The most recommended books about gay men

Maali is a deeply flawed but deeply beautiful character. Usually, I find the second person too distant and lacking personality, but this narration is, oddly for a ghost, full of life.

I also loved how Karunatilaka doesn't give a history lesson, but the way he opens the reader's eyes to the past is exactly like we're looking at Maali's photographs. It's a hard look but the surreal dark humor of the novel prevents this from being a bleak read.

Perhaps the thing that is most striking about the novel is how razor-sharp the writing is. I bookmarked so many sections that I knew I'd want to go back over to think about. Karunatilaka gets his ideas across with intelligence, humor and originality. This was my first read of the year, and my favorite.

The stars of this book are “solitaries,” people who choose to live alone or spend substantial stretches of time alone. Upending the demeaning caricatures of people who spend a lot of time alone, Johson shows that some of the most renowned artists and authors have been solitaries.

They have rich inner lives and contribute meaningfully to society. Even unknown solitaries are artists–they design their own lives. Solitaries value friendship and do not see romantic relationships as sitting atop a relationship hierarchy. Free of a conventional focus on The One, they are more open to more different people and the world.

I sometimes imagine what it would be like to wake up on top of a snowbound mountain, knowing you are alone–and then to hear footsteps outside…It is safe to imagine, of course, because I am NOT alone in a chalet in the Swiss Alps but in my own home, surrounded by my family. However, for a character in this stunning European novel, this is how it all starts.

And then, as you follow the incredible twists and turns of the plot and try to puzzle out the relationships among the characters, you realize that nothing is as it seems. The novel perfectly captures the brooding atmosphere of the Swiss Alps, which I visited as a tourist, although I did not end up in the abandoned valley haunted by echoes. I am glad I did not–but thrilled to read about the characters who did.

The tagline for this book is “Agatha Christie but make it gay.” But Cat Sebastian does something better than that; although like Christie, everyone is concealing a secret, in Hither, Page almost everyone’s secret is being kept for a good reason—to prevent hurting someone they care about. In this book, Leo, a jaded, world-weary spy, is sent to investigate a murder in a small village. It's just after the end of WWII, and everyone is exhausted and wishes life would just get back to normal already, none more so than James, a local doctor with a touch of PTSD who needs nothing less than to get involved with espionage and smuggling. And then he meets Leo. (Spoiler: things go better than you'd think for the two of them.)

Reading this book is like someone you care about bringing you a bowl of tomato soup on a rainy day.

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.

Sass’s first novel, Surrender Your Sons, is a favorite of mine, so it’s no surprise that this book, a queer horror novel reminiscent of Scream, is a riot and an absolute page-turner.

It contains all the best elements of slasher movies and teen comedies alike, and unabashedly gay characters with wit and sharp edges kept me invested all the way until the story’s climactic ending. 

James Baldwin is one of my favorite authors, and this book is a short, masterful look at the mechanisms behind queer shame. Two lovers, David and Giovanni, hide in a darkened room in self-imposed exile in Paris until the narrator’s sense of shame breaks their love trance.

David, an American who is engaged to a woman, cannot bear to continue his gay affair and so leaves Giovanni, prompting a confrontation with a changed reality and a tragic reckoning with the guillotine. 

I love novels that pluck figures from the sidelines of history and place them up-front-and-center. In this case, the figure is the real-life Vietnamese-born man who served as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’ cook in Paris. Full of atmospheric detail, the writing in this novel is absolutely exquisite. I felt immersed in 1930s Paris, a world that’s long entranced me, but I was seeing it from an entirely new perspective. Truong offers tantalizing glimpses of Bihn’s life in the Stein-Toklas household, but the most memorable scenes happen when he’s alone, walking through the streets of Paris, on his way to meeting a lover, or regaling us with stories of his childhood in Vietnam and his fraught but tender love for his father. It’s a beautiful tale of exile and homecoming.

Apparently, I was on a bit of a gothic kick in the past year or caught up in stories centered more on character drama and banter.

Bergslien and Weaver create a fantastic alternate 1920s setting where magic is widely accepted as a thing but, okay, uncommon. The journey they take you on is equal parts hilarious and heart-wrenching, with two young people just trying to navigate their frustrating and bizarre families and the high society they’re surrounded by.

If quiet fantasy has a parallel with horror, this book should probably be the first example people hold up.

I loved this book because it is beautiful in so many ways. It is a coming-of-age tale for many of the characters in a unique way. House challenged my view of ways to love, tolerance, and limits of belief. Additionally, I enjoyed this book because of its wonderfully crafted prose. With lessons richly sprinkled on its pages, it provided me with a new way of thinking. The cherry on top for me, was the quite unique plot that as the reader I followed and could not stop until I finished the last page.