Books like Lesbians at midlife by Barbara Sang

Cameron Post, a gay teen from a conservative Montana ranch town, is sent to a conversion therapy center after her family demands she change her sexual orientation.

A Black woman who escapes enslavement becomes a vampire, weaving a multigenerational tale from the 1850s to the 2020s that explores identity, freedom, and the queer vampire myth.

Lilliet Berne, a celebrated Paris Opera soprano, discovers the libretto for her dream role mirrors a buried betrayal from her past. As she probes memories, she confronts secrets from her orphanhood to her rise in Second Empire Paris.

A practical handbook guiding men through the transition into gay identity and community life in the United States.

Queering the Color Line transforms previous understandings of how homosexuality was “invented” as a category of identity in the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing a range of sources, including sexology texts, early cinema, and African American literature, Siobhan B. Somerville argues that the emerging understanding of homosexuality depended on the context of the black/white “color line,” the dominant system of racial distinction during this period. This book thus critiques and revises tendencies to treat race and sexuality as unrelated categories of analysis, showing instead that race has historically been central to the cultural production of homosexuality. At about the same time that the 1896 Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision hardened the racialized boundary between black and white, prominent trials were drawing the public’s attention to emerging categories of sexual identity. Somerville argues that these concurrent developments were not merely parallel but in fact inextricably interrelated and that the discourses of racial and sexual “deviance” were used to reinforce each other’s terms. She provides original readings of such texts as Havelock Ellis’s late nineteenth-century work on “sexual inversion,” the 1914 film A Florida Enchantment, the novels of Pauline E. Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, and Jean Toomer’s fiction and autobiographical writings, including Cane. Through her analyses of these texts and her archival research, Somerville contributes to the growing body of scholarship that focuses on discovering the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality. Queering the Color Line will have broad appeal across disciplines including African American studies, gay and lesbian studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, cinema studies, and gender studies.

There is more to identity than identifying with one’s culture or standing solidly against it. José Esteban Muñoz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture—not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Muñoz calls this process “disidentification,” and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism.

An anthology of authentic lesbian voices from Britain, drawn from the National Lesbian and Gay Survey, exploring relationships, coming‑out experiences, and social issues with humor and candor.

A celebrated anthology edited by Naomi Holoch and Joan Nestle, the Vintage Book of International Lesbian Fiction assembles short stories from 27 countries, offering a vivid, global portrait of lesbian experience across diverse cultures.