The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature

If there’s no single definition of what it means to be queer — a word whose meaning seems to shape-shift constantly, just like the culture around it — then there’s perhaps no consensus on what defines queer literature as a genre either. Still, one thing many queer people share is that we first discovered ourselves on the page. Often furtively, we read novels or recited poems or watched plays that seemed not only to speak exclusively to us, but also showed us a way of speaking about ourselves to others.

But among those works we sought out in school libraries or online, which have been the most influential in making and furthering queer culture? That was the question we posed to six writers — the essayist and novelist Roxane Gay, the playwright and educator James Ijames, the playwright and actor Lisa Kron, the journalist and TV writer Thomas Page McBee, the novelist Neel Mukherjee and the fiction and nonfiction writer Edmund White — who gathered over Zoom in early May for the latest installment of our T 25 list. Ahead of time, I’d asked everyone to nominate 10 or so works that we could discuss when we met, and we also exchanged some messages about the assignment’s parameters: We’d focus only on English-language literature (not in translation) that came out after the end of World War II, as queer life became less coded and began to flourish in the West, and we’d exclusively discuss novels, plays and poems (as opposed to, say, memoir or biography or other types of nonfiction — though this rule incited a whole debate within the debate). The writers also agreed not to select works by one another.

There was little agreement beyond all that — no surprise for a group of six spirited queers — and the shared desire to create a list that was less white, less male, less cis than those that’ve come before. Poetry, as it always does, spoke to different people in different ways, although everyone had concluded, by the end of the three-hour conversation, that they wanted to include a lot of it: Each panelist seemed to have a favorite collection, which they passionately persuaded the others to read or revisit. Trailblazers like James Baldwin and the butch icon Leslie Feinberg proved to be unignorable. So too was the underlying seriousness of this exercise (even if the disagreements themselves were lots of fun): In an era of new book bans and anti-L.G.B.T.Q. legislation, the works chosen below, which are presented more or less in the order they came up, and not ranked, are proof of queer folks’ endurance. Like previous generations, younger people might escape to these books to find joy and sorrow, sex and death, fuller knowledge of themselves and the history they share. — Kurt Soller

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Soller: Many of you sent me notes about how you framed your nomination lists, so I thought we could start by talking about what queer literature even is right now.

Lisa Kron: One thing that’s striking is that there’s so much to choose from. I don’t know what it means to say “most influential” — particularly in queer culture, where things come from the bottom up. I started with, “Who were the people and what were the works that ignited my creative imagination and revolutionized my thinking?” As I did that, I realized, “Oh, these are all people working inside what I consider dyke culture.”

James Ijames: I was interested in literature that either showed me myself or that had values that felt particularly queer: care and tenderness, stuff like that. Also: Writers who’ve impacted my politics. [James] Baldwin and [Tony] Kushner immediately came to mind. Essex Hemphill. The literature of the AIDS era has been fortifying for me — to read how people survived.

Thomas Page McBee: I might be unique to this group in that I’ve lived multiple queer identities. I was excited to see “Stone Butch Blues” on [others’] lists because that book spoke to me in two bodies across time.

1. “Stone Butch Blues” by Leslie Feinberg, 1993

A lifelong political activist, Leslie Feinberg (who used the pronoun hir) devoted most of hir writing to exploring the complexities of gender. Hir first novel, “Stone Butch Blues,” which Feinberg made free to download from hir website before hir death in 2014, drew from hir experiences growing up in a Jewish working-class family in Buffalo. The book’s narrator, Jess Goldberg, who confounds her parents as a “child who couldn’t be cataloged by Sears,” runs away from home as a teenager, then finds refuge in the gay bars of Buffalo. She learns from the butches and femmes who safeguard those establishments, endures multiple sexual assaults during police raids, acquires and loses jobs in factories, goes on and off hormones and struggles with the loss of history she feels when passing as a man. Eventually, Jess returns to the question that shapes much of her life: “Woman or man?” The distinction, she discovers, is not always so clear. — Coco Romack

Roxane Gay: I read “Stone Butch Blues” when I was 17, and it was the first time I saw anything resembling butch identity. As a girl from Omaha — where I simply didn’t see anything queer — I just thought, “Wow.”

McBee: I thought a lot about works that have both a timelessness and a queerness to them. Although I feel like “queer" has come to mean something different today than what I once understood it to mean. To me, the old definition of “queer” was about resistance to assimilation. Today, it can still mean that, but it’s also a catchall term for the entire community.

Neel Mukherjee: I feel a bit of regret and some grief that the words “gay" and “lesbian” have fallen off the map, although “queer” is more expansive. I also feel nostalgic about the fact that an underworld used to exist and doesn’t anymore. That’s the trade-off between the growing acceptance of queer culture and queer culture being a subculture in the past (although it still remains sub- in a lot of places).

Gay: I was thinking about books that reflect the evolution of queerness and what has become possible. With someone like Audre Lorde, “Sister Outsider” was the book where I found out, “Oh, there are other Black lesbians. It’s not just me.” To see, both in her poetry and in her prose, that she was comfortable talking about anger, that she was comfortable talking about holding white women in particular to account — that was incredibly risky in her day. Frankly, it still is. That she was willing to take those chances is emblematic of what a lot of the best queer literature does: You see a writer doing something that might not work out in their favor, but they do it anyway.

Soller: Thomas, you chose Lorde’s “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name” (1982), which she calls her “biomythography.”

McBee: I picked what struck me as the most fictional, just to fit the parameters of the project, but I defer to Roxane here.

Gay: You could pick her cancer journals [she died in 1992], or any of her poetry collections, or any of the compendiums of her work. But “Sister Outsider” presents her worldview in her own words without any external analysis.

2. “Sister Outsider” by Audre Lorde, 1984

“Sister Outsider” is essentially Audre Lorde’s thesis statement, an amalgam of essays, speeches and interview text. The central tenets by which the poet, writer and activist sought to live her life — calling out the greed of a for-profit economy and the need for social justice — are laid out here in her precise, metaphor-rich language. In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” she compares that erotic knowledge to a “tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz,” a kernel that she “would knead … gently back and forth.” As she notes in an interview with the poet Adrienne Rich, “When someone said to me, ‘How do you feel?’ or ‘What do you think?’ … I would recite a poem, and somewhere in that poem would be the feeling, the vital piece of information.” Lorde repeatedly stresses the importance, and the beauty, of her disparate identities as a Black lesbian poet and how the feminist and civil rights movements must acknowledge such differences in order to succeed. To read this book is to be reminded that questions about privilege and intersectionality are not new and that almost every conversation about them owes something to Lorde, who wrote in her poem “Who Said It Was Simple” (1973), “But I who am bound by my mirror / as well as my bed / see causes in colour / as well as sex / and sit here wondering / which me will survive / all these liberations.” — Tomi Obaro

Soller: We have to discuss these hybrid forms. Many of you emailed me various thoughts about memoir and autofiction. Roxane, I’m curious how you would characterize a book like “Sister Outsider,” because it’s many different things, most of which we’d consider nonfiction. For this list, we’re focusing on fiction, poetry, plays, performance. But how do you all feel about those constraints? What do you think queer literature specifically has to say with its hybrid forms?

