GAY45 Best Queer Books of 2025 to Read Now in London, New York, Vienna, Amsterdam and Paris

GAY45’s annual selection is, as expected, a deeply subjective yet rigorously curated reflection of the year in queer literature, fiction and non-fiction.

Monthly donation Recurring monthly charge

Secured by Stripe • Your payment information is encrypted

Thoughtful and bold, it emerges from months of discussion and debate among our book critics and editorial team. Beyond mere rankings, this list embodies our shared belief that literature remains one of the most powerful spaces for queer storytelling — a mirror to our desires, struggles, and evolving identities.

Fiction

Bryan Washington – Palaver

Bryan Washington, the Dylan Thomas Prize and NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award winner, returns with Palaver, a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction. The novel traces an estranged son in Tokyo and his Jamaican mother from Houston as they navigate a decade of silence when she arrives uninvited at Christmas. Moving through past and present across Houston, Jamaica, and Japan with understated humour, Washington crafts an intimate meditation on chosen families and reconciliation. Washington’s frank yet intimate storytelling explores queer identity, displacement, and the fraught process of forgiveness with his signature emotional complexity. It’s a rare novel managing to be funny, sad, and honest simultaneously—a technically dazzling exploration of what home means when blood and belonging diverge.

The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir by Edmund White

Edmund White’s latest memoir (he died soon after the publishing this year), The Loves of My Life, is a thunderous, unabashed testament to a life lived at the very pulse of queer erotic history. Spanning from furtive school-boy awakenings in the repressive 1950s Midwest through the fevered liberation of 1970s New York, the terror of the AIDS crisis and the swirl of app-driven promiscuity, White charts decades of desire with both humour and ache. His writing remains as vivid as ever — graphic, witty and often poetic — refusing shame, embracing longing, regret, joy. Encounters with hustlers, lovers, friends, interludes meant to “cure” him of his sexuality, even a lifetime’s tally of partners, are laid bare with a frankness few could sustain. Yet the book is more than memoir: it is a chronicle of queer memory, a mosaic of lives and loves swept up in social transformation. At times raw, sometimes rapturous, it remains an incendiary tribute to desire, identity and survival — a fitting send-off from one of the last great chroniclers of gay life.

Our New Gods by Thomas Vowles

In Our New Gods by Thomas Vowles (June 2025), the city of Naarm — formerly Melbourne — becomes a fever dream, and its queer underworld pulses with desire, paranoia, and dread. The novel follows 21-year-old Ash, newly arrived and starry-eyed, as he becomes entangled in a dangerous infatuation with his charismatic friend James and James’s mysterious new lover, Raf. What begins as jealousy blossoms into obsession after Ash witnesses a violent incident — or perhaps only imagines one. Vowles’s background in screenwriting shows. The prose moves with cinematic precision — near-religious saunas, grimy share-houses, nightlife flashing like neon — generating a tension that creeps under your skin. But it isn’t merely a thriller. Beneath the suspicion and the erotic charge lies a quietly devastating exploration of loneliness, longing and self-delusion. The book asks: when you remake yourself in a new city, are you really escaping your demons — or carrying them with you? In doing so, Our New Gods emerges as one of 2025’s most unsettling, essential queer fictions.

Backlight by Pirkko Saisio

In Backlight, Pirkko Saisio turns memory into a beautifully ragged portrait of self-discovery. The second volume of her so-called Helsinki Trilogy — here rendered into English by Mia Spangenberg — the novel traces a nineteen-year-old’s uncertain passage from suburban Finland to a Swiss orphanage in the tumult of 1968. What emerges is not a tidy bildungsroman but a disquieting, luminous reckoning: the protagonist wrestles with a leftist upbringing, Christian morality and the stirrings of her own queerness. Saisio’s prose fragments between childhood recollection and adult reflection — erratic, lyrical, alive — rendering identity as something continually becoming, never fixed. In this volume, Saisio doesn’t simply narrate adolescence — she excavates memory. The result is intimate, raw and deeply human: a testament to the porous boundary between place, history and inner life.

