Books like The Famous Lady Lovers

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.

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.

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.

Katz’s book highlights the queer relationships enjoyed by some of the most famous men of the nineteenth-century United States, from Abraham Lincoln to Walt Whitman, as well as many lesser-known figures.

The book changed the way I thought about men’s friendships as part of their private lives. Katz wants to show that these relationships forged a new understanding of gay men’s sexuality as more than physical. The result is a loving portrait of men’s affections and passions.

A beautifully written coming-of-age tale. And another book I have read many times. The descriptions are so sensuous and evocative of a hot summer in the French countryside that it’s easy to lose yourself in them. This story isn’t a straightforward romance and reading about deeply flawed but very human characters are ultimately what gives me comfort with this one.

It’s a queer re-telling of The Gift of the Magi, both adorable and melodramatic—and I loved it! Yin and Ari celebrate their own space they’ve carved out with help from supportive friends and family and their own hard work, which fits Herrera’s Dreamers/refugee theme and is handled with trust, compassion, and love—but isn’t sugar-coated, either.

They’ve both got instincts and baggage around things falling apart or not working out and a hesitancy to think they can do enough for each other. This brilliantly written psychology leads to a series of good (yet terrible) choices. Watching them try to do something truly special for each other—even though they’re breaking their own rules for the gift exchange—had this wonderful bittersweet edge to it that ultimately ended on a note of joy I really loved, even if it got a little bumpy along the way.

I re-listen to this one on audiobook every year while I bake my Christmas cookies and walk the dog, and every year, it helps conjure joy via the two men realizing they’re right for each other despite some missteps. Thanks to some dire events, the main character, Toby, learns how to both stand up for himself and finally declare what it is he wants out of life—which happens to be Mr. Miggles, the town librarian (and also his boss).

Tristan Wright takes an already wonderful story and makes it entirely engrossing via his performance, and I have multiple “Yes!” fist-pumping moments throughout (which, if I’m walking the dog, makes people stare at me on the street). Also, Toby and his love interest, Mr. Miggles, are librarians, and this story has so much library love in it I felt like I was getting a warm hug.

Many books have kissing in the forest, but how many are about kissing the forest itself?

Fenton has watched countless hunters enter his forest to claim a wish by killing the white-tailed stag. Each hunter has taken: a sip from the stream, a flower from the vine, wood to light a fire. Each hunter has subsequently died.

Prior is different; he takes nothing, instead asking for a god’s assistance in waking his sister from her sleeping sickness. Fenton—who is the forest and the white-tailed stag and a son of Old Nan and also, definitely, a god—decides to pack up the forest and help Prior out.

Where I come from, that sort of thing will get you a little kiss or two at the very least.

This book arrives with a profound introduction on "writing ourselves into being," and casts a crucial gaze on writing from the margins.

It invites the reader to engage with difference, whether the difference is queer or skin colour or cultural heritage or whichever form of diversity. Contributors share with the reader their art, craft, and lived experience, where "writing oneself in," as Octavia Butler did, is fundamental self-creation, snatching space that has been stolen or withheld.

This anthology of personal truths, as authors unskin to their innermost selves, is as startling as it is introspective.

The Memory Librarian is an adaptation of Monáe's 2018 emotion picture, Dirty Computer. Told in the icon's signature Afro-futuristic fashion, this unquestionably queer AF collection of sci-fi stories describes a dystopian world where dirty computers (people who stray from societal norms) are ostracized in the worse ways imaginable. What's even scarier, while the stories take place in the future, the premise isn't that far from our present-day reality.

Books that boast BIPOC themes are being banned at a record rate. And this year alone, over 200 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced into legislation. Just as Americans have banded together around their common causes, the inhabitants in Monáe's sci-fi saga unite as chosen family. Together they navigate technology, battle memory control, explore identity, and fight for freedom in a ruthless police state.

"Everything comes full circle. And time takes care of itself. Our work is the work of… show more.