The 20 Best LGBTQ Books of 2023 (So Far)

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Every year, it gets more and more difficult to formulate a recommended reading list of fantastic must-read books by queer authors because these days, there are so many queer authors publishing fantastic must-read books. A champagne problem if there ever was one. But for Esquire, I have done my damndest as a Pride Month gift to you all. You’re welcome.

Below, I present twenty of my favorite LGBTQ books published this year thus far, in order of publication date. The list includes some of the usual talented suspects, some exciting debuts, and even a celebrity memoir, covering an array of genres and narrative styles, from intelligent nonfiction to supremely inventive novels to super sexy poetry (though, I might argue, all poetry is sexy). This summer is the perfect time to catch up on whichever of these titles you’ve yet to read, and/or recommend the ones you have to friends. Happy reading and happy Pride Month to all!

(This list will be updated in the future with more luminous queer books published in the latter half of 2023.)

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, by Marisa Crane

In the world of Exoskeletons, the Department of Balance attaches extra Shadows to society’s wrongdoers as a mark of their crime and a signal to the rest of respectable society. Even under constant surveillance, the darkly comic narrator Kris—addressing her late wife Beau (“the mail makes me cry—who gave businesses permission to print your name?”), who died in childbirth with their baby (“a sophisticated potato”)—reaches for life’s quotidian pleasures born of caring for a family built by choice.

Endpapers, by Jennifer Savran Kelly

Dawn—a bookbinder at the Met and a nonbinary artist, dragged toward the two poles of the gender spectrum by the people in her life—finds a love letter written in German on the back of a lesbian pulp novel. She searches for the letter’s writer: a woman named Gertrude, who escaped Nazi Germany and made a home in the US. Endpapers is something of a queer period piece, chronicling events in mid-20th-century America under McCarthyism as well as post-9/11 New York City—both eras that didn’t yet have the wealth of queer language we have now.

Couplets: A Love Story, by Maggie Millner

If you think you don’t like poetry, then read this stunning book, written mostly in rhyming couplets, and you’ll realize you’ve loved poetry all along—you just hadn’t yet read the work of Maggie Millner. It’s a classic love story: girl has boyfriend, girl meets another woman, girl rediscovers herself (but, of course, as the book’s speaker says, “I became myself. / No, I was always myself. / There’s no such person as myself.”), all told in roughly 100 pages, perfect for an afternoon. Trusted lover beside you reading their own copy of Couplets recommended, but not required.

Your Driver Is Waiting, by Priya Guns

Damani—a Tamil immigrant and a driver for the fictional rideshare company called, well, RideShare—is drawn to a woman named Jolene—white, wealthy, and “well-meaning”—who climbs into her car on one fateful day. What follows challenges everything Damani knows about sex, politics, and power. Rest assured, this electric novel is fiercer and funnier than Taxi Driver, the classic Scorsese film that inspired it. Damani may be one to always pick ‘fight’ over ‘flight,’ but Priya Guns’s debut novel is ready for a quick getaway—its engine is always running.

Confidence, by Rafael Frumkin

We devour scammer stories (see: Inventing Anna, The Dropout) because they bring the hubris and comeuppance that make for delicious drama, and Rafael Frumkin’s queer grifter novel is as delectable as they come. As a teen, tiny Ezra is busted for selling fake drugs (in reality: crushed Sudafed mixed with salt) and sent to a correctional camp where he meets charismatic Orson. Con after fantastic con, their relationship builds—sexually, romantically, and otherwise—in this The Talented Mr. Ripley meets Thelma and Louise of a showstopper.

Flux, by Jinwoo Chong

The elevator pitch for this book, I know, sounds rather like someone threw darts at Post-Its on a wall, took whatever prompts they landed on—“speculative fiction,” “neo-noir,” “time travel,” “themes of grief and trauma,” and “three Korean Americans with names beginning with ‘B’,” just to name a few—gave them to the uber-talented writer Jinwoo Chong, and said, “Go.” And go he did. As Chong’s characters intersect through time and space, both style and substance pour out of the seams of this striking debut novel.

The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag, by Sasha Velour

Look, I’m not exaggerating when I say: this book is a work of genius. Sasha Velour, known to most as the winner of the ninth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, deftly splices her insightful words and vivid illustrations (Velour holds a master’s degree in cartooning) with candid memoir and academic theory to produce this engaging entry into the literary queer canon. It offers glimpses into what’s behind the smokes and mirrors of her life as a drag performer, and honors—with evident love for and knowledge of—the queer histories that have made present-day (and future) drag possible.

Is It Hot in Here (Or Am I Suffering for All Eternity for the Sins I Committed on Earth)?, by Zach Zimmerman

I have a soft spot for books of essays by queer comedians (see: the works of Isaac Oliver, Ryan O’Connell, et al.) because the writing is often so unforced—jokes and hijinks-y anecdotes and stories of queer trauma are delivered so easily that you’re happy to be crying one moment and guffawing the next. All that to say: Zach Zimmerman’s debut covers all those bases and more as they write about their evolution from “conservative, Southern Baptist carnivore” to “gay vegetarian atheist.” Look forward to the TV adaptation.

Homebodies, by Tembe Denton-Hurst

This debut novel’s protagonist, Mickey, is a queer Black woman living the life in New York City, with a dream job in digital media and a loving steady girlfriend, but all of it is upended when she learns she is being replaced at work. When she goes home to Maryland, she reconnects with an old flame. Plotwise, it could hit too close to home for many of us as queer folks of color working in this industry, but Tembe Denton-Hurst’s masterful command of the narrative—classical in its shape, contemporary in its textures—makes this sparkling story shine all the more.