Gay: I don’t think you can overlook nonfiction in talking about queer literature. Nonfiction was where we were first allowed to articulate our realities. It’s fundamental. Frankly, it’s more important than fiction and poetry. Nonfiction, hybrid forms, memoirs — these are the ways we were able to write ourselves into public consciousness.

Edmund White: I thoroughly agree. You know, what they call autofiction … Certainly, all the great gay French writers, like [Marcel] Proust and André Gide, they all were writing autobiographical fiction of some sort. Maybe they were disguising themselves, but still, they oftentimes used the word “I.” Once, on a debate stage, I was talking about [Ernest] Hemingway’s [1927] story “Hills Like White Elephants,” and I was saying that a heterosexual writer could assume that the reader had the same values as he did, and so he could use indirectness — it’s about abortion, yet Hemingway never uses that word — but that a gay writer like Proust had such unusual ideas that he had to spell them out for the general public.

Kron: This brings up the interesting idea of who writers are writing for. Are people writing to be apprehended by a mainstream audience, or are they writing within the subculture? To me, the greatest gift of being a lesbian is where it exists outside of things like patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy: where it’s not knocking on the door, asking for admission, but firmly standing somewhere else, articulating what it sees. So while I think the term “queer” is appealing in its capaciousness, I always feel slightly wary of it because it’s so easily marketed and commodified.

McBee: With trans people, there’s a desire for our stories that’s often othering and salacious. I see a market demand for that [kind of] nonfiction because, so often, we’re hard to even imagine. Queer and trans people have, amazingly, taken that demand and subverted it, and that’s why those kinds of stories are so important.

Mukherjee: When did autobiographical become autofictional? Also, Roxane, the point you were making about how some of the greatest truths of queer culture and activism have been done in nonfiction … Oddly enough, queer fiction writers have long hidden behind persona and character to write about queer culture and about themselves. Ed was talking about Proust and Gide —

White: Willa Cather is a good example, too.

Mukherjee: Same with Damon Galgut. Ed put “In a Strange Room” on his list. Its three narratives are united by a first-person narrator called Damon, who is the central character. I remember interviewing Galgut once and saying, “Your character Damon” — and he stopped me and said, “No, that’s not a character, that’s me.” I thought to myself, “I’m trying to protect you here,” which is a very quaint protectiveness on my part. But it’s a very, very intense book — a masterpiece, actually.

3. “In a Strange Room” by Damon Galgut, 2010

Three ill-fated trips fill Damon Galgut’s short novel, the South African writer’s seventh. Its protagonist, Damon, wanders around Greece, southeastern Africa and India at three different stages of adulthood, endlessly fleeing home. Like its gay narrator, who recounts his itinerant journeys in a blend of first and third person — almost as though he were a stranger to himself — Galgut’s book resists easy categorization but is defined, above all, by Damon’s inability to connect with others. His first voyage, in which a chance meeting between strangers turns into a trek through Lesotho’s countryside, runs off course when Damon storms away from his companion, a German who fascinates and then frustrates. Damon’s second trip brings him close to Jerome, a Swiss beauty who’s constantly, comically chaperoned by his traveling companions. Partly thanks to fate, but mostly owing to indecision, the two fail to consummate their attraction: “I am writing about myself alone, it’s all I know, and for this reason I have always failed in every love.” (Fittingly for a novel about thwarted desire, there are no sex scenes.) The book closes with the protagonist looking after a suicidal friend in Goa: One moment, she is the charmer from their Cape Town days; the next, “the dark stranger has waxed to the full … the one who wants her dead.” She has locked herself inside the strange room of her mind, where Damon cannot step foot, despite his best efforts at intimacy. — Miguel Morales

Soller: Three of you nominated three different works by James Baldwin. Was that about, “I need to make sure I have James Baldwin on my list,” or were you thinking about the books themselves?

White: Well, “Giovanni’s Room” is about two white men, whereas “Just Above My Head” [1979], which I picked, has some of the most tender and beautiful sex scenes between Black men I’ve ever read.

Mukherjee: And yet “Giovanni’s Room” was a very daring book for a Black American exile to have written. It’s the first of its kind in some ways, and it holds that historical value, which makes it important.

Ijames: I always like when people of color write about white people — we know white people better than they know themselves.

White: Neel, you used the word “historical,” which is something we have to look at. There are entirely different periods: Before Stonewall [in 1969], queer writers were writing for a straight audience; after, we began to dare to write directly to gay readers. That’s the Rubicon that divides everything.

Ijames: In terms of Baldwin, I picked “Go Tell It on the Mountain” [1952]. When I read that book, I wasn’t yet aware of what my sexual identity was. But, my God, that scene where he talks about the piano player and how he could see the muscles of his legs through the fabric — that was something I knew I wasn’t supposed to have access to. It’s always stayed with me.

Mukherjee: I think we’ve all had that moment at a particular time in life — in adolescence — when we read about same-sex desire on the page and couldn’t get enough of it. Those scenes made us, I think. And the Baldwin book for me at that age was “Giovanni’s Room.” I mean, there were trashier books as well.

4. “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin, 1956

In 1948, James Baldwin traded New York for Paris. When we meet David, the narrator of the author’s second novel, he’s done the same. Baldwin hoped that the move might offer him space to write and a reprieve from American racism; David, a closeted white man, is trying to escape himself. One night while his soon-to-be fiancée, Hella, is away, he meets a handsome Italian barman, Giovanni, and, after an evening of furtive flirting and a shared breakfast of white wine and oysters, goes home with him. “Life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea. Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning,” David tells us of the beginning of their affair. Eventually, though, reality catches up with the couple, and the room starts to feel like a prison, at least to David, whose shame clouds his thinking and propels the novel to its tragic close. Yet for the reader, the book is clearly a cautionary tale about the cost of self-deception and the senselessness of shrinking from love. As one character tells David when he sees him holding back, “Love him … love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?” — Kate Guadagnino

Soller: Was there any impulse not to choose books that you felt were, for lack of a better word, obvious? “Giovanni’s Room” is a classic, no doubt.

McBee: Definitely. First, because I thought other people would pick them. But also because we’ve replicated all the structural dynamics that exist outside of L.G.B.T.Q. culture within it: In terms of the canon, we think about very white cis gay men primarily. That’s not Baldwin, whose inclusion in the canon is rare as a Black man. I’m also especially mindful of trans people — elevating the things we’re doing and keeping us in this conversation feels incredibly urgent to me.

