2024 Pride Month Reads
Here are 17 outstanding, fresh California books written by LGBTQ authors.
Over the past three years at the California Book Club, we’ve featured a wide range of literary works either by queer authors or spotlighting diverse experiences of sexual orientation and gender identity. July’s CBC author, Venita Blackburn, is a lesbian fiction writer and professor based in Fresno, and her marvelous, slightly meta novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, focuses on a lesbian science fiction graphic novelist as its protagonist. Past works, in the order in which we featured them, include Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart, Nina Revoyr’s Southland, Myriam Gurba’s Mean, Robin Coste-Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus, Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Rabih Alameddine’s The Wrong End of the Telescope, Jaime Cortez’s Gordo, Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, Deborah A. Miranda’s Bad Indians, and Jessica Hagedorn’s The Gangster of Love. These are all worth revisiting if you missed them the first time around—here we’ve linked to the event recaps and videos in which the authors talked to esteemed literary critic and CBC host John Freeman about their work. Around the Bay Area, we’re pumped about Pride Day, which falls on June 30. But if you’re like us, books by LGBTQ authors are not meant to be sequestered, to be read for only one day or month a year, but cherished all year long. Here are dazzling queer California books published over the past few years.•
Join us on July 25 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Venita Blackburn will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Dead in Long Beach, California. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
WHO’S AFRAID OF GENDER?, BY JUDITH BUTLER
With a wide-arching goal of alliance, Butler’s book is accessible to a large audience, as they capture an ideal vision of gender as expansive, personally expressive, but not forcibly adhering to gender-normative demands and the “phantasms” (fears) placed on gender fluidity. The book counters anti-genderist sentiment, from anti-trans feminists to the church. Butler also refutes Pope Francis, who holds the view that gender theory is akin to nuclear warfare. Yet, cautious of inflaming controversy, Butler maintains a calm tone throughout.
ORGAN MEATS, BY K-MING CHANG
Chang is a startling experimentalist. In this surreal novel, the third work in an outstanding, strange triptych (the other two books are Bestiary and Gods of Want), two inseparable friends, Anita and Rainie, aspire to be dogs and wind up having all sorts of weird upside-down experiences in their quest, all tied together by Anita’s mother’s emphasis on folklore about female dogs. The prose is headlong, wild—Chang is a treasure, working in a style and mode that are rare to experience.
THE PALACE OF EROS, BY CARO DE ROBERTIS
The Greek myth of Psyche and Eros is subversively and beautifully reimagined in De Robertis’s sixth novel, forthcoming from Atria on August 13. Here, Psyche is a young woman who is trying to avoid being married in a deeply patriarchal society, while Eros is a nonbinary god, the daughter of Aphrodite—a goddess whose jealousy of Psyche is vengeful and destructive.
PERFUME AND PAIN, BY ANNA DORN
After a brush with internet cancellation and another tumultuous relationship, novelist Astrid Dahl vows to stay single and sober for a bit. Unfortunately, she’s soon courted by a cute PhD student in her writing group, a queer-curious movie star, and a judgy new neighbor who lives beside her Los Angeles bungalow. Unfurling like the lesbian pulp fiction novels that fascinate Astrid, this novel is dripping with drama, vices, and propulsive love stories. Read our review.
THE SONS OF EL REY, BY ALEX ESPINOZA
El Rey Coyote, the luchador stage name for Ernesto Vega, a mainstream folk hero, is in Mexico City in the 1960s when he dons a luchador mask. Yet hidden behind this mask of machismo is Ernesto’s love for his male best friend. Constantly shifting time periods and narratives, Ernesto’s story is overlapped with the two stories of his son and grandson. Freddy, Ernesto’s son, struggles with keeping his dad’s gym open in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Freddy’s son, Julian, engages in online dating apps and gay sex work while wearing a burlesque luchador costume. Read our review.
ALL FOURS, BY MIRANDA JULY
What started as a cross-country trip from Los Angeles to New York becomes a two-week stay at a cheap motel half an hour from home for our unnamed narrator. She finds a freedom she didn’t think was possible and begins to distance herself from the roles of wife and mother. Here, July explores human intimacy and female sexuality. Read our review.
THE DEFAULT WORLD, BY NAOMI KANAKIA
In this clash of the underground queer world and aggressive tech capitalism, Jhanvi heads back to San Francisco—the city she promised to never return to—with a plot to marry her tech-worker friend and enjoy his healthcare benefits. Instead, drawn to their sex parties and claims of adoration, she finds herself falling in with his wealthy crew of bacchanalian friends. But cracks soon appear in Jhanvi’s vision of this perfect world.
