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Friday Mood Recs: 10 books from the queer canon for Pride Month and beyond
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Friday Mood Recs: 10 books from the queer canon for Pride Month and beyond

Classic texts that explore queer identity and longing

Sara Hildreth's avatar
Sara Hildreth
Jun 13, 2025
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FictionMatters
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Friday Mood Recs: 10 books from the queer canon for Pride Month and beyond
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This Pride Month in Patreon, we’re reading Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance as our FictionMatters Book Blub selection. I have to shoutout the wonderful

Alice Elliott Dark
who first recommended this book to me! I picked it up immediately after she mentioned it to me but it took a little bit of time to fit it into our book club rotation. The book itself is beautiful, and I particularly appreciated the introduction by Garth Greenwell in the new Harper Perennial edition, which positions Dancer as a groundbreaking gay novel that continues to inspire queer narratives today.

While I won’t profess to be an expert on the queer literary canon, reading Holleran’s work has got me thinking about other classic and modern classic texts that explore gender, queerness, and desire. Here’s a list of ten books that have been formative to my own understanding of this literary tradition. I’d love to hear your recommendations as well!

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