The best books about gay men

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.

Written in the fifties, perhaps the author’s gender helped excuse her brave assumption that the intimate thoughts and feelings of a group of young gay men attempting to come to terms with their sexual identity was a valid topic. Renaud writes of stunted lives: the invented girlfriends, the cautious hints to probe another man’s preferences, the desperate need to belong, provoking the retreat into society’s stereotyping even amongst themselves. The novel is dated; one character has to explain to another what drag is! But it was one more step towards gay men’s forming their identity and self-acceptance. 

This book has plenty of push and pull, and I couldn’t put it down.

I wanted the main guys to get together so badly, and loved watching them grow as young men, making important decisions for their respective countries while making peace with the social lens constantly being aimed their way. 

An extraordinary, high-pitched, Munchausenesque account of a visit to only-just-post-Soviet Leningrad during an especially overheated period of recent history. Not at all like the genteel memories of champagne receptions at the Mariinsky Theatre followed by strolls down the Moika during the White Nights that one gets in other travelogues.

This book is for all of us who escaped the small-mindedness of the world in which we were raised and about the places that took us in. The book’s hero is Aaron Englund, a gay, bookish, and much-misunderstood boy who grows up in a small town in rural Minnesota. It is about his struggles in that hostile world and the other outsiders he encounters as he tries to figure out who he is. It is about saving oneself and finding one’s place, and it is in some ways a homage to my adopted home, San Francisco. It is also a book about love, about falling in love and falling out of love, and is full of humor and compassion. 

When I first came out – at 45! – this book became the whisper on every new gay friend’s lips – you must read this. You may not agree with it all, but please read.

Alan Downs explores the impact of growing up and surviving as a gay man in a society – he examines why we are both massive over-achievers in career and status, whilst simultaneously massively indulging in a hedonistic lifestyle that can be destructive. He’s particularly good at skewering issues around shame and anger, and the importance of primary relationships, for example with our Fathers.

I believe this book – a quick, vital read – can inform so much debate about self-acceptance and be genuinely empowering.

My first sexual experience after I moved to London in 1957 was with a slightly older man I met at one of the parties I got invited to after my book was published. When we got to his flat I knew enough to take my clothes off and lie down on the bed, but what was I supposed to do then? Clueless, I lay there like a stick of celery. “You’re not gay,” he kept repeating. “Yes I am,” I kept repeating, but didn’t know how to prove it.

Too many years later, in 1966, The Song of the Loon filled in the blanks of how gay men actually had sex. It’s very well-written explicit erotica, a backwoods fantasy about impossibly handsome masculine men living far from those city gays corrupted by shame and disappointment. Song is no quick potboiler. It’s a gay author’s well-realized attempt to bring to life… show more.

First, because a novel should surprise us, and Less surprised me greatly. When I started reading this picaresque tale of a middle-aged gay man wandering as far as humanly possible to escape the sadness and embarrassment of his young lover marrying someone else, I knew only that it had won a Pulitzer and that there was some controversy over that. Having read Andrew Sean Greer’s funny and wildly imaginative novel, I believe I understand the problem: books that win a major literary prize are expected to be grim and “major.” They are hardly ever funny. I’m not sure how that jaundiced view of the literary arts came to be, but there it is. 

Less is a comic adventure novel – correction, a misadventure novel, for Arthur Less is well-meaning but naïve, an innocent in the workings of the world, and I kept wondering if his hapless blundering through his travels… show more.

Another story of dark, hidden family secrets. I read this book a long time ago but it’s stuck with me and I need to re-read it soon. The story centres on a troubled auctioneer who discovers a collection of old family photos which catch his eye. But as he examines the photos deeper, he realises their content is a snuff movie before there was such a thing, leading him to delve into their owner's past. 

Guide is the fourth book in Cooper’s George Miles Cycle. This short novel is packed with so much to think about, even if what that includes will make your skin crawl.

If you are unfamiliar with Cooper’s work, this isn’t the book I’d recommend you start with, but his language is so precise that it’s hard to imagine the sentences being written in any other way. The shifting POV chapters take readers on a tour of the seedier parts of L.A., forcing us to examine and interrogate not only how we all tell our own stories, but also how some people then use those to erase or justify their complicity. 

Larque is an unusual and sympathetic protagonist. She’s a wife, mother, and moderately successful businesswoman, but thinks of herself as a failed artist.

She also has the ability to create doppelgangers, temporary doubles of the people in her life. But this time, they’re a lot less temporary. Sky is her ten-year-old self, rebellious and contemptuous of the choices her adult self has made, and Lark is a young gay man dealing with life in the early 1990s.