Mukherjee: The canon’s necessarily backward-looking because some time must have passed for a book to have made it in. But it also should be forward-looking so it’s never closed off, making space for books like, say, “Nevada,” which I read only recently. Why didn’t people tell me about this book in 2013, when it first came out?

5. “Nevada” by Imogen Binnie, 2013

“Nevada” is that rare thing — a book that was published by an indie press (the erstwhile Topside) and reissued by an imprint of a major house (MCD x FSG Originals) just under a decade later, in 2022. Its snarky, cerebral heroine, Maria Griffiths, who is as likely to opine on James Joyce as she is on the New Jersey punk band the Bouncing Souls, and feels freest while dodging New York City traffic on her bike, decides that she’s “really good at being trans” but less adept at being emotionally present. After getting dumped by her girlfriend and fired from her job at a Manhattan bookstore that sounds a lot like the Strand, she heads west in search of self-knowledge. On her way through Star City, Nev., the almost-30-year-old Maria develops a fast if slightly uneasy friendship with James, a 20-year-old who reminds her of herself at that age. She’s not automatically taken up as the mentor she hopes to be, but the novel itself was embraced by readers — and writers — for being among the first to center the experience of a trans woman. “I felt invisible to the world at large and also invisible to the [queer] demimonde,” Imogen Binnie writes in her 2022 afterword, “so it was kind of a shout that I, and therefore we, exist.” — K.G.

McBee: I think any trans writer working today has read that book and been affected by it.

Mukherjee: It’s very smart, very funny. I wanted to ask those of you who’ve read it: What do you think is going on in that book?

McBee: She’s writing about being trans, right? And there is a kind of looping quality: You start to take a leap and then you pull back. We meet two characters who are trying to figure out who they are. Sometimes we see each other and we don’t feel reflected back. It captures such an ineffable, almost indescribable nuance of a certain kind of experience that’s so hard, I think, for people to understand who haven’t experienced it. That’s what good fiction does.

Soller: One of the things you’re also implying, Neel, is that it’s entertaining. Roxane, you had mentioned something similar at the beginning …

Gay: Often when we’re talking about literature, people treat it with a capital “L”: It has to be ponderous. But I think fiction has to be both enlightening and entertaining. It doesn’t always have to be funny. But we have seen throughout history that, often, people expect queer narratives to be grounded in misery, and that’s not always the case. We do know joy as much as we know suffering. I like narratives, like “Manhunt,” that reflect that.

6. “Manhunt” by Gretchen Felker-Martin, 2022

Men are monsters, infected by the T. rex virus, which turns anything with enough testosterone into a vicious, brain-dead killing machine. In what remains of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, Beth and Fran, two old friends and trans women, are forced to pick off the changed men in order to harvest their testicles, the best supply of estrogen around and their only means to keep from joining the plague of men. Gretchen Felker-Martin uses the horror genre to sharpen the life-or-death stakes for trans people, although, it turns out, the murderous men are the least of Beth and Fran’s worries. After having taken over the state of Maryland, hundreds of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) are marching north to solidify their hold on the Eastern Seaboard. With men indisposed, TERFs take up the mantle of policing women’s bodies, forcing the protagonists to seek refuge in an elaborate bunker that doubles as a rich brat’s pleasure palace. Capitalism, unsurprisingly, has survived the end of the world, and here some folks are sold into forced labor — or thrown to the proverbial wolves. Early in the book, one character thinks of the new men, “Maybe this world is the one they’d always wanted,” but the same could apply to the cis women who now find themselves atop the postapocalyptic food chain, fatally mistaking comfort for safety. — M.M.

Gay: “Manhunt” is not cheerful. It’s a gory book set in the near future where the world has basically collapsed and trans people have to find ways of getting the hormones they need, even though there’s no longer a pharmaceutical industry. This is the kind of book that queer writers have been desperate to write forever and are rarely given the opportunity to because publishing is insistent upon narratives that fit its preconceived notions about what queer writing should look like. In that way, it’s like “Detransition, Baby.” I loved seeing that on other people’s lists because, you know, Torrey Peters, she went there. It was just irreverent, [referencing] so many things that queer people don’t necessarily want to talk about. And she made a story out of it instead of sitting and making the discomfort the only story.

7. “Detransition, Baby” by Torrey Peters, 2021

In Torrey Peters’s debut novel, the main character, Reese — a white trans woman in her 30s with a “genius” for romantic drama — has nearly lost hope of being a mother when her ex, a man named Ames, invites her to co-parent the child he’s expecting with his new girlfriend, Katrina (who also happens to be his boss). The triangular will-they-or-won’t-they story that follows excavates the lives of Reese and Ames — who was once himself a trans woman, Amy — and, to a lesser extent, Katrina, whose experience as an Asian American cis woman leads her to reflect on the various ways that “women are made to feel that they don’t deserve to be mothers.” Together, these characters try to solve what Reese calls the “Sex and the City Problem,” a set of zero-sum life choices embodied by the television show’s four female protagonists that, “for every generation of trans women prior to Reese’s … was an aspirational problem.” The resulting story addresses discrimination and the ways in which individuals choose to care for one another when biology — and straight culture — fails them. At one point, a young trans woman whom Reese has “mothered” tells her to stop feeling so morose. “This, Reese reflects, is the other reason to be a mother — in whatever fashion motherhood comes your way — so when you’re old and alone and feeling sorry for yourself, your daughter will roll her eyes at your theatrics and bring you in from the cold.” — Rose Courteau

Mukherjee: I love Lisa’s inclusion of Alison Bechdel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For.” It’s funny and pokes fun at itself — and at lesbians — and there’s an element of play, whereas “Fun Home” [Bechdel’s graphic memoir, adapted by Kron and Jeanine Tesori into a 2013 musical] is such a bleak book in some ways.

Kron: Alison wrote “D.T.W.F.” for [more than] 20 years. It’s inarguably influential: She was one of the main drivers of creating a visible lesbian cultural presence. And she wrote it specifically for a lesbian audience.

8. “Dykes to Watch Out For” by Alison Bechdel, 1986

Alison Bechdel’s long-running comic “Dykes to Watch Out For” amassed a cult following soon after it was published in the feminist newspaper WomaNews in 1983, then syndicated as a biweekly strip. In 1986, Firebrand Books released the first book edition, offering a home for Bechdel’s cast of lesbian characters: friends who braid each other’s armpit hair at music festivals, amorous nuns with little hope of salvation and gloriously mulleted butches, rings of keys jangling from their back pockets. The satirical scenes call to mind soap operas — a strip titled “The Roommates: Part One” zeros in on the friendship between Flo and Jean, forged over a mutual passion for Audre Lorde and herbology, just as it begins to sour. “Tune in next time for more spine-tingling confrontations,” it teases. So nuanced are the depictions of lesbians, and women in general, that, in 1985, the comic gave rise to the Bechdel test, now a metric for measuring the representation of female characters onscreen. And though Bechdel put the series on hiatus in 2008, its influence has hardly diminished: This month, Audible began airing an audio adaptation that features the voices of Carrie Brownstein, Roberta Colindrez and Roxane Gay. — C.R.

