Here are 100 books that Gay Bar fans have personally recommended if you like
Gay Bar.
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I have been writing about LGBTQ+ culture for magazines and newspapers for almost a decade, and am a voracious consumer of queer stories. Queer literature makes our various needs and desires as a community come alive on the page, and helps us to connect with and understand one another. Reading LGBTQ+ books is a way to learn about contemporary queer life, and work out what more we can be doing to help those more marginalised than us.
This book is written with the utmost clarity – making an incisive and digestible argument why liberation for trans people fits into wider fights for socialism and justice for minorities. With chapters on why “T” belongs in “LGBT” and why trans inclusion should be core to feminist movements, it’s an essential read for LGBTQ+ people and their allies.
'Few books are as urgent as Shon Faye's debut ... Faye has hope for the future - and maybe so should we' Independent
'Unsparing, important and weighty ... a vitally needed antidote' Observer
'Takes the status quo by the lapels and gives it a shaking' Times Literary Supplement
Trans people in Britain today have become a culture war 'issue'. Despite making up less than one per cent of the country's population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarized 'debate' which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I’m a 54-year-old gay man who has led my own messy life here in New York City, marked as much by sex, romance, friendship, and culture as by drug addiction, relationship drama, mental illness and youthful trauma. I’ve published five novels, all of which contain queer characters who’ve not exactly been poster children for mainstream-world-approved LGBTQ behavior. I’m drawn to novels like the ones I’ve mentioned because they show queer people not as the hetero world often would like them to be—sanitized, asexual, witty and “fabulous”—but as capable of dysfunction, mediocrity, unwise choices and poor conduct as anybody else.
Like a hipster Brooklyn transgender Sex and the City, this novel is a chatty, hilarious, and moving look at queer folks grasping for parenthood and family in a world where all the rules have been thrown out.
The book’s narrator, transwoman Reese, takes us on this ride with such sardonic, poignant insight about the world she lives in that we begin to feel like we live in it, too. When Reese’s ex, Ames—who has detransitioned from his former transwoman identity, Amy—gets his straight female boss pregnant, the three of them begin negotiating how they might raise the child together.
But the novel’s true power lies in how Reese explains her life and her friends to us—bravely refusing to portray trans people as angelic role models and instead offering something deeper and more endearing: showing them as real people.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The lives of three women—transgender and cisgender—collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires in “one of the most celebrated novels of the year” (Time)
“Reading this novel is like holding a live wire in your hand.”—Vulture
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by more than twenty publications, including The New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Time, Vogue, Esquire, Vulture, and Autostraddle
PEN/Hemingway Award Winner • Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Gotham Book Prize • Longlisted for The Women’s…
I have been writing about LGBTQ+ culture for magazines and newspapers for almost a decade, and am a voracious consumer of queer stories. Queer literature makes our various needs and desires as a community come alive on the page, and helps us to connect with and understand one another. Reading LGBTQ+ books is a way to learn about contemporary queer life, and work out what more we can be doing to help those more marginalised than us.
Recently published and super accessible, this book is a modern catalogue of lesbian and bi culture for women. It looks at the recent evolution of queer female visibility in the mainstream and across pop culture, asking what material changes this visibility has for the life of queer women everywhere. It’s funny and pacey and broad in scope, as it asks: How islesbian culture changing?
'This "love letter of sorts" to inclusive queer women's culture is perfect for anyone who's just come out, wants to know what the heck's going on or has yearned for an entire chapter dedicated to the film Carol.' - DIVA
'An introspective dive into the fast-moving world of queer culture, Daisy unpacks some of the 21st century's biggest lesbian and bisexual moments to paint a portrait of what modern-day queerness looks like.' - GAY TIMES
'Daisy Jones effortlessly explores queer culture' - COSMOPOLITAN ______________________________________________________________________________________
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
I have been writing about LGBTQ+ culture for magazines and newspapers for almost a decade, and am a voracious consumer of queer stories. Queer literature makes our various needs and desires as a community come alive on the page, and helps us to connect with and understand one another. Reading LGBTQ+ books is a way to learn about contemporary queer life, and work out what more we can be doing to help those more marginalised than us.
The follow-up to his acclaimed book What Belongs to You, Cleanness is a relatively short but gorgeously executed novel about an American teacher living in Sofia, Bulgaria. It gives snapshots of his relationship, as well as dating app hooks ups – for better or worse. Greenwell is one of the greatest writers of our time, and he turns each sentence beautifully.
