Screw Book Bans: 31 Queer Books to Read in Defiance During Pride

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While the far right tries to censor LGBTQ+ books out of existence, allow us to recommend the gayest, queerest, most lesbionic page-turners for your Pride season reading delight.

Hi, if you’re new here (welcome!), rest assured that we are not. Cosmo has been battling regressive moral panic—and the censorship it can spawn—for decades. Over the years, various fringe groups have sought to censor us for printing "pornography" and "explicit content," aka honest, informative reporting on totally normal physical intimacy and crucial sexual health topics. So you could say we are experts in defending the right to empower readers. Which is why we’re standing with the LGBTQ+ authors whose work is under fire right now from lawmakers and at least 50 groups agitating for book bans at the national, state, or local level.

This isn't just about Drag Story Hour or inclusive kids’ books anymore. (Although the challenges against both, against titles like And Tango Makes Three—the award-winning, completely unscandalous illustrated tale of two male penguins raising a chick—remain absurd.) It's not just about parents being denied a say in what their kids can and cannot read. In some parts of the country, the hysteria is preventing even fully grown adults from accessing books—for themselves—that happen to have LGBTQ+ themes.

Last year, the Patmos Library in Jamestown, Michigan, lost its taxpayer funding after staff refused to strip a handful of LGBTQ+ titles from the library's collection. Targeted books included Gender Queer, a 2019 illustrated memoir that, as a concession to conservatives, was already shelved behind the checkout desk like a controlled substance. (The library has managed to stay open with more than $277,000 raised via GoFundMe, but some of its detractors have stepped up their efforts and are now calling for the removal of all books containing LGBTQ+ themes.) This March, conservative lawmakers in Mississippi advanced a bill aimed at combating so-called internet pornography that would in effect prohibit e-books depicting "homosexuality" or "lesbianism" (among other topics) from public schools and libraries. Meanwhile in Oklahoma, state senate Republicans passed a bill that would ban both printed and digital material from the state's public and school libraries "that the average person age 18 or older applying contemporary community standards would find has a predominant tendency to appeal to a prurient interest in sex." It's easy to guess which kinds of sex those "community standards" would censor.

As crushing as the news can feel, it's important to understand that this baseless alarmism springs from a noisy, intolerant minority. The truth is that 73 percent of U.S. adults say they oppose book bans, according to a November 2022 national survey conducted by OnePoll. Forty-three percent said they made an effort to read banned or challenged books in the previous year. And there are plenty of people actively challenging the challenges.

"Librarians on the ground are organizing, quite effectively, to push back," says Emily Drabinski, president-elect of the American Library Association. Drabinski is openly gay and will be sending a clear message when she takes office in June: "I’m gonna have the gayest inauguration brunch in the history of libraries—it's going to be all rainbows. Now is the time when we have to be really loud and super public about who we are."

Community involvement is crucial too, so consider joining your local branch's resistance efforts if you haven't already. "There are so many more of us than there are of them," Drabinski says of the would-be censors. "I know we’re on the right side of history and I know we’re on the right side of the present. I totally believe we’re going to win."

LGBTQ+ writing is essential not just to the queer community—as a guiding beacon of survival, wisdom, truth, and excellence—but to a general public that benefits from understanding the breadth of human experience. Sample some of that goodness on the following pages, where you’ll find stirring passages from 31 LGBTQ+ novels, memoirs, and more, most of which have roared into existence since last Pride season alone. May we be able to read freely, everywhere, and without apology.

by Maggie Millner

$23 at Bookshop

"Everyone had the same Ikea bed.She tied my wrists to hers, above my head.

(She liked what she called clean lines, I would learn;her major had been architecture.)"

Girls Like Girls

by Hayley Kiyoko

$19 AT BOOKSHOP

Pretty Baby: A Memoir

by Chris Belcher

$17 AT BOOKSHOP

The Adult

by Bronwyn Fischer

$27 at Amazon

Edited by Shantel Gabrieal Buggs and Trevor Hoppe

$19 AT BOOKSHOP

"I don't entertain any purity myths, and I don't believe in the concept of sin. I see group sex as a fun weekend activity that's better than a movie but requires a bit more preparation."

—Alexander Cheves

Wanting: Women Writing About Desire

Edited by Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters

$17 at bookshop

Mrs. S

by K Patrick

$17 at bookshop

Sounds Fake but Okay: An Asexual and Aromantic Perspective on Love, Relationships, Sex, and Pretty Much Anything Else

by Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca

$19 at bookshop

If Tomorrow Doesn't Come

by Jen St. Jude

$19 at Bookshop

2

by Alison Rumfitt

$17 at bookshop

The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag

by Sasha Velour

$42 at bookshop

All the Things They Said We Couldn't Have: Stories of Trans Joy

by T. C. Oakes-Monger

$18 at bookshop

Thin Skin: Essays

by Jenn Shapland

$24 at bookshop

by Rae McDaniel

$26.97 at Bookshop

Nobody Needs to Know: A Memoir

by Pidgeon Pagonis

$18 at amazon

Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir

by Lamya H

$25 AT BOOKSHOP

by Amelia Possanza

$25 AT BOOKSHOP

It's Totally Normal!: An LGBTQIA+ Guide to Puberty, Sex, and Gender

by Monica Gupta Mehta and Asha Lily Mehta

$18 at bookshop

Brown Neon: Essays

by Raquel Gutiérrez

$16 at bookshop

To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories

by Sarah Viren

$26 at bookshop

by Geena Rocero

$26 at bookshop

by Bretman Rock

$28 at Bookshop

Bellies: A Novel

by Nicola Dina

$30 at Amazon

Quietly Hostile: Essays

by Samantha Irby

$16 at Bookshop

Learned by Heart

by Emma Donoghue

$26 at Bookshop

by Krista Burton

$28 AT AMAZON

by Marisa Crane

$25 at bookshop

Heretic: A Memoir

by Jeanna Kadlec

$26 at bookshop

Baby Making for Everybody: Family Building and Fertility for LGBTQ+ and Solo Parents

by Ray Rachlin and Marea Goodman

$18 at bookshop

A Place for Us: A Memoir

by Brandon J. Wolf

$19 at amazon

by Jessi Hempel

$26 AT BOOKSHOP

Book research by Michelle Hart. All books quoted courtesy of the publishers.

Erin Quinlan is a journalist in New York City and the features director at Cosmopolitan.

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