The Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2022

This is the queer sibling story of my dreams. It’s about Yami, a Mexican American teenager just to trying to get through high school, and it has everything I could possibly want in a YA novel: brilliant, complex characterization; entertaining teen drama; a sapphic love story; messy family dynamics; and a thoughtful, nuanced exploration of immigration, mental health, and suicidal ideation. It doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff, but it’s also warm and full of joy. Reyes strikes the perfect balance.

When was the last time you read a murder mystery about a queer family living in an old mansion in the Bay Area in the 1950s? Probably never. Let’s fix that. Andy is a closeted gay cop who’s fired from the San Francisco police force after he’s caught in a raid at a gay bar. He’s then hired by the matriarch of a wealthy queer family (they own a soap empire!) who wants him to investigate the murder of her wife. Everyone is queer! Everyone! It’s an atmospheric, character-driven mystery with a satisfying conclusion, but it’s also a moving story about the ongoing violence of being forced to hide yourself, and the (messy) healing that comes with finding queer community.

I don’t often read a memoir in a single sitting, but I read this in one long breath, and that’s the best thing I can say about a book. It’s a warm and insightful book about growing up queer and Indian in Appalachia, and about the messy, shifting intersections of home, geography, culture, gender, and history that have shaped Avashia’s life. She’s an astute thinker and a wonderful storyteller. This memoir is full of vivid scenes of family and childhood, and plenty of knotty, challenging ideas about the roles that place plays in our lives.

In this brilliant book of trans history, trans historian Kit Heyam shares stories of people from cultures all over the world who have lived outside of rigid gender binaries since long before the phrase “gender binary” existed. Through these diverse, singular stories, Heyam shows over and over again that gender has always been fluid and complicated, that societies have defined it in dozens of ways throughout centuries, and that trans and nonbinary people have always existed, in a thousand different ways. This is a crucial history that couldn’t be more relevant today.

This breathtaking collection of interlocking essays explores gender and transition, illness and disability, art, water, memory, and the act of reading and writing. Horn writes beautifully about so many things: swimming, the art of tattooing, traveling, masculinity, childhood. But their writing is always grounded in the physical reality of the body: what it’s like to live in a trans body, a gendered body, a body that is visible to others, a body that is not visible to others. They play with form, interspersing longer lyric essays with short lists that utilize quotes, imagery, poetry, and recollections. This is queer writing at its best — a beautiful example of just how inventive and world-opening essays can be.

Chen Chen’s poetry is playful and silly and joyful in a way that feels distinctly queer. He messes with form, he interrupts himself, he makes his own rules, he puts all his exuberance onto the page. His poems are not frivolous, and the ones in this collection deal with plenty of real-world heaviness: racism, the pandemic, grief. But Chen Chen takes silliness seriously, and he takes joy seriously, and that’s what makes his poems so unique. They’re queerly alive. They’re soft, and they sometimes cut.