15 LGBTQ Books Out This Month You Need to Read

Part memoir, part documentary, Fine intersperses Rhea Ewing’s own experience growing up in rural Kentucky with interviews from other trans people with a range of identities and experiences about their relationships with gender. Alison Bechdel says this has “great documentary power,” and it’s perfect for anyone who wants to explore how gender shapes people’s lives.

From the author of Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji comes a collection of poetry collection that promises to “distill the radiant power and epic grief of a mischievous and wanting young deity, embodied.” There are multiple poems on the Amazon page if you want a preview. On coming out, from “disclosure”: “my brother said you can’t live in that bubble in new york the real world is not like that but it’s a lie there are no real worlds you can live in whatever bubble you like a diving bell made of tender glass”

Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” releases his second poetry collection, reflecting on his grief in the wake of his mother’s death. This promises to be a unique, haunting, and experimental collection.

Nyle DiMarco is an actor and producer known for winning both America’s Next Top Model and Dancing with the Stars. In this memoir, he describes growing up Deaf in multi-generational Deaf family, and what it’s like to navigate a world designed for hearing people, including how he broke into the acting business. This is a “proud and defiant song of Deaf culture and a love letter to American Sign Language, Nyle’s primary language.” Nyle came out as sexually fluid in 2015.

That title and cover combo is hard to resist. This is a story of Mertz growing up in a staunchly Catholic family and slowly finding their way to their trans and nonbinary butch identity. They also begin to grapple with the role faith may still have in their life, and how to locate themselves within that structure.

This is really more of a New Adult title, because it follows two young women in college. Molly has been crushing on Cora since high school, but here she is in college with her, and she still can’t seem to get up the nerve to ask her out. That’s when Alex swoops in, promising to use her heartbreaker ways to teach Molly how to flirt with Cora — and along the way, convince Alex’s on-again off-again girlfriend that she can, in fact, have a platonic friend. Alex and Molly immediately clash, since they have very different personalities, but somewhere along the way, those feelings begin to change…This is a kind of Cyrano story, and it does, of course, have the cute rollerskating date the cover promises.

Pie isn’t really a ghost. She’s not dead. She’s just invisible. She and her mother have been on the move her whole life, staying unseen in other people’s houses. But when she gets to choose their next destination, she picks Pittsburgh, where she fell in love with a girl. But in a world obsessed with appearances, she feels like no one will love an invisible girl. This is a story about finding your own worth and navigating messy relationships, both with family and friends. Content warning for abuse.

Zora and Andi meet at Harmony Music Camp, the only Black girls in a mostly white crowd. They both are struggling with their family life — Andi feels unmoored after her mother’s death and unable to connect to her music anymore, while Zora feels stifled by her parents’ expectation of her becoming a flute prodigy. They are able to find connection and understanding with each other, which eventually melts into the overwhelming emotion of first love.

Side note: I love that we now have two sapphic music camp middle grade books! (The other is Drum Roll, Please by Lisa Jane Bigelow.)

When Annabelle meets new nonbinary student Bailey, she’s smitten, and they quickly become friends. What she isn’t expecting, though, is to have her dad tell her that him and Bailey have something in common: they’re both trans. She realizes that categories like fruit and vegetable or boy and girl stop seeming so clear cut — or so important. She also soon finds out that their community isn’t as accepting as she thought, and she’s determined to make that change.

This is a nonbinary, Anishinaabe graphic novel take on Alice In Wonderland! When Aimée wanders off during a school trip to avoid the bullying they’ve faced since coming out, they are transported into another world full of traditional Anishinaabe figures. To get back home, Aimée has to help Trickster hunt down dark water spirits and avoid the land-grabbing Queen and her robots.

This is the third book in a series. What Makes a Baby is aimed at ages 4–8, Sex Is a Funny Word at ages 8–10, and this one is for middle schoolers ages 10 and up. This is queer-, disability-, and trans-inclusive sex ed book that “grounds sex education in social justice.” It discusses consent, pleasure, stigma, pornography, risk, and more. Let’s be honest, it’s exactly the book that so many on the book banning brigade are afraid of, so let’s show it some love!