100 books like Blue Heaven

This novel weaves three unique stories told by three very distinctive gay men who live in London at completely different periods of time. What unites them? Internalised homophobia, something as a gay person I remember from a long time ago. Each character yearns for someone. Each in a distinct way. Rent boy, Jack, longs for his regular client, Oscar Wilde. Lonely artist Colin desires the model he paints while staying closeted in the 1950s. And David’s desire lands him in prison in the 1980s.

Each story travels at the same pace with each character reflecting similar highs and lows. And you don’t have to be gay to identify with this well-written novel.

This is deliciously dark. It’s a tale about Eric, a twisted teenager who has tied up a home invader and is keeping him downstairs while his mother has left him alone. She’s busy trying to seek fame overseas. Eric keeps his teachers and his classmates unsettled while paying his daily expenses by entertaining older clients in Sydney’s richer suburbs. There is nothing charming about this story, yet its cast of disturbing eccentric characters makes this a real page turner.

To be fair, there is a love story featured in this novel, but it’s not at the heart of this tale. This is a historical piece full of captivating characterisation. Robin is a burly man who’s clumsy and unpopular in the small coastal town he lives in. But a horrendous storm is brewing, and Robin takes it upon himself to gather the townsfolk and get them to shelter at The Moth and Moon, the local pub. The world building is excellent. All characters are well realised. Most are eccentric. None are forgettable. And these elements make this tale truly charming.

Charlie is homeless and lives in an abandoned carnival, just one of the places full of wonder and mystery in this novel. He is sometimes fed by a mature-aged gay couple and has an unrequited love. But he dies and we continue reading his story in a surreal version of the world he inhabited while alive. Yes, Charlie is a ghost. The carnival he still lives in has a life of its own, and he needs to protect the living who showed him kindness. A truly beautiful tale.

This highly readable book allows us to hear from one of the actual parties to a Supreme Court case. Jim Obergefell and his co-author, Debbie Cenziper, invite us into the twined lives of Obergefell and his beloved, John Arthur. 

In 2013 Obergefell and Arthur, who was dying painfully from ALS, flew from their home in Ohio to Maryland, where gay marriage was recognized, to exchange vows. But Ohio refused to acknowledge their marriage and would insist that Arthur’s death certificate must describe him as single. As Arthur lay on his deathbed, he and Obergefell contracted with civil rights attorney Al Gerhardstein to pursue the lawsuit that would become Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the Supreme Court held that the states must recognize same-sex marriages. Gerhardstein always insisted that every civil rights case starts with a story. This one could melt a heart of stone.

First published in 1980, Gaywyck was the first historical gay gothic romance. Virga, whose day job for forty years was as photo editor, turns his extraordinary eye on turn-of-the-last century New York.

The tangled lives, dark secrets, and mad love – all conventions of the romance genre – are stood on their heads in this reimagining. “I realized genre has no gender,” Virga says, and set about cannily reversing roles and inverting tropes to fashion a puzzle wrapped in an enigma of requited and unrequited love.

Gaywyck stands the test of time and remains a modern classic.   

If there is something written by Tennessee Williams that I’ve not read, I’d be surprised. All I’ve known about his personal life is that he was gay, but what that meant to him, or how he expressed it, were mysteries to me until I read Leading Men, a fictionalized account of Tennessee Williams’s 30-year love affair with Frank Merlo. Set largely in Italy, it’s filled with dazzling characters and backstage intrigue. It’s also a heartbreaking novel about life in the shadows of greatness. A book that hasn’t left me since I read it and I’m sure to read it again.

I’m a gay writer living in France, so of course, I had to read The Stuffed Coffin when it won France’s national 2019 Prize for Gay Thriller. And as a bonus, it’s set in Greece, the country which stole my heart long ago. After breaking up with his boyfriend, Damien needs to get away and chooses a bucolic Greek village next to the sea. His first night there, he falls for a handsome youth, Nikos, but their relationship is anything but simple. Meanwhile, bodies start appearing: drowned, run over, whatever. It’s hardly the calm respite Damien envisioned but readers will definitely enjoy this sometimes-quirky and definitely entertaining read.

This book resonates with me for a lot of reasons. The first is that I was married to a gay man before I met my current husband. Friends said his being gay would break us up, and they were right.

One of the protagonists in Reed’s book is a gay man married to a woman. So I was anxious to see what Reed, a gay man who was once also married to a woman, would do with this.

Secondly, I taught in a community college where many of my students had dropped out of school because they’d been bullied like one of the key characters in this book. One of the first essays the first year students were asked to write was a self-examination.

Many of the formerly bullied students wrote about how traumatic high school had been and how they felt unlovable because of it. My first published books… show more.

Written from the perspective of one of the victims of the infamous 2001 Queen Boat scandal, when 52 men were arrested and put on trial in Egypt during a raid on a gay party, In the Spider’s Room is an intense depiction of living in a society that fears and rejects any form of queerness. Unflinching, claustrophobic, and suffocating, Abdelnaby does not shy away from exploring what happens when one is presented with no avenues for expressing their desires and sense of self.