It's pride month! In memory of the Stonewall Riots that spawned the modern LGBT rights movement, LGBT communities and their allies now observe June as their season, considered the appropriate time to hold Pride Parades and other events that celebrate the LGBT community, its history, and its identity.

To commemorate this highly significant month for the LGBT community, we're writing a number of articles regarding LGBT culture and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:items relevant to it. One import🐭ant category of such items is literature. There are tons of books about the LGBT community, and novels featuring LGBT characters and themes. This list will recommend some of the most notable stories regarding this demographic, many of them written by queer authors.

Best YA Novel
Will Grayson, Will Grayson

A collaboration b✨etween legendary YA authors John Green and David Leviathan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson🌠 tells the story of two teenagers with the same name.

Pros & Cons
  • Multiple excellent authors with distinct voices
  • Loads of charm

Will Grayson, Will Grayson is a collaboration between two well-known YA authors: John Green, who would go on to write Paper Towns and The Fault In Our Stars, and David Leviathan, author of Boy Meets Boy and Every Day. Leviathan is gay, and the rest of his novels are male-male romances, whereas this is Green's only major experiment with LGBT fiction.

The novel is told from alternating points of view between the two Will Graysons. Both stories have major LGBT themes, with Leviathan's Will actually being gay and Green's having a queer presence in his supporting cast. The disparate (though in many ways similar) voices of these two authors weave together into something that is more than the sum of its parts.

Best Graphic Novel
Heartstopper 1-4 Boxset

The basis for th🍌e Netflix series of the same name, Heartstopper is a high-school romance with a queer twist. This box set contains the first four volumes o𒊎f the graphic novel series.

Pros & Cons
  • Excellent art and writing
  • Laid back, slice of life vibe

Another relatively laid-back slice-of-life story, Heartstopper is a series of graphic novels that tells the long romantic story between gay teenagers Charlie Spring and Nick Nelson. It's a light-hearted, wholesome story with lots of romantic drama, self-doubt, and extremely sensual hand-holding. If you're looking for something nice and easygoing or want to get caught up in a cute little gay romance, this is the story for you.

Most Impactful
The Color Purple

An old mainstay of LGBT literature from an era when such a thing was barely allowed to exist, The Color Purple is a classic, harrowing story about survival and abu🦂se.

Pros & Cons
  • Emotionally affective
  • Very disturbing, just as it intends to be
  • Not for the faint of heart

If you're looking for something light and heartwarming, gentle, or wholesome, you probably shouldn't read The Color Purple. This book is a serious and very bleak exploration of abuse and how one survives it. The story of a Black lesbian who spends much of her life being shuffled between different abusive men, this novel ultimately centers the main character's queer love story with one of the many people who help her survive and escape her situation. It's a difficult read but an extremely worthwhile one. It has a lot of important things to say and carries a lot of emotion.

Best Superhero Story
Dreadnought: Nemesis - Book One

A traditional superhero story with a queer twist, Dreadnought tells the action-packed and extremely queer story of Danny, whose superheroic transformation comes and💞 causes her to acquire her ideal body.

Pros & Cons
  • A well-told trans narrative
  • Does a great job balancing its queer and super heroic elements

Dreadnought tells the story of the closeted trans teenager Danny Tozer. At the beginning of the story, she's hiding her true self from everyone around her, including her best friend and parents. Her life is looking pretty dour, but then, everything changes when she acquires the mantle of Dreadnought, the most powerful superhero in the world, whose gift can be transferred from one bearer to another.

This has many effects, including the recipient instantly developing their ideal body, blessing Danny with a rapid and extremely successful transition that outs her as tra꧅ns to everyone around her. In the aftermath of this, she must deal with both her new superheroic mantle and the consequences of the transformation that comes with it.

Best Sci-fi Novel
The Left Hand of Darkness

A classic of science fiction by the legendary Ursula K. Le Guin, ꧙this novel𝔍 is about an entire planet of Intersex characters and how their differing nature affects their society and interactions with our outsider protagonist.

Pros & Cons
  • Amazing characters
  • Some of the best character arcs ever written
  • An almost entirely intersex cast
  • Though it has a lot to say about gender, it's somewhat detached from actual LGBT communities

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:A classic of science fiction by legendary sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness is a story about human nature, gender, and what happens when we encounter the other. Its protagonist is an emissary sent by a larger interstellar community to contact a human colony so old that it doesn't remember that there are humans elsewhere.

Notably, this planet hosts a variant of the human species, whose members are hermaphroditic. This is one of many complex differences the characters of this novel have to navigate, and, in doing so, t▨hey discover how one makes peace with something alien.

Best Dystopia
An Unkindness of Ghosts

This sci-fi dystopia is set on a massive, intergenerational space vesse♚l containing the remainder of humanity, with racially segregated decks whose "lesser" inhabitants often have gender-bending anatomy.

Pros & Cons
  • Loads and loads of queer characters
  • A well-told dystopian story

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Another sci-fi novel that is queer primarily because of the anatomy of its characters, An Unkindness of Ghosts takes place on the HSS Matilda, whose segregated decks give the light-skinned, gender-conforming inhabitants of the upper decks ample resources while condemning those on the lower decks to privation and the endless violence of the ship's guards. This novel does a lot with ideas of race and gender and the intersection between them, portraying the brutality of such social systems it depicts.

Best Fantasy
The Song of Achilles

This romantic retelling of the Tro🅷jan War tells the story from Patroclus's perspective and emphasizes his romance with Achilles, which is already present in the original text.

Pros & Cons
  • A queer love story in a well-done fantasy novel
  • Draws attention to a bit of queerness already deeply embedded in the western canon

If we wanted to be pedantic, we could potentially justify putting the Iliad on this list. That classic epic poem already turns on a bit of queerness, with Achilles' romantic attachment to Patroclus playing a major role in his motives throughout, and especially at the end of, the story. However, at the end of the day, an epic poem isn't a novel, and, besides, there's a retelling of that story that accentuates all the queer elements of it brilliantly.

The Song of Achilles is a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:great fantasy novel that retells the Trojan War from Patroclus' perspective, putting an increased emphasis on their backstory and romance, which is a great queer love story. Because this element was already present in the original text, it fits in quite naturally while also creating an alternate take on the story that justifies its existence.

FAQWhat Are Queer Books?

There are different ways of classifying books as queer, and there are queer theorists who will argue that every possible work can be "queered" by proper analysis. All the books on this list contain p🍷rominent queer themes and characters, with all but one having an LGBT protagonist. (The one is The Left Hand of Darkness, which gets away with it because every single other character in that book is queer.)

Why Is June LGBT Pride Month?

B🃏ecause the Stonewall Riots, the event that sparked the modern LGBT rights movements, took place on💮 June 28, 1969, when queer patrons defended themselves against a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City.

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