We are Celebrating Lesbian Visibility Day by sharing books that delve into lesbian and LGBTQ+ experiences, including fiction, biography, and history.
Winner of the Stonewall Book Award, Cantoras is a revolutionary novel about five wildly different women who, in the midst of the Uruguayan dictatorship, find one another as lovers, friends, and ultimately, family.
Sister Outsider is a collection of nonfiction writings on race, gender, and LGBTQ issues by the groundbreaking feminist Audre Lorde.
A Winner of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Bestiary is a novel that traces one family’s history from Taiwan to America, with themes of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood.
Selina Hastings gives the first biography of the universally acclaimed British writer, Sybille Bedford, a writer and a journalist who was ahead of her time in many ways, including forming friendships with a literary network of high-powered lesbians.
Forcing the Spring is the definitive account of five remarkable years in American civil rights history, when the United States experienced a tectonic shift on the issue of marriage equality.
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
“ZAMI is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her. . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page.” —Off Our Backs
The Liar’s Dictionary chronicles the misadventures of a lovelorn Victorian lexicographer and the young woman put on his trail a century later to root out his misdeeds while confronting questions of her own sexuality and place in the world.
Originally published in 1971, Merle Miller’s On Being Different is a pioneering and thought-provoking book about being gay in the United States. Miller’s essay “What It Means To Be a Homosexual,” described as “the most widely read and discussed essay of the decade,” carried the seed that would blossom into On Being Different—one of the earliest memoirs to affirm the importance of coming out.
Leaving Isn’t Even the Hardest Thing
Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing interrogates notions of queerness and what it means to live freely. Each essay is a reckoning: of survival, identity, and how to reclaim one’s past when carving out a future.
Tightly woven, humane and insightful, tracing unflinchingly the most intimate reaches of a young woman’s heart and mind, Say Say Say is a riveting story about what it means to love, in a world where time is always running out.
A literary coming-of-age poetry collection and a piercingly intimate deconstruction of daughterhood, Black Girl, Call Home is an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity.
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
Andrea Lawlor gives a riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman whose hero/ine wends his/her way through a world gutted by loss, pulsing with music, and opening into an array of intimacy and connections.
Find more books on LGBTQ+ Literature and History of LGBTQ+ on our Higher Education course listings.
