June 2026 List of the Month: The Best LGBTQ Nonfiction

In honor of Pride Month, our June List of the Month is dedicated to The Best LGBTQ Nonfiction. This can include histories, biographies and memoirs, sociological studies, political polemics, and anything else of a nonfictional nature.

Each member may add ten titles, and is encouraged to add notes explaining their choices. Downvoting is only permitted on titles that do not fit the theme, and are not LGBTQ related.

For a complete list of topics covered so far in our project, please see the section for Lists of the Month on the Zeitgeist page

We would welcome suggestions for future lists. Please add them here, and we will keep them in mind, going forward.

list suggestion: books about road trips

related suggestion: books *for* road trips (to listen to, to read in the back seat, as preparation for)

maybe also surprising non-fiction - learned something unexpected or unexpected for the topic (thinking of the book about Manet's Olympia I'm reading right now, which is including history I would not have guessed it would discuss, but which is really interesting)

>1 AbigailAdams26: Are we counting poetry as nonfiction for this list? I think of it that way since that's where it ends up in my libraries, but that may not be the sort of nonfiction you have in mind.

>3 slimikin: I wouldn't. Poetry is not prose at all, which both fiction and non-fiction are.

>4 SandraArdnas:

i think that's a bit too simplistic.

People tell stories in poetry all the time. Is The Inferno not both fiction and poetry? What about Bernardine Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe?

Poetry is the style, I guess? Poetry, plays, and prose. They can all be fiction or non-fiction.

If someone has written LGBTQ non-fiction in verse, I'm impressed and also think it is valid for this list.

>6 keristars: Maybe Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate would fit your definition, to the extent that it’s autobiographical… But it’s called “a novel in verse“, so it would be wrong for the list.

As many people have said before in other threads, “non-fiction” is a poor way of expressing what we mean here, but it’s the term English language booksellers and publishers like to use.

>5 lilithcat: It's not about the story or lack of it, those are distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, both of which are prose. Poetry is its own type of text altogether, as is drama for that matter.

>1 AbigailAdams26:

Downvoting is only permitted on titles that do not fit the theme, and are not LGBTQ related.

I just gave thumbs down on two transphobic titles that pit (white) cis, gay men against transgender people and, by extension, their allies. (There's a discussion to be had about the connections between gay male transphobia and misogyny, but I'm not proposing to discuss them, merely marking awareness.)

My justification, despite these titles superficially being "on topic", is that they go squarely against the spirit of the Pride Month and so (presumably) this list.

>9 LolaWalser: I took a look at what you downvoted, and the "gender ideology" in one title makes me think it's LBG Without T, even without knowing more (and that it was positively reviewed in The Times), which I agree goes against the spirit of the list.

Such a shame. :(

>6 keristars: Tony Keith, Jr.'s How the Boogeyman Became a Poet would count, but I was also thinking about Tommy Pico's Junk and Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.'s Gay Poems for Red States, both of which tend autobiographical. There are also LGBTQ themes and experiences in Mothman Apologia, Bestiary: Poems, You Better Be Lightning, Cenzontle, and Mary Oliver's poetry, too. Those are less clear-cut, though, and I could include or not include them...depending on what the goal is for this list. :D