We are thrilled to kick off Pride Month 2024 with New York Times bestselling author Christopher Rice. In this guest post, he reflects on the history of “gay books,” shares his own picks and brings in some of his best friends to share their favorite books as well. With his fourth book in the Sapphire Cove series, Sapphire Dawn, releasing June 25, you’ll have an abundance of can’t-miss LGBTQIA+ reads to add to your TBR this month.
For Christopher Rice’s Definitive Pride Season Reads, You Gotta Have Friends
When I first came out in the late 90’s, a “gay book” had an unspoken yet restrictive definition. It was a largely white narrative focused on the sexual development of a group of cisgender gay males living in an urban center. While urgent AIDS narratives were giving up some ground to screwball sex comedies and lighthearted detective novels, the focus was still the same.
Meanwhile, stories focused on the experiences of queer women — what today’s readers would call sapphic books — enjoyed a greater degree of support from small, independent presses than they did traditional publishers. Complicating matters was the lack of an adequate umbrella term like “queer”, which struck many of us as either stridently academic or still offensive enough to be considered a slur.
Don’t get me wrong, I adored the books that took up the most shelf space at those gay bookstores. Inhaled them, in fact. Many of them proved fundamental to my development as both a queer man and a writer.
Like People From History, Felice Picano’s epic and emotional saga, has had a permanent place in my library since I first bought it. It depicted queer male lives unfolding on a grand and dramatic scale, often tying them to the great cultural events of the period. In its pages, we weren’t just here and queer, as the saying goes. We were here, there and everywhere else.
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And then there’s Andrew Holleran’s undisputed classic, Dancer From The Dance, which seared itself on my soul from the minute I turned the final page. But the shelves of those early gay book stores weren’t anywhere near as inclusive as the queer book community feels today, a function of publishing industry trends and a still evolving understanding of gender identity and race.
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Romance novels like my Sapphire Cove series would have struggled to find a foothold. Too mainstream, some readers would have decried. Too unrealistic in a time when gritty realism had proven a necessary literary survival mechanism for a community whose ranks were decimated by a terrible epidemic. Too naïve in a time when marriage equality seemed like a pipe dream. Ironic given Donnie Bascombe, the hero of my latest entry in the series, Sapphire Dawn, (out Jun 25th) and a proud former adult entertainment star who now runs his own studio, feels like a character drawn from that era in which gay men were still regarded by most mainstream society as sexual outlaws — even if I do give him a swoony happily ever after.
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When She Reads asked me to create a definitive list of reads for Pride season, I knew I had to do more than stir up old memories of browsing the racks at (the now sadly shuttered) A Different Light in West Hollywood. Instead, I reached out to a diverse group of friends and colleagues to bring you both a sampling of their work as well as their personal suggestions for a definitive Pride read. The result, I hope, presents a more evolved, and still evolving, understanding of the queer community’s diversity than the “to be read pile” on my own nightstand demonstrated back in 1997.
My best friend and producing partner, Eric Shaw Quinn, is also a brilliant New York Times bestselling author. Some of my favorite books of his include the swoon-filled epic of gay Biblical history, The Prince’s Psalm, and his big hearted comic novel, Say Uncle, which broke ground around the topic of gay parenting when it was first published in the 90’s.
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For his definitive Pride read, Eric chose The Front Runner by Patricia Nell Warren, which he described as a “beautiful and frank love story about two men falling in love and how the world felt about it.” He went on to say, “This book saved my life. It let me know there were other people who felt like me.” The story of a tough conservative track coach with a hidden past falling for one of his younger runners was authored by an outspoken queer woman and is a beloved gay classic today. It went on to sell over 10 million copies after its release. Eric and I both had the pleasure of becoming friends with Patricia before her passing, and we frequently welcomed her as a guest on our podcast “The Dinner Party Show“, which we run through our production company, Dinner Partners.
