Amplify Queer Stories with these Pride Month Book Recs
What’s your PRIDE VIBE? Are you looking to get in touch with yourself? Build your relationships with others? Be inspired? Escape into the world of reality TV or the romance of the past? Planning ahead to your Fall TBR? You guessed it…we have a book for that. Amplify queer stories with these Pride Month book recs!
PERSONAL GUIDES
Taking everything they know from more than a decade of work with the queer and trans community, their personal journey of gender exploration, and clinical best practices, licensed therapist, coach, and speaker Rae McDaniel created the Gender Freedom Model. A uniquely supportive narrative for gender exploration and transition grounded in queer joy, their nine-pillar model has helped thousands of transgender and nonbinary individuals explore gender through play, pleasure, and freedom. And now, it can help you too.
Whether you're transgender, non-binary, cisgender, or still exploring, this compassionate and practical guide will help you experience your gender in new, expansive ways by teaching:
- How to move from anxiety, self-doubt, and fear to a confident, proactive state of mind.
- How to navigate discomfort and celebrate your inherent worth as you develop genuine self-love.
- How to design relationships, community, and a sex life that lights you up.
- Practical tools to align your gender identity and expression with your most authentic self through play, pleasure, and possibility.
"Rae McDaniel is a leader in their generation, matching compassion with clear-sighted vision for a sex-positive future.” – Emily Nagoski, Ph.D, author of Come As You Are and Burnout
YOU ARE ENOUGH EXACTLY AS YOU ARE.
From the time we’re born, a litany of do’s and don’ts are placed on us by our families, our communities, and society. We’re required to fit into boxes based on our race, gender, sexuality, and other parts of our identities, being told by others how we should behave, who we should date, or what we should be interested in. For so many of us, those boxes begin to feel like shackles when we realize they don’t fit our unique shape, yet we keep trying because we crave acceptance and validation. But is “fitting in” worth the time, energy, and suffering? Actor, writer, and activist Brandon Kyle Goodman says, Hell no it ain’t!
As a Black nonbinary, queer person in a dark-skinned 6’1”, 180-pound male body born into a religious immigrant household, Brandon knows the pain of having to hide one’s true self, the work of learning to love that true self, and the freedom of finally being your true self.
In You Gotta Be You, Brandon affectionately challenges you to consider, “Who would I be if society never got its hands on me?” This question set Brandon on a mission to dropkick societal shackles by unlearning all the things he was told he should be in order to step into who he really is. It required him to reexamine messy but ultimately defining moments in his life—his first time being followed in a store, navigating his mother’s born-again Christianity, and regretfully using soap as lube (yes, you read that right!)—to find the lessons that would guide him to his most authentic self.
Compassionate and soulful, funny and revealing, You Gotta Be You is an unapologetic call to self-freedom. It’s about turning rejection (from others and yourself) into a roadmap to self-love. It’s a guide to setting boundaries and fostering self-growth. And most importantly, it’s an affirmation that we are enough exactly as we are.
RELATIONSHIP GUIDES
“You can trust him.” –Tabitha Brown
IT AIN’T EASY GETTING YOUR SHIT TOGETHER
THIS BOOK IS THE SOLUTION
If any of this sounds like you, it’s best you start reading this book now!
- You seek more fulfilling relationships and dating experiences
- You’re ready to shake off shame about past mistakes and step into your power
- You want to say “see ya” to the toxic people and emotional gut-punchers
- Your “people pleaser” days are over and it’s time to learn how to effectively say no
He knows you need help—whether financial, spiritual, or in a relationship—because you never learned how to properly handle the hurt and anger you’ve experienced in the past, it has become the emotional trash in the way of being your best self. Don’t nobody want that!
Whether it’s fixing your family issues, situationships, money, or frenemies, MJ offers sage advice about how to stop blocking yourself from bigger and better things.
This isn’t your gentle guide on breathing or journaling. MJ serves up no holds barred advice on how to navigate your emotions that will help you disrupt cycles of trauma, create boundaries, and transform into a goddess of emotional wholeness. Get the F*ck Out Your Own Way will help you learn how to make better choices and decisions. It will set you on the right path for a happier emotional life once and for all.
Rolling Out's Must-Read Books for June by Black Authors
LGBTQ+ influencers Terrell and Jarius open up about their joyful love story and family life—and the challenges they've encountered along the way—in this honest, powerful guidebook.
Terrell and Jarius Joseph—a picturesque home, adorable children, family businesses, and millions of fans online. Love Out Loud is Terrell and Jarius’s guide to help couples of all kinds sustain their relationship and nurture their nontraditional family. With the Josephs’s essential roadmap you’ll learn how to:
- Define your needs as individuals and as a couple to build the life of your dreams
- Recognize growing pains before they hurt your marriage
- Break tradition to discover your unique parenting style
- Build a circle of support for your children
More people than ever are receptive to the pleasures of anal, but compassionate, medically comprehensive information can be challenging to come by. No more!
