Here are 100 books that The Velvet Rage fans have personally recommended if you like
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I came out as bisexual way back in 1991, and experienced a lot of discrimination, hostility, and ridicule from both the gay and straight communities. Finding stories about me and my own experience has always been vital, to help me explore and understand more about myself and how I “fit in” in a world that seems to be so locked into an either/or framework. True, I have witnessed a number of positive changes for bi+ folks in the decades since I came out, but there's still a long way to go in terms of visibility, acceptance, and understanding.
As a writer, each time I read anything by James Baldwin, it´s like I´m getting a master class in how to capture a feeling and translate that into an articulate thought. When a friend told me to read this book over 30 years ago, shortly after I came out, they said this was “the best, and perhaps the most tragic novel about bisexuality ever written.”
Years later, it still kicks me in the gut each time I read it. Baldwin´s detailed examination of David´s desire for Giovanni while simultaneously being engaged to his fiancé, Hella, remains achingly beautiful.
When David meets the sensual Giovanni in a bohemian bar, he is swept into a passionate love affair. But his girlfriend's return to Paris destroys everything. Unable to admit to the truth, David pretends the liaison never happened - while Giovanni's life descends into tragedy.
United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love's endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love,…
I am an author, speaker, researcher, and thinking partner with a PhD in Social Psychology and specialization in the fields of human sexuality, intercultural fluency, and relationships. I have over two decades of experience working with individuals, couples, companies, and governments across 40 countries. I truly believe that we can create world peace one relationship at a time, and embrace it as my mission. My third book in English, Love By Design, is the result of two-decade-long research on the status of thriving relationships and its key ingredients. These could be applied to relationships in all spaces, from bedrooms (most intimate) to the boardrooms (most public).
Esther Perel's exploration of the intricate dance between intimacy and desire resonates with many couples who are in long-term relationships, want it to work so desperately, and yet find themselves stuck. This book builds on the concepts of differentiation and attachment styles while inviting readers to embrace a new paradigm of eroticism within committed relationships.
What resonates deeply is Perel's grounded yet unflinching approach to addressing taboo topics and dismantling societal norms. Through her eloquent prose and compelling case studies, she illuminates the path to unlocking erotic intelligence and reigniting passion in long-term partnerships.
A New York City therapist examines the paradoxical relationship between domesticity and sexual desire and explains what it takes to bring lust home.
One of the world’s most respected voices on erotic intelligence, Esther Perel offers a bold, provocative new take on intimacy and sex. Mating in Captivity invites us to explore the paradoxical union of domesticity and sexual desire, and explains what it takes to bring lust home.
Drawing on more than twenty years of experience as a couples therapist, Perel examines the complexities of sustaining desire. Through case studies and lively discussion, Perel demonstrates how more exciting, playful,…
As a social entrepreneur, I'm passionate about gender equality and always challenging myself and my perspectives. From exploring feminine power in The Red Tent to understanding complex societal structures in 100 Years of Solitude to appreciating the blend of science and womanhood in Lessons in Chemistry, to promoting sexual freedom in Ethical Slut, and finally, recognizing intersectional struggles in Hood Feminism, each book deepens my understanding and fuels my passion for change.
I deeply appreciate Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy's book for its courage in challenging societal norms around relationships.
The book's exploration of ethical non-monogamy pushes me to examine my personal boundaries and expectations. I value its discussion not just on sexuality but on all relationship dynamics.
The book resonates with me intensely, serving as a catalyst for self-discovery and understanding, which is why I hold it in such high regard.
The classic guide to love, sex, and intimacy beyond the limits of conventional monogamy has been fully updated to reflect today’s modern attitudes and the latest information on nontraditional relationships.
“One of the most useful relationship books you could ever read, no matter what your lifestyle choices. It’s chock-full of great information about communication, jealousy, asking for what you want, and maintaining a relationship with integrity.”—Annie Sprinkle, PhD, sexologist and author of Dr. Sprinkle’s Spectacular Sex
For 20 years The Ethical Slut—widely known as the “Poly Bible”—has dispelled myths and showed curious readers how to maintain a successful polyamorous lifestyle…
I am someone who has lived a number of different lives. Although I loved being a father and husband I knew I wasn’t being authentic. At 45 that all changed utterly when I finally came out as gay – and accepted myself for perhaps the very first time in my life. However, even before coming out I was a professional writer – it was my only way to make sense of the world. But I also knew that although a successful writer I wasn’t a truthful one – and the most beautiful thing in life is discovering your own truth, isn’t it? Join me here in a safe space to experience yours.
Part manifesto, part archive of a fascinating and alluring sub-culture, Geoff Mains's book explores the possibilities of extreme encounters through pain/pleasure, BDSM, and role play in the leather community.
It’s not sensationalist although it examines ideas around sensation. It celebrates performance whilst honoring intimacy. It’s a book that would offer a reader of every sexuality an insight into some of their own fantasies and how to access them safely, and meaningfully.
I read it like I would read an exhaustive and tempting menu – picking out items I might like to taste myself and learning a great deal in the process.
