Queer writers name the best American LGBTQ+ books for
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- The Guardian commissioned the project ahead of Pride Month and America's 250th anniversary, asking leading queer writers to recommend a single American LGBTQ+ book, with selections ranging from obscure 1870s titles to canonical 20th-century works.
- Michael Cunningham made one of the most provocative picks, choosing Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as "probably the least widely acknowledged queer novel in American literature," arguing the Jake Barnes–Brett Ashley relationship is fundamentally about queerness and gender norm-subversion.
- Sarah Schulman chose Carson McCullers' 1940 debut The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, detailing how McCullers — a suit-wearing, gender-transgressing writer from segregated Georgia — embedded queer, trans, and all-Black scenes in the novel at age 23.
- Robert Glück highlighted Donald Allen's The New American Poetry anthology as a "queer bible," noting that nearly 30% of its 44 featured poets were queer, including Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Allen Ginsberg, despite the era's criminalization of homosexuality.
- Imogen Binnie credited Dennis Cooper's Period with saving their life, describing how finding the novel while shelving fiction at The Strand bookstore in New York gave them their first on-page recognition of trans dissociation.
- Kaveh Akbar selected Jos Charles' Feeld, a trans poet's deconstruction of English into a pidgin blending pre-Chaucerian Anglo-Saxon and millennial text-speak, calling Charles "an actual capital-G genius."
- Brontez Purnell chose Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar — a novel Purnell acknowledged is not explicitly queer — recounting how a middle-school English teacher in Alabama handed it to a depressed 12-year-old Purnell, and the queer community has since adopted it.
- Samuel R Delany picked James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, the Paris-set story of David, an American engaged to Hella who carries on a passionate affair with bartender Giovanni, who is ultimately executed for a murder David barely understands.
Why it matters: The feature deliberately complicates the LGBTQ+ literary canon by reclaiming authors — Hemingway, Plath, McCullers — typically filed under straight American literature, while also surfacing lesser-known queer works. With nearly two dozen writers contributing, the project effectively functions as a living, contested map of which books shaped a generation of queer American readers, with several contributors framing specific titles as life-saving.
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