally sustainable while polyamorous.

Short Story: Kink: Stories—Garth Greenwell, R. O. Kwon, 288 pgs, 2021

Kink is a short story collection written by diverse authors that span the sexuality spectrum. Love, desire, pleasure, and kinks are portrayed in just as varied settings. More than smut, these works show the beauty and importance of different types of pleasure and how that definition is flexible.

Short Story: Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Fiction—Devon W. Carbado, Dwight A. McBride, Donald Weise, and Evelyn C. White, 600 pgs, 2002

One hundred years of Black queerness! The range of materials written by these forty authors is deep and wide. This collection covers turn-of-the-(last)-century fiction through the (limited) sexual liberation of the 1960s to the century’s last cultural wave of the 1990s. Here’s to the future!

Fiction: Peaces—Helen Oyeyemi, 256 pgs, 2021

Newlyweds Otto and Xavier (and their pet mongoose) honeymoon on a sleeper train that’s more like a fever dream than a mode of transportation. The Lucky Day seems to have no other passengers until a mysterious note is discovered which is when the real journey begins. Oyeyemi takes you down bizarre, winding passages filled with unexpected and deep connections that lead to the most sublime and strange destinations.

I love everything Helen Oyeyemi has written, and I can’t wait for whatever she does next.

I hope you enjoyed my list. Please let us know if you read any, what you think of them, and what your top picks are!