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Reading List · LGBTQ+ LiteratureThe Best LGBTQ+ Authors to Read
LGBTQ+ writers have shaped modern literature in poetry, fiction, memoir and the essay, often writing about desire, family and identity at times when doing so carried real risk. Oscar Wilde was imprisoned; James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room caused controversy on publication. Later writers such as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and Alan Hollinghurst wrote openly about lesbian and gay lives, and younger writers continue to widen what that writing can look like.
Every writer here publicly identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual or queer, or, for historical figures, has same-sex relationships plainly documented by reputable sources; where a writer rejected labels, that is noted. The list is ordered chronologically by year of birth, from Wilde (1854) to Ocean Vuong (1988), and mixes classics with living writers.
Twelve LGBTQ+ authors, and where to start with each
Oscar Wilde
1854–1900 · Dublin, Ireland
Wilde wrote comedies, fairy tales, essays, poems and one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which appeared in a magazine in 1890 and in revised book form in 1891. His plays, ending with The Importance of Being Earnest (first performed in February 1895), use epigram and paradox to puncture Victorian respectability and the gap between public and private lives.
Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas led, through a libel case involving Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, to Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency in May 1895 and two years’ hard labour. In prison he wrote the letter later published as De Profundis; The Ballad of Reading Gaol followed in 1898.
Read Wilde if you want wit with a sharp edge and a central chapter of gay literary history.
Start with The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). A young man keeps his youth and beauty while his portrait ages and records the damage done by his way of life. Or The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Wilde’s last comedy, in which two young men lead double lives under invented names.
All Oscar Wilde books →Virginia Woolf
1882–1941 · London, England
Woolf’s novels follow the inner lives of her characters, moving between their thoughts, memories and perceptions. Mrs Dalloway (1925) takes place over a single June day in London, and To the Lighthouse (1927) follows a family across years. Her essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) is about women, money and writing.
Woolf’s most important relationship with a woman was with the writer Vita Sackville-West, with whom she was lovers for several years from the mid-1920s and close friends until her death. Orlando (1928), whose title character lives for centuries and changes sex, was inspired by Sackville-West. Woolf was married to Leonard Woolf throughout.
Read Woolf if you want to see how a novel can follow a mind from moment to moment.
Start with Orlando (1928). A young English nobleman lives through more than three centuries and partway through becomes a woman, in a novel inspired by Vita Sackville-West. Or Mrs Dalloway (1925). One June day in London as Clarissa Dalloway prepares to give a party.
All Virginia Woolf books →James Baldwin
1924–1987 · New York City, USA
Baldwin wrote novels and essays about race, religion, sexuality and family in the United States. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), draws on a Harlem upbringing, and the essays of Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963) made him a leading essayist on race in America.
Baldwin had relationships mainly, though not only, with men; he kept his private life largely private and resisted the words ‘gay’ and ‘queer’. Giovanni’s Room (1956), about an American in Paris, caused controversy for its homoerotic content. He moved to Paris in 1948 and lived in France for most of his later life.
Read Baldwin if you want fiction and essays that treat race and sexuality with the same honesty.
Start with Giovanni’s Room (1956). In Paris, an American man is torn between his fiancée and his love for an Italian man, Giovanni. Or The Fire Next Time (1963). Two essays, including ‘Down at the Cross’, on race, religion and America in the early 1960s.
All James Baldwin books →Frank O’Hara
1926–1966 · Baltimore, Maryland, USA
O’Hara wrote quick, conversational poems full of friends, streets, films, painters and lunch breaks in Manhattan. He was a leading figure of the New York School, an informal circle of poets and artists, and worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where by 1960 he was an assistant curator. Meditations in an Emergency appeared in 1957.
O’Hara was gay. He lived on and off with Joe LeSueur for a decade, and the dancer Vincent Warren, his partner from 1959, inspired several poems. He died in 1966, aged 40, after being struck by a jeep on Fire Island. His Collected Poems (1971) shared the National Book Award for Poetry.
Read O’Hara if you want poems that sound like a friend talking to you on a New York street.
Start with Lunch Poems (1964). A short collection published by City Lights of O’Hara’s city poems, among them some of his best-known work. Or Meditations in an Emergency (1957). O’Hara’s earlier collection, published by Grove Press.
All Frank O’Hara books →Adrienne Rich
1929–2012 · Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Rich wrote poems and essays about women’s lives, marriage, motherhood, power and language. Diving into the Wreck (1973) shared the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry; Rich declined it as an individual and accepted it with fellow nominees Audre Lorde and Alice Walker on behalf of women whose voices went unheard.
In 1976 she began a partnership with the Jamaican-born novelist Michelle Cliff that lasted until her death, and in the same year published ‘Twenty-One Love Poems’, which address love between women. Her essay ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1980) is among her best-known prose. In 1997 she declined the National Medal of Arts in protest.
Read Rich if you want poetry where the personal and the political are the same subject.
Start with The Dream of a Common Language (1978). Poems from 1974 to 1977, including the sequence ‘Twenty-One Love Poems’, first issued as a pamphlet. Or Diving into the Wreck (1973). The collection that shared the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry.
All Adrienne Rich books →John Rechy
Born 1931 · El Paso, Texas, USA
Rechy writes about gay life on the margins of American cities: hustlers, bars, parks and the night. His first novel, City of Night (1963), drew on his own years hustling in New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans and became an international bestseller. Numbers (1967) and Rushes (1979) continued in the same territory.
Both of Rechy’s parents were born in Mexico, and he is often described as a Mexican-American novelist whose fiction focuses on gay culture. Other books include The Sexual Outlaw (1977) and the memoir About My Life and the Kept Woman (2008). In 1997 he was the first novelist to receive the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award.
Read Rechy if you want an unvarnished picture of gay street life in mid-century America.
Start with City of Night (1963). A largely autobiographical novel about a young hustler moving between New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans. Or About My Life and the Kept Woman (2008). Rechy’s memoir.
All John Rechy books →Audre Lorde
1934–1992 · New York City, USA
Lorde described herself as a ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’, and her writing holds all of these together. Her poetry, including The Black Unicorn (1978), and the essays and speeches collected in Sister Outsider (1984) deal with racism, sexism, homophobia, anger and the differences between women.
The Cancer Journals (1980) records her experience of cancer, and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), which she called a ‘biomythography’, tells the story of her early life. She was New York State Poet Laureate from 1991 until her death in 1992.
Read Lorde if you want essays that still shape how people talk about race, gender and difference.
Start with Sister Outsider (1984). Essays and speeches, including ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’. Or Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982). Lorde’s account of her early life, which she called a ‘biomythography’.
All Audre Lorde books →Alan Hollinghurst
Born 1954 · Stroud, Gloucestershire, England
Hollinghurst writes long, closely observed novels about gay men in England, alert to class, money, politics and sex. The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) won the Somerset Maugham Award, The Folding Star won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1994, and The Line of Beauty (2004) won the Booker Prize.
Hollinghurst is gay and lives in London, and he is credited with helping gay-themed fiction into the literary mainstream. His later novels, The Stranger’s Child (2011), The Sparsholt Affair (2017) and Our Evenings (2024), follow lives and reputations across decades.
Read Hollinghurst if you want English social comedy and gay life in the same long novel.
Start with The Line of Beauty (2004). Nick Guest, a young gay Oxford graduate, lives with the family of a Conservative MP between 1983 and 1987, in the novel that won the 2004 Booker Prize. Or The Swimming-Pool Library (1988). Hollinghurst’s first novel, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award.
All Alan Hollinghurst books →Jeanette Winterson
Born 1959 · Manchester, England
Winterson was adopted as a baby and raised in Accrington, Lancashire, by evangelical parents in the Elim Pentecostal Church, who trained her to be a missionary. Her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), draws on that upbringing and won the Whitbread Prize for a First Novel.
Her later fiction, including The Passion (1987), Written on the Body (1992) and the Booker-longlisted Frankissstein (2019), plays with history, myth and form. She married the psychotherapist Susie Orbach in 2015, and has said she does not think of herself as a lesbian and prefers to move beyond such labels.
Read Winterson if you want a coming-of-age story that is funny and furious at once.
Start with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985). Jeanette, an adopted girl raised for missionary work in a Pentecostal household in Lancashire, falls in love with another girl and refuses to repent when her church turns on her. Or Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011). A memoir that gives a non-fiction account of the same Accrington childhood.
