Our Picks for the Summer Stretch Across Generations, Genres and Shelves
By Chris Azzopardi and Sarah Hunt
The challenges of the current political era have inspired a strong wave of LGBTQ+ titles across every genre and age range, and our editors have been reading. Below are the books we think deserve a place on your summer reading list – and honestly, on every other list, too.
Arts and Culture
“Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000” by Barry Walters
Barry Walters, who has written for the Village Voice, Spin and Rolling Stone, has spent his career writing about queer music from the inside. Here, he takes his cue from Sylvester’s euphoric “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” to trace the full arc of LGBTQ+ music from Stonewall to RuPaul. In this sprawling deep dive, he moves from Lou Reed and David Bowie through the disco queens and homopunks in between, making the case that queer artists didn’t just contribute to pop history – they built it.
“Fire Island Art: 100 Years” edited by John Dempsey
Flip through the pages of this first-ever art history of Fire Island and you might just feel the salt air. For nearly a century, the slender barrier island off the coast of Long Island has been a place where queer artists vacationed – and, in doing so, made it sacred. The archival materials editor John Dempsey has unearthed, many never before published, carry the particular ache of queer history: sun-drenched, hard-won and achingly beautiful. Front and center is PaJaMa – Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French – three painters who made Fire Island the backdrop of their intertwined lives in the late 1930s and ’40s, and whose tender, unhurried images feel like stolen glimpses into a world that wasn’t supposed to be seen.
“Rainbow Dreams: Color and Light in Contemporary Art” edited by Olga Rei and Valentine Uhovski
Consider this your permission to judge a book by its cover: “Rainbow Dreams” arrives printed with a seamless rainbow gradient on its exterior, and the inside delivers on that promise. Featuring more than 200 works by some of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists – Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Judy Chicago, Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons and Ellsworth Kelly among them – it’s a dizzying, joyful tour of the color spectrum in every medium imaginable: paintings, monumental sculptures, LED light installations, immersive spaces and more. Paola Pivi’s feathered bear sculptures sit alongside Ugo Rondinone’s neon works and Nick Cave’s maximalist visions, revealing just how differently brilliant minds see and use color. For a book that doesn’t wave any particular flag, it feels awfully good to hold right now.
Fiction
“Take Me with You” by Steven Rowley
Here’s a question for your next dinner party: If a beam of light appeared in your backyard and offered you a way out, would you go? In Steven Rowley’s latest, college professor Jesse watches his husband Norman do exactly that, stepping into a strange light in their Joshua Tree backyard and vanishing after 30 years together. What follows is less a sci-fi story than a deeply grounded portrait of a marriage – and of one man suddenly alone for the first time in his adult life, forced to reckon with who he is without the person who defined him. From The New York Times bestselling author of “Lily and the Octopus” and “The Guncle” – winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor – comes a novel that asks what it means to stay when someone you love chooses to go.
“That’s What Friends Are For” by Wade Rouse
Michigan author Wade Rouse has dreamed up something irresistible: what happened to Coco, the gay housekeeper played by Charles Levin who appeared in the very first episode of “The Golden Girls” – then vanished, written out to make room for Sophia? Rouse fictionalizes the life of the actor who played him, imagining Coco alongside three aging gay besties living together in a fabulous pink mid-century home in Palm Springs, members of a monthly drag tribute called “The Golden Gays.” It’s being called an “affectionate queer homage” to ‘The Golden Girls’ by Publishers Weekly and “a rip-roaringly funny ode to found family, Palm Springs, drag and Bea Arthur” by author Grant Ginder. The New York Post recommends it as the “perfect cozy gift to make you laugh, cry and fall in love with your chosen family.” Coco deserved better – and now, finally, he gets it.
“The Summer Boy” by Philippe Besson
July 1985. A scruffy resort island off the coast of France. Six teenagers suspended between carefree mornings in the waves and nights heavy with yearning, orbiting each other in a circle of frustrated desire – François loves Alice who loves Nicolas, Marc is drawn to Philippe who is drawn to Nicolas, and Nicolas himself remains an enigma. From the author of the bestselling “Lie With Me,” translated from French by Sam Taylor, this autofictional novel follows Philippe as he excavates that summer and the boy whose sudden disappearance at a cliffside party left a mystery that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Besson writes with a delicate, nostalgia-laden precision, moving between that long-ago summer and the present with the kind of clarity that only distance – and a lifetime of carrying something – can bring. Quietly devastating.
“The Dinner Party” by Cat Fitzpatrick
A riotous post-pandemic dinner party. A short arcadian pageant. The trials of making babies as queer and transsexual couples. Eight love poems. An epistolary friendship. Cat Fitzpatrick’s follow-up to her Lambda Award-winning debut novel “The Call Out” is a novel-in-verse that moves through all of it with jubilance and tenderness, celebrating queerness and the communities we build through joy, support and love. Fitzpatrick – the first trans woman director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Rutgers University-Newark, and co-editor of the ALA Stonewall Award-winning anthology “Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction & Fantasy from Transgender Writers” – is one of the most distinctive trans literary voices working today. “The Dinner Party” is proof that the table she’s setting has room for all of us.
Nonfiction and Memoir
“A Black Queer History of the United States” by C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost
Columbia University’s C. Riley Snorton and University of Illinois-Chicago’s Darius Bost make a compelling argument in their January 2026 release: that gender and sexual expression have always been inseparable from the Black freedom struggle. Moving from the colonial era to the present day, the book draws on figures including James Baldwin, Josephine Baker and Marlon Riggs to show how Black queer and trans Americans have shaped – and been shaped by – the fight for racial justice. A landmark work of accessible scholarship.
“Pretty: A Memoir” by KB Brookins
Winner of the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction, KB Brookins’ debut memoir traces their coming-of-age as a Black transmasculine person in Texas, weaving poetry into prose as they reckon with family, church, masculinity and desire. Brookins writes about negotiating the space between who they are and how they’re perceived with candor and linguistic precision, pulling from both queer theory and pop culture without losing the thread of an intimately personal story that Publisher’s Weekly called a “powerful testament” to the journey of self-actualization.
“Queer & Christian” by Rev. Brandan Robertson
For LGBTQ+ people who have experienced faith as a weapon rather than a refuge, Rev. Brandan Robertson – the theologian known as the “TikTok Pastor” – offers an evidence-based reclamation of Scripture. The book methodically challenges the passages most often weaponized against queer people, situating them in historical and cultural context while also celebrating queer figures throughout the biblical tradition. With conversion therapy cases reaching the Supreme Court and book bans accelerating, Robertson’s theological framework feels especially well-timed.