Pioneer Summer by Elena Malisova & Katerina Silvan

In Pioneer Summer, co-written by Elena Malisova and Kateryna Sylvanova and freshly translated for English-speaking readers in 2025 by Anne O. Fisher, we revisit a fragile spark of first love in the Soviet Union — and pay witness to the danger of queerness under repression. Set in the summer of 1986, the novel traces 16-year-old Yurka’s impulsive summer at a Pioneer Camp, where he becomes enamoured of Volodya, the earnest, party-aligned counsellor. Theirs is a slow-burn romance, rendered with tender restraint — a tentative, secret attachment blossoming against the looming collapse of an era. Decades later, Yurka returns to the neglected camp to exhume a time capsule and reclaim a love long buried — a structural conceit that underlines how queer intimacy, once so fragile, resists erasure. The authors, themselves forced into exile after the book’s runaway Russian success and the state’s brutal backlash, imbue their text with urgency. Pioneer Summer is not just a coming-of-age romance; it is a quiet act of defiance. Its power lies in the simplicity of young longing, and the courage to narrate love where politics demands silence.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

Set in the Netherlands in 1961, Yael van der Wouden’s debut (written in original in English) follows Isabel, a recluse meticulously maintaining her family home in Overijssel. When her brother Louis deposits his girlfriend Eva for the summer, Isabel’s rigid domesticity collides with Eva’s careless presence—she sleeps late, touches forbidden objects, moves loudly through rooms. As household items begin disappearing, Isabel’s suspicions spiral into obsession, then unexpectedly into desire. The novel won the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Van der Wouden lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands; her essay on Dutch identity and Jewishness received notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018. Critics have noted the novel’s atmospheric intensity and its exploration of repression as desire’s twin. What begins as a psychological thriller—with echoes of Patricia Highsmith—transforms into something more complex: an examination of complicity, inheritance and the stories families tell to survive their own histories. The house itself, acquired by Isabel’s uncle during the war, becomes both character and evidence. Van der Wouden’s prose is taut and unsentimental, building claustrophobic tension until the narrative cracks open in its final act, revealing how the war’s aftermath continues to haunt those who profited from others’ suffering.

Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter

Charlie Porter’s debut novel chronicles Johnny Grant, now forty-eight, as he reflects on his relationship with Jerry Field, who died of AIDS in 1995. They met in 1991—Johnny nineteen, Jerry forty-five—and made a life together in Jerry’s council flat. Nearly three decades later, Johnny remains in the same East London dwelling, haunted by memory and threatened by a new tower block that will soon obstruct the light Jerry cherished in their garden. Porter, formerly the Financial Times’s menswear critic and author of two fashion books, employs a turbulent stream-of-consciousness that Hilton Als has aptly described as “a queering of Beckett”. The novel was shortlisted for the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize, an award celebrating fiction that extends the possibilities of the form. Porter’s prose—colloquial yet intensely literary—mirrors the fractured temporality of grief itself, moving fluidly between the AIDS crisis of the early nineties and the present day. What emerges is both elegy and manifesto: a meditation on “radical philosophies” and “the many possibilities of love, sex and friendship before the AIDS crisis devastated the queer community”. The novel asks not merely how we remember loss, but how we preserve ways of living that might otherwise vanish entirely.

Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor

Wyeth, a young Black painter, arrives in New York during a sweltering summer, grappling with creative paralysis whilst navigating the city’s competitive art world. After attending a dubious exhibition by careerist artists, he retreats to a West Village bar where he meets Keating, a former seminarian. As the two men become acquainted over long conversations about God, sex and art, Wyeth begins investigating the life of a forgotten minor Black artist whilst working for an art restorer. Taylor’s debut novel Real Life was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize; his short story collection Filthy Animals won The Story Prize in 2022. With Minor Black Figures, his third novel, Taylor confronts questions he’s long circled: what does it mean to be a Black artist making Black art under the scrutiny of the white gaze? Taylor writes about the meticulous details of lithograph restoration with the same erotic, graceful attention he lavishes on Wyeth’s assignations. The novel explores Wyeth’s resistance to identity politics—he bristles when observers assume his work is political commentary rather than formal experimentation—yet finds himself unable to escape the weight of perception and expectation. Taylor looks his audience dead in the eye and invites readers into the criticism itself rather than disputing it outright. What emerges is a portrait of an artist frozen by the question of how to create freely when every gesture risks being interpreted through the lens of race, when safety itself feels impossible to locate.