Longlisted for the Prix Sade 2021 Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize Longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 A New York Times Critics Top Ten Book of the Year Named a Best Book of the Year by over 30 Publications, including The New Yorker, TIME, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and the BBC
In the highly anticipated follow-up to his beloved debut, What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell deepens his exploration of foreignness, obligation, and desire
Sofia, Bulgaria, a landlocked city in southern Europe, stirs with hope and impending upheaval.…
My memoir Performance Anxiety, about my adolescence, is a true story. But I realize that writing it, I created a character. He has my name and attributes, but is at least partly invented. That's inevitable because the source material, memory, is fluid. And he is nuanced by what I chose to emphasize about my past and those times.
These five memoirs depict—and, at least partly, invent—boyhoods wildly different from mine. I've never met the writers, but I know these guys. Our challenges and fears, and hopefully triumphs, are common to queer kids. Are they shared by all kids, regardless of orientation? I'll keep reading memoirs to find out.
Paul Monette's life could have been mine. (His death, too.) Fear kept us both closeted until full adulthood. All he ever wanted was a lover, one of "the smiling men" he could never seem to touch. (Me, too.) Then he got HIV. (By dumb luck, I didn't.)
Writing in 1991, years before new drugs could have saved his life, Monette was "dying by inches." By then he had found his man—twice, actually—but lost each one to AIDS. His searing anger brought that tragic, terrifying time back to me hard. But rage couldn't hide the innocent, pained boy he shows us he had been.
I was humbled by his self-forgiveness: "I can't judge the world of my first twenty years by the laws of freedom that followed Stonewall."
He grew up in a small town in New England in the 1950's, watching lassie, going to church, getting straight A's at school, a scholar destined for success. But he already had a secret, and his public life with family and friends was already a constant round of ventriloquism as he played the joker and pretended to be the same as everyone else. For Paul Monette was gay.
BECOMING A MAN is about growing up gay, and about the tyranny and self denial of the closet - one man's struggle, for half his life, to come out. From the white-bread…
My memoir Performance Anxiety, about my adolescence, is a true story. But I realize that writing it, I created a character. He has my name and attributes, but is at least partly invented. That's inevitable because the source material, memory, is fluid. And he is nuanced by what I chose to emphasize about my past and those times.
These five memoirs depict—and, at least partly, invent—boyhoods wildly different from mine. I've never met the writers, but I know these guys. Our challenges and fears, and hopefully triumphs, are common to queer kids. Are they shared by all kids, regardless of orientation? I'll keep reading memoirs to find out.
Sexual desire, acted on or repressed, is either the text or subtext of every gay man's life.
Edmund White treats sex explicitly and with bracing honesty. His frankness—for example, in describing his fumbling, agonized, danger-courting attempts as a kid to find love—recalled my own youthful risks and failures, but freed those memories of shame.
I've read few of White's many books. (Guess I was jealous of his output and acclaim; better I should have emulated his driving curiosity and intelligence.) His recent death, at 85, prompted me to read this narrative of his long, unruly, ceaselessly questing life.
A sharp observer of trends and sub-cultures, White moved among the famous—writers, artists, intellectuals—and descriptions of and dish about them are an extra, but only slightly guilty, pleasure.
No one has been more frank, lucid, rueful and entertaining about growing up gay in Middle America than Edmund White. Best known for his autobiographical novels, starting with A Boy's Own Story, White here takes fiction out of his story and delivers the facts of his life in all their shocking and absorbing verity.
From an adolescence in the 1950s, an era that tried to "cure his homosexuality" but found him "unsalvageable," he emerged into a 1960s society that redesignated his orientation as "acceptable (nearly)." He describes a life touched by psychotherapy in every decade, starting with his flamboyant and…
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
My memoir Performance Anxiety, about my adolescence, is a true story. But I realize that writing it, I created a character. He has my name and attributes, but is at least partly invented. That's inevitable because the source material, memory, is fluid. And he is nuanced by what I chose to emphasize about my past and those times.
These five memoirs depict—and, at least partly, invent—boyhoods wildly different from mine. I've never met the writers, but I know these guys. Our challenges and fears, and hopefully triumphs, are common to queer kids. Are they shared by all kids, regardless of orientation? I'll keep reading memoirs to find out.
Kevin Sessums was the kind of kid who just can't hide it. Too exuberant, drawn to fantasy, costume, theatrical gestures.
He might disagree, but to me, he seems never even to have been in the closet. Not that he had it easy. There was family trauma. He was bullied by classmates, targeted by older men. His big extended family of certifiable characters in the small-town South was right out of Flannery O'Connor. He asked himself, at thirteen—and I wish I'd had such guts—"Why not just be what everyone expected I was?" There were Blacks and Civil Rights activism intimately close, and young Kevin was equally no-nonsense about the stupidity of racism.
Spoiler alert: he escaped to a life of arts and culture and queer adulthood in New York.
Mississippi Sissy is the stunning memoir from Kevin Sessums, a celebrity journalist who grew up scaring other children, hiding terrible secrets, pretending to be Arlene Frances and running wild in the South.
