Here are 100 books that Love Stories fans have personally recommended if you like
Love Stories.
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If society considered your desires illegal, would you save records of it? As a historian of sexuality in the US and as a queer person, I’m drawn to stories about convention-defying love. We know much more about straight people’s passions because these were the socially approved ones. Learning about queer people’s desires is more challenging—and the result feels even more precious.
I love this book because it is both totally surprising and, at the same time, familiar. Sylvia and Charity lived together for more than 40 years in the early 1800s in New England, and their neighbors acknowledged their status as devoted partners.
Cleves is a masterful storyteller. Reading the book, I was captivated by these two remarkable women. When I finished the book, I realized I had a completely different understanding of queer relationships in early America.
Charity and Sylvia is the intimate history of two ordinary women who lived in an extraordinary same-sex marriage during the early nineteenth century. Based on diaries, letters, and poetry, among other original documents, the research traces the women's lives in sharp detail. Charity Bryant was born in 1777 to a consumptive mother who died a month later. Raised in Massachusetts, Charity developed into a brilliant and strong-willed woman with a passion for her own sex. After being banished from her family home by her father at age twenty, she traveled throughout Massachusetts, working as a teacher, making intimate female friends,…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
If society considered your desires illegal, would you save records of it? As a historian of sexuality in the US and as a queer person, I’m drawn to stories about convention-defying love. We know much more about straight people’s passions because these were the socially approved ones. Learning about queer people’s desires is more challenging—and the result feels even more precious.
I can’t take my eyes off this collection of gorgeous historical photographs of affectionate queer couples from 1850 to 1950. Nini and Treadwell scoured libraries and personal collections to create this visual testament to gay love. Their painstaking digitization of often fragile originals created a unique archive, one that we can all share on our coffee tables.
I loved the book so much that I obtained permission from Nini and Treadwell to reprint one of their images as the frontispiece of Fierce Desires! We, too, rarely get to see these snapshots of queer affection, but they are beautiful to behold.
Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850-1950 portrays the history of romantic love between men in hundreds of moving and tender vernacular photographs taken between the years 1850 and 1950. This visual narrative of astonishing sensitivity brings to light an until-now-unpublished collection of hundreds of snapshots, portraits, and group photos taken in the most varied of contexts, both private and public.
Taken when male partnerships were often illegal, the photos here were found at flea markets, in shoe boxes, family archives, old suitcases, and later online and at auctions. The collection now includes photos from all over the…
If society considered your desires illegal, would you save records of it? As a historian of sexuality in the US and as a queer person, I’m drawn to stories about convention-defying love. We know much more about straight people’s passions because these were the socially approved ones. Learning about queer people’s desires is more challenging—and the result feels even more precious.
This extraordinary book reprints passionate letters exchanged by two Black women in the mid-19th century—the only such letters ever discovered in the US. I loved reading Addie Brown’s letters to Rebecca Primus, which reveal the depth of their commitment to each other.
Griffin’s commentary perfectly balances the transcribed letters. She taught me that Rebecca, who was from an educated family, was a trailblazing educator for formerly enslaved people in Maryland, has a school named after her, and left her papers (including Addie’s letters!) for posterity. I felt like I knew and cared about Addie and Rebecca by the book’s end.
A riveting collection of letters written at the time of the Civil War that chronicle the lives of two African American women from New England: one who went to the South to found a school, the other a domestic servant who stayed in the North, in New York and New England.
Rebecca Primus, the daughter of a prominent black Hartford family, was one of the many women who traveled south after the Civil War to teach the newly freed men and women. She was sent by the Hartford Freedmen's Aid Society to Royal Oak, Maryland, where she helped to found…
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…
If society considered your desires illegal, would you save records of it? As a historian of sexuality in the US and as a queer person, I’m drawn to stories about convention-defying love. We know much more about straight people’s passions because these were the socially approved ones. Learning about queer people’s desires is more challenging—and the result feels even more precious.
I wanted to listen to Blues music all day after reading Woolner’s enlightening tour of queer Black women’s loves and lusts in the early 20th century United States. From fights that erupted in lesbian love triangles to affairs among Blues performers and their fans, Woolner keeps the story humming.
The book convinced me that “lady lovers,” as Black Americans called queer women at the time, created a vibrant world of desire, friendship, and love.
