In the midst of Riese and I working on this list of upcoming LGBTQ+ books for June 2025, news began circulating that the Chicago Sun-Times and other newspapers had published a syndicated summer books reading list that was generated by AI. While the list was full of real authors, the books attributed to them were largely made up. Only five in 15 titles were real, the rest were cobbled together imagined descriptions pulled from the dregs of AI slop.
Riese and I spend so many hours on these monthly books previews for Autostraddle. Could AI do it faster? Sure. They could do something faster, but it wouldn’t be the list you see here. AI misses books, labels things gay that aren’t gay, makes some up and could even pull transphobic books if they had the right keywords attached to them. (Out of curiosity, Riese asked Gemini to pull release dates for a list of 2025 LGBTQ+ books from Goodreads. It got about half of them wrong.) Regardless of quality or accuracy alone, the list would be soulless. Two real queer humans curate this list for you every month, and we do so with the deep knowledge of the queer publishing landscape and its history as well as personal relationships. AI only has slop and keywords.
One frustrating response to the AI reading list debacle I saw made fun of the writer behind it for using a cheap trick to complete such an easy task. Writing books previews like this is not easy. Devaluing this work is not the answer. Our LGBTQ-specific lists, which we now do monthly instead of seasonally, require a tremendous amount of work. Riese uses all resources available to her to try to find the titles, authors, and pub dates for upcoming queer books. This requires referencing a compendium of various sources, from Amazon’s “Coming Soon” sub-section to publisher catalogues to PR emails we’ve been sent to lists on other websites like Book Riot, Literary Hub, The Lesbrary, Electric Literature, and LGBTQ Reads. She also pulls the Bookshop.org links for all the titles.
Riese then passes that list off to me, and I essentially check her work, using all the resources available to me to see if anything has been missed. Literally always, I make additions when we get to this point, which is not a knock on Riese’s research abilities, which are pristine. It just really is a two-person job. There are plenty of queer books, especially in the literary fiction realm, that don’t necessarily use words like “queer” or “lesbian” or “gay” in their description copy, so it takes a closer look or personal knowledge of the author to determine that queerness. We are bibliophiles. We recognize the names of queer authors or celebrities, we recognize popular series, we recognize iconography or visual cues invisible to AI.
It’s not just about research, it’s the realities of our lives as queer writers and editors, socializing with and working with other queer writers. I have so many personal connections with authors that enable me to add more titles to the list that might be more underground. I always add some harder-to-discover poetry collections. I go to dozens of literary events a year. My wife is a queer novelist who gets a constant stream of galleys sent to our home. AI famously does not have a literary wife.
I then write up descriptions for each book, usually only having been able to actually read a handful of them ahead of time and not wanting to just echo the publisher description word for word. So I’ll pull out the parts of the book’s premise I think will be most interesting to our readers specifically, usually the parts most interesting to me, too.
By this point, I have no idea how many hours Riese and I have put into this — maybe three days, if I had to guess — but after finishing those descriptions, double checking all the pub dates and name spellings, and pulling all the images and writing alt text descriptions for them, the list starts to look like a list. We then work with our coworker Motti to figure out how to best social it. At no point does AI touch the process, because it would suck the life out of it.
The fact that this list is painstakingly researched and written by two queer human readers is part of its value. You can trust us as experts. We’ve seen over and over again how AI is not to be trusted. But you can also see our humanity come through in this list, in our nuances, in the authentic queer perspectives we bring to the titles we choose to champion.
You should also read Maris Kreizman on this issue. She writes:
There are so many factors to consider when putting together a list. I not only want to feature the best books, but I also want diversity of topic, of tone, of author background, of publisher size, of general popularity. I use my expertise to weigh my choices and game them out to create a balanced list that reflects both my personal taste plus the voice of the outlet I’m writing for. I would wager to say that ChatGPT can’t do this, and now it’s just a matter of convincing the world, including media bosses and readers alike, that there is value in what I do.
