Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly bookish meme created by Rukky @ Eternity Books and co-hosted by Aria @ Book Nook Bits and Dini @ Dinipandareads! It’s just moved to a lower-frequency posting schedule which you can check out here.

June’s prompt is as follows:

Happy Pride! ️‍ What are your favorite books with LGBTQIA+ representation? Are there authors or series you always recommend? What books are on your Pride Month TBR? What do you think makes representation feel genuine?

I have to say that I don’t really think of what I read in terms of representing minority groups at the moment: not that it doesn’t, because I am interested in books that are by and about and for groups that are marginalised in society on all kinds of different axes. It’s mostly because I pulled back on the number of obsessive stats about books I was keeping for my mental health, and also because I got somewhat uncomfortable about some of the associated baggage like “own voices”, which became an intense pressure on people to come out and share personal details. I’m thinking about e.g. the situation where Becky Albertalli was pressured to come out because of Leah on the Offbeat.

Given my swing to reading more non-fiction as well, I kind of naturally fell out of the habit of thinking about books this way, so despite the fact that I read plenty of queer fiction, I didn’t have an immediate answer here, but let’s see if I can do better!

At the moment, a lot of the queer stuff I’m reading is danmei, which I wouldn’t necessarily refer to as being good LGBTQIA+ representation in general. I think it does things which are radical, particularly in context, where queerness is common and people are accepting… but there are also a lot of issues baked in, like gong and shou dynamics, and the fact that the shou sometimes ends up with a rather feminised role (sometimes down to being referred to as “wife”), authors insist that the dynamic is immutable, etc. Still, I don’t think ruling danmei out entirely as queer fiction is fair, and I’ve been deeply enjoying Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s work, Priest’s Guardian, Xue Shan Fei Hu’s The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish, and currently Feng Yu Nie’s Mistakenly Saving the Villain.

Most of the other queer books I read are sci-fi or fantasy, where I really enjoy hopepunk takes like Becky Chambers’ A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and sequels, where homophobia just isn’t a thing, or Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice et al, which play with gender and relationships — everyone in the Radch is referred to as “she”, no matter what. Malka Older’s murder mysteries set on Jupiter are a lot of fun too, with a gender-swapped Sherlock and Watson duo who are, yes, in a romantic relationship as well…

There’s so much I’m missing here: I love K.A. Doore‘s roundups of each year’s queer SFF for this, which often help me find books I’d somehow never come across at all that sound amazing. I highly recommend keeping an eye out for these.

When it comes to romance, of course there’s plenty out there: favourites of mine include Jordan L. Hawk (usually his work has SF/F and horror crossover), KJ Charles (sometimes has fantasy elements too) and Cat Sebastian.

In my non-fiction reading, fear not, there have been some queer books there too! Most recently Anthony Delaney’s Queer Georgians, which uncovers various stories of queer people in the Georgian period in the UK. I have Will Tosh’s Straight Acting on the go, which is about Shakespeare’s sexuality and all the debate there is around that, and I’m quite looking forward to picking up a copy of A.J. West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed the World when I can, especially after reading Jane Cholmeley’s A Bookshop of One’s Own.

As you may have guessed from the preamble above, I don’t have a Pride-specific reading list. I’m queer all year round, and so is my reading.

I’d say that’s also the key to what makes representation feel genuine: you can’t just be checking a box. The queerness has to be lived in, baked into your story (even if that’s in small ways) in the way it’s baked into the world. If you can cut it out by simply swapping the pronouns of your side character’s partner and omitting to mention the pride flag in the coffee shop window… well.