And Larque is both of them, as well as herself and the menacing Virtuous Woman who lurks in the background, waiting for her chance to take over Larque’s life. It makes for a wild midlife crisis in which Larque has to decide who she wants to be and what she wants for her creations.

A few years ago we at Gertrude lit journal decided to answer the question that kept coming our way: What are some great books written by queer people with narratives that center on queer people? Before the pandemic made a mess of things, we ran GERTIE, a book club that chose two fabulous queer books every quarter. This was our very first book selection, and—like with many firsts, perhaps—it holds a special place.

The Angel of History takes place during one night in the waiting room of a San Francisco psyche ward when visits by the Devil and 14 Saints reveal the life of Jacob, a Yemen-born poet who was born in an Egyptian whorehouse. Yes, you read that right. 

Fadeout is the first book in Hansen’s Dave Brandstetter mysteries. The protagonist, an openly gay insurance investigator in 1970s California, is convinced that a man who has been reported dead is actually still alive, and he must hurry to find him. Another classic in the gay mystery canon, Fadeout is vividly noir, grittily honest, and rejects cliches and stereotypes in a way that is still shocking over fifty years later.

McKinty takes you right to the streets of a city in chaos. An excellent, edgy, police procedural with a great sense of place––and McKinty doesn’t spare the language or violence in DS Sean Duffy’s first appearance.

In 1981 Belfast, it seems a serial killer is targeting homosexuals––an anomaly in Ulster during the troubles when most murders are sectarian. Just as Duffy starts to doubt this angle, a young woman, ex-wife of a hunger striker, commits suicide, or was she murdered––and was she connected somehow to the killings?

We’re immediately caught up in Duffy’s dysfunctional world, he’s a Catholic detective in the predominantly Protestant RUC. A hard drinker, too smart for his own good, but with a strong moral compass. 

Angels in America was the first place I saw a fuller depiction of life with serious illness, and it blew my mind. Prior, who has AIDS, is arguably the main character. The focus doesn’t cut away from him the second things get very bad. Instead, we stay and see him through. I believe deeply in the power of seeing one’s darkest moments honestly reflected in art. I first discovered Angels through the amazing TV series with Al Pacino and Meryl Streep and it broke my heart into a thousand pieces. When I later read the plays, I was amazed at how funny they are. The joke density is very high. The bleakness and pathos combined with incisive humor are what make these amazing works of art some of my all-time favorites. 

An M/M ("male and male") romance novella that upends traditional romance tropes. There are no aristocratic major characters, and no heroine. Instead two hero/es, Martin St. Vincent, a freed Caribbean ex-slave, and Theo Swann, a failed curate-to-be now running a "marriage mart" rag and as "Mrs. Swann," writing Gothic novels, play out the original Georgette Heyer trope of a Foolish Young Female character's thwarted elopement. Their literally bruising There and Back coach journey retrieves the female, but also develops their own attraction, and brings them through emotional or financial liberations to the threshold of a "new world." The diversity of race and sexuality is thoroughly modern, but content warning: as per usual for the sub-genre, there's plentiful sex.

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.

This has a quite classic theme of good versus bad. I was really rooting for Zacriah from the start. He was more of your “has hidden magic” hero, but he came from humble beginnings. I do like an underdog, but more than that I like everyday people (or elves!) and seeing how they rise against adversity. Maybe because, especially in the current climate, it feels like we need to do this more and more. Zacriah is an everyday hero. Hadrian, the other protagonist is, however, a prince. The writing is such though that I was rooting for him too. Maybe because it was obvious that he cared for Zac from the start and I’m a sucker for a love story. 

My personal wish is that Americans start reading a whole lot more books from other countries, especially books that shine a light on the queer experience around the world.

Ours is a global community, and we can’t fall into the trap of thinking diversity only exists in our own country and language. Lucas Rocha’s novel tells the story of three Brazilian teens who are dealing with the impact of HIV in their own unique ways. It’s engrossing, tender, and transporting.

Anyone who loves this should also seek out the work of Vitor Martins, and should demand more books in translation so we can travel through literature.

I’ve been singing the praises of Silvera’s They Both at the End for so long, I was a little nervous about the prequel that came out this year. What if it couldn’t hold up?

Silly me: Silvera knows exactly what he’s doing, setting a doomed romance against the dawn of a new technology, and keeping the reader invested despite knowing the young lovers are on the clock. It’s a romance that reads like a thriller. I’m a sucker for both!