Whether you’re a top or a bottom, gay or straight, experienced or just getting ready to stretch your, um, imagination—Butt Seriously gives you the medically accurate, scientifically-backed information you need to keep your peach ready to take you to the height of sexual bliss.
This first-of-a-kind guide will teach you how to keep your anus healthy, maximize your pleasure, and bust the myths holding us back around anal sex. Among other takeaways, Butt Seriously will:
- Offer comprehensive, medically-accurate sex-ed for anyone who engages, regardless of gender and sexual identity
- Reveal why a prostate orgasm is the best orgasm
- Show women how butt play allows access to their other erogenous spot (the A-zone)
- Recommend the best techniques, toys, lubes, and other products
- Teach readers how to poop, sit, eat, exercise to support their pelvic floor and heal common challenges such as hemorrhoids and fissures.
MEMOIRS
AN AMAZON BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH PICK
By turns harrowing and hopeful, MAKE IT COUNT is the inspiring story of the first openly transgender woman to win a NCAA title, following her traditional upbringing in Jamaica, her fight to become a US citizen, and her efforts to achieve her Olympic dreams.
CeCé Telfer is a warrior. The first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA championship, she has contended with transphobia on and off the track since childhood. Now, she stands at the crossroads of a national and international conversation about equity in sports, forced to advocate for her personhood and rights at every turn. After spending years training for the 2024 Olympics, Telfer has been sidelined and silenced more times than she can count. But she’s never been good at taking no for an answer.
MAKE IT COUNT is Telfer’s raw and inspiring story. From coming of age in Jamaica, where she grew up hearing a constant barrage of slurs, to beginning her new life in Toronto and then New Hampshire, where she realized what running could offer her, to living in the backseat of her car while searching for a coach, to Mexico, where she trained for the US Trials, this book follows the arc of Telfer’s Olympic dream.
This is the story of running on what feels like the edge of a knife, of what it means to compete when you’re not just an athlete but treated like a walking controversy. But it’s also the story of resilience and athleticism, of a runner who found a clarity in her sport that otherwise eluded her—a sense of being simply alive on this earth, a human moving through space. Finally, herself.
A memoir penned with one good finger, Ndopu writes about being profoundly disabled and profoundly successful.
Global humanitarian Eddie Ndopu was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a rare degenerative motor neuron disease affecting his mobility. He was told that he wouldn’t live beyond age five and yet, Ndopu thrived. He grew up loving pop music, lip syncing the latest hits, and watching The Bold and the Beautiful for the haute couture, and was the only wheelchair user at his school, where he flourished academically. By his late teens, he had become a sought after speaker, travelling the world to address audiences about disability justice.
Ndopu was ecstatic when he was later accepted on a full scholarship into one of the world's most prestigious schools, Oxford University. But he soon learns that it's not just the medical community he must thwart— it's the educational one too.
In Sipping Dom Pérignon Through a Straw, we follow Ndopu, sporting his oversized, bejewelled sunglasses, as he scales the mountain of success, only to find exclusion, discrimination, and neglect waiting for him on the other side. Like every other student, Ndopu tries to keep up appearances—dashing to and from his public policy lectures before meeting for cocktails with his squad, all while campaigning to become student body president. Privately, however, Ndopu faces obstacles that are all too familiar to people with disabilities, yet remain unnoticed by most people. With the revolving door of care aides, hefty bills, and a lack of support from the university, Ndopu feels alienated by his environment. As he soars professionally, sipping champagne with world leaders, he continues to feel the loneliness and pressure of being the only one in the room. Determined to carve out his place in the world, he must challenge bias at the highest echelons of power and prestige. But as the pressure mounts, Ndopu must find his stride or collapse under the crushing weight of ableism.
Written with his one good finger, this evocative, searing, and vulnerable prose will leave you spellbound by Ndopu’s remarkable journey to reach beyond ableism, reminding us of our own capacity for resilience.
REALITY TV
Four-time Emmy-winning series RuPaul's Drag Race never set out to find mainstream success. Over thirteen years and about 160 drag queen contestants later, everything from its language and style has seeped into the culture, cementing its place in herstory, one tuck at a time. With viewers from all walks of life, Drag Race has become a worldwide phenomenon.
Told over its first ten years, And Don't F*ck It Up tells a cultural history through the stories of the people who lived it: the creators of the show, the contestants, the crew, the judges, and even some key (famous) fans. It traces the evolution of the show—and its queens—through its first 14 gag-worthy seasons, serving up all kinds of behind-the-scenes realness. With a history as shady as it is inspiring, the once-in-a-generation success story of RuPaul’s Drag Race is explored here as never before, in intimate, exuberant, unfettered detail.
