When I was 15, I started dating this guy who was half Chinese, half Polish, and born in Brazil (what a mix!). His dad traveled a lot so I never really got to see him. On my boyfriend's 16th birthday, I was invited over for a family dinner. It was the first time meeting his parents. Needless to say, I was freaking out. Porn has long been blamed for fuelling sexist attitudes and setting unrealistic sexual expectations. Research has provided contradictory results, but one study delved deeper. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen and University of California in Los Angeles asked 200 adults about their porn consumption and assessed their personality in terms of agreeableness, which is one of the “big five” personality traits that indicates how altruistic, helpful, trusting and sociable a person is. The only novel by the great Oscar Wilde may not be overtly gay, but there's plenty of gay subtext there for the careful reader - about as much gay subtext as a popular author could get away with in 1891. This gem of a graphic novel is about a prince who loves wearing dresses and a girl who loves making them. Sebastian dons gorgeous gowns and is known about Paris as Lady Crystallia; Frances is a talented seamstress and fashion designer who makes those spectacular gowns. This book is a beautiful celebration of fashion, friendship, love, fabulous dresses, and the joys of being your true self. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

This romance anthology set in the America during and after the Revolutionary War includes an m/m story about an American soldier and a British officer and an f/f story about a woman who works as Eliza Hamilton’s maid and a dressmaker who arrives at the Hamilton mansion. Homegoing by yaa gyasi As soon as his dad met me, he said in broken English, "You can date my son all you want, but he has a wife waiting for him in China so you're wasting your time." Many of these shows and films rely on crowdfunding campaigns to assist in funding production costs while also serving as early marketing tools to build interest in the show. This is the first book I can remember reading featuring queer women and a happy ending. Nan Astley is a ordinary oyster girl from Whistable, when she meets and falls in love with Kitty Butler, a male imperator working the music halls. Her love for Kitty leads her on a journey through queer Victorian London—from the music halls and hidden gay bars to the socialist movement. There’s romance and friendship and heartbreak, but mostly, it’s a book about queer family and the unexpected ways that love (in its many forms) alters our lives. An Unseen Attraction by K.J. Charles It’s Pride month, which means I get to unapologetically talk up queer books all month (as if I don’t do that 12 months of the year). For me, Pride has always been about honoring the past as much as celebrating the present. So it’s no surprise that Pride has got me thinking about queer historical fiction.

Many queer female writers see Rita Mae Brown's 1973 coming-of-age book as an iconic work of LGBT literature: "[I love Rubyfruit Jungle] because, well, because. I think this was the first 'lesbian' book I ever read! And devoured. And loved," writes The Year of Needy Girls' Patricia Smith. Yolanda Wallace, author of Tailor-Made, tells us, "When I was a teenager questioning my sexuality, this book provided the answers I was looking for."

I asked him careful questions about his years in the service and his home country. He gave me polite answers and told me, a white boy from New York, that I should really make it over to Asia at some point. The book, an immediate smash with queer women for its frank depiction of lesbian desire and of flirting with gender roles, was made into a 2002 BBC miniseries that reinvigorated interest in the novel, which won the Lambda Literary Award and earned a place on the New York Times list of notable books the year it was published. Recently, Alan Hollinghurst said the gay novel is dead. "There was an urgency, a novelty to the whole thing," said the gay author, who won the Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty. "And in our culture at least those things are no longer the case." With all due respect to Hollinghurst, it is still an urgent time to write (and read) about LGBTQ+ lives. Queer people face dangerous and deadly challenges -- both in the United States and abroad -- and it falls on writers to continue to bring these stories to light. The Price of Salt's dizzyingly erotically charged prose also telegraphed her signature sense of an ominous "menace" (in this case, the threat of being caught or found out just as the Red Scare hit the United States). Highsmith went on to write more queer-tinged fiction, including The Talented Mr. Ripley and all of the Ripley novels to follow.My friend wanted his girlfriend to dress like a porn star and do what a porn star would do. Porn is so easily accessible. You see guys watching it in the classroom on their phones; on the bus.”