LGTBQ+ books

As we live in the 21st century, several things have changed and we can no longer claim that only two sexes exist. One of the biggest topics of nowadays are people’s sexuality and personal identification. As centuries were passing through, literature was influenced by the changes of society and in turn literature was evolved as well. Almost a century ago a vast amount of female authors came up. So, during the last few years a new change came up in the literature world and people from the LGBTQ+ group started to narrate their own stories, or people generally created stories that talk about such people. 

This phenomeno started appearing in the 20th century, but it was in the 21th century when it gained the attention it deserves. Among the novels that made this result possible there is the Nobel Prize-winner André Gide’s  novel “The Immoralist” (1902), based on the author’s own experience, which narrates the tragic position of a married man due to his attraction to males.  Following, a second well-known book is “Orlando: A Biography” (1928) by Virginia Woolf. This story develops from the Elizabathian ages to the 20th century and describes the vicissitude of Orlando, a British intersexual nobleman who can change his identity through mysterious sleeps and so play totally different, male and female roles across the plot.

However, nowadays LGBTQ+ issues are widely discussed and criticized at the same time, and authors are developing through their pieces of writing the most critical aspects of these people’s lives, as an attempt to eraze discrimination against them. Among the novels representing this tendency has to be remembered “Middlesex”(2002), by Jeffrey Eugenides, which has won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and recounts the story of Calliope Stephanides, an intersex Greek immigrant to the US who has been raised as a girl but has received male genes through a DNA transplant. Eugenides also penned “The marriage plot” (2011), that narrates the love triangle among three friends. Futhermore, another winner of  the Pulitzer Prize is “Less” (2017), a satirical- comedical novel by Andrew Sean Greer , about an homosexual and aging man (autopiographical points of the story) who by travelling all around the world tries to forget the marriage of the man he loves with another person. Another very powerful story is the novel “Boy Erased: A Memoir”(2016) by Garrard Conley, a book describing the true story of the homosexual author who was sent by his christian fundemental family to a gay propagandistic conversion therapy that promised to “cure” his homosexuality. 

In addition, there are numerous books ideal for young people that focus on these themes, including, among the others, “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda”(2015), a young adult novel by Becky Albertalli, narrating the story of a bullied homosexual boy, “History is all you left me” and “They both die at the end” (both published in 2017) by Adam Silvera,  which are two books describing loss, teen issues and homosexuality. There is also a French graphic novel by Jul Maroh, called “Blue is the Warmest Color” or “Blue Angel” (2013), which tells a love story between two young women in France at the end of the 1990s.

Of course the books that we have chosen are just a few representative examples of this whole category. 

In conclusion, it is important to underline that while reading such books, a person can get more information about such people as well as learn to accept and not isolate them due to their differences. In addition, people can evolve their way of thinking and in turn change the world to a better and even more humane place.