Boyslut, by Zachary Zane

It’s refreshing to read Zachary Zane’s debut book, a memoir-cum-manifesto, in which he argues that, in much of American culture, “sex-negativity is pervasive, insidious, and touches us all—and not in a fun, kinky way.” By taking himself for his subject and dissecting the ways that bisexuality, polyamory, and perhaps failed notions of masculinity have shaped his life, Zane (a sex columnist for magazines like Men’s Health and Cosmopolitan) makes sexual candor radical again. Read an interview between the author and Esquire here.

The New Masculinity, by Alex Manley

Truly, masculinity is the thesis topic du jour, and for good reason. “Masculinity is at what feels like a crisis point,” decrees the nonbinary writer Alex Manley. As a longtime editor at the website AskMen, they have been a scholar of the unfairer sex for about a decade. In their latest book of nonfiction, they pull out all the stops. In a narrative voice at once astute and accessible, Manley blends memoir and research to offer a recalibration of what manhood can and should look like today and in the future.

Dykette, by Jenny Fran Davis

Sasha and Jesse, a lesbian couple, meet Jules and Miranda, a wealthy lesbian couple. (Insert “we liked your vibes” joke here.) The latter invites the former to their house in the country, alongside another couple: Jesse’s bestie Lou and Lou’s lover Darcy. During the getaway, jealousies arise, confessions are made, rage is unleashed; each couple’s future is determined in the ten days covered by this finely paced and expertly observed novel. It’s sexy and terrifying, hilarious and unrestrained. This book is a lesbian fantasia on Brooklynite themes.

Quietly Hostile, by Samantha Irby

Samantha Irby’s unapologetic blend of cynicism, earnestness, and salt has, in my humble opinion, solidified her status as one of our era’s most memorable humorists. In this latest book of essays, now her fourth, she never misses a comic beat, and rarely lets a line go unpunched. Yet it’s the slower moments in between (describing the death of her mother, chronicling quotidian life as Covid-19 descended upon the US, etc.) that offer the most clarifying honesty—filtered deliciously, as ever, through Irby’s signature sardonics. Let there one day be a Sam Irby box set. Read an interview between the author and Esquire here.

The Late Americans, by Brandon Taylor

It truly feels like I can’t write one of these lists if I can’t include the latest work by the legend-in-the-making Brandon Taylor. This triumph of a second novel returns the reader to a prestigious campus in the American midwest and features a rotating cast of students—painters and dancers and musicians—all trying to make art in an age when everything is falling apart. In short: it’s a perfect read for our times. Read an interview between the author and Esquire here.

The Male Gazed, by Manuel Betancourt

In this memoir-in-essays, Manuel Betancourt turns the male gaze onto masculinity itself, deconstructing it through the lens of what he’s watched on his screens—whether it’s thirst traps, telenovelas, or Antonio Banderas—as a queer Colombian man and a film critic. This book is filled with incisive thinking, both academic and personal, all woven wonderfully together. If I may quote myself from the blurb I wrote for the book: “Betancourt is a dream critic—as in, a fabulous scholar of dreams, of the desirous imagination.” Read an interview between the author and Esquire here.

Lesbian Love Story, by Amelia Possanza

This book’s subtitle is “a memoir in archives,” and it’s exhilarating to read Amelia Possanza connect her personal journey as a lesbian in 2023 with stories of lesbian love throughout history: from drag kings in Bushwick, to lesbian caretakers in the AIDS crisis, to Sappho in classical Greece. Her skillful storytelling makes the past feel present as she tells of the first women at the Olympics and Harlem’s Black lesbians in the early 20th century. Possanza writes that she has fallen in love thrice in her life: first, with water; then stories; then lesbians. That love, here, sings.

The Celebrants, by Steven Rowley

Five friends—Naomi, Craig, Marielle, Jordan, and Jordan (“Jordy” to differentiate from the other)—regularly reconvene to throw each other’s funerals, as in: to celebrate each other’s lives even as they live. But someone’s dire personal news threatens to unravel everything, not least of all their joint promise to live well and together. This novel is a newly-minted New York Times bestseller—and for good reason. It’s Steven Rowley’s sharpest work to date, which is saying something, as his bibliography includes modern queer favorites like The Editor and The Guncle.

Horse Barbie, by Geena Rocero

Trans activist, director, model, host—the list goes on for Geena Rocero, and with this memoir, she can add “brilliant writer” to her CV. Her voice rings warm with a hard-won edge as she traces her journey from the streets of Manila, where her transness was hypervisible as a pageant queen; to the music videos and magazine covers of New York City, where she “went stealth” to develop her modeling career; to the TED Talk stage in 2013, when she came out to the wider world as trans. This book is another milestone for Rocero, and a must-read for all.

Pageboy, by Elliot Page

As in Rocero’s memoir, Elliot Page chronicles the tension between hypervisibility and being fully seen—in Page’s life, against the context of being one of the most recognizable actors and trans people in Hollywood. Page’s writing is straightforward and to-the-point, perhaps necessitated by the pace and tumult of celebrity life. There’s lots of juicy material in the book (secret kisses and showmances abound), but it’s this prevailing sense of assurance and confidence in Page’s voice that makes one of the year’s most anticipated titles worth the wait.

Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew from It, by Greg Marshall

True story: one page into Leg, I was already cackling. Two pages into Leg, I was sobbing with abandon. In this heartfelt debut memoir, Greg Marshall tells his story of coming out twice: first, as a gay man; second, as a man with cerebral palsy—a diagnosis that his family kept from him since birth. Throughout the book, Marshall unflinchingly looks at queerness, disability, illness, and family through the lens of his own queer, disabled, ill family with great aplomb. This marvelous book will stick with me for a very long time.

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