Good Gay Reads
Discover the best in LGBTQ+ literature with Good Gay Reads, a curated list of must-read gay fiction. From Alan Hollinghurst's classic 'The Swimming-Pool Library' to Michael Cunningham's 'A Home at the End of the World,' explore compelling stories of identity, love, and desire. Uncover your next favorite book today.
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The Persian Boy
by Mary Renault
“It takes skill to depict, as Miss Renault has done, this half-man, half Courtesan who is so deeply in love with the warrior.”–The Atlantic Monthly The Persian Boy traces the last years of Alexander’s life through the eyes of his lover, Bagoas. Abducted and gelded as a boy, Bagoas was sold as a courtesan to King Darius of Persia, but found freedom with Alexander after the Macedon army conquered his homeland. Their relationship sustains Alexander as he weathers assassination plots, the demands of two foreign wives, a sometimes-mutinous army, and his own ferocious temper. After Alexander’s mysterious death, we are left wondering if this Persian boy understood the great warrior and his ambitions better than anyone.
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Can't Buy Me Love
by Chris Kenry
Left suddenly and unexpectedly without funds, Jack, an unemployed shopaholic, stumbles into a hustling career that is ripe for funding his expensive tastes. When he teams up with dark and decadent fellow hustler Ray, he starts raking in more money than he ever dreamed - not to mention falling for his partner. Things are finally going his way, but can a pair of etrepreneurial escorts really live happily ever after? 'A romp through every gay subculture imaginable' - The Village Voice 'A rollicking debut' - Publisher's Weekly
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The Swimming-Pool Library
by Alan Hollinghurst
The dazzling first novel from the best-selling, Booker Prize-Winning author of The Line of Beauty and The Sparsholt Affair. An enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with impunity. The Swimming-Pool Library focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and Lord Nantwich, an elderly man searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions.
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A Home at the End of the World
by Michael Cunningham
From Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, comes this widely praised novel of two boyhood friends: Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city's erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare's child. Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise "their" child together and, with an odd friend, Alice, create a new kind of family. A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.
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The World of Normal Boys
by K. M. Soehnlein
Living in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s is quiet for Robin until his brother is killed in an accident, causing the relationship with his family to deteriorate as he rebels against his middle-American lifestyle.
