Gaye Magazine Celebrates Black Queer Authors for National Book Month

This National Book Month, Gaye Magazine puts Black queer stories where they belong, front and center.

This October, as National Book Month celebrates reading and literature, Gaye Magazine is showing love to Black queer authors with books that invite us to see ourselves beyond somebody else’s limitations. From complicated romances to histories, novels, and poetry, this reading list celebrates lives that cannot be reduced to a single narrative.

Here are some of our favorite reads:

The Disappearers by: Marlon James

In The Disappearers, Booker Prize-winning Jamaican novelist Marlon James returns to the charged terrain of home, history, masculinity, and survival. Set amid Jamaica’s violently homophobic culture of the 1980s and ’90s, the novel follows gay men trying to find pleasure, safety, community, and room to breathe in a world determined to render them invisible.

James writes with the scale, heat, humor, and stylistic daring that have made his work essential, but the emotional register here is especially piercing: a reckoning with what it means to be erased, and what it takes to leave a record of your life behind. For readers drawn to ambitious queer fiction that refuses to separate beauty from brutality, this is a major literary event. Purchase The Disappearers.

There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood by: Rasheed Newson

Rasheed Newson’s There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood is a lush, incisive historical mystery set in an entertainment industry built on fantasy, hierarchy, and silence. When a backlot fixer begins investigating the death of Xavier C. Barlow, a closeted Black actor whose talent and image made him a studio asset, the novel follows a trail through the compromises and hidden lives of Golden Age Hollywood.

Newson, whose earlier work has also explored the complicated intersections of Black life, queerness, politics, and history, understands that the past is never merely past. With its noir-inflected glamour and sharp awareness of who gets protected, exploited, or forgotten, this is a page-turner with real moral voltage. Purchase There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood.

They All Fall in Love at the End by: Haili Blassingame

Haili Blassingame’s debut novel, They All Fall in Love at the End, takes the familiar language of romantic confusion and gives it a fresh, emotionally intelligent Black queer center. Cat St. Clair, a young Black writer in an open relationship, believes she is ready for a new chapter, until love opens into more complicated configurations than she ever planned for.

As attraction, jealousy, friendship, writing, and self-definition collide, Blassingame makes space for desire that is neither neat nor easily resolved. The result is a smart, warm, and genuinely messy contemporary romance about choosing honesty over performance, even when the truth threatens to rearrange every relationship in the room. Purchase They All Fall in Love at the End.

A Black Queer History of the United States by: C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost

A Black Queer History of the United States is a bracing and indispensable intervention from scholars C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bost. Rather than treating Black queer and trans people as marginal to the nation’s story, the book places their lives, thought, resistance, artistry, and community-making at the very center of it.

Moving across eras, from slavery and Reconstruction through the civil-rights movement, AIDS activism, and contemporary struggles for liberation, Snorton and Bost reveal how race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and state violence have always been connected. It is a book for readers who want more than representation; it offers a fuller framework for understanding U.S. history itself, and the Black queer people who have continually expanded its possibilities. Purchase A Black Queer History of the United States

Soulmate as a Verb by:  Kelsey L. Smoot

Kelsey L. Smoot’s Soulmate as a Verb is a collection that makes intimacy feel both elemental and politically urgent. Through poems attentive to Black trans embodiment, erotic possibility, grief, friendship, faith, harm, and repair, Smoot refuses the fantasy that love is something one simply finds. Instead, the book asks what it means to practice devotion, to oneself, to another person, to a future that can feel dangerously uncertain.

The poems move with lyric clarity and emotional precision, honoring the pleasures of connection without turning away from the vulnerability it requires. Soulmate as a Verb is for readers who understand that survival can be sensual, that tenderness is labor, and that Black trans life contains multitudes beyond the narrow frames often imposed upon it. Purchase Soulmate as a Verb.

Promise/Threat by: Jonah Mixon-Webster

With Promise/Threat, Jonah Mixon-Webster returns to the page with poems that are restless, surreal, and unafraid of the nation’s deepest shadows. The collection moves through violence, desire, memory, dreams, family, Black interiority, and the shifting aftermath of American harm, often locating revelation in the fractured and strange. Mixon-Webster’s work has long been distinguished by its musical intelligence and formal risk-taking; here, he builds a world where the beautiful and the terrifying arrive in the same breath. The title itself captures the book’s central tension that every promise contains the possibility of betrayal, but every threat may also produce a language for endurance. This is poetry that does not offer easy consolation, it offers confrontation, witness, and the possibility of becoming otherwise. Purchase Promise/Threat.

Forever for the Culture by: Steven Underwood

In Forever for the Culture: Notes from the New Black Digital Arts Renaissance, Steven Underwood gives Black digital artists the critical attention their influence has long deserved. The book examines how Black makers have shaped contemporary culture across social media, visual art, music, humor, fashion, design, dance, and the viral ecosystems that now determine what the world sees and shares.

Underwood treats the digital not as a weightless space of trends, but as a site of authorship, labor, community, innovation, and intellectual property, one where Black creativity is often celebrated while its creators remain under-credited or uncompensated. Looking to both history and the present moment, Forever for the Culture is an essential meditation on who builds culture online, who profits from it, and what it means to preserve Black creative genius in real time. Purchase Forever for the Culture.