A subculture of gay men participate in a radical form of sexuality and community known as leather. Through intimate forms of encounter, using such tools as pain-pleasure, bondage, and role-play, leather can bring a shift of conciousness and a new vision of the self. This innovative book pioneered in sensitively exploring and celebrating leathersexuality. As relevant today as when it was written 20 years ago, Urban Aboriginals is an intimate view of the gay male leather community. Within its pages, author Geoff Mains explores the spritual, sexual, emotional, cultural and physiological aspects that make this "scene" one of the most…
I’ve been gay for half my life; the other half I was confused, questioning, and considered a pathologic deviant by the American Psychiatric Association. I am no longer confused, or considered pathologic or deviant. I’m a father, psychiatrist, and author who grew up in Nebraska. I was a good boy, followed all the rules, and lived the life that was expected of me. I fit in but I never felt like I belonged. I took back control of my life and threw off expectations of what I should be. I want others to believe that they can have a richer life by living the life they were meant to live.
When I explored coming out in my forties, I was lonely and searched for answers. I found nothing. So, I wrote my own book.
Gay people who’ve been in heterosexual marriages, especially those with children, face a predicament: a bad choice and a worse one. The Lie is a story of hope for anyone caught in the dilemma of either living a lie or leaving a family they love. Many consider suicide; many have attempted it.
The Lie is an emotional and honest story of Dameron’s coming out to live the life he was meant to live. He owns up to his past, sheds the shame and guilt, and seeks and finds forgiveness as he begins to live his life honestly.
A candid memoir of denial, stolen identities, betrayal, faking it, and coming out.
Do you know me?, the email began, sparking tremors of fear that turned into a full quake of panic when William Dameron discovered that his selfie had been stolen by strangers. On social networks and dating sites, his image and identity-a forty-year-old straight white male-had been used to hook countless women into believing in lies of love and romance. Was it all an ironic cosmic joke? Almost a decade prior, William himself had been living a lie that had lasted for more than twenty years. His secret?…
As a journalist, lawyer, and writer, I've been thinking and writing about state regulation of sexuality for 20 years. Political writing about sex can easily fall into orthodoxy; whether conservative or liberal, each side has its expected talking points. When I began investigating ways of thinking about public displays of sexuality in Park Cruising, I returned to the cache of sex-positive writing of the 1980s and 1990s. Some of it was invigorating, and some stale. So I sought out new writing about sex and sexuality, and I was richly rewarded. These books are just the tip of the iceberg; there's a feast of contemporary writing and thinking. So much to think through and explore!
For me, this book begins with a pleasing reversal: that the tough-looking guys engaged in casual, rough, or extreme types of sexual expression are in fact displaying tenderness.
The book made me reexamine what I thought I knew about the emotions and relationships at work in gay “pig” subcultures. I found myself underlining passage after passage. In the last third of the book, Florêncio becomes a character in the scene he is describing, a risky move that pays off.
This book analyses contemporary gay "pig" masculinities, which have emerged alongside antiretroviral therapies, online porn, and new sexualised patterns of recreational drug use, examining how they trouble modern European understandings of the male body, their ethics, and their political underpinnings.
This is the first book to reflect on an increasingly visible new form of sexualised gay masculinity, and the first monograph to move debates on condomless sex amongst gay men beyond discourses of HIV and/or AIDS. It contributes to existing critical histories of sexuality, pornography and other sex media at a crucial juncture in the history of gay male sex…
Sylvia Barry is our invention, a solitary witch who writes queer romance from her lighthouse keep. As a pair of co-authors, one of us grew up with the dry humor of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, and the other grew up with fanfiction and romance tropes. We came together to write quirky, queer romances that are playful and ironic but also deal with deeper themes of self-discovery, trauma healing, and community. Rivals-to-lovers and grumpy/sunshine are our favorite tropes to write, especially in dual (or more!) POV, because the Yearning is always juicy, and we play off each other’s energy as we write our opposing characters.
If a book could smell like jasmine and taste like clover honey, it would be this.
We loved losing ourselves in the warm, sticky, bitter-sweet nostalgia of a small Georgia hometown, where you can practically hear the crickets and smell the night-blooming flowers. We had our hearts broken by a story of childhood friends turned lovers, turned dirty little secrets, turned estranged, turned something fragile but precious.
We were left breathless by Sander Santiago’s descriptions of grief, acceptance, and the fully caramelized romance between golden sunshine boy Fin (ballplayer turned med student) and taciturn bad boy Orion (delinquent turned musician).
There’s a whole bit about pain being broken down between guilt and hope that absolutely killed us. Good cry turned warm and fuzzies.
When Franklin-Fin-Ness makes up his mind it tends to stay made. Running, med school, and caring for his healing mother are things Fin never second-guesses. More stubborn than his mind, his heart picked Orion a long time ago. Seeing Orion again proves his heart is still invested, but his temper and fears about their past repeating have Fin wondering if following his heart is worth losing his mind.