Soller: You’re talking in a way about pioneers, Lisa. There’s obviously lots of great contemporary work that’s built on the backs of people who’ve been doing this for decades.

Mukherjee: Such as Ed. He was a game-changer and I just want to acknowledge that.

White: Thanks. I wrote the first review in the Times of London of Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Swimming-Pool Library,” and I said, “This is the greatest gay novel by an Englishman.” But my favorite one by him is “The Folding Star” [1994]. We’re all so used to reading stories about tutors who fall in love with their students, like Henry James’s “The Pupil” [1891]. In this one, they actually have sex! And it’s very, very hot sex. But to me, the greatest gay comic novel is written by a straight man: [Vladimir] Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” [1962].

Mukherjee: It wouldn’t be a queer panel at all if we didn’t devote at least half our time to talking about hot sex. I give you that “The Folding Star” is the more beautiful book, especially the middle pastoral section. Hollinghurst’s such a great prose stylist. Very few people put together an English sentence like he does. But when “The Swimming-Pool Library” came out, it was like a thunderclap. The sex scenes are extended, numerous, graphic and stunningly done, with literary prose that never crosses over into the purple. That’s very difficult to do. He’s also uncovering something darker about the history of homosexuality in England and its eventual liberalization.

9. “The Swimming-Pool Library” by Alan Hollinghurst, 1988

By the time Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel was published, AIDS had devastated London, but the book is set just before the disease had taken hold in the city and therefore possesses, like one of the turn-of-the-20th-century Ronald Firbank novels favored by its narrator, the moneyed and myopic Will Beckwith, the “faint smell of lost time.” All of Will’s haunts, from Kensington Gardens to the Corinthian Club, a gym where men take gleeful stock of one another between sets and laps, teem with the possibility of sex to be had freely and without fear. Will’s attentions are diverted when Charles Nantwich, an older man who happens to have the remains of a Roman bath in his basement, asks him to be his biographer. Thus Will delves into an earlier period of gay life, one in which secrecy often acted as an aphrodisiac, via Charles’s diaries detailing his priapic days as a student at Winchester College and then Oxford, as a government official in Sudan and beyond. The pair turn out to have much in common, including upper-class backgrounds that ultimately fail to offer them full protection from prejudice and, less sympathetically, a tendency to fetishize men of color. Still, the book remains a richly wrought celebration of male pleasure, even as it emphasizes the importance of familiarizing oneself with the pain of those who came before. — K.G.

Kron: The idea of lesbians is that we’re sexless — that we’re just over here whispering to each other in French. [All laugh.] That’s one of the reasons I put [Patricia Highsmith’s] “The Price of Salt” [1952] and [Ann Bannon’s 1950s] Beebo Brinker novels on my list. Those books could be published because they were pulp. Lesbian sex could appear for male consumption, even though they weren’t actually for male consumption: That’s how they could get in under the wire and get published.

Mukherjee: Lesbian sex was never freighted with the kind of sex-equals-death thinking that became a default for gay men because of AIDS, of course. Hollinghurst gets away from that; he writes about sex as pure desire. But — and this might be a question for you, Thomas — where’s the hot trans sex?

McBee: Well, in the broadest sense of the trans umbrella, for those of us who picked “Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl,” that’s a great example. That’s one of the queerest books, in both the classic and the modern sense. It’s very erotic. And the protagonist, we don’t really understand what their gender identity is (we might think of them as gender nonconforming). That’s actually part of what’s hot about the book.

10. “Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl,” by Andrea Lawlor, 2017

Like a punk Ovid, Andrea Lawlor, in their debut novel, writes of bodies changed into other forms. Paul, an undergraduate layabout and scrappy bartender at the only gay club in Iowa City, changes his body and his gender at will as he pursues paramours of every imaginable type. “He was an omnivore, an orange-hanky flagger, an aficionado of all-you-can-eat buffets,” Lawlor writes of their shape-shifting protagonist. The book’s movable feast follows Paul on his trail of peccadilloes, as he cruises the coffee shops, punk bars and libraries of his cozy college town, then on to a feminist music festival and finally on a trip across AIDS-era America in 1993. The book has many wry descriptions of the queer characters who seek one another out in small towns all over the country, but mostly it’s an account of the kind of hooking up that’s possible when desire gets unglued from fixed gender or sexual identities. Paul can become whoever he wants simply by thinking about it. Lawlor wants us to know that we can, too. — Evan Moffitt

Gay: As our understanding of gender expands, so do the possibilities for our sexuality. People of my generation and earlier often worried about disrupting the status quo — the work could seem a bit neutered because a lot of us thought, “They already think we’re a bunch of sex addicts.” It’s so important to see the sex part of our sexuality acknowledged, to do away with certain respectability politics and to [write about] the range of things we find hot. That can take many different forms because our understanding of sexuality is increasingly expansive. Every day I’m learning about a new sort of sexual expression and I’m like, “Oh, I’m so old.” But literature that reflects that is useful.

Soller: Should we talk about H.I.V./AIDS? James, you were the only one who picked “Angels in America.”

Ijames: I know! Maybe I’m gauche? [Laughs.] Being a playwright, you’re always looking for folks who’re doing what you want to do. Kushner — in addition to the politics and the queerness of his story — is just ambitious. It’s inspiring how big the world is, how expansive, how many different kinds of people there are in the play. No, it’s not very diverse in terms of race. There’s just Belize. But there’s this whole Mormon story that’s wild and very American. And there’s just something about the mysticism of the play and how it’s written and its scale that feels important to me. I don’t know if it’s the most important play written by a queer writer.

Kron: But definitely influential.

Ijames: There’s some genuinely beautiful writing and some slightly flawed politics in it. But I think that’s true of a lot of queer literature.

