The best genre-bending books on queer pasts and futures

Queer theory can sometimes be head-scratching, but the first time I read Cruising Utopia (on a camping trip in the mountains), I found myself gazing anew at the trees above me and my lover by my side. The late great theorist pushes us to reconsider how queerness is experienced and remembered in quotidian times and spaces. From sharing a bottle of Coke with a lover to memorializing abandoned toilets in the New York City subway, Muñoz revels in the ecstatic potential of “queer utopian memory” and queer world-building. Cruising Utopia is a marriage of critical theory and thoughtful storytelling, giving readers a much-needed injection of hope in these thoroughly anti-queer times.    

Have you ever searched for queer history only to find… yourself? This is Jenn Shapland’s story in her delightful biography-slash-memoir about the writer Carson McCullers. Shapland digs through McCullers’ letters, discovers the late writer’s therapy appointment notes, and even recounts her own experiences living in McCullers’ former home, looking for any shreds of evidence to confirm the famed writer’s queerness. In the process, Shapland discovers her own lesbianism. As a trans lesbian, I relate so vividly to Shapland’s experiences of rethinking her own identity in the process of doing queer history. I love how she interweaves her own life with McCullers’—a kind of transgenerational rejection of the closet and a celebration of queer womanhood.  

Trans sci-fi? Yes, please. This delightful collection of short stories—which I have read twice now—consistently wows with its relatable queer and trans body-suffering, body-shifting protagonists. It is not so much a book about queer futures as it is a futurist rendering of the past twenty years, including climate disaster, endless wars, gentrification, digital subcultures, and a bit of high school nostalgia. A trans gay boy enters a portal in the woods; a young menstruating person pulls a screwdriver from their vagina; job opportunities on the moon entice anti-capitalist, ennui-filled teenagers. If Muñoz imagined queerness as a utopian space-time rupture, Jarboe reminds us that our queer dystopia is inescapably here. We wrestle now in our flesh in this fucked-up world. 

Somewhere in their fourteen-page digression on the 18th-century non-binary American prophet Universal Publick Friend did I realize—once again—that I was nearly done with T Fleischmann’s enchanting book-length essay on transness, time, and art. I have read it three times! As a trans person, I love this book for its meditations on the transitioning body and its sexy tales of intimate encounters. It also offers a critical engagement with the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work, as well as a memoir of discovery that, like Fleischmann themself, bounces from New York City to rural Tennessee and back again, charting a geography of queer friendship and memory. 

As a historian, I love well-researched historical fiction. Imagine my surprise when a lover handed me Confessions of the Fox. This book offers a historical reimagining of the life and times of 18th-century English thief Jack Sheppard, who, in Rosenberg’s estimation, was a transgender man. Confessions is also a commentary on queer historical practice. Periodic footnotes offer meta observations by a modern-day trans academic who has apparently “discovered” Sheppard’s lost text. This is a fun and stirring book on many levels—a revisionist work of “what if” history, a page-turning working-class queer love story, and an intervention in transgender historiography.