A Rainbow Reading Room

It may surprise you to read this but apparently I’m not the only person alive to have ever come out.

This week I am sharing a list of LGBTQ+ books I have read. There are probably some more knocking about. I shall find them and read them too when I’m not line-dancing at queer rodeos, chatting up drag kings or creating zines with northern sapphics.

I have arranged these books in the least convenient way imaginable - in the order in which I originally read them.

Some are A Bit Of A Downer so if anyone knows of a nice book in which, I don’t know, a hot lady DJ and a witty lady architect overcome a relatively small amount of adversity and end up living happily on a barge with their rescue dog, Horatia Nelson, let me know.

Although maybe there’s lots of romantic and positive gay books and shows I’ve somehow missed? Maybe that was the real meaning of Friends. It should have been called The One Where Susan And Carol Successfully Ignore These Self-Obsessed Straight People and Quietly Raising A Child In The 90s.

*See note below

Anyway, here’s that list.

The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde

A Victorian comedy play in which friends Jack and Algernon pretend (?) to be someone called Ernest.

I knew full well that Wilde was a gay icon but still didn’t pick up on anything queer in a story about men leading double lives in order to fit in to society. I was too busy exclaiming ‘a handbag?!’ in my poshest voice. I read a lot of other Wilde too but this one stuck.

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

Celie writes letters to God in the 1900s. A story of abuse, loss, racism, sexism, salvation, sisterhood, sex and joy.

Whole A-level English lessons were spent just reading this out loud. At the time this was the best book I’d read, so I read ahead to the end and was sent to the library for being a smart alec where I decided to read…

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson

A girl grows up and is a lesbian in the 60s despite her religious mother’s best efforts.

I read this of my own volition at 18. How did it take me this long to come out? I am actually asking you.

The Vagina Monologues - Eve Ensler

A play with a lot of vaginas.

It was one of those book crazes you get, like 50 Shades, trust me, everyone was reading it. I think?

Selected Poems - Carol Ann Duffy

Some very good poems about women.

I didn’t set foot in the uni LGBTQ centre, I was too busy cheerleading, clubbing, getting off with boys, watching Diagnosis Murder and occasionally writing essays about Warming Her Pearls with a hangover.

The Well of Loneliness - Radclyffe Hall

A woman called Stephen grows up and falls in love with a babe she meets during the First World War.

I remember reading this as a student and thinking ‘being a lesbian sounds absolutely dreadful.’

Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides

An intersex person called Cal is raised as a girl and later embraces his male identity.

The problem I have with Jeffrey Eugenides is that I’m obsessed with The Virgin Suicides and this is not as mesmeric.

C+nto & Other Poems - Joelle Taylor

Lesbian vignettes.

A book that makes you embarrassed to write about it because your words fall short. To sum up though - a whole world, layered, unique.

The Threshing Floor - Barbara Burford

Hannah mourns her lover, Jennifer, in the title story of this collection.

Among the short stories is also one about a lady who falls in love with a valley, which may or may not be a metaphor.

Well, that was the list. I now feel extremely inadequate. Still, it’s a good excuse to head to the library. What are your favourite queer books?

xY

*In terms of the books in the picture - I have read Virginia Woolf but not Orlando. The Moomin books are children’s books by an absolutely iconic lesbian who deserves a whole post of her own.