As he grew up in Forest, Mississippi, befriended by the family maid, Mattie May, he became a young man who turned the word "sissy" on its head, just as his mother taught him. In Jackson, he is befriended by Eudora Welty and journalist Frank Hains, but when Hains is brutally murdered in his antebellum mansion, Kevin's long road north towards celebrity begins. In his memoir, Kevin Sessums brings…
My memoir Performance Anxiety, about my adolescence, is a true story. But I realize that writing it, I created a character. He has my name and attributes, but is at least partly invented. That's inevitable because the source material, memory, is fluid. And he is nuanced by what I chose to emphasize about my past and those times.
These five memoirs depict—and, at least partly, invent—boyhoods wildly different from mine. I've never met the writers, but I know these guys. Our challenges and fears, and hopefully triumphs, are common to queer kids. Are they shared by all kids, regardless of orientation? I'll keep reading memoirs to find out.
I never heard a more harrowing story of the closet and coming out.
There was no bullying, rape or damnation to hell in Andrew Tobias' childhood. He was a high-achieving, good-looking son of an affluent family in cosmopolitan New York who came to adulthood in the anything-goes sixties. He realized he was homosexual at age 11—then never allowed himself to tell a soul, or have sex (even with himself) until 23. When he finally, tentatively, began to own being gay, he remained twisted up by stereotypes of masculinity and queerness.
Paradoxically, because he was afraid of it, his saga gives a colorful rendering of gay culture around 1970. (And I happen to know that he eventually found self-acceptance, love, and a prominent, honored role in gay politics.)
The classic account of growing up gay in America. "The best little boy in the world never had wet dreams or masturbated; he always topped his class, honored mom and dad, deferred to elders and excelled in sports . . . . The best little boy in the world was . . . the model IBM exec . . . The best little boy in the world was a closet case who 'never read anything about homosexuality.' . . . John Reid comes out slowly, hilariously, brilliantly. One reads this utterly honest account with the shock of recognition." The New…
As a writer of gay mystery, I try to read as widely as I can—both to learn from writers who have gone before me and for the pleasure of the books themselves. I’m always thrilled when I find writers like the ones I’ve shared in this list: people who think deeply and carefully about the complexities (and, occasionally, the agonies) of being a gay man, while, at the same time, weaving in the suspense and puzzles inherent in mysteries.
Benjamin Justice is a broken man—a former prize-winning journalist whose career (and life) has been shattered by the death of his lover and a scandal surrounding his best-known writing. Recruited by his former boss to assist an up-and-coming journalist, Ben finds himself investigating a murder that occurred outside a gay bar. The series is tightly written and casts a dark glamor across gay life in ’90s California.
It’s 1994, an election year when violent crime is rampant, voters want action, and politicians smell blood. When a Latino teenager confesses to the murder of a pretty-boy cokehead outside a gay bar in L.A., the cops consider the case closed. But Benjamin Justice, a disgraced former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, sees something in the jailed boy others don’t. His former editor, Harry Brofsky, now toiling at the rival Los Angeles Sun, pries Justice from his alcoholic seclusion to help neophyte reporter Alexandra Templeton dig deeper into the story. But why would a seemingly decent kid confess to…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I was an odd kid—a bookworm worried about why I was different from others. Luckily, my family continuously reminded me that I belonged. Once out of the closet, I was able to appreciate the importance of families, both chosen and unchosen. I became a writer because I was compelled to articulate that importance and maybe help others understand how knowledge, trauma, emotions, and love move between the generations. Queer and family histories have inspired a lot of my journalism and fiction, but especially my new novel, This Is It. I hope it fits alongside these recommendations that explore queer multi-generational stories with wit, intelligence, and wisdom.
I love any work that can draw me in by being uncanny while still being emotional. This book is such a work. It's the story of a gay bar that houses a community of cross-generational queer people who become close-knit while the world outside becomes more and more hostile to them.
Though he tells the story with distance and coldness, Neil Bartlett made me feel like I belonged in that bar, in that community. Reading how the characters clutch at meaning and love, how they embrace who they are, and how they support one another had me rooting for them (and for myself) louder every time I turned a page.
It is 3 a.m. in The City, and in a dark corner of The Bar, two lovers collide in the beginnings of a passionate and violent affair.
Boy: nineteen, beautiful, ready for anyone to take him home, and 'O': the Older Man, cynical, unpredictable, and at the mercy of his personal demons. Their romance is orchestrated and observed by the owner of The Bar, Madame, who looks after her boys and ensures that their haven remains inviolate.
At once a joyful celebration of homosexual love and culture, and a devastating evocation of the homophobic climate which stemmed from the 80s…
