Book picks similar to
Mysterious Acts by My People by Valerie Wetlaufer
poetry
lgbt
queer
lgbtq
Since I Laid My Burden Down
Brontez Purnell - 2017
An emotional tightrope walk of a book and an important American story rarely, if ever, told.” —Michelle Tea, author of Black WaveDeShawn lives a high, creative, and promiscuous life in San Francisco. But when he’s called back to his cramped Alabama hometown for his uncle’s funeral, he’s hit by flashbacks of handsome, doomed neighbors and sweltering Sunday services. Amidst prickly reminders of his childhood, DeShawn ponders family, church, and the men in his life, prompting the question: Who deserves love?A raw, funny, and uninhibited stumble down memory lane, Brontez Purnell’s debut novel explores how one man’s early sexual and artistic escapades grow into a life.
Relationship Material
Jenya Keefe - 2019
He has a good life, but the emotional aftermath of a horrific crime makes him feel too damaged to date. So when his sister’s hot bestie, Malcolm Umbertini, comes on to him, he turns him down flat. Mal is Relationship Material: the kind who thinks in the long term. What would Evan do with a man like that?As a prosecuting attorney, Mal’s learned how to read people, and he knows there’s more to Evan than meets the eye. Mal has faced his own hardships since his family kicked him out as a teen, and he respects Evan’s courage and emotional resilience. More than that, he wants Evan—in his bed and in his life. But can he weather another rejection?Both wary, they agree to a no-strings fling. Mal knows that Evan wants things to stay casual, but he’s falling in love a little more with each encounter. With health, happiness, and bruised hearts on the line, Mal and Evan must risk everything for love.Reader discretion advised. This title contains the following sensitive themes:Child Abuse (past)Drug Use (references to past interaction with drug users/drug dealers)Emotional Abuse Explicit Violence (past)Eating Disorder (past)Non-Consent (Discussion of past incident)Self-Harm (references)Sexual Assault (Discussion of past assault)
Build Yourself a Boat
Camonghne Felix - 2019
This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains.Build Yourself a Boat, an innovative debut by award-winning poet Camonghne Felix, interrogates generational trauma, the possibility of healing, and the messiness of survival.Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through lyric and memory.
The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant
Dan Savage - 1999
In The Kid, Savage tells a no-holds-barred, high-energy story of an ordinary American couple who wants to have a baby. Except that in this case the couple happens to be Dan and his boyfriend. That fact, in the face of a society enormously uneasy with gay adoption, makes for an edgy, entertaining, and illuminating read. When Dan and his boyfriend are finally presented with an infant badly in need of parenting, they find themselves caught up in a drama that extends well beyond the confines of their immediate world. A story about confronting homophobia, falling in love, getting older, and getting a little bit smarter, The Kid is a book about the very human desire to have a family.
Honesty
Seth King - 2010
Maybe we were meant to explode.”As a closeted teenager in the Deep South with a holy-roller father and the scars to prove it, bookworm Cole Furman has resigned himself to experiencing life and love only within the pages of his favorite novels. But after Nick Flores seems to walk off a page and starts to rewrite his story, Cole finds his dreams spinning into a dazzling – and complicated – reality. If you have ever found yourself on the wild breathless thriller ride that is young love, Honesty will rip you back again in screaming color.
The Suicidal Peanut
Matthew J. Metzger - 2015
His text-flirting with Demi, the brother of his best friend, is going nowhere: Demi already has a boyfriend and anyway, who dates their best friend's twin? But then, the pining after Nick is going nowhere either, because Nick probably likes gay-bashing on Friday nights for fun. He's gorgeous, but he's dangerous, and Tab knows better than that.So what's a bit of harmless flirting, when one is taken and the other is straight? It's just a bit of fun.That is until Demi is suddenly single, and Nick is not looking as straight and scary as he was before.
Catrachos: Poems
Roy G. Guzmán - 2020
In these unflinching, riveting poems, Roy G. Guzmán reaches across borders—between life and death and between countries—invoking the voices of the lost. Part immigration narrative, part elegy, and part queer coming-of-age story, Catrachos finds its own religion in fantastic figures such as the X-Men, pop singers, and the “Queerodactyl,” which is imagined in a series of poems as a dinosaur sashaying in the shadow of an oncoming comet, insistent on surviving extinction. With exceptional energy, humor, and inventiveness, Guzmán’s debut is a devastating display of lyrical and moral complexity—an introduction to an immediately captivating, urgently needed voice.