Musician and drifter Orion Starr expects ghosts at his mother's funeral in his rural Georgia town. He never expects one to be his former crush, Fin. Especially since he ghosted the guy…
Incarceration is a gigantic problem in the US, especially because of its connection to racial injustice. I have no firsthand experience with prison or the system, and yet it looms large in my imagination and my deepest fears. That should not be the case merely because I’m a Black gay American, but here we are. I feel that with the help of my mother and others, I have managed to sidestep a lot of the potential pitfalls of people’s misguided perception of my identity, but I have an active, paranoid imagination and profound survivor guilt, so I gravitate toward stories about people at who are odds with our society in ways that reflect that precarious status which allows me to explore a wide range of human experiences.
This book has a provenance that’s almost like a prison
sentence: released in 1953 under the title Cast the First Stone, it
would have been Himes’ first novel, but its frankness about homosexual
relationships in prison and the fact that a Black writer had written white
main characters, made publishers shit their pants and doctor the life out of it
to make it conform to 50s market expectations. Of course, in the process, they
ruined it.
But in 1998, Old School Books released Himes’ "director’s cut,” a much different, more beautiful, raw, and thoughtful book that’s as much about prison life as it is about the prison of masculinity. Paradoxically, prison
seems to be a place where people indulge homosexual desires, though the
atmosphere somehow remains homophobic.
Reading this book could foster more
compassion for queer desires, whether those of prisoners who identify as
LGBTQIA+, or those who claim…
A classic restored-the complete and unexpurgated text of a great African-American writer's brutal and lyrical novel of prison life. First published in reduced and bowdlerized form in 1952 as Cast the First Stone, Yesterday Will Make You Cry was Chester Himes's first, most powerful, and autobiographical novel. This Old School Books edition presents it for the first time precisely as Himes wrote it, a sardonic masterpiece of debasement and transfiguration in an American penitentiary and one of his most enduring literary achievements.
Sylvia Barry is our invention, a solitary witch who writes queer romance from her lighthouse keep. As a pair of co-authors, one of us grew up with the dry humor of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, and the other grew up with fanfiction and romance tropes. We came together to write quirky, queer romances that are playful and ironic but also deal with deeper themes of self-discovery, trauma healing, and community. Rivals-to-lovers and grumpy/sunshine are our favorite tropes to write, especially in dual (or more!) POV, because the Yearning is always juicy, and we play off each other’s energy as we write our opposing characters.
It’s Oscar Wilde and the cast of Monty Python having an orgy on the set of Bridgerton–what’s not to love?
Alexis Hall is an auto-buy author for us, and Something Fabulous is one of our favorites. It’s a hysterical romp–sexy and romantic but also deeply irreverent and laugh-out-loud funny. Chock full of shenanigans, relatable and diverse characters, and a fresh reimagining of Regency romance.
We love a grumpy duke. We love a chaotic, wide-eyed ward. We LOVE Sir Horley Comewithers and his questionable cabin in the woods. There’s a scene with a bee that has caused irreparable damage to our lungs and ribs.
From the acclaimed author of Boyfriend Material comes a delightfully witty romance featuring a reserved duke who’s betrothed to one twin and hopelessly enamoured of the other.
Valentine Layton, the Duke of Malvern, has twin problems: literally.
It was always his father’s hope that Valentine would marry Miss Arabella Tarleton. But, unfortunately, too many novels at an impressionable age have caused her to grow up…romantic. So romantic that a marriage of convenience will not do and after Valentine’s proposal she flees into the night determined never to set eyes on him again.
Arabella’s twin brother, Mr. Bonaventure “Bonny” Tarleton, has…
I’ve always loved cartoons and anime. I’m also bisexual and non-binary. Growing up, gay representation was hard to come by, so when we did get it, we were always super excited, whether it was good or not so good. Luckily, I’ve gotten to watch the world change and grow more accepting, but sometimes it’s still difficult to find good rep when you don’t know where to look. I try to fill my books with good representation so that my readers can feel seen in a way I didn’t, and I want to spread the word about some great LGBT manga that I love and made an impact on me.
I’m always a sucker for something sweet, wholesome, and low-to-no stakes when it comes to my gay manga.
It’s a sweet and wholesome story about a mom who realizes her eldest son is gay, but gives him the space, respect, and privacy to come out in his own time. She also makes a point to defend her son’s sexuality without outing him to others. It made me crack up because I remember being that eldest son - thinking I was slick at hiding my sexuality, when I really wasn’t.
I also love how the mom gives her son the space he needs and respects his privacy. A super mom, for sure!
A doting mother and her two beloved sons, one of whom she thinks is probably gay, go about their daily lives in this hilarious and heartwarming LGBTQIA+-friendly family comedy!
Despite belonging to a family of four, the Aoyama residence is typically home to three, with Dad away for work. Mom Tomoko and her two darling sons, Hiroki and Yuri, go about their everyday lives with little to disturb their gentle routines.
But as Hiroki begins his first year of high school, Tomoko can’t help but wonder if her eldest has fallen for another boy. Though Tomoko is content to cheer…
