The Queer Reads You Won't Want to Miss in 2025

Elle

3 hours ago

Compared to recent years, 2025's Pride Month has shaped up to be a relatively somber affair. Corporate sponsors have overwhelmingly scaled back their Pride sponsorships and initiatives supporting the queer community, and the White House has continued its relentless assault on LGBTQ citizens (particularly trans Americans). But if there's one thing LGBTQ folks know how to do, it's celebrate their community in the face of widespread hostility. (The first Pride was a riot, after all.) And they know how to keep that celebration going all year long.
Despite mounting societal pressures and outright book bans, the queer literary landscape is richer and more varied than ever, with a surge of new releases celebrating LGBTQ joy and providing testimony of our queer siblings' experiences. Of these new titles, you can find ELLE's picks for the best of 2025 (so far) below.
Gurung's creative vision has made him a mainstay in the fashion world ever since launching his eponymous label in 2009. This year, he brought that singular voice to literature with this stirring memoir, which follows Gurung's journey from his childhood in Nepal to his immigration to the U.S. and meteoric rise as a designer.
Set in the summer of 1996, von Blanckensee's debut is a grungy, glittering maelstrom of a queer coming-of-age novel, spanning subjects such as sex work, religious trauma, addiction through the cross-country adventure at its center. When secret girlfriends Hannah and Sam depart their Long Island, New York, hometown—and Hannah's devout Orthodox family—for a new life in San Francisco, the financial strains of the city lead them to find work at a strip club, where their relationship is tested.
In Erica Peplin's literary romance Work Nights, Jane Grabowski's job at an acclaimed New York City newspaper is more grunt work than glamour, but that's fine with her. Each new workday brings a fresh opportunity for Jane to flirt with Madeline, the paper's gorgeous—and seemingly straight—intern. In an effort to distract Jane from her doomed crush, Jane's roommate drags her to a series of queer events across the city. It's at one of these events that Jane meets the crunchy, commitment-ready musician Addy, and in short order she finds herself increasingly torn between two very different women.
It's fitting that the publishing industry's first definitive biography of trailblazing LGBTQ activist Marsha P. Johnson was penned by a similarly singular Black transgender woman: renowned artist and organizer Tourmaline, whose work has garnered recognition from TIME, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Tourmaline renders Marsha's remarkable life in vivid, electric prose, depicting every stitch of her story with all the reverence and precision it deserves.
Rebecca meets The Haunting of Bly Manor in acclaimed YA author Christina Li's adult debut, a sprawling Hollywood gothic about inherited trauma and the real cost of the American Dream. The legendary (and reclusive) actress Vivian Yin is dead, and at the reading of her will, Vivian's daughters learn that their childhood home has been left not to them but to an entirely separate family. Both racing to stake their claim, the two families move into Vivian's crumbling mansion, where they soon find themselves haunted not just by grief but by a far more sinister force.
You likely learned Tommy Dorfman's name from her breakout performance on the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why. Or maybe you know her by her reputation as an It girl and fashion icon. But with her new memoir on her transition, queerness, and recovery from addiction, Dorfman shows that she's much more than her name: She has a powerful and compelling voice of her own—one the world deserves to hear.
These days, people love to compare any and every lyrical queer love story to Call Me by Your Name. But Crane's much-anticipated follow-up to I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself—which follows high school basketball players Mack and Liv as they navigate love, grief, and the shores of adulthood—makes a strong case for the comparison with its lucid, longing-filled prose.
More than anything, 30-year-old trans woman Max craves contentment and stability—and she thinks she's finally found those things in Vincent, her new boyfriend. But when the consequences of an entanglement from Vincent's past begin to surface, Max must decide how to weigh her partner's past against their present relationship.
Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa have never met in person, but they share a past: As teenagers, they found each other online and tried to build a video game together called Saga of the Sorceress. Eighteen years later, all three trans women unknowingly live within a stone's throw of one another in the New York City metro area. Still reeling from a recent near-death experience, Abraxa decides to resurrect the video game—a decision that draws all three back into each other's orbit.
Having freshly abandoned their gender, their name, and their corporate job, the unnamed narrator of Carlstrom's exhilarating debut is in the midst of a 'bender to end all benders' when they learn that their conspiracy-theorist father has gone missing. So they do the only logical thing: They steal a car and embark on a road trip from Chicago to Arkansas in search of him.
Years after fleeing from the anger of his father, a reverend and doctor, Davis is preparing to marry the man of his dreams in New York City—without his disapproving parents in attendance. But when he learns during his wedding reception that his father has been in a terrible car accident, Davis must confront the past to determine where exactly their relationship went so wrong.
Detransition Baby was a tough act to follow, but with Peters's delightful follow-up to her acclaimed debut novel, she's pulled it off admirably. The titular narrative—which follows a lumberjack exploring gender in preparation for an upcoming dance—sits cheekily alongside tales of gender apocalypse and taboo romance in this novel-and-stories collection.
A lesbian romance between a clown and a magician is no laughing matter in the latest novel from the acclaimed author of Mostly Dead Things and With Teeth. When Cherry (the clown) meets Margot the Magnificent, she is shaken from her complacency on both a personal and a professional level. Before long, however, Cherry must decide exactly how much she wants to risk for her new relationship—and her art.
She's a singer, drag queen, reality star, and now author—what can't Bob do? Coming hot on the heels of a scene-stealing run on Peacock's The Traitors, the drag queen's debut novel takes place in a world where dead luminaries have spontaneously started coming back to life. When Harriet Tubman shows up and calls upon disgraced music producer Darnell to help her produce a hip-hop album about her legacy, Darnell is forced to confront his own past alongside hers.
In his second novel, acclaimed poet and author Ocean Vuong follows Hai, a 19-year-old in small-town Connecticut who stands on the brink of taking his life when an elderly woman suffering from dementia convinces him to reconsider. He soon takes a position as caretaker to the woman, a widow named Grazina, which results in the two forming a life-changing friendship over the course of the following year.
Following a brutal breakup, memoirist Melissa Febos decided to spend three months celibate for the first time in almost 20 years of dating. Those three months ultimately stretched into a year—which, as she chronicles in her latest lyrical work of nonfiction, turned out to be one of the most creatively, spiritually, and fulfilling periods of her life.
In Vaishnavi Patel's alternate version of 1960s India, the region was never liberated from British rule. There, protagonist Kalki is a young woman coming into herself, both by exploring her queerness and by engaging in small acts of rebellion against the oppressive regime. But as she grows increasingly involved with her city's burgeoning independence movement, she is forced to decide whether she would rather save her community or herself.
It starts as a joke. But after her best friend suggests she 'marry rich,' the unnamed narrator of Rahmani's clever debut novel decides to tackle that goal with all the investment and fervor she was previously channeling into her academic career. Over the course of a single summer, she sets out to go on 100 dates with suitors of all genders in hopes of landing a marriage proposal by the beginning of the next semester.
When Erica Skyberg decides to transition, she is 35 years old, recently divorced, and working as an English teacher in rural South Dakota. So she turns for support to the only other trans woman she knows: her 17-year-old student Abigail. At turns hilarious and heartwarming, St. James's novel follows along as the two form a halting—but increasingly joyful—friendship.
Who doesn't love a lesbian vampire novel? Set across multiple timelines—one in 16th-century Spain, one in 1800s London, and one in pre-Covid Boston—Schwab's latest fantastical tale tells the story of three women adjusting to their new lives as vampires in a world that was never meant to accommodate their hunger.