Book bans surged again last school year, with 6,870 bans targeting nearly 4,000 titles—most for LGBTQ+ content. Florida, Texas, and Tennessee led the crackdown, pulling both modern queer bestsellers and enduring classics from shelves. Yet many of these books continue to reappear, refusing to be erased. Here are seven influential queer books worth gifting this season: Plato’s Symposium, André Gide’s Corydon, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner, and Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story. This holiday season, give the gift of stories censors couldn’t silence.