My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson

Earl “Trey” Singleton III arrives in New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. Born into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, at seventeen, he is ready to leave his overbearing parents and their expectations behind. The year is 1985, and the government’s indifference to the AIDS epidemic amounts to a policy of attrition. Trey volunteers at a renegade home hospice for AIDS patients and, after being put to the test by gay rights activists, becomes a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Newson is a writer and producer of Bel-Air, The Chi, and Narcos. His debut novel is structured as a fictional memoir, complete with footnotes explicating the historical figures who populate Trey’s New York—among them civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, who becomes an unlikely Socratic mentor, and Fred Trump, Trey’s negligent landlord, whom he manages to outwit. The novel has drawn comparisons to E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime for its audacious blending of real and imagined lives. What Newson accomplishes is both a coming-of-age story and an act of historical reclamation: he shines light on an era of queer Black life that has too often been flattened or whitewashed. The prose is vibrant and unflinching, capturing both the ecstatic defiance of bathhouse culture and the grinding fury of activist work. This is a book about learning to live fully in the shadow of death—and about refusing to let history erase those who did.

Nonfiction

Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays by Edgar Gomez

In Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays, Edgar Gomez delivers a compelling portrait of survival, identity and longing. Published in February 2025, the 256-page memoir traverses the author’s history as a queer, working-class Latino in Florida — jobs at a flip-flop shop, minimum-wage foot-rub shifts for closeted tourists, and the haunting spectre of a mother’s illness — while holding fast to the dream of becoming a writer. Gomez’s essays oscillate between dark humour and raw poignancy: there are moments of small absurdity — the smell of pesticides, the awkward hush of street-side bootleg CD stalls — yet also scenes suffused with tenderness: coming out to his mother amid fear and shame, the solace found among friends, the painful memory of the 2016 massacre at Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. What emerges is a memoir that refuses to cast the author as victim or saint. Instead, Gomez gives us the torn edges of the American Dream: unglamorous, precarious, often cruel. And yet — through grit, community, laughter, and love — he claims space. It is a book of survival and belonging: urgent, messy, and utterly human.

Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs

In Baldwin: A Love Story, Nicholas Boggs offers what feels like the definitive re-imagining of James Baldwin — not just as an icon of civil-rights literature, but as a man whose art was deeply shaped by love, longing and intimate bonds. The biography—published in August 2025—draws on newly uncovered archives, first-hand interviews and a formidable sweep across decades to map Baldwin’s relationships with four men: from mentor to muse, from companion to collaborator. Boggs eschews hagiography. Instead, he paints Baldwin in full: a talented, restless artist haunted by loneliness, dependent on affection, yet driven by fierce moral urgency. The book’s virtues lie in its ordering of Baldwin’s life as a “love story,” revealing how his erotic and emotional worlds fueled his fiction and essays — and grounding the mythic status of Baldwin in concrete human relationships. For readers seeking the sensual and political architecture behind Baldwin’s writing, this biography is essential: rigorous and tender, unsparing yet affectionate — a portrait worthy of the man it seeks to reclaim.

The Einstein of Sex: Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin by Daniel Brook

In The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin (2025), journalist Daniel Brook resurrects the life and thought of Magnus Hirschfeld — perhaps the greatest forgotten intellectual of early queer modernity. Brook draws a vivid arc from Hirschfeld’s Prussian childhood, through his revolutionary sex-scientific work, to his exile and final, anguished solitude in the face of fascist annihilation. Hirschfeld is framed as a visionary who, long before our era of “gender spectra,” argued that sexuality, gender and even race were fluid and socially constructed — with a moral urgency born of both personal courage and his Jewish identity. Brook’s prose is thoughtful and forceful, re-painting Weimar-era Berlin as a world simultaneously radiant and precarious — glamorous cabarets, liberated minds, looming violence. The book’s strength lies in its refusal to romanticise: Hirschfeld emerges not as a saint, but as a brilliant, flawed, deeply humane thinker whose ideas were decades ahead of their time. At just over 320 pages, The Einstein of Sex offers more than biography: it delivers a searing meditation on memory, loss and the cost of erasure. A vital read for anyone concerned with the roots of queer freedom — and with the price paid for it.