Black queer women have shaped American culture since long before the era of gay liberation. Decades prior to the Stonewall Uprising, in the 1920s and 1930s, Black "lady lovers"-as women who loved women were then called-crafted a queer world. In the cabarets, rent parties, speakeasies, literary salons, and universities of the Jazz Age and Great Depression, communities of Black lady lovers grew, and queer flirtations flourished. Cookie Woolner here uncovers the intimate lives of performers, writers, and educators such as Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Gladys Bentley, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Lucy Diggs Slowe, along with the many everyday women she encountered…
I am someone who has lived a number of different lives. Although I loved being a father and husband I knew I wasn’t being authentic. At 45 that all changed utterly when I finally came out as gay – and accepted myself for perhaps the very first time in my life. However, even before coming out I was a professional writer – it was my only way to make sense of the world. But I also knew that although a successful writer I wasn’t a truthful one – and the most beautiful thing in life is discovering your own truth, isn’t it? Join me here in a safe space to experience yours.
Part manifesto, part archive of a fascinating and alluring sub-culture, Geoff Mains's book explores the possibilities of extreme encounters through pain/pleasure, BDSM, and role play in the leather community.
It’s not sensationalist although it examines ideas around sensation. It celebrates performance whilst honoring intimacy. It’s a book that would offer a reader of every sexuality an insight into some of their own fantasies and how to access them safely, and meaningfully.
I read it like I would read an exhaustive and tempting menu – picking out items I might like to taste myself and learning a great deal in the process.
A subculture of gay men participate in a radical form of sexuality and community known as leather. Through intimate forms of encounter, using such tools as pain-pleasure, bondage, and role-play, leather can bring a shift of conciousness and a new vision of the self. This innovative book pioneered in sensitively exploring and celebrating leathersexuality. As relevant today as when it was written 20 years ago, Urban Aboriginals is an intimate view of the gay male leather community. Within its pages, author Geoff Mains explores the spritual, sexual, emotional, cultural and physiological aspects that make this "scene" one of the most…
I’ve known all my life that I am gay. At age 50 I decided to try my hand at writing. After an image of two men kissing in a 1920s vehicle landed in my head, I began writing my Medicine for the Bluestrilogy (Acquaintanceis book one). But knowing nothing about LGBT history, I began a deep dive into gay and lesbian history, into the history of Portland and Oregon, into the era of the 1920s, the KKK, Prohibition, Freud, eugenics, and more. During 20 years of writing the trilogy, I’ve read dozens of books that roiled through my imagination and the information spilled out in the story.
This book was essential background for my trilogy. What I like most is its descriptions of the different sex practices of the different homosexual “types”—lower/working class men (“trade” or “wolves”) preferred anal intercourse with boys or young men (“punks” or “lambs”); upper class men preferred oral sex with “queens” or “fairies.” Focusing on the Pacific Northwest of the USA, Boag does great research into criminal and court records, which were some of the only records of these “aberrant” activities. A bonus is Boag’s tracing of the influence of the Oscar Wilde trial (1895) on attitudes in the Western USA.
At the turn of the twentieth century, two distinct, yet at times overlapping, male same-sex sexual subcultures had emerged in the Pacific Northwest: one among the men and boys who toiled in the region's logging, fishing, mining, farming, and railroad-building industries; the other among the young urban white-collar workers of the emerging corporate order. Boag draws on police logs, court records, and newspaper accounts to create a vivid picture of the lives of these men and youths - their sexual practices, cultural networks, cross-class relations, variations in rural and urban experiences, and ethnic and racial influences.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Two people (or more!) who find a home in each other when they don't have a home in the world make my heart leap. I love romance, and I've been writing and drawing them professionally for over 20 years. I got my start writing and drawing sexy comics when I was out of college, my work has been featured in the Museum of Sex in NYC and various anthologies focused on queer and intersectional feminist stories about love and sex. I love stories about queer people, or outcasts, or people who don't quite understand themselves yet.
These are real people; they have to be because I’ve never read a book and felt more like I knew the characters in real life. The dialogue makes me feel like a teen riding in the backseat with friends, at a crossroads in life, flying by the seat of my pants.
E.K. Weaver's critically-acclaimed road trip romance comic is collected here in this award-winning, commercially-successful omnibus edition. Less Than Epic tells the story of Amal (just out of the closet and freshly disowned by his parents) and TJ (a mysterious and eccentric vagrant) and their journey across the continental United States.