HISTORICAL FICTION
Fin Tighe is clinging to respectability by his nail-bitten fingers. He may be the illegitimate son of an English earl, but he hasn’t spoken to his father in a decade, and his engineer’s salary is barely enough to support him and his cousin Aurelie. A dancer in the corps de ballet, Aurelie is at constant risk from groping, leering men who assume any dancer is a prostitute in training. And Fin’s evenings spent in the clandestine gay community may be legal through a loophole in the Napoleonic Code, but they leave him vulnerable.
So, when Fin’s employer, Gustave Eiffel, announces that he needs additional investors to pay for his pet project, a 300-meter tower that will dominate the city’s skyline, Fin jumps at the chance. If he raises enough money, the commission will earn him a fortune, and hopefully, some protection.
Capricious stranger Gilbert Duhais appears to be a boon from the gods. Gilbert is handsome, wealthy, connected, and somehow privy to Fin’s background. Gilbert persuades Fin to masquerade as his father’s heir—which couldn’t be further from the truth—and introduces him to every nouveau riche speculator in the city. Each provocative interaction heightens Fin's risk of exposure. But also brings Fin closer to his dream of financial security.
When a dear friend of Fin’s is murdered above a clandestine gay club, the stakes rise even higher. Fin must untangle the disparate threads of his past—and his current romantic gamble—before they become his noose.
COMING SOON
A suspenseful dark comedy about a struggling writer who wakes up to find his date from the night before dead—and must then decide how far he’s willing to go to spin the event into his next big book: “Prepare to gasp out loud, cringe, cackle, and cry” (Jesse Q. Sutanto, bestselling author of Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers).
A few years ago, David Alvarez had it all: a six-figure book deal, a loving boyfriend, and an exciting writing career. His debut novel was a resounding success, which made the publication of his second book—a total flop—all the more devastating. Now, David is single, lonely, and desperately trying to come up with the next great idea for his third manuscript, one that will redeem him in the eyes of readers, reviewers, the entire publishing world…and maybe even his ex-boyfriend.
But good ideas are hard to come by, and the mounting pressure of a near-empty bank account isn’t helping. When David connects with a sexy stranger on a dating app, he figures a wild night out in New York City may be just what he needs to find inspiration. Lucky for him, his date turns out to be handsome, confident, and wealthy, not to mention the perfect distraction from yet another evening staring at a blank screen.
After one of the best nights of his life, David wakes up hungover but giddy—only to find prince charming dead next to him in bed. Horrified, completely confused, and suddenly faced with the implausible-but-somehow-plausible idea that he may have actually killed his date, David calls the only person he can trust in a moment of crisis: his literary agent, Stacey.
Together, David and Stacey must untangle the events of the previous night, cover their tracks, and spin the entire misadventure into David’s career-defining novel—if only they can figure out what to do with the body first.
Angelina Sicco was born and raised in Cadenze, an ugly little mountain town that's dead most of the year. Determined to be content with her lot in life, she walks her mongrel dog, attends her brother's heavy metal concerts, holds court in the local dive bar, and does everything she can to bait hot, queer women to her sleepy, conservative hometown. But on the night of a family party, Angelina runs into the sternly handsome Jagvi, who's back in town for a spell.
Upon Jagvi's arrival, an ancient evil is awakened, and a monstrous force infiltrates Angelina's life. Only Jagvi’s touch repels it — the final trigger for a secret, passionate romance. This monster feasts on all the messy bits that naje up a life, and Angelina Sicco’s life has never looked tastier. What will Angelina do to protect her future–and at what cost?
Almost every Latina has heard the phrase calladita te ves más bonita—you look most beautiful when you are silent. It’s a message rooted in machismo passed from generation to generation, and one that poet and Latine therapist, Kim Guerra, grew up on.
In Badass Bonita, Guerra tells a story of coming into her own power, and guides readers through the process of finding their own. Rejecting what she was taught as a girl, she learned to use her voice and the more she listened to that inner niña, the more she unearthed her inner guerrera. Vowing never to be calladita again, she now teaches Latine women to find their voices, healing the stories and emotional wounds that have kept them silent.
Tackling tough conversations around machismo, mental health, trauma, and intersectional identities, Badass Bonita is a guide that will help readers:
- Understand underlying sources of wounds and trauma,
- Shift from self‑silencing and into revolutionary self‑love,
- Build confidence and bring positive change to relationships, family and community.
Lyrical and accessible, written in Kim’s signature poetic, Spanglish style, Badass Bonita is perfect for readers of My Grandmother’s Hands and Este dolor no es mío, — for mothers, daughters, therapists, and mujeres poderosas everywhere ready find their wings.