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My good friend Dee Johnson has one of the more impressive resumes in the TV business. Before becoming an accomplished showrunner and executive producer, her first entertainment industry gig was a writer’s assistant in the 1990’s, often working as the lone Asian American lesbian in the room. She went on to become one of creative forces behind groundbreaking depictions of LGBT characters on major network shows like ER. More recently she served as an executive producer on Fellow Travelers, the critically acclaimed Showtime series exploring McCarthy era homophobia, adapted from the novel by Thomas Mallon.
For her definitive Pride read, Dee chose Red Azalea, a memoir by Anchee Min. “It really stuck with me for a long time after reading it. Imagine having the courage to love another woman during the Cultural Revolution – when you as an individual could own nothing at all, not even your feelings.”
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Veteran TV writer Rasheed Newson shook up publishing recently with his unflinching novel My Government Means To Kill Me. Composed as a set of searing personal essays, it told the tale of 1980’s queer activism and the dawn of the ACT UP movement in Manhattan — an era that has often been defined by white voices — through the eyes of a Black man who counted civil rights era icon Bayard Rustin among his mentors.
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When I asked Rasheed for his definitive Pride season read, he answered without hesitation, “Just As I Am by E. Lynn Harris. It focused on Black characters who are queer, messy and unforgettable. It helped convince my Black, gay, 15-year old self that my adulthood didn’t have to be drab and cursed. I could be the vibrant hero of my own story – one day.”
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In today’s marketplace, queer romance authors often get stereotyped as cisgender straight women who fetishize male bodies, usually by critics who already possess a reflexive disdain of the romance genre in general. These sweeping dismissals distract from the diversity of the genre’s authors. The category’s blockbuster title, Red, White & Royal Blue was written by an author, Casey McQuiston, who identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. To say nothing of the increasing number of cis males who are writing gay romance novels. (Ahem. I happen to be one of them.)
While it’s been present since the genre first started to flower in the age of digital publishing, this diversity wasn’t always obvious due to the extent some romance authors needed pseudonyms to protect them from harassment in their day jobs. Transmale romance author J.R. Gray has been open about his identity since first entering publishing. The author of numerous queer romance novels, his latest, Goodbye Note, releases this month.
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He told me, “The Last Herald-Mage Trilogy by Mercedes Lackey was my first interaction with a character that was like me in a book. It had such a big impact on me in my early twenties…It also cemented my love of fantasy and how accepting sci-fi and fantasy readers are of queerness.”
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Sidney Karger has written for some of the biggest comic talents in the entertainment industry. While his second novel, The Bump, is technically a rom com, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. He uses humor to explore the alienation and anxiety that’s beset a gay couple anticipating the arrival of their first child, and there are some difficult moments along the way. Reading it reminded me of how much more attainable the dream of having a family is for queer men now as opposed to when I first came out.
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Sidney’s definitive Pride read is The Hours by Michael Cunningham
“Michael Cunningham’s thoroughly ambitious retelling of Virginia Woolf and her character Mrs. Dalloway interweaves the interior lives of three different women from three different eras into one of the most powerfully written and original queer stories ever told,” he told while on book tour.
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About Christopher Rice
Christopher Rice is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Award and is the Amazon Charts and New York Times bestselling author of A Density of Souls; Bone Music, Blood Echo, and Blood Victory in the Burning Girl series; and Bram Stoker Award finalists The Heavens Rise and The Vines. An executive producer for television, he collaborated with his mother Anne Rice on the novel Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra and Ramses The Damned: The Reign of Osiris. Together with his best friend and producing partner, New York Times bestselling novelist Eric Shaw Quinn, Christopher runs the production company Dinner Partners. Among other projects, they produce the podcast and video network TDPS, which can be found at www.TheDinnerPartyShow.com. He lives in West Hollywood, California, and writes tales of romance between men under the pseudonym C. Travis Rice. Visit him at www.christopherricebooks.com.
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