The Price of Salt
Patricia Highsmith - 1952
They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol into a choice between her daughter and her lover. With this reissue, The Price of Salt may finally be recognized as a major twentieth-century American novel.
Kicker's Journey
Lois Cloarec Hart - 2009
But when Kicker falls in love with a teacher, Madelyn Bristow, it radically alters the course of her tranquil life.Together, the lovers flee the brutality of Madelyn's father and the prejudices of upper crust England in search of freedom to live, and love, as they choose. A journey as much of the heart and soul as of the body, it will find the lovers struggling against the expectations of gender, the oppression of class, and even, at times, each other.What they find at the end of their journey is not a new Eden, but a land of hope and opportunity that offers them the chance to live out their most cherished dream - a life together.
Taste on my Tongue
Beth Bolden - 2017
However, his new agent's brilliant plan for Landon's superstardom doesn’t have anything to do with his music – it’s called Kitchen Wars, and it’s the hottest new reality show on TV. Landon wishes he could have nothing to do with it. Since the first morning he mixed flour and water, Quentin Maxwell knew he wanted to be a baker. After becoming the pastry chef at a popular LA bakery, anyone else might be satisfied. But Quen wants to call his own shots. Going on Kitchen Wars to win the money for his own bakery seems like a huge risk, but maybe it's worth it. They’re an unlikely pair. Landon can’t even figure out how to turn an oven on, while Quentin makes his living with one. But with each passing week on Kitchen Wars, they discover what a great team they make – on set, off set, and between the sheets. Winning should be everything, but what happens when the tastiest pairing is their own? Taste on my Tongue is a 80,000 word standalone gay romance featuring two men falling adorably in love, reality TV shenanigans, and too much food porn. Don't read hungry!
Up!
Al Stewart - 2018
He recovers from bitter disappointment and gradually life returns to a regular rhythm. Safe and predictable. Every day he gains confidence, but with health comes boredom. From the window ledge, he watches people outside and wishes he could be like them. There's another side to Luke. Underneath his bed are five hidden pairs of jeans with matching Dr Martens: yellow, purple, striped, green and tartan. Some days he feels the itch to get them out. Nope. Those days are gone. One day, an amazing thing happens. Dynamic blog artist Formaldehyde Bob comes to town with an exhibition of light and dark! Luke has crushed on him since being fifteen, idolising the man and his unusual creations. Something about the art calls to Luke like nothing else, makes him believe there might after all be someone out there who thinks in the same way. A soul mate. A bird with a similar song. No. Luke isn't going to go and see Formaldehyde Bob. He isn't. Because he's happy with his monotonous lot and doesn't want to see hope sliding down a mountain of sand. Will Luke take a chance and visit Formaldehyde Bob? Can the jeans ever be worn again? Does grumpy Barbara ever smile? And the most important question: is there any magic left in the world? Find out in this snowy tale of young love in the most unexpected places. Content warning: references to self-harm, mental illness.
The Dogs of Balboa
Rose Christo - 2014
Torn apart by guilt, Michael sabotages his own life, until one year later, when Michael unexpectedly crosses paths with the victim again. Michael is determined to make it up to Noah, a painfully shy Native American boy whose only ambition is to travel into space. But Noah doesn't remember Michael; and Michael doesn't have the courage to refresh his memory. And behind Noah's attack lies a disturbing pastime with roots as old as America itself.
Mysterious Skin
Scott Heim - 1995
Neil McCormick is fully aware of the events from that summer of 1981. Wise beyond his years, curious about his developing sexuality, Neil found what he perceived to be love and guidance from his baseball coach. Now, ten years later, he is a teenage hustler, a terrorist of sorts, unaware of the dangerous path his life is taking. His recklessness is governed by idealized memories of his coach, memories that unexpectedly change when Brian comes to Neil for help and, ultimately, the truth.
Less
Andrew Sean Greer - 2017
A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years now engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes--it would all be too awkward--and you can’t say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of half-baked literary invitations you’ve received from around the world. QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?ANSWER: You accept them all. If you are Arthur Less.Thus begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take Arthur Less to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India and Japan and put thousands of miles between him and the problems he refuses to face. What could possibly go wrong?Well: Arthur will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Sahara sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and arrive in Japan too late for the cherry blossoms. In between: science fiction fans, crazed academics, emergency rooms, starlets, doctors, exes and, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to see. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. The second phase of life, as he thinks of it, falling behind him like the second phase of a rocket. There will be his first love. And there will be his last.A love story, a satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, by an author The New York Times has hailed as “inspired, lyrical,” “elegiac,” “ingenious,” as well as “too sappy by half,” Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.