11. “Angels in America” by Tony Kushner, 1991

Practically from the moment it first appeared onstage in 1991, Tony Kushner’s two-part, 7.5-hour epic seemed destined to claim a prominent place in the American theatrical canon. Set primarily in 1985 and ’86, as H.I.V. ravaged New York’s gay community, Kushner’s play follows its lead characters on their intertwined, often hallucinatory journeys through grim apartments, hospital wards, Antarctic dreamscapes, a Mormon Visitors’ Center and a crumbling bureaucratic office in heaven, “a City Much Like San Francisco.” Unafraid of melodrama and camp, the play raged and philosophized with operatic wit and pathos. It was, as The New York Times theater critic Frank Rich wrote in 1993, “the most thrilling American play in years.” As ambitious in scale as in subject matter, “Angels in America” not only gave universal themes of hope, loss, progress and redemption an explicitly queer context, it put queerness itself at the center of the American story. — Michael Snyder

Gay: A lot of the writing around H.I.V. doesn’t age well. In the ’90s, when we were all in ACT UP, I don’t know that any of us thought the disease was going to be possible to overcome. Of course, the gay men in the conversation can speak more aptly to that. But all we did was go to funerals; it did feel like there was no hope and that the only way out was perhaps to engage in more respectability politics. It was so bad — I think the next generation has no idea how bad it actually was — and the literature reflects that.

Kron: I just remembered that one of the first things I thought I was going to put on my list was “The Normal Heart” [1985]. It was almost like Larry Kramer was a better playwright than he even had control over, in the way that he was able to see himself and his own limitations. One thing he captures is urgency, the acute sense of trying to get a response to the fact that your community is dying and the powers that be will not respond. I thought about that a little earlier when we were talking about Baldwin and Lorde, and then there’s the Zoe Leonard poem that I put on my list. These are writers who have resurfaced in the past several years because they’re speaking to where we are right now, culturally and politically.

12. “I Want a President” by Zoe Leonard, 1992

The New York artist Zoe Leonard devoted much of her artwork to the H.I.V./AIDS crisis, often lamenting the government’s seeming indifference to it. In the lead-up to the 1992 presidential election, after her friend, the poet Eileen Myles, announced a write-in campaign against the incumbent George H.W. Bush, Leonard composed the prose poem “I Want a President,” a wish list of character traits for the nation’s next leader. “I want a dyke for president,” it begins, followed by dozens of other attributes: a president who has experienced prejudice, illness and violence; “someone with bad teeth” who has eaten hospital food; “a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office …” At first, the poem circulated among friends on loose-leaf photocopies; eventually, the art journal “LTTR” printed it on postcards. But it would gain even wider recognition years later thanks to another presidential election — days before the 2016 presidential election, Leonard wheat-pasted a 30-foot-tall copy of the text at the foot of Manhattan’s High Line. At an event hosted by the park, Leonard said she was both gratified and “utterly horrified” that two decades after she wrote the poem, it still had such relevance. “It’s a real call and a metaphoric one,” she told the audience, for “someone intelligent, experienced and compassionate.” But beyond that, she added, it demands us to rethink how we govern ourselves. — C.R.

McBee: I see Zoe’s poem on Instagram all the time — it’s something that people still rally around.

Kron: Our progress — and I say this with such pain — was based largely on assimilation: on the fight for gay marriage, on being recognized by corporations. But now we’re seeing all of that was built largely on sand. It’s so painful, right? It’s so painful. So who are the writers that are coming back up now? The ones who have an analysis and a worldview that we didn’t listen to in the ’80s, the ’90s, the 2000s.

Mukherjee: Ed, you were at the front line [of the AIDS crisis].

White: Well, I was late to [write about] AIDS, but I did eventually. I think it handed gay writers a great subject because it was about death and love. To go from Stonewall to the outbreak is a very fast cycle for a whole culture — being oppressed, then liberated, then exalted, then killed off is pretty dramatic.

Soller: Do you want to talk about the Thom Gunn collection you chose?

White: He was a great poet, but he seldom wrote about gay life until AIDS came along. He was quite a cool, analytic and distant writer, and then suddenly destiny gave him this tremendous subject matter. In the end, I think “The Man With Night Sweats” is his best book and one of the deepest feeling.

13. “The Man With Night Sweats” by Thom Gunn, 1992

The rhyming couplets and iambic pentameter within this volume might recall Ben Jonson or John Donne — both major influences on Thom Gunn — were it not for the verses’ unbridled eroticism. Greek mythology enabled Gunn, an English poet who was closeted until midlife, to meditate on the joys and heartbreaks of queer intimacy, such as in “Philemon and Baucis”: “Truly each other’s, they have embraced so long / Their barks have met and wedded in one flow / Blanketing both.” Even poems about zoo animals seethe with sex, like “The Life of the Otter,” in which the title creature’s genitals are described as “neat / As a stone acorn with two oak leaves / Carved in a French cathedral porch,” their “Potency / set in fur / like an ornament.” The book’s title poem, among its most haunting, describes a man dying of AIDS, soaking his bedsheets as life seeps out of him. The speaker laments how his pursuit of physical closeness — a fundamental aspect of his maturation — became the thing that would kill him: “I grew as I explored / The body I could trust / Even while I adored / The risk that made robust, / A world of wonders in / Each challenge to the skin.” Gunn makes that irony even plainer with another poem, “In Time of Plague,” delivering some of his most potent lines: “I am confused / confused to be attracted / by, in effect, my own annihilation.” — E.M.

Ijames: Hemphill’s poems saved my life. And you can’t find his book anywhere: It’s not in print. I somehow got my hands on a copy and then someone stole it, and I’ve just been working off a PDF of it for years.

14. “Ceremonies” by Essex Hemphill, 1992

Raunchy, raw and direct, the poems in Essex Hemphill’s “Ceremonies” represent an impatient call to action. As a Black gay man who had already lost several friends and comrades to AIDS, Hemphill knew he had no time to waste. “My life seems to be / marked down / for quick removal / from the shelf,” he wrote in “Heavy Breathing.” He dismissed polite petitioning for rights and desperate attempts to cling to respectability as distractions from the urgent work at hand. Eulogizing the Black writer and activist Joseph Beam in “When My Brother Fell,” he lashed out at the impractical sentimentality of feel-good projects like the AIDS quilt: “sewing quilts / will not bring you back / nor save us.” Hemphill’s poetry was written to be performed, as memorialized in Marlon Riggs’s film “Tongues Untied” (1989), but even on the page, the frequent pattern of hook, slow buildup, rapid intensification and climactic release is recognizably sexual. There are bodies in these poems, bodies the narrator appreciates, lusts after, enjoys and cherishes — “Ceremonies” is a declaration of love and, in spite of everything, hope. In “American Wedding,” he writes, “They don’t know / We are becoming powerful. / Every time we kiss / we confirm the new world coming.” The poem ends, “Long may we live / to free this dream.” Hemphill died of complications from AIDS at 38, three years after the book’s publication. — June Thomas

Mukherjee: I was surprised not to see W.H. Auden on anyone’s list but overjoyed when I saw James Merrill there. I kept thinking there’s something about Auden and Merrill — they’re both formalists, actually, and their formal range is dazzling. I agree with Ed that Gunn was the poet of the AIDS generation, but we forget that Merrill died of [complications from] AIDS, and the poems in his final volume, “A Scattering of Salts,” become very moving.