Be Gay, Do Crime edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley

The anthology Be Gay, Do Crime (edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley) is a combustible celebration of queer transgression: sixteen short stories by an all-queer roster of writers, published by Dzanc Books in June 2025. The collection traffics in the chaotic, the illicit, and the absurd: from a trans woman’s gleeful campaign of prank calls to a bank robbery by ageing queers resisting gentrification, from petty thefts as emotional reckoning to stabs at political assassination. What the editors and contributors deliver is not a straightforward glorification of crime, but a kind of exuberant, messy morality—characters committing “crimes” as acts of survival, protest, or reclamation of dignity. Yet the book’s strength is also its greatest ambivalence: the criminal acts often feel intimate, small-scale, personal—inflected by heartbreak, rage, desperation. The result is less a manifesto than a vivid kaleidoscope of queerness pushed to its edges, of queerness as rupture. For readers drawn to transgressive literature, it is provocative, unsettling—and, perhaps, necessary.

Queer Print Cultures: Resistance, Subversion, and Community, co-edited by Javier Samper Vendrell and Vance Byrd

In Queer Print Cultures: Resistance, Subversion, and Community — co-edited by Javier Samper Vendrell and Vance Byrd, published by University of Toronto Press in late 2025 — queer life and print meet in a richly layered history of survival, resistance and belonging. The volume gathers essays by scholars, librarians, archivists and activists to explore how queer communities have turned print — from zines and romance novels to sci-fi and social-media paratexts — into a technology of identity, desire, and dissent. Part survey, part archive, part manifesto, the book traces queer print’s role in forging counterpublics across time and geography — Germany’s early sex-radical texts, postwar science-fiction zines, Bangladeshi underground pamphlets, digitised fandoms — spotlighting voices often erased from mainstream literary history. For those of us engaged in the politics of memory and representation, this is not merely a scholarly resource, but a vivid map of queerness as collective art and cultural resistance — reminding us that print remains one of the most potent tools for imagining new worlds.

Poetry

Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems by Essex Hemphill

Essex Hemphill was born in Chicago in 1957 and raised in southeast Washington, D.C., where he began writing poetry at fourteen. He died on 4 November 1995 from AIDS-related complications, aged thirty-eight. In the years between, he became arguably the most vital Black gay poet since the Harlem Renaissance, giving voice to a community doubly marginalised and fiercely determined to be heard. This selection, published thirty years after his death, gathers work from his only full-length collection, Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (1992), alongside rarely seen poems from magazines and chapbooks. Hemphill’s verses unflinchingly explore the overlapping identities of sexuality, gender and race, and his own experiences as a Black gay man during the AIDS crisis. He featured prominently in Marlon Riggs’s documentaries Tongues Untied(1989) and Black Is…Black Ain’t (1994), his voice is commanding on film as on the page. Hemphill wrote with tenderness and rage, demanding recognition not merely of existence but of desire, joy and the full complexity of Black queer life. His poems remain urgent—a reminder that the struggle for visibility is never finished, and that art can be both refuge and weapon.

For 2026, the horizon is bright. Two anticipated novels loom large: John of John by Douglas Stuart, whose Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo have already established him as one of Britain’s most vital voices on class, queerness and survival; and Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt, a debut from the Irish poet whose non-fiction All Down Darkness Wide announced a writer of uncommon grace. If Stuart’s track record is any indication, and if Hewitt’s lyric precision translates to prose, 2026 may deliver what 2025 merely promised: work that doesn’t simply reflect queer life but reshapes how we understand it.

Subscribe to our newsletter here.
Join 12,000+ readers who receive it every Wednesday, with exclusive content.

* * *

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know.

* * *

You can listen to our podcast Queer News & Journalism on your favourite platform or go to our YouTube Channel @GAY45mag.

* * *

Let us know what you think at [email protected].

* * *

Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected].

* * *

We appreciate it. Thanks for reading.

Author

Jackson Williams

Jackson Williams is a staff writer for GAY45. He is a San Francisco–born journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Bay Area Reporter, where he covers politics, culture, and the intersection of race and queer identity.

View all posts