I couldn’t agree more. June is an especially busy time for queer books, because publishers like to capitalize on Pride month roundups and bookstore display tables. The density of June’s LGBTQ+ book lineup requires even greater attention to the painstaking details, research, and nuances of this work we do, making sure we’re not just championing the titles on every Pride month upcoming book list but also the ones at the margins. We don’t get every queer book coming out on here, and we don’t pretend to, but we do try to offer a wide range of genres, identities, tones, and themes so that there’s a little bit of something for everyone. It’s a labor of love.
And with all that, I’d like to remind you that we can’t do what we do without the support of our members. For AF+ members, Autostraddle x For Them has rolled out some new hats specifically for queer book lovers, include the Read a Fucking Book hat which nods to Autostraddle’s long legacy of covering queer books (before it was cool to do so) and the Banned Books Reader hat, so you can wear your support for banned books on your head and also know you’ve put $$$ into the queer media committed to continuing to cover those banned books. Take a look:
Autostraddle’s Top Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books for June 2025
Atmosphere: A Love Story, by Taylor Jenkins Reid (June 3, Romance, Thriller)
Huge news for The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo heads! Taylor Jenkins Reid, who recently came out as bisexual, has penned a thrilling new lesbian love story set in the 1980s and involving a SPACE MISSION. The romance that unfolds is between one woman in space and one on the ground, which as Riese has pointed out is a bizarrely popular setup, as seen on Netflix’s space seriesAwayand in Apple TV’sInvasion. Atmosphere has indeed also already been optioned for film.
Be Gay Do Crime by multiple authors, edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley (June 3, Short Fiction)
I, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, have a short story in this anthology of nasty stories in which gays are behaving very badly. I feel so lucky to share the pages of this book with so many queer geniuses, like Alissa Nutting, Temim Fruchter, Myriam Lacroix, Anna Dorn, Mac Crane, SJ Sindu, Priya Guns, and so many more! You can read Fruchter’s story from the anthology on Autostraddle. And if you want to read more about some of the stories contained within as well as learn those stories’ origins, take a look at the Inside the Anthology piece published by LGBTQ Reads, which includes a description and artist statement about my story “Of Course, A Curse”, about a woman who destroys her girlfriend’s favorite hat after becoming convinced it’s cursed.
The Can-Do Mindset, by Candace Parker (June 3, Memoir)
The one and only WNBA superstar Candace Parker has penned a memoir that doubles as a self-help book hinging on her daily mantra of “Can-Do” (which was also her nickname as a child). In the book, she uses her personal stories both on and off the court to illuminate how this mindset has helped her achieve her purpose.
The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex, by Melissa Febos (June 3, Memoir)
I have been so excited for this book ever since I heard Melissa read from it a couple summers ago. I mean, look, I’m a Febos completist. I read everything she writes, and Abandon Me is one of my favorite books of all time. Well, The Dry Season, which I’ve already had the chance to devour, is a perfect companion to that previous Febos work. It details the author’s one year commitment to herself to remain celibate, an exercise not necessarily in restraint but in self-discovery and excavation. I am sure I will have more to write about this book very soon. For now, you can get a taste in the essay excerpted in the New York Times (which is actually the portion of the book I heard Melissa read from that summer) as well as in the NYT profile of her ahead of the book’s release.
A Language of Limbs, by Dylin Hardcastle (June 3, Literary Fiction)
I’m in the midst of reading this formally inventive novel, which begins with a seismic event in Newcastle, Australia in 1972 when a teenage girl is caught kissing her neighbor in a forbidden act of queer love. The narrative then splits into two possible stories —one where her family kicks her out of the house and she ends up at a queer communal home in Sydney, and another in which she represses her queerness and feelings for her neighbor friend and makes her way to a university in Sydney to study English literature. It’s like gay, literary Sliding Doors. And its told in gorgeous, often fragmentary prose.
Songs of No Provenance, by Lydi Conklin (June 3, Literary Fiction)
From the author of the excellent queer story collection Rainbow Rainbow comes their