100 books like I Think Our Son Is Gay 01

I still remember when this book came out my senior year of high school, and how ridiculously excited my friends and I were to find out about it. It was probably one of my first times finding some good, wholesome gay representation in manga.

An unknown brother-in-law traveling from Canada to Japan to meet his husband’s family, with personal character growth about gay acceptance? Sign me up!

I feel like I’m always down to read more about family dynamics that aren’t your typical nuclear setup, so this is just a win-win for me.

I can’t find another way to describe it - this book is just funny!

An autobiographical story about the author’s struggles to find a girlfriend and the general difficulties of dating, this book kept putting me in my own feelings because I recognized so many of those emotions. I used to believe that dating in the gay community was easy. (It’s not.)

I love it whenever someone manages to take an aspect of being gay and show the difficulties in a relatable or humorous way. I feel like almost everyone, gay or straight, can relate to the difficulties of dating. I also love that the author is not afraid to poke a little fun at herself in a healthy way. Sometimes, that’s how you get through the struggle!

I thought that this book was such a fun way to turn the “magical girl” trope on its head by taking a trans boy, Max, and having him discover he’s the descendant of a long line of magical girls. You can’t set up that premise and not expect some shenanigans.

I’ve always loved the “magical girl” genre, and it all felt very “Sailor Moon” to me. I felt a lot for Max, considering my own personal issues with trying to get my family to understand my gender. It’s a complicated thing, and adding magical girl powers into the mix? I’ll take on gender issues any day! Frankly, I’m amazed no one thought to do something like this sooner!

I rarely see asexual representation in the media, but with this book, I got a beautiful story about a girl finding her worth outside of a relationship while she starts to understand her own sexuality.

Like the main character, Chika, I have often heard people write off asexuality, saying things like “Oh, you just haven’t met the right person!” which can make asexual people feel isolated or “broken” - another experience Chika has as well.

Watching her learn about her own feelings and come to terms with who she is is a powerful experience that I, and many other young LGBTQ+ readers, will feel connected to. Getting to experience a story that so eloquently describes experiences like these always warms my heart because I know that it helps people feel a connection, and I’m always happy to see more representation.

The book that put British literary giant Hollinghurst on the map in 1988, this gorgeously written, fast-paced novel follows Will, a ridiculously privileged, idle, and good-looking young gay man in early 1980s London who has torrid sexual affairs with a racially diverse group of working-class men and also inadvertently saves the life of a very elderly gay aristocratic man with a homoerotic colonial past.

With its Forsterian attunement to the prejudices and vanities of the Thatcher-era British upper class, its explicit evocation of the early 20th century gay British novelist Ronald Firbank and its sometimes cringe-y look at cross-class and cross-racial desire, the novel showcases gay men driven ecstatically and obsessively by both libidinous and aesthetic yearnings—all of them oblivious to the dark clouds of AIDS gathering on London’s horizon.

This novel is everything—a school story, a coming-of-age story, a fish-out-of-water story as well as being chock-full of swords and sorcery. It follows genius mechanist Kiram Kir-Zaki as he journeys far away from his home to attend the prestigious Sagrada Academy where he hopes to make the connections that will earn him a place in the king’s court. Instead, he finds himself shunned on account of his race and compelled to share a room with a man who is widely believed to have no soul. If two hot outcasts being forced to share a room and eventually falling so deeply in love that death itself cannot separate them, then this book is your cup of tea.

Forster captures the loneliness and enforced celibacy many experienced when homosexuality was criminalized, and which I also experienced.

Forster had his first sexual experience at 37. His hero Maurice, like characters in many novels of the early twentieth century, tries therapy to change himself, and remains in a celibate relationship until his partner marries a woman. Maurice was published after Forster’s death, though it was written six decades earlier.

It inspired younger writers like Isherwood and was made into a great film with the young Hugh Grant as Maurice’s partner Clive. Forster’s statement that he would not have bothered to write unless he could give his hero a happy ending, also inspired my fiction-writing.

I was a freshman in college and still closeted about my homosexuality when I found Numbers in an LGBTQ+ bookstore. The description on the dust jacket got my blood racing: in an effort to reclaim his youth, a handsome gay man strikes out to see how many sexual conquests he can rack up during a ten-day stay in L.A. I bought the book and read it in my dorm room when my roommate wasn’t around.

I got more than I bargained for. Along with descriptions of sexual encounters, the novel opened my eyes to the ramifications of internalized homophobia and explored the value of sex among an oppressed people who are persecuted for their carnal desires. This novel written in 1967 spoke to me across the decades. It still can.

A valuable first-person account in real time describing what it was like to be gay in early 20th century USA. Jeb is well-read in the homosexuality literature of his era, from Havelock Ellis to Walt Whitman. One sympathizes with Jeb’s shame and misery in a time when being homosexual was socially unacceptable and illegal. Yet his self-pity and social ineptitude can be exasperating. In time he makes some gay friends, but he is often ambivalent toward them. Eventually he does develop some confidence and self-assertiveness. Most admirable is his love of culture (books, art, movies, stage plays, concerts) and his affection for nature (weather, plants, scenery, etc.) which he describes so exquisitely. By sloth and lack of dedication, Jeb never achieved his ambitions as a writer, but he did leave us these diaries that so well describe his singular life.

Did you think I would only recommend one Queer Eye book on my list? Do you know me at all?

Love That Story has a lot of laughs, of course, but like the author, the depths of compassion laced with gentle education speaks to the heart of everything I wish I’d always known. Do not read unless you want to better understand this lovely soul. You might just finish this book as a better version of yourself.