15. “A Scattering of Salts” by James Merrill, 1995

In 1995, one month after James Merrill’s death, came the publication of his valedictory volume, a “A Scattering of Salts,” arguably the greatest accomplishment of the poet’s five-decade career. Born into immense wealth (his father was a co-founder of Merrill Lynch), the writer infused his early poetry with a formal sophistication and then later, starting in the 1970s, an esoteric mysticism. In “A Scattering of Salts,” which is elegiac yet tactile, Merrill describes the thrill of meeting other men (“A stranger’s idle glance could be the match / That sends us all to blazes”); the indignities of hospitalization as a gay man in the ’90s (“Pills washed down with ouzo hadn’t worked. / Now while the whole street buzzed and lurked / The paramedics left you there, / Returning costumed for a walk in Space.”); the sensuality of light bulbs (“Feel for what it shone from, / Ribbed clay each night anew / Hardened to its mission: / Light for the likes of you.”); and the fleshy beauty of alabaster (“flamboyant, vaguely lewd / Honey-pink volumes flounced with lard / Like Parma ham, like the blown-up / Varnished nipple of a Titian nude.”). These poems are neither radical nor experimental — their queerness is subtextual as often as it is explicit — but those quiet currents of loss and desire only deepen the sense of recognition, like a stranger’s idle glance, sending every page to blazes. — M.S.

White: He was a tremendous influence on my life in every way — he gave me lots of money [through a foundation] that I survived on in the 1970s.

Ijames: Jericho Brown’s “The Tradition” is another that stays with me. He’s audacious in the sense that he’s always trying to manage and invent form. I don’t know a ton about poetry: I read it, but I don’t know how to talk very deeply about it. I know when it moves me, and that book I find very moving.

16. “The Tradition” by Jericho Brown, 2019

Jericho Brown often refers to himself as a love poet, and indeed, his third poetry collection, “The Tradition,” includes verses about ecstasy and longing. In “I Know What I Love,” he writes, “Some- / Times what I love just / Doesn’t show up at all. / It can hurt me if it / Means to … because / That’s what in love / Means.” But the book’s sweeping scope also encompasses themes of racism, sexual violence, H.I.V. and police brutality. Throughout, the Louisiana-born poet draws on mythology and history to dissect a world that often devalues the voices of Black gay men. As if trying to find a fresh way to be heard, Brown reveals a new form for five poems in the collection — his own invention, which he’s called “gutting a sonnet.” Simply titled “Duplex,” each one contains 14 lines in seven couplets and several repeated lines. “My last love drove a burgundy car. / My first love drove a burgundy car. / He was fast and awful, tall as my father. / Steadfast and awful, my tall father.” The format, which simulates the call-and-response familiar from blues and other Southern Black music traditions, lets each poem offer up several points-of-view at once. “I wanted a form that in my head was Black and queer and Southern,” Brown wrote shortly after the book was published. “Since I am carrying these truths in this body as one, how do I get a form that is many forms?” — Brian Keith Jackson

McBee: If anyone hasn’t read “Feeld,” it’s one of the most formally inventive and amazing books of poetry. It’s by a trans woman, Jos Charles, who wrote it entirely in [a kind of] Chaucerian English. You have to read it out loud to understand it. The fact that she’s trans and she’s working with these medieval structures, it’s obviously so subversive, this insistence within history to include us formally. There’s something provocative and exciting about that.

Mukherjee: I wish my nodding could be neon.

17. “Feeld” by Jos Charles, 2018

Trans women, Jos Charles has said, are often viewed as “technological, new, invented.” They aren’t, of course, but the language around them can be. The 60 poems in “Feeld” demonstrate this, reflecting on the experience of a transgender woman by using metaphors largely taken from the garden and the field (or “feeld”). Such naturalistic imagery is of a piece with the Middle English poetry this work invokes, as in the opening lines of its first poem, which finds the speaker browsing clothes at a shopping mall and navigating its women’s bathroom: “thees wite skirtes / & orang sweters / i wont / inn the feedynge marte / wile mye vegetable partes bloome / inn the commen waye / a grackel inn the guarden rooste / the tall wymon wasching handes.” The anachronistic phrasing seems like Chaucer (the Wife of Bath in “The Canterbury Tales” [1387] provides an “anteseedynt” for “feeld’s” speaker) but is largely of Charles’s own design — inflected with internet and text speak, often phonetic, full of dropped letters in some places and extra ones in others. In blending old (or “aynchent”) traditions with newer ones, Charles revises a literary tradition that, indeed, has largely ignored the existence of that “grackel inn the guarden rooste.” — R.C.

Gay: Danez [Smith] is also just such an inventive poet. They have written so many outstanding poems that speak not only to queerness but to the Black condition, to what it means to be Black and alive and H.I.V. positive, to be all of those things in a world where Black life is increasingly endangered. There’s also this amazing thing they do [in their latest collection] where there are two titles — one for Black people, one for non-Black people. I think it’s reflective of what only queer poetry can accomplish.

18. “Homie” by Danez Smith, 2020

Chosen family — for queer people, often more of an imperative than a choice — is the central preoccupation of the poet Danez Smith’s “Homie,” an intention made clear from its title, etched in bubble gum letters on a lime-green cover. But that title is also a feint. “This book was titled homie because I don’t want non-Black people to say my nig out loud,” writes Smith in an introductory note. “This book is really titled my nig.” A diminutive form of that most potent of words, and a term of endearment among Black friends, it’s an apt title for this paean to friendship, the “first & cleanest love.” In poems funny (“my man is more a concept than anything.”), mournful (“i miss them. all the dead. how young. how silly / to miss what you will become.”) and galvanizing, the speaker reflects on their loved ones and their losses, their romantic life, the realities of living with H.I.V., the shadow of depression, the temptation of suicide. With an ear for the subtleties of the language used to describe friendship — one poem employs different meanings of the word “dog” to tragic effect — Smith creates a powerful portrait of the Black queer community and the ways it saves itself again and again. The book was published in January 2020, just before the isolation of the pandemic would reinforce the need for such connection: “at the end of the world, let there be you,” writes Smith in “acknowledgments,” the collection’s last poem. “My world.” — T.O.

Soller: We could talk about poetry all afternoon, but I also feel like everyone keeps surfacing this idea of rediscovery. That seemed like a real animating spirit of your long lists.

White: There’s a book I’ve kept bringing up [over the years], but no one’s reprinted it [in recent decades] or seems to care about it. It’s Terry Andrews’s “The Story of Harold.” He was a children’s book writer, and this was written under a pseudonym because it’s such dangerous material. It’s about a bisexual sadist who has a part-time affair with a kind of crazy man who wants to be burned alive. The sadist also writes children’s books. It’s a book written in the early 1970s that would be forbidden today: He tells the whole story of his transgressive life in attractive terms to this child. It’s fascinating.

