While certain elements of can feel dissonant, at best (for example: why am I enjoying a rainbow flag display in the domestic terminal at Newark when many trans and gender-nonconforming people ?), one of the best parts of June’s annual celebration of all things rainbow-colored is enjoying the best that the has to offer. With that in mind, we asked nine queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming authors—including Anna Dorn, Camonghne Felix, Isle McElroy, and R. O.
Kwon—to share the first books they saw themselves represented in. See all of their picks, plus descriptions of why those books resonated, below: by Dorothy Allison was absolutely the first book I ever read that made me think, Oh, you can do that?! It’s a novel that’s not outwardly, capital-“G” Gay by any means, but as a young, closeted queer person—I was in sixth grade when I found a copy in a classroom—I started reading it and immediately saw myself wedged in there. The way that Bone Boatwright can’t seem to make sense of her heart? The way she’s always trying to figure out how to be the best version of herself so that other people will love her? All of that really resonated with me.
Plus, there’s all that landscape writing: every cypress knob, every bend of the creek, every tree branch shading an upturned face! All of that felt like the kind of writing I wanted to do; the kind of work that made you remember that you had a body and it lives inside of something so much bigger—a bright, big world .