Son, Rise, Son, Shine: A Journey of Faith, Family, and Finding the Light Within by Gerald Garth

Gerald Garth’s Son, Rise, Son, Shine is an intimate memoir about faith, family, and becoming whole when the world asks you to divide yourself. Born in Baton Rouge and raised within the expectations of a Southern Black family and church, Garth traces a life shaped by his grandmother’s love, religious doctrine, sexuality, heartbreak, and the search for purpose. Along the way, he confronts the belief that spiritual devotion and an authentic life must come at each other’s expense.

Its central concern is reconciliation, making room for the parts of oneself that others insist cannot coexist. For readers drawn to stories of Black queer becoming, this is a personal account of moving beyond shame without abandoning faith, and discovering that the light one seeks can also be the light one carries. Purchase Son, Rise, Son, Shine.

Letters to My Dad: A Journey of Healing and Empowerment by R. Wayne Woodson

In Letters to My Dad: A Journey of Healing and Empowerment, R. Wayne Woodson turns the conversations his father left unfinished into a deeply personal collection of letters. Writing toward someone he can no longer reach, Woodson explores grief, identity, love, spirituality, illness, and resilience, making space for both the words he wishes he had spoken and the person he is still learning to become.

The letter form gives these reflections an intimate center: a son continuing to address his father while finding language for his own survival. Moving from pain toward purpose and from silence toward a reclaimed voice, the book presents healing as an ongoing relationship with memory, self-understanding, and ancestral guidance. For readers carrying their own unsaid words, it invites them to consider what writing can preserve, release, and make possible. Purchase Letters to My Dad: A Journey of Healing and Empowerment.

Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn

Nicole Dennis-Benn is a Jamaican-born, out lesbian author, and this debut is an adult contemporary literary novel. It’s set in and around Montego Bay, Jamaica; where a luxury resort provides jobs for a working-class community while a planned expansion threatens to swallow their homes. The story follows several women in one family and their neighborhood as they deal with colorism, classism, homophobia, and the pressure to survive by any means.

Dennis-Benn writes in a voice that carries Jamaican speech and rhythm, which gives the book a strong sense of place. It won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book. It was also a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was long-listed for the Dublin Literary Award.

Purchase Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn here. 

Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera

Gabby Rivera is a queer Puerto Rican author from the Bronx, and this semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel is contemporary YA, though Rivera has described it as slightly older, new-adult territory. Juliet comes out to her family in a messy, painful way and then heads to Portland, Oregon, for an internship with a famous feminist author she idolizes. Over the course of the summer, she realizes that author’s feminism leaves out women of color, and the book follows her as she finds her own voice and a community of queer people of color.

The story also takes her to Miami, which gives her a very different view of what being queer and Puerto Rican can look like. It began with a small press in 2016 before Penguin Random House reissued it in 2019, and the American Library Association selected it for its Rainbow and Over the Rainbow lists in 2017. It has since been adapted as a graphic novel, and Rivera went on to write Marvel’s America comics.

Purchase Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera here. 

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender

Kacen Callender is a Black, queer, trans author from St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and this is a contemporary YA novel. Felix is a Black, queer, trans teenager who has never been in love and worries that he’ll never get a story with a happy ending. After someone posts his deadname and old photos at his prestigious arts school, he hatches a plan for revenge that spirals into a tangled love triangle.

Along the way, the novel digs into identity, self-worth, and what it means to deserve love, and it’s honest about Felix’s mistakes as well as his pain. It’s an emotional but ultimately hopeful read. Callender is a Stonewall and Lambda Literary Award–winning author.

Purchase Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender here.

D’Vaughn & Kris Plan a Wedding by Chencia C. Higgins

Chencia C. Higgins is a Black author from Texas, and this is an adult contemporary romantic comedy with a fake-relationship, reality-TV setup. D’Vaughn, a Black, plus-sized, femme guidance counselor who isn’t out to her religious mother, signs up for the show Instant I Do as a way to finally come out. Kris, an Afro-Latina stud and social media influencer, is paired with her and wants to find real love, so the pair have six weeks to convince their families they’re getting legitimately getting married. Reviewers praise how warmly the families are written, the bilingual banter in Kris’s family, and the fact that the couple communicates well instead of relying on miscommunication drama. It’s a lighter, low-angst read with some spice. It was a New York Times best romance of 2022, and the New York Times Book Review called it “Triumphantly Black, queer and contemporary.”

Purchase D’Vaughn & Kris Plan a Wedding by Chencia C. Higgins here. 

I’m Clockable by Monroe Alise

D.C. native Monroe Alise takes the phrase behind her viral I’m Clockable platform into a memoir about the years she spent learning how to make herself easier for other people to accept. Before Alise landed roles on Starz’s “P-Valley” and Showtime’s “The Chi,” she learned to watch how she spoke and limit what she shared to avoid scrutiny. In I’m Clockable, Alise follows that habit from childhood into adulthood and her acting career. She takes the title from moments when strangers identify her as trans before she introduces herself, then examines how that scrutiny shapes what she shares and where she feels safe. Alise also writes about accountability and how personal wounds can explain harmful choices without excusing the harm they cause.

Purchase I’m Clockable