Sarah Waters
Born 1966 · Neyland, Pembrokeshire, Wales
Waters writes historical novels, several of them with lesbian heroines. Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, are set in Victorian England; The Night Watch (2006) moves through 1940s London, and The Paying Guests (2014) through the 1920s.
Waters is a lesbian, and her doctoral thesis was on lesbian and gay historical fiction from 1870 to the present. Her novels combine period detail with plots built on secrets and reversals, and The Little Stranger (2009) is a ghost story.
Read Waters if you want long, plot-driven historical fiction with lesbian lives at its centre.
Start with Fingersmith (2002). Sue, a young thief raised in Victorian London, poses as a maid to help a con man defraud a sheltered heiress, and the plot turns more than once. Or Tipping the Velvet (1998). Waters’s first novel, about a young woman from a Whitstable oyster restaurant who follows a male impersonator to the music halls of 1890s London.
All Sarah Waters books →Carmen Maria Machado
Born 1986 · Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA
Machado writes stories that borrow from horror, fairy tale and science fiction to write about women’s bodies, desire and violence. Her Body and Other Parties (2017) was a National Book Award finalist, won the Shirley Jackson Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and in 2018 the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.
Machado is bisexual and has spoken about growing up in a religious household and the guilt it gave her about her sexuality. Her memoir In the Dream House (2019), about an abusive relationship with another woman, won the Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction and the 2021 Folio Prize.
Read Machado if you want genre-bending stories that are unsettling and precise.
Start with Her Body and Other Parties (2017). A story collection that uses horror and fairy tale to write about women’s bodies and desire. Or In the Dream House (2019). A memoir of an abusive relationship with another woman, written mostly in the second person, with each chapter using a different genre or trope.
All Carmen Maria Machado books →Ocean Vuong
Born 1988 · Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Vuong was born in Vietnam and came to Hartford, Connecticut, at about the age of two, after his family spent time in a refugee camp in the Philippines. His poems and novels deal with family, war, migration, queer love and language. Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) won the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Vuong is gay, and queer identity runs through his work. His first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), is written as a letter from a son to his mother, who cannot read. Time Is a Mother (2022) followed her death, and his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, appeared in 2025.
Read Vuong if you want lyrical writing about family, migration and first love.
Start with On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). A young Vietnamese American writes a letter to his mother, who cannot read, about three generations of his family and his first love, a boy called Trevor. Or Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016). The poetry collection that won the T. S. Eliot Prize.
All Ocean Vuong books →Which LGBTQ+ author should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For wit and a Victorian scandal — Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
- For a classic love story set in Paris — James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956)
- For poems about city life — Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems (1964)
- For essays on race, gender and difference — Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984)
- For a twisting Victorian crime plot — Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002)
- For a memoir that breaks the rules of form — Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House (2019)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
Who are the best LGBTQ+ authors to start with?
For classics, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin are good starting points. For living writers, try Sarah Waters, Carmen Maria Machado or Ocean Vuong.
How were the authors on this list chosen?
Each writer either publicly identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual or queer, or, for historical figures, has same-sex relationships plainly documented by reputable sources. The list mixes classics and living writers and is ordered by year of birth.
Was James Baldwin gay?
Baldwin had relationships mainly, though not only, with men. He kept his private life largely private and resisted the labels ‘gay’ and ‘queer’, but Giovanni’s Room (1956) is one of the best-known novels about love between men.
Which Virginia Woolf novel is about gender?
Orlando (1928), whose title character lives for more than three centuries and changes sex. It was inspired by Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf had a long relationship.
Which LGBTQ+ authors have won major prizes?
Alan Hollinghurst won the 2004 Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty, Ocean Vuong the T. S. Eliot Prize for Night Sky with Exit Wounds, and Carmen Maria Machado two Lambda Literary Awards and the 2021 Folio Prize.
What is a good LGBTQ+ book for someone new to poetry?
Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964) is conversational and easy to dip into. Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language (1978), with its ‘Twenty-One Love Poems’, is another option.
Start with the author whose questions interest you most. The book you remember longest may not be the one with the clearest answers, but the one that changes how you see something familiar.
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