19. “The Story of Harold” by Terry Andrews, 1974

“We will have a lot of sex”: So the narrator promises in this orchestral saga of a bisexual children’s book writer with a boundless carnal appetite. Autofiction before the term was coined, the novel is by a man named Terry Andrews, who’s also its protagonist. Or is it pseudo-autofiction? Andrews was a pen name for George Selden, best known for the children’s book “The Cricket in Times Square” (1960). This is not a children’s book. It’s a feverishly horny stepsibling to chimerical New York novels like Renata Adler’s “Speedboat” (1976): Terry’s adventures include flogging a married surgeon, seducing a Dubonnet-drinking widow and taking B.D.S.M. scenes with a suicidal welfare worker close to the point of no return. There is tenderness. It comes from the writer’s effort to console a lonely little boy with stories of a tiny man named Harold who has a limited supply of magic to fix people’s problems and from Terry’s love for the sacred and profane New York City — the baths, the Frick, the subway. Calling the novel “exceptional,” a New York Times reviewer also noted that it isn’t interested in “the crude irony of children’s book writer as ‘pervert.’ Terry isn’t a child molester”: “Once we get used to Terry … we see him as, if not ‘just another human being,’ a human being it would not be all that hard to be.” But the paperback, with illustrations by Edward Gorey, promptly went out of print. Somewhere between “The Phantom Tollbooth” and the Marquis de Sade, this isn’t a straight book, yet Terry, one of the “limbo people,” probably wouldn’t call it gay either. — Liz Brown

Gay: For my part, I think Robert Jones Jr.’s “The Prophets” is undersung. When I read it, I gasped many times. It’s about two gay men who have a loving and generous relationship during the slavery era. It’s one of the only books I’ve read about enslavement where the enslaved people not only hated their circumstances but were openly defiant — poisoning their enslavers, vengeful in ways that I think all of us understand and would love to see more of. Nobody’s just like, “I’ll get through it,” the way you see in a lot of enslavement narratives.

20. “The Prophets” by Robert Jones Jr., 2021

Same-sex love assumes grave risk in Robert Jones Jr.’s first novel, set on a cotton plantation in Mississippi nicknamed Empty. There, two enslaved teenagers, Samuel and Isaiah, go about “working, eating, sleeping, playing” and making love “on purpose.” This last qualifier is remarkable within the sexual economy of Empty, where men and women are forced to propagate for the benefit of their master’s work force and, frequently, for his personal pleasure. When a fellow enslaved person — seeking to protect his wife from such brutality by currying favor with the owner — begins sermonizing the Christian gospel, he draws attention to Samuel and Isaiah, who in the eyes of others blend “into one blue-black mass, defined by the mistaken belief that it was a broken manhood coating their skin.” Taking many of its chapter names from books of the Bible (Deuteronomy, Judges, Psalms), the novel rotates among several perspectives, including that of a woman named Sarah, who remembers her birthplace “deep in the bush” of Africa, where gender was chosen and names assigned based on “how your soul manifested.” These overlapping narratives portray a system in which “everything that was learned had to be transmitted by circling the thing rather than uncovering it” and love becomes an act of resistance. — R.C.

White: I reviewed that book — it’s great.

Gay: He works in the vein of Baldwin, but also in a vein that’s all his own. I think it’s important to emphasize that we shouldn’t necessarily be looking for people to step into the shoes of other queer writers.

White: Bryan Washington, who wrote “Memorial,” is a good example of somebody who’s writing in an entirely new way. In bringing Japanese and Black characters together and exploring that whole theme, the language is incomparable.

21. “Memorial” by Bryan Washington, 2020

Bryan Washington’s debut novel is set up like a sitcom: Mike’s Japanese mother comes to stay with him and his boyfriend, Benson, who is Black. But the next day Mike has to fly to Osaka to visit his estranged, ailing father, leaving Benson and Mitsuko to fend for (and feed) themselves. Their prickly silence gives way to a hesitant alliance once Mitsuko enlists Benson’s help in the kitchen, preparing Japanese dishes like curry rice and katsu. Benson narrates the first and last sections of the novel while Mike takes the middle stretch; the baton-pass storytelling allows Washington to depict a relationship in its final throes, where neither party deserves blame for letting love run its course. “You shouldn’t make a home out of other people,” Mike tells an acquaintance, a notion the book complicates by showing how the couple’s romantic fallout allows their affection to flourish in other directions — proving all the possibilities that can come after heartbreak. — M.M.

Mukherjee: What do we even mean when we say something like “In a Strange Room” or “Memorial” is influential? They haven’t had time to be influential.

White: I would definitely plump for Bryan Washington because I think he’s an extraordinary writer, but Neel, as you say, maybe he’s too new to be “influential” …

Gay: New work can be just as influential as older work, especially when it comes to queer work, where so many voices were overlooked for so long. It’s important to include contemporary voices.

Mukherjee: These are all very young writers writing. The question of being overlooked doesn’t arise for them.

Gay: That’s not necessarily true. Young writers get overlooked all the time.

Mukherjee: But perhaps not for reasons of queerness. Or I would maybe idealistically like to think that.

Soller: James, you chose more plays than other people, which I appreciated.

Ijames: Taylor Mac’s “Hir” is just wonderful — he’s one of the most important contemporary theater makers right now.

22. “Hir” by Taylor Mac, 2015

The theater artist Taylor Mac (who prefers the pronoun “judy,” and you should read about why) structures “Hir” around a Great American Premise: a house disintegrating, a family at a boiling point, a prodigal son returned to find that the home he remembers no longer exists. The ghosts of Eugene O’Neill and Sam Shepard lurk in the corners of the dilapidated California starter house that belongs to the Connor family, but Mac has given the patriarchy glitter wigs. “Paradigm shift!” Paige Connor sings ecstatically as her son, Isaac, just back from military duty, reels: Max, the sibling he’d known as his sister, has come out as transgender (pronouns: ze/hir — pronounced, meaningfully, here), and his authoritarian father is now post-stroke, catatonic, and, courtesy of Paige, wearing lingerie and drinking estrogen milkshakes. Meanwhile, Paige herself — with her gleeful, brutal, world-building-and-world-destroying energy — is systematically deconstructing the house that’s done her so much harm (a house that, like all houses-that-will-not-stand in the American theater, is the country itself). “Don’t you pity him,” Paige snarls about the sad clown that was once her abusive husband. “We will not rewrite his history with pity.” But Paige’s tragedy is that, for all her reforming zeal, she’s too wrathful to write the future. That’s where Max comes in. When, at the play’s end, ze approaches hir helpless father with a gesture of care, “Hir” dares to hope that truly radical change may yet walk hand in hand with tenderness. Revolution is not revenge, but rather the everyday act of deciding who you want to be. — Sara Holdren

Kron: Taylor is a dazzling performer, but it’s been amazing to see the depth of his writing. (I use he, but Taylor uses a number of pronouns, including judy.) “Hir” is extraordinary because it’s about the wages of patriarchy on families, but particularly on men. I mean, talk about the scope of its ambition: It’s showing how inevitably the patriarchy is going to collapse, and it’s acknowledging what the cost is going to be to these men.

Mukherjee: Can we talk about whether queer literature needs to be written by queer people? Because I nominated a work — Anne Carson’s “Autobiography of Red” [1998] — that I feel is a very queer work written by a straight person. How does everyone feel about this? In a time of increasing debates about appropriation, I think the queer community has been remarkably liberal and expansive about welcoming nonqueer people who write about them.

Gay: I think that anybody can write about anything and oftentimes they can do so well.

Mukherjee: I’m so glad you said that.

Gay: The idea of appropriation only comes up when it’s glaring: You are not of us and you are trying to write about us. That said, I think if we’re going to make a list of the 25 most important queer works, straight people literally have everything else. They have enough. They’re good. We don’t need to die on this hill.

McBee: We don’t gate-keep; we’re queer people. But there is something important about naming the specific aesthetic that comes out of our communities.

Soller: Do queer works also need to be about queer people?

Ijames: That makes me think of Lorraine Hansberry, whose plays are not necessarily explicitly about queer people, but I feel there’s a queer lens to them. Now, I didn’t pick a Hansberry play for that reason.

Kron: I think that’s right about her lens. She’s vast, I couldn’t pick one play over another.

McBee: Not to put aside Lorraine Hansberry, but similarly, I thought a lot about putting [Truman Capote’s] “In Cold Blood” [1965] on my list, and I didn’t.

Soller: Is there anyone else whom people feel they’ll be thinking about all day if we don’t talk about it now?

Kron: There’s no Adrienne Rich on here either.

Mukherjee: What about Elizabeth Bishop?

White: She didn’t want to be called a feminist writer, much less a lesbian. She was like Susan Sontag in that way: Sontag didn’t want to be thought of as a lesbian writer because she thought that was second-class. She just wanted to be a writer.

Kron: Adrienne Rich and Susan Sontag started in the same circles. Rich claimed her lesbianism and Sontag didn’t, and we know the effect that had on their careers. I’m team Rich.

23. “Diving Into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich, 1973

“Diving Into the Wreck” is a threshold book. During the years she worked on the collection, Adrienne Rich, then in her early 40s, was immersed in feminist politics and had started to think about living as a lesbian, but she hadn’t yet slept with a woman. The book is full of doors, ladders and journeys, including the title poem’s strange descent into the depths, where “there is no one / to tell me when the ocean / will begin.” Three years later, in “Twenty-One Love Poems” (1976), she would write explicitly about lesbian sex, but here she is still preparing for the new world to come. In “Incipience,” she describes “imagining the existence / of something uncreated,” and in “From a Survivor” experiences life as “a succession of brief, amazing movements / each one making possible the next.” Not that it’s an entirely peaceful transformation. In “Waking in the Dark” she writes, “The tragedy of sex / lies around us, a woodlot / the axes are sharpened for.” Rich came to be revered by feminists, especially for her influential prose writing on topics such as motherhood and “compulsory heterosexuality,” without losing the support of the poetry establishment. — J.T.

McBee: Can I go to the mat for someone else’s pick? Roxane chose “Written on the Body,” by Jeanette Winterson, which I almost put on my list. The book is spellbinding, but Winterson herself has been an ongoing force.

24. “Written on the Body” by Jeanette Winterson, 1992

The narrator of Jeanette Winterson’s “Written on the Body,” whose name and gender are never disclosed, sees the hollow clichés of romance everywhere. A serial seducer of married women who “used to think of marriage as a plate-glass window just begging for a brick,” they are addicted to the exhilarating early stages of a relationship, at which point they typically pull the plug. That is, until they fall for Louise, whose red hair is as wild and entrancing as a swarm of butterflies. Suddenly, the habitual window smasher is desperate to gather up all the bricks. A cancer diagnosis causes an abrupt tonal shift in the book’s second half, when the narrator makes the ultimate romantic sacrifice, abandoning pleasure and comfort — and London — in a desperate attempt to save Louise. The fragmentary style of the novel is the literary equivalent of pointillism: examined close up, some of the dots seem random, misplaced, perhaps even ugly, but take a broader view and the effect is as mysterious as being in love. — J.T.

Soller: And where did we end up on “The Price of Salt”? It’s the oldest book anyone nominated.

Kron: Back then, there wasn’t [really] anything else out there. There was so little lesbian literature published for so long.

25. “The Price of Salt” by Patricia Highsmith, 1952

A year after it was first published — under the pen name Claire Morgan — “The Price of Salt” came out as a mass-market paperback with a deliciously pulpy cover: A glamorous woman rests her hand on the shoulder of a younger one who lounges, improbably, on a chartreuse sofa perched in front of a rocky outcropping as a menacing-looking man looms in the background. Therein lies the love triangle at the heart of the novel, between Carol, a New Jersey housewife; her conniving husband, Harge; and Therese, a dreamy 19-year-old who longs to upend her boring city life. Therese is working at the doll counter of Frankenberg’s department store in Manhattan when she catches Carol’s gray eyes — “dominant as light or fire” — and is instantly drawn to her. As in Todd Haynes’s 2015 film adaptation, “Carol,” the two embark on a transformative affair, one that is complicated by Harge’s getting wise. For Carol, whom Patricia Highsmith partly based on a former lover of hers, choosing to be true to herself means losing not just social ease but custody of her daughter. According to Highsmith, the fact that Carol chooses it anyway, relinquishing Harge for good, is what gives the book its power. — K.G.

White: That’s not a great book! I like Highsmith, but it’s not her best.

Kron: But it’s an influential book. Are we talking about books that we love or books that are important to the development of queer culture?

White: It should be both.

Gay: It’s a great book for many, many lesbians.

At top: JEB (Joan E. Biren) “Gloria and Charmaine” (1979) from “Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians” (Anthology Editions); Clifford Prince King’s “Safe Space” (2020); Crawford Wayne Barton collection (1993-2011), Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society; © Maika Elan; Lyle Ashton Harris’s “M. Lamar, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 1993” (2015), courtesy of the artist and Salon 94; Reynaldo Rivera’s “Girls, El Conquistador” (1997), courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings L.A./N.Y.; Melody Melamed’s “Gabe and Paul” (2017).

Research Editors: Alexis Sottile and James K. Williamson

Copy Editor: James Camp

Production: Nancy Coleman, Amy Fang, Betsy Horan, Chris Littlewood and Carla Valdivia Nakatani