I WILL GREET THE SUN AGAIN, BY KHASHAYAR J. KHABUSHANI
K is the queer child of Iranian immigrants growing up in the San Fernando Valley, longing to be thought of as just another boy yet overwhelmed by the conflict between his desire for a good friend and the constraints imposed by his parents’ expectations. With this book, Khabushani turns his own pain—a pain that is common for queer children of brown assimilationist immigrants—into art. This is a haunting debut, sparely written, by an author to watch, that should have received more attention.
TEHRANGELES, BY POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR
What if Little Women were a brilliant satire that featured über-wealthy Gen Z Iranian teenagers in Los Angeles? Part of the plot of the wonderfully campy novel Tehrangeles revolves around Mina, one of the younger sisters in the novel, who is gay. While trying to dig her reckless older sister Roxana out of a social media scandal, Mina reckons with Roxana’s homophobic remarks and finds love.
EXHIBIT, BY R.O. KWON
In San Francisco, fine art photographer Jin Han’s life is turned upside down when she meets Lidija Jung, a captivating ballerina who garners her attention almost immediately. Han is forced to make difficult decisions regarding her marriage, her career, and her life goals as her feelings for Jung deepen. An old family curse serves to complicate things further, and Han stands to risk losing everything. Read our profile.
ALL FRIENDS ARE NECESSARY, BY TOMAS MONIZ
In this warm and approachable novel, Oakland author Moniz chronicles the return of a 37-year-old grieving bisexual man, “Chino” Flores, to the Bay Area from Washington after he and his wife lose the child they were expecting during her late-term pregnancy. As he tries to fly solo and put himself back together, he gathers friends and lovers and develops an important bond. Apart from being a candid look at the joys to be found in relationships, both sexual and platonic, Moniz’s work is also a celebration of everyday life in the Bay Area.
THE FUTURE WAS COLOR, BY PATRICK NATHAN
George Curtis is a queer Jew who emigrated from Hungary during World War II and is now living in Hollywood in the 1950s during the Lavender and Red Scares. Writing monster movies and trying to keep a low profile, George is politically mute, until a Hollywood actor named Madeline offers him a place to write. While living there, he begins drafting a political philosophy essay about the Hungarian uprising—and engages in the party scene of Los Angeles in expressive and erotic bursts.
THOM GUNN: A COOL QUEER LIFE, BY MICHAEL NOTT
This life-size biography, spanning 720 pages and fusing academic and rigor, shows the transitions of Gunn’s acclaimed poetry from an emphasis on rhyme and meter to free verse. An influential figure of the gay movement in San Francisco, Gunn wrote The Man with Night Sweats (1992), a collection that paid tribute to those affected by the AIDS epidemic. Nott writes an accessible and all-inclusive account of Gunn’s wild and inspirational life, covering Gunn’s time in England, his mother’s suicide when he was 15, his move to the United States, his experimentation with LSD, and more.
THE GUNCLE ABROAD, BY STEVEN ROWLEY
The guncle (gay uncle) is back. Five years after having spent his summer taking care of his niece and nephew—Maisie and Grant—Patrick O’Hara is once again called to look over the children (and inevitably everyone else), at his brother’s wedding in Italy. Hands full with handling upset teenagers, a second-guessing groom, and a budding rivalry with a launt (lesbian aunt), O’Hara rediscovers himself and reinvents his notions of what love is.
YR DEAD, BY SAM SAX
Queer writer and poet Sax’s debut novel plunges into a single moment: the short space between when Ezra self-immolates and when they die. In that flash of pain and mortality, Ezra relives every feeling of love and belonging that they have experienced as a queer person, as well as the moments of exclusion and isolation. This highly anticipated debut novel from the author of Pig is heartfelt and imaginative.
HIDING FOR MY LIFE: BEING GAY IN THE NAVY, BY KAREN SOLT
San Diego–based Solt’s book is a powerful, knowledgeable, and heartfelt memoir about her successful yet fraught career in the navy from 1984 to 2006. While still figuring out love for herself, Solt is forced to hide that she’s a lesbian; during the ’80s, the navy still treated homosexuality among sailors as a crime and transferred gay sailors without regard for their partnerships, yet she manages to maintain a secret love life, including with a fellow service member. The great victory here is the comfort Solt takes in being able to live openly after her retirement.
BLACKOUTS, BY JUSTIN TORRES
Torres’s edgy sophomore novel is stunningly innovative, making use of the techniques of erasure poetry to tell the strange story of a gay Puerto Rican man who is in conversation at “the Palace” with an older, dying, yet playful queer raconteur, Juan Gay, whom he’d met previously in a mental hospital. Juan wants the narrator to work on a groundbreaking real-life project that centers on the secret historical accounts of gay people that were compiled by Jan Gay in the 1941 book Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, which was appropriated without credit in subsequent years. Read our review.
Q&A: A Conversation with Amy Tan
Excerpt: The Backyard Bird Chronicles
Event Recap: Adrian Tomine
Introducing the Special Guest