I’ve always been fascinated by the stories of outsiders. I’m probably attracted to the topic because I come from a couple of misfits who reared me in a small town in the deeply conservative South. My mom is an irreverent, Socialist, Croatian immigrant with half a dozen kids, and my dad a curmudgeonly polyglot who loves books more than people. First as a journalist, then as a historian, I’ve long studied the economies and cultures created by those systematically marginalized or merely with a healthy disdain for the mainstream—enslaved people, queers, disenfranchised women, downtrodden artists, poor immigrants. The books here all capture things that make our society beautifully textured, diverse, and resilient.
This book taught me that there are always sources for determined historians to find on any topic. Like most good stories about subcultures, It reveals the influence of the marginalized on the mainstream, even when it’s been hidden from history.
Chauncey explodes the false perception that gay men before the 1960s did not share a common culture but were closeted and isolated from each other. I love his humanizing use of unpublished personal sources like diaries. He also reveals how the pathologizing of homosexuality by medical professionals accidentally supported the creation of vibrant gay communities.
Rarely have I learned so much from such an engaging book. This is my favorite history book of all time.
The award-winning, field-defining history of gay life in New York City in the early to mid-20th century
Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Drawing on a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, George Chauncey constructs a fascinating portrait of a vibrant, cohesive gay world that is not supposed to have existed. Called "monumental" (Washington Post), "unassailable" (Boston Globe), "brilliant" (The Nation), and "a first-rate book of history" (The New York Times), Gay New Yorkforever changed how…
Pet names in romance can make or break a book, in my opinion. Sometimes, they can be offputting, but other times, pet names make me smile. They elevate the chemistry between characters–turn the heat up a notch on a steam scene, make you blush, and make you fall in love with the characters. When I read a pet name I can imagine the tone, level, and timbre. It makes me feel like I'm there in the pages with the characters. I think it's because a pet name or nickname is special. A person assigns it to you because they care–or, better yet, within the pages of a romance, they love.
This book was my most anticipated read of 2023, and not just because of all the TikTok videos and reels I devoured.
Niko and Brandon's relationship had been hinted at during the previous books, and I was salivating for all of those pieces to be linked together so I would have their full love story. Even more so, I needed to know why Niko called Bran his Lotus Flower.
That nickname and romance had a chokehold on me before I even read the book, and the book did not disappoint. Niko and Bran’s relationship, trials, tribulations and that nickname are going to stay with me for a long time.
From USA Today bestselling author Rina Kent comes a new STANDALONE MM college romance.
I’m not attracted to men. Or so I thought before I slammed into Nikolai Sokolov. A mafia heir, a notorious bastard, and a violent monster. An ill-fated meeting puts me in his path. And just like that, he has his sights set on me. A quiet artist, a golden boy, and his enemy’s twin brother. He doesn’t seem to care that the odds are stacked against us. In fact, he sets out to break my steel-like control and blur my limits. I thought my biggest worry…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I grew up attending Catholic school in conservative Indiana. Sex—especially if it was of the homosexual variety—was the ultimate taboo. I can’t overstate how damaging it is to believe that one of your natural urges is proof of your depravity. Books that depict queer sexual relations, be they fleeting or romantic, gave me my first glimpse of a wider world where my sexual identity could be expressed. These books liberated me. Even now, I find that sexy and subversive novels help me understand parts of myself that can still be difficult to discuss in polite company. We all need our boundaries pushed.
I was a freshman in college and still closeted about my homosexuality when I found Numbers in an LGBTQ+ bookstore. The description on the dust jacket got my blood racing: in an effort to reclaim his youth, a handsome gay man strikes out to see how many sexual conquests he can rack up during a ten-day stay in L.A. I bought the book and read it in my dorm room when my roommate wasn’t around.
I got more than I bargained for. Along with descriptions of sexual encounters, the novel opened my eyes to the ramifications of internalized homophobia and explored the value of sex among an oppressed people who are persecuted for their carnal desires. This novel written in 1967 spoke to me across the decades. It still can.
An aging male hustler wages an obsessive battle against the passing of his youth in this darkly compelling follow-up to the cult hit City of Night.
Johnny Rio, a handsome narcissist no longer a pretty boy, travels to Los Angeles, the site of past sexual conquest and remembered youthful radiance, in a frenzied attempt to recreate his younger self.
Like a retired boxer—an undefeated champion—who refuses to accept the possible ravages of time, Johnny is led by some unfathomable force to return to combat once again. Combat, for him, takes place in the dark balconies and dismal bathrooms of LA’s…
