Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | June 11, 2025
Happy Pride, fellow queers! Times are tough. You deserve solidarity, community, and the opportunity to buy as many books as you desire. Go on. You've earned it. LGBTQIA+ literature is in the midst of a real boom. Why not enjoy that? Go read the kind of book that would make bigots living in mouldy castles have an aneurysm. Here are eight of my personal choices of epic 2025 Pride reads.
Cabal by Clive Barker
He may not have written anything in a few years, but Clive Barker is the reigning king of queer horror for a reason. Without him, we wouldn't have generations of incredible LGBTQIA+ authors blending themes of queerness, body horror, and eroticism. Maybe you don't have the time to crack open one of his mammoth fantasy epics like Imajica or Weaveworld this Pride, but luckily for you, Cabal, one of his shortest novels, is also one of his queerest.
Boone is a tortured and totally straight young man who is convinced that he's secretly a serial killer. He seeks refuge from his own violence and finds his way to Midian, a phantasmagorical underworld populated by strange and powerful monsters. Is he one of them? Is he actually a murderer? And is this all an amazing allegory for being gay? Barker's books have long played around with the homophobic ideas of queer people being "monsters." In his world, he replies, "yes, and it's awesome." Being a monster is far better than being a bigot. Read Cabal then watch Barker's own film adaptation, Nightbreed. He got David Cronenberg to play the villain!
Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York by Elon Green
In the 1980s and '90s, Richard Westall Rogers Jr., known as the Last Call Killer, terrorised Manhattan's gay community. He lured men from piano bars and brutally murdered them. But it would take years for the victims to face justice, as homophobia and the AIDS crisis made it all too easy to demonize them and for law enforcement to simply not do their jobs. Prejudices towards the victims' "life-styles" forced the queer community to step forward and protect its own. True crime all too often revels in the traumas of others or falls into easy traps of exploitation in the name of concern. Elon Green's book is too smart and empathetic for that. This story is much bigger than just a series of murders. It's about queer life in New York and a community's resilience in the face of a deadly epidemic and a societal and political response of "just die already."
Corpses, Fools & Monsters by Willow Catelyn Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner
There have been trans images in cinema for over a century, although historically, positively representation has been thin on the ground. Nowadays, trans cinema has a variety of voices emerging from the margins to push back against negative stereotypes and cis-dominated narratives. Maclay and Gardner's excellent book is a long-awaited addition to the canon of queer theory. Think of it as The Celluloid Closet for trans cinema. It develops a rich and expansive history of trans images on the big screen, from Christine Jorgensen to Holly Woodlawn to the works of the Wachowskis and Isabel Sandoval. It's full of films I'd never heard of before and paints a rich portrait of an oft-overlooked and derided subset of the medium, one that's finally getting its dues and some space in the mainstream.
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Reese is a trans woman who wants a child. Her ex Ames has detransitioned and back to living as a man, now with his new lover, Katrina. Ames wants Reese back, and when Katrina reveals she's pregnant, he wonders if this could be the way he gets her back. Why not bring Reese into the fold and raise the baby as a family?
Detransition, Baby is a novel designed to be polarising, both in its premise and in Torrey Peters' chaotic, very funny, and proudly messy prose. There's a lot of rambling here but it's all so fascinating, jam-packed with razor-sharp insight and some discomfiting truths. How thrilling to see a proudly trans novel that's both unconcerned with the cis gaze and candid about the topic of detransition without being used to further a bigoted agenda. All that and it's laugh out loud funny.
Brainwyrms by Alison Rumfitt
If you're still in the mood for something Barker-esque but modern, meet Alison Rumfitt. In Brainwyrms -- doesn't that title say it all? -- a trans woman named Frankie struggles with the fallout of surviving a transphobic terrorist attack. She descends into a traumatic cycle of drugs, self-harming, and hard-partying, which leads her towards Vanya, a mysterious beauty with some dark proclivities. Their dom-sub relationship becomes increasingly out of control as the pair become embroiled in a vast political conspiracy that might reveal the true motivation behind the scourge of transphobia that has taken over Britain.
Rumfitt's works are about trauma, fascism, and living in an effing stupid country dominated by both. Being a resident of TERF Island is to be stuck in a hellish nightmare that is both terrifying and aggressively dumb. Rumfitt's pitch-black satire isn't subtle but it doesn't need to be because, frankly, our current transphobic system is as subtle as worms in the brain. It's a grotty and queasy read, much like, well, do I even need to finish that sentence?
Cemetery Boys by Aidan Thomas
Yadriel wants to prove himself as a brujo but his traditional Latino family has trouble accepting his transition. So, he decides to figure out his magic himself. But his attempt to find the ghost of his murdered cousin ends in him summoning the spirit of Julian, a classmate with a bad reputation who refuses to disappear into the afterlife. This is a great YA fantasy that made me bawl by the end.
Woodworking by Emily St. James
Former TV critic turned Yellowjackets writer Emily St. James made her literary debut this year with a sharp and kind-hearted drama about identity and community in a small South Dakota town on the eve of Trump's first election. Erica is newly out as trans but only to herself. To the rest of the world, she's a male high school teacher dealing with a divorce. In the town of Mitchell, there's only one out trans person: Abigail, a student who is viewed by locals with a combination of fascination and fear. All Abigail wants is to lay low and survive high school until she's old enough to leave and start a new life elsewhere. She's certainly not equipped to be the trans fairy godmother to someone twice her age. But sometimes, the responsibility of community doesn't give you much of a choice.
Woodworking is sharp, sweet, and deeply moving, a slice of life story about trying to be yourself in a world where such things are made near-impossible. Flipping between two perspectives--Erica's third-person view and the first-person narration of Abigail--St. James shows a generational divide between these two trans women. Erica, the older woman, is more wide-eyed about her coming out, albeit with awareness of the pressures around her. Abigail is jaded, having been kicked out of her family home and outed by her new classmates. The "trans experience", however it's defined, means different things for both women. St James offers a frequently funny (often bleakly so) and melancholy take on how freedom and privacy are too quickly hijacked by opportunists and bigots, but it's not a hopeless novel. It's too tender and caring for that.
