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While certain elements of Pride Month can feel dissonant, at best (for example: why am I enjoying a rainbow flag display in the domestic terminal at Newark when many trans and gender-nonconforming people still can’t get health care?), one of the best parts of June’s annual celebration of all things rainbow-colored is enjoying the best that the LGBTQ+ literary community has to offer.
With that in mind, we asked nine queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming authors—including Anna Dorn, Camonghne Felix, Isle McElroy, and R. O. Kwon—to share the first books they saw themselves represented in. See all of their picks, plus descriptions of why those books resonated, below:
Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison was absolutely the first book I ever read that made me think, Oh, you can do that?! It’s a novel that’s not outwardly, capital-“G” Gay by any means, but as a young, closeted queer person—I was in sixth grade when I found a copy in a classroom—I started reading it and immediately saw myself wedged in there. The way that Bone Boatwright can’t seem to make sense of her heart? The way she’s always trying to figure out how to be the best version of herself so that other people will love her? All of that really resonated with me. Plus, there’s all that landscape writing: every cypress knob, every bend of the creek, every tree branch shading an upturned face! All of that felt like the kind of writing I wanted to do; the kind of work that made you remember that you had a body and it lives inside of something so much bigger—a bright, big world that holds us all. Every time I read this book I find something new to cherish in its pages. It’s a remarkable novel and I wouldn’t be the writer I am today if I hadn’t lucked upon it so many years ago. It has informed every speck of my work.
Miss Nelson is a blonde, pink-dress-and-flats wearing elementary school teacher whose students won’t listen. “The kids in Room 207 were misbehaving again,” Marshall writes. “Spitballs stuck to the ceiling. Paper planes whizzed through the air. They were the worst-behaved class in the whole school.” Miss Nelson decides she’s had it with her class. “Something will have to be done,” she says. The next day, the rowdy crowd is met with a surprise: Miss Viola Swamp, a substitute teacher, shows up in a long black dress and wild green and yellow stockings, wearing a nasty scowl and long black fingernails. Marshall writes of the naughty kids, “They could see that she was a real witch.” Miss Swamp rides these kids so hard over the course of a few school days that they go out to search for Miss Nelson, which is when the reader discovers that Miss Swamp is actually Miss Nelson in a kind of badass, mean-teacher costume. I loved this weird, rough-around-the-edges picture book as a kid. Marshall, who died of AIDS in 1992, wrote the first book about drag I had access to in my conservative Catholic home. Miss Nelson Is Missing! taught me that it’s actually okay to dress weird, even butch, to deceive or even scare people into doing what you want. When I taught elementary school, changing my clothes and my name changed my affect, too, and it changed not only my life but my students’ for the better. Miss Swamp isn’t conventionally beautiful, and she isn’t soft, but she can get a group of tough kids to read poetry and hit the books, and there’s a uniquely queer beauty in that. On the eve of my first child’s entry to kindergarten, when I shared the story of Miss Nelson finding her nerve as Miss Swamp, I was sharing my own story with him, too.
My God, what a classic! I read it a few years after undergrad, and it was the first book that I read that had a butch protagonist and a litany of butches who were depicted three-dimensionally—not as a punching bag or a merely a tragic story—throughout. Stone Butch Blues was my first look into a possible butch adulthood—at the time, I didn’t know any butches past the age of 30— and the first book I’d read that had a truly diverse (gender, sexuality, and race-wise) sapphic community. Feiberg’s fictional Buffalo community was sometimes toxic (aren’t they all?), but most times life-saving.
Feinberg said that a lot of the book was based on her/zir’s own life, so it was also my first foray into “autofiction” as a reader. It’s just so heavy and real and showed, as I hope my memoir does to readers, a true depiction of inter and intra-communal violence that butches go through—no matter how much you do or don’t “pass.” It’s required reading to this day because it brings up questions that the sapphic community is still grappling with: why do we shame butch-for-butch relationships? How do we, as non-cis men, still perpetuate strict gender roles and toxic masculinity? Why do we shame trans men and trans-masculine people for not reluctantly accepting womanhood? What decisions are we compelled to make—as they relate to medical transition—in order to fit into a rigid, gendered society? Why do we hold the idea of “passing” though passing doesn’t save us? Does everyone have the capacity to change?
Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker touched me deeply and is present in everything I’ve written since. Originally published in 1962 and reissued in 2004 by the New York Review of Books, the novel follows a woman self-destructing at her identical twin’s idyllic California wedding. The reprint’s back cover identifies Cassandra as gay, but the book never explicitly does. However, there’s a reference to a woman named Liz Janko calling Cassandra nonstop for weeks—obvious lesbian behavior—and her grandmother nearly addresses her sexuality before Cassandra cuts her off. Cassandra exists as an antidote to much of what annoys me in contemporary queer fiction. Instead of shouting her homosexuality from the rooftops as though it’s her sole defining trait, Cassandra s sexuality is the least of her problems. Rather than being self-serious and morally superior but ultimately shallow, Cassandra is morally gray and seemingly frivolous but secretly very smart. The Guardian calls Cassandra “a supremely intelligent neurotic.” She’s definitely the queer elder to my Perfume Pain protagonist, Astrid. I imagine in some fictional afterlife, Cassandra and Astrid are drinking heavily together, making jokes they shouldn’t be making.
Summer Sisters was the first book I read that presented queerness to me as a departure from heteronormative definitions of what friendship and romance can be. This Judy Blume novel follows two girls as they attempt to reckon with their earth-shattering dynamic, which continues to enrich and complicate their lives well into adulthood. There are many moments in the book where Vix and Caitlin’s friendship seems to expand beyond the conventional understanding of what a friendship is and can look like. They are intimate in ways that felt new to 10-year-old me and I could tell that they were doing a kind of romantic dance, even though it went unnamed. They kissed, sometimes they touched, there was full consent, and they were in love—as in love as two friends who truly see each other might be. In the wake of an earth-shattering youthhood, they end up living completely separate lives but that romantic undercurrent remains as they realize that they both have the power to break each other’s hearts. That idea of love, a love both familiar and titillating, helped normalize the idea of romance between women, helped me understand what queerness truly is (living outside of normativity) and helped me identify what I was feeling when the first woman who would break my heart walked into my life.
I first read T Kira Māhealani Madden s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls in a days-long spell in a sweaty summer. Madden’s story enthralled me from the opening pages, in which she recounts her mother stealing a jewelry mannequin from a J.C. Penney dum and shooting a man who crawled through her window. Madden’s memories of her adolescence and her parents’ addictions are achingly tender and sensorily sharp, so much so that you feel as if you are there with her, a jewelry mannequin invited into her home to witness it all unfold. I was doubly struck by Madden’s memoir, not just by her story and her captivating, enviable prose, but also by the fact that I’d never before read a memoir by a mixed-Asian and white dyke. I felt glimmers of my own life in many of Madden’s essays, meeting men who betrayed us and yearning for a love we can’t yet articulate to ourselves. I love the structure of the book, where longer essays and fragments intermingle, because life doesn’t always happen in longform. Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is the memoir that made me want to write my own, even if only as a challenge to myself to write something half as beautiful and true. In a craft essay published on LitHub, Madden writes, "Writing, for me, is no catharsis. Writing is work. Writing is my job. Writing is the only divinity or spirituality I have found, a medium through which, at my best, I can speak through time and space.” Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is a book that, to me, veers close to the divine. If you haven’t read it already, you know what to do!
I’d grown up used to meeting no one demographically like me in this art form—anglophone literature—I loved so much I’d make it my life. My favorite books, before college, were by Virginia Woolf and Leo Tolstoy and Henry James; in other words, the long dead, but after college, as I began reading Korean writers, I became increasingly hungry for more of us.
Partly as a result, Susan Choi’s My Education—with its chronicle of a graduate student, Regina, falling into an obsessive relationship with Martha, the pregnant, married wife of her male professor—was a revelation. When I read the novel in 2014, there was the still-unfamiliar joy of encountering a queer Asian American woman in fiction. But I also loved the ferocity of Regina’s desire. She wants and wants and wants, and can’t quite see why the older, married Martha isn’t giving as much of herself to Regina as the latter wishes. What’s also not all that common, then and now, is a novel centering an Asian American woman whose capacity for desire is as large and avid as I know mine can be. Women like me tend to be expected to put almost everyone else first. It’s intensely satisfying to see Regina chase after what she wants. She’s determined. She’s often wildly unreasonable. The strength of Regina’s longing helped as I started thinking my way toward my novel Exhibit, with its focus on desire-fueled Korean women.
At the time, I wasn’t out, both because of my upbringing and because, as a queer woman partnered with a cis man, I felt uncertain I had the right to talk about who I was and am. I’m bisexual, or pansexual—either term works for me—but I’d end up waiting five more years to talk about it in public. In 2013, I was beginning to write toward more openness, and My Education helped nudge me along. I need to reread it again.
House Rules was gifted to me (okay, it was a borrow I never returned) by a writer I greatly admire
in early 2014. She told me the novel was dark, and depressing, and about horses, and these were
all the things I needed to hear to read it immediately. Sure, I’d read about queer characters before, in both coded and explicit ways. I’d read about dykes and tomboys; I’d read held gazes and trembling fingers and I’d read romances. But before Heather, I’d never felt known in that divine, terrifying way that some works of art, if we’re very lucky in this life, know you. House Rules undid me. As dark and depressing as promised, and exquisitely skillful—it also featured a protagonist undefined by the ghastly abuse she endured.
House Rules’ protagonist Lee, a teenage runaway show jumper (equestrian), has it bad—Lewis’s characters always suffer, profoundly so—but still she is horny, and sincere, and hardscrabble, and wanting. Lee is fisted in motel after motel, bent over a tackbox, and she shows up to ride, perfectly, the next day. Lee is soulful and good and deeply sad. Lee is powerful, despite all the bad, oppressive powers in her life. She is insatiable. Heather Lewis was a show jumper herself, and she also suffered tremendously, dying by suicide at the age of forty, her third and final book published posthumously after wide rejection. But to me, Heather, like her characters, will always be a hero. If I could push anyone’s work into the hands of my people, and if I could have just one more story by anyone—it’s always Heather. When meeting Eileen Myles and Sarah Schulman, two other heroes of mine, I asked: tell me about Heather. They did. And when I finished that first read of House Rules I posted on Facebook, “has anyone read this???” A very hot cowboy butch responded. 10 years later, we’re married.
I can’t possibly be the only queer writer who first saw themselves in Imogen Binnie’s Nevada. I know I’m not very special for building a connection with the novel. But that’s part of what makes the novel so special–Nevada was a novel willing to explore the complicated humanity of being trans. As much as I reluctantly see myself in its protagonist, the avoidant and chaotic and selfish–and charming!—Maria Griffiths, a woman so detached from her feelings and her body that she would rather steal her girlfriend’s car than have a difficult conversation, I also found kinship in James, a young man living in Nevada who might very well be trans but who appears years away from accepting this truth for himself. The magic of Binnie’s novel is her ability to convey a realistic portrait of transition and queer life. Transitioning doesn’t automatically make everything better for Maria. Rather, it asks her to confront parts of herself—the hard, messy, emotional parts–that she would rather avoid. That is hard emotional work. Work that Maria clearly avoids, work that James would rather not even begin to broach. I read the novel a few years after I came out. It was not a window into a life that I wish I were living. Rather, it articulated a truth that many of the trans memoirs I’d previously read did not want to portray: Even after transitioning, even when you become more authentically you, you are still yourself, still hauling all the emotional baggage that might have nothing to do with gender identity. Here was a novel that made the trans experience a human experience, showing that we are just as lovable and maddening and real as any other complicated subject in fiction.
