Amid rising threats to queer families—including health policies that restrict trans kids’ health care and attacks on marriage equality—I find myself craving books that showcase LGBTQ+ families in an authentic way. Though queer representation has improved in literature in recent years, I still need to actively seek out the types of stories I’m looking for, so I set out on a reading journey.
I was looking for books that portray diverse queer families and all the dynamics they entail. I read stories of queer kids coming out to straight parents, and queer parents navigating raising children. I found books about relationships between queer adults and their siblings. I especially enjoyed books that explore how different cultural and generational contexts influence these relationships.
I was also looking for different definitions of family. The concept of “chosen family” carries deep history and resonance in the LGBTQ+ community, especially for those who have been rejected by their families of origin for choosing to live openly and proudly. I wanted to make sure chosen families were represented in the literature I read, so I sought out books that portray new ways of building family ties and community.
The eight books I’ve collected here span genres and cultures but they all share a nuanced, authentic representation of queer families. Together they create a rich tapestry of LGBTQ+ stories that break stereotypes and show the beauty of all types of families.
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
This poetic book follows Cyrus, a queer Iranian-American young man, who grapples with issues of loss, family, and identity. After losing his mother at a young age, Cyrus and his father leave their native Iran for America, hoping to start over. As an adult, he reflects on this journey, seeks answers about his mother’s death, and is led to an art exhibit centering a terminally ill woman to whom he feels an unexplainable pull. Along with its fascinating portrayal of Iranian and Iranian-American culture, the novel features two queer characters navigating their identities. Readers can also look forward to an unexpected but very cute queer friendship-turned-romance.
Spent by Alison Bechdel
The legendary lesbian writer’s latest comic novel is an often humorous portrayal of queer families, both traditional and chosen. It picks up on the author’s cult-favorite comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For,” which debuted in 1983 and portrays a loosely knit group of queer friends as they navigate love and relationships. In Spent, the characters have aged a few decades and are now living in COVID-era America. The storylines include characters navigating evolving relationship dynamics and polyamory, as well as how the current political landscape and polarization impacts relationships between queer people and their families of origin. Illustrated in Bechdel’s iconic, simple yet expressive style, the book is brimful of diverse queer families—there are queer parents and their queer child; a gay adult and her straight, conservative sister; and many others. All this coalesces into a witty and incisive look at modern queer identity.
Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn
This is a beautiful and heartbreaking exploration of queer identity told through the lens of Patsy, a lesbian woman from Jamaica who leaves behind her home and her young daughter Tru to follow a childhood love to New York. Told over a decade, the novel follows both Patsy and Tru as they struggle to find themselves and search for happiness while constricted by traditional views of gender and sexuality. Dennis-Benn’s book explores lesbian identity and gender nonconformity with compassion and authenticity. Told through a mother-daughter relationship defined by queerness and love, as well as geographic and emotional distance, this is a book about family ties both lost and found.
Exalted by Anna Dorn
This is an edgy, captivating, astrology-themed book that follows two women who are trying, but not necessarily succeeding, to get their lives together. Emily is a millennial who makes a living running a famous Instagram astrology account and struggles with a dysfunctional relationship with a guy she refuses to call her boyfriend. 40-something Dawn is searching for meaning while navigating a breakup with a girlfriend and a tense relationship with her son, whose needs she never seems to put before her own. Dorn doesn’t shy away from a characters’ lack of likeability, which makes her examination of psychology, queer identity, and surprising familial relationships all the richer. It also contains a shocking plot twist that will leave you reeling.
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Evaristo’s novel explores race, sexuality, gender, and how views of these identities have shifted in recent decades. The book follows the lives of a dozen characters, most of whom are Black, queer, British women, as they navigate life’s challenges. Among the storylines is the relationship between Black lesbian playwright Amma and her teenage daughter Yazz, as well as Shirley, a Barbadian-British teacher who grows jaded by the racism she witnesses in the education system, and her conservative colleague Penelope, who makes a startling discovery about herself. I especially enjoyed the book’s portrayal of how lesbian and queer identity has shifted from a focus on women-only spaces to an embrace of gender fluidity and nonbinary identity and the portrait of tensions arising as older generations struggle to adapt to—and at times clash with—younger people’s evolving ideas.
April May June July by Alison B. Hart
This novel follows four siblings in the Barber family, each named after a month of the year, as they navigate the aftermath of the tragic event that defined their childhood: their father’s kidnapping in Iraq. Now, years later, new developments in their father’s case force each sibling to deal with the possibility that their father is still alive. The sibling set includes two queer characters: June (who as an adult goes by Juniper), a soccer coach about to wed her longtime girlfriend, and July, a college student who is learning about his sexuality and navigating feelings for two very different guys. What I love about this book is that it does not fall into the trap of making the queer characters’ sexuality their defining characteristic, rather sexuality is just one of the multitude of aspects that form an identity.
Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune
This romance with a dash of fantasy is a perfect read if you are looking for something heartwarming. It begins with its main character, a middle aged career-driven lawyer named Wallace, attending his own funeral as a ghost. There he meets a Reaper, who takes him to an unusual yet charming cafe that serves as a crossing to the afterlife. The book centers on Wallace’s time at the coffee shop, where he gets to know a quirky cast of characters who spend their days ushering the dead into the afterlife. He discovers unexpected friendship and even romance, and is forced to grapple with the life he led and what he wishes he had done differently. It is a lovely exploration of queer love and chosen family that will leave you smiling.
The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz
The book follows the Oppenheimer triplets, born to a Jewish-American New York family via assisted reproduction in the early days of IVF. As the trio grow up, they each navigate different interests and aspects of their identities; Sally’s coming out journey as a lesbian intersects with her brother Lewyn’s burgeoning college romance. They also come to learn unexpected things about their parents, which force them to reckon with topics of loyalty, love, religion, and race. Throughout, the book weaves queer identity into storylines about the ebb and flow of family relationships as characters find themselves, their political identities, and relatives they didn’t know they had.
