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. From Barry Walters’ sweeping history of queer music to AIDS-era ghost stories to a “Golden Girls” spinoff set in Palm Springs drag culture. For memoir, nonfiction, and younger-reader shelves, a landmark Black queer history of the United States to picture books, YA biography, and a cozy monster-hunting romantasy.
Whether you’re looking for a memoir that hits close to home, nonfiction that reframes what you thought you knew, or younger-reader titles for every age and shelf, there’s plenty of ground to cover.
Links to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh catalog where available.
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.
The book is full of moments like Bette Midler’s “Friends” becoming an unlikely AIDS-era anthem and Whitney Houston in her first and last major gay press interview with Houston speaking about the LGBTQ+ community as though she weren’t a part of it. “I can’t imagine her anguish in that moment,” Walters writes.
As Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys puts it, “Barry Walters has been writing about music from an American queer perspective for five decades. This is his testament: a musical, personal and political history that explores and celebrates the LGBTQ+ contribution to popular music.”
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“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.
Fifteen chapters, each by a leading art writer, trace the overlapping circles of friends and collaborators who shaped the island’s identity — from George Daniell and Andy Warhol to Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar and David Hockney. Contemporary artists like Nicole Eisenman, Wolfgang Tillmans and Salman Toor carry that legacy forward. Part archive, part love letter, this is a book that reminds you why Fire Island has always felt, to so many of us, like coming home.
“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
“Waiting on a Friend” by Natalie Adler
New York’s East Village, 1984. Renata, described as a “young dyke-about-town,” has always been able to see ghosts — but lately, as AIDS claims more and more people in her community, they’re everywhere. When her best friend Mark dies, she waits for his ghost to appear. It doesn’t. And when a mysterious company moves into the neighborhood promising to rid apartments of lingering presences — capturing and storing ghosts in the process — Renata realizes the world is trying to erase the very people she’s fighting to remember. Named Fiction Debut of the Month by Library Journal, Natalie Adler’s debut is, at its heart, a book about friendship and loss, but more specifically a haunting portrait of how mass loss during the AIDS crisis reshaped an entire generation of queer life.
“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.
“Night Night Fawn” by Jordy Rosenberg
Barbara Rosenberg is dying in a cluttered rent-controlled Manhattan apartment, high on opioids, and she has things to say. About her smutty late husband. About her career as a receptionist for a disreputable plastic surgeon. About her glory days as an accomplished jazzerciser and her failed dreams of film noir stardom. About Karl Marx, Zionism, gender and her two great disappointing loves: an estranged trans son and a long-lost best friend whose betrayal still haunts her. From the author of “Confessions of the Fox,” a novel that veers from memoir to diatribe to deranged manifesto — and what The New York Times Book Review calls “a rant of comedic genius.”
“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.
“Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You” by Julián Delgado Lopera
The author of The New York Times-acclaimed “Fiebre Tropical” returns with a sophomore novel set in 1990s Colombia, navigating the rivers, drag clubs and dusty apartments of Bogotá with electric, Spanglish-drenched prose. At the heart of the story: a depressed father haunted by the young man he loved and betrayed, his teenage daughter desperate for answers about her mother’s drowning and Mamadora Eléctrica — a luminous travesti who steps into the wreckage of their lives. Morbid teens, dysfunctional families and queer chosen kinship thread through Julián Delgado Lopera’s latest, which Publishers Weekly calls “striking and indelible” and Alejandro Varela describes as “a present for us all.”
“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.
“Play Naked” by Amanda De Lisio
York University professor Amanda De Lisio centers the stories of sex workers who mobilized during Rio de Janeiro’s 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, events that generated global spectacle while intensifying police scrutiny of femme and trans bodies. Drawing on extensive interviews, De Lisio frames sex work as a site of political resistance and economic agency, pushing back against the trafficking narratives that typically dominate coverage of mega-events. The result is a rigorous, compassionate look at how queer and trans people navigate — and subvert — systems designed to exploit or erase them.
“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.
“Wine, Women, and Weed: A Memoir of Faith, Hope, and Love” by Elisabeth Mack
Healthcare leader Elisabeth Mack came out and found lasting love later in life, a trajectory that still goes underrepresented in LGBTQ+ memoir. Moving through a strict religious upbringing, a heterosexual marriage and profound loss, Mack’s debut explores how identity can take decades to fully surface. For readers who came to their queerness in adulthood, or who are still working out what faith and sexuality can look like together, her story offers both recognition and a kind of permission.
Children’s and YA
“Athlete Is Agender: True Stories of LGBTQ+ People in Sports” edited by Katherine Locke and Nicole Melleby
With trans athletes’ right to compete under legal assault across the country, this 2025 middle-grade anthology arrives as both affirmation and argument. Featuring personal essays by queer, trans and nonbinary athletes alongside profiles of Megan Rapinoe, Billie Jean King and Adam Rippon, the collection makes the case that sport has never belonged to any single identity. A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year and ALA Rainbow Book List selection. Ages 10 and up.
“Bromantasy” by Máire Roche
Former teacher Máire Roche’s debut novel follows two best friends — the charmingly useless Juniper and the endlessly capable Mo — who stumble into a monster-hunting quest and discover that their feelings for each other might be harder to face than anything in the forest. Roche, who describes the book as “my love letter to every queer person carving out moments of joy despite it all,” delivers a cozy, laugh-out-loud friends-to-lovers romantasy. Fans of Travis Baldree’s “Legends and Lattes” and T.J. Klune’s “The House in the Cerulean Sea” will want this immediately.
“Hick” by Sarah Miller
A 2026 Stonewall Book Award Honor Book, Sarah Miller’s YA biography follows Lorena Hickok from a brutal childhood in rural Wisconsin to the top of the Associated Press masthead — and into a years-long intimate relationship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Miller read all 3,500 letters between the two women to reconstruct the story, and the result is both a portrait of a trailblazing queer journalist and an honest look at how love survives the weight of public life. A rare YA nonfiction title that earns the word essential. Ages 14 and up.
“Teeny and Tilly” by Beanie Feldstein, illustrated by Laura Watkins
“Booksmart” and “Lady Bird” actress Beanie Feldstein makes her picture book debut with a story about Teeny, a girl who’s been teased her whole life for being short, and the unexpected friendship she forms with Tilly, the tallest kid at her new school. Warm and genuinely funny, the book is less about difference as a concept and more about the specific courage it takes to reach across your own nerves and connect. Feldstein, who lives in Brooklyn with her wife, brings a real tenderness to the material. Ages 4–8.
“What Kind of Queen?” by Kyle Casey Chu and Andrew W. Shaffer, illustrated by Cindy Lozito
Co-written by Drag Story Hour co-founder Kyle Casey Chu and historian Andrew W. Shaffer, this vibrant picture book biography introduces young readers to José Sarria, born in 1922 to Colombian immigrants in San Francisco, who became the first openly gay person to run for public office in the United States. Told with a fairy-tale sensibility and brought to life by Cindy Lozito’s research-driven illustrations, it celebrates Sarria’s legacy as a drag performer, community builder and forerunner to figures like Harvey Milk. Perfect for Pride and well beyond.