Books like The Lie — picked by fans

There are very few books that capture the particular suffering of loving someone and not being loved back.

Greenwell’s powerful debut novel is one of them. Set in the capital city of Bulgaria, the novel begins with an encounter that the narrator, an American teacher working abroad, has with Mitko, a sex worker. It is written in prose whose beauty, beat by beat, is as achingly beautiful as the unrequited love the narrator has for Mitko. This is one to savor slowly.

My copy is heavily underlined. Garth, a trained opera singer, reads like a dream. Accompany your reading with his readings from the work (they’re on YouTube). 

I was able to be on a couple of panels with Mr. Greer where he discussed this novel and its sequel, Less is Lost. The first book, Less, is a queer novel that won the Pulitzer Prize, a well-deserved accolade for this story about second chances in life—or third or fourth chances, depending upon the situation.

It’s remarkable to see a novel like this win such a major literary prize. Mr. Greer deserves it for his dynamic work.

Set in 1990s working-class Glasgow, Young Mungo depicts a queer love story blossoming against the rising tensions of religious clashes, gang wars, and class struggles.

Tenderly written and brilliantly paced, the novel also depicts one of the most beautiful sibling relationships. Watch for: the two gangs (one protestant and the other catholic) facing off on a historic bridge in Glasgow and the scene where Mungo meets James in, wait for it, a dovecote.

Sometimes I regret not having experienced the sex and drugs enjoyed by my contemporaries who came out much younger in life. The Christodora brought me back to reality. The reality of those years was much darker than my fantasies.

Murphy sketches out the diverse group of intertwined characters that inhabit the Christodora, a gentrified building in Manhattan’s East Village. I wanted to be the artistic Mateo who pushes through life’s difficulties to live an actualized life. But I can’t escape that I could have been one of the AIDS victims for whom the activism Murphy describes was so critical. Or I might have been Hector, an AIDS activist who descends into substance abuse after losing his lover.

Christodora recounts the heartbreak of AIDS but ultimately is a story of the healing of broken lives.

When I first came out – at 45! – this book became the whisper on every new gay friend’s lips – you must read this. You may not agree with it all, but please read.

Alan Downs explores the impact of growing up and surviving as a gay man in a society – he examines why we are both massive over-achievers in career and status, whilst simultaneously massively indulging in a hedonistic lifestyle that can be destructive. He’s particularly good at skewering issues around shame and anger, and the importance of primary relationships, for example with our Fathers.

I believe this book – a quick, vital read – can inform so much debate about self-acceptance and be genuinely empowering.

Interest in the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institute for Sexual Science (active 1919–1933 in Berlin) has grown since the television program Transparent included him in its second season in 2015.

Laurie Marhoefer’s new book challenges his status as a queer history hero, highlighting how his views on sexual emancipation, cross-dressing (as drag was then known), and transgenderism were embedded in racism and colonialism. Marhoefer also tells the lesser-known history of Hirschfeld’s companion in later life, Li Shiu Tong, who after Hirschfeld’s death in May 1935 continued his own research on human sexuality. 

Li’s previously unknown manuscript and notes—rescued serendipitously from a waste bin soon after his death in Vancouver in 1993—is a stark reminder of how many histories of sexuality are at risk of being (almost) similarly lost.

If a book could smell like jasmine and taste like clover honey, it would be this. 

We loved losing ourselves in the warm, sticky, bitter-sweet nostalgia of a small Georgia hometown, where you can practically hear the crickets and smell the night-blooming flowers. We had our hearts broken by a story of childhood friends turned lovers, turned dirty little secrets, turned estranged, turned something fragile but precious.

We were left breathless by Sander Santiago’s descriptions of grief, acceptance, and the fully caramelized romance between golden sunshine boy Fin (ballplayer turned med student) and taciturn bad boy Orion (delinquent turned musician).

There’s a whole bit about pain being broken down between guilt and hope that absolutely killed us. Good cry turned warm and fuzzies.

This book has a provenance that’s almost like a prison sentence: released in 1953 under the title Cast the First Stone, it would have been Himes’ first novel, but its frankness about homosexual relationships in prison and the fact that a Black writer had written white main characters, made publishers shit their pants and doctor the life out of it to make it conform to 50s market expectations. Of course, in the process, they ruined it.

But in 1998, Old School Books released Himes’ "director’s cut,” a much different, more beautiful, raw, and thoughtful book that’s as much about prison life as it is about the prison of masculinity. Paradoxically, prison seems to be a place where people indulge homosexual desires, though the atmosphere somehow remains homophobic.

Reading this book could foster more compassion for queer desires, whether those of prisoners who identify as LGBTQIA+, or those who… show more.

The stars of this book are “solitaries,” people who choose to live alone or spend substantial stretches of time alone. Upending the demeaning caricatures of people who spend a lot of time alone, Johson shows that some of the most renowned artists and authors have been solitaries.

They have rich inner lives and contribute meaningfully to society. Even unknown solitaries are artists–they design their own lives. Solitaries value friendship and do not see romantic relationships as sitting atop a relationship hierarchy. Free of a conventional focus on The One, they are more open to more different people and the world.

I still remember when this book came out my senior year of high school, and how ridiculously excited my friends and I were to find out about it. It was probably one of my first times finding some good, wholesome gay representation in manga.

An unknown brother-in-law traveling from Canada to Japan to meet his husband’s family, with personal character growth about gay acceptance? Sign me up!

I feel like I’m always down to read more about family dynamics that aren’t your typical nuclear setup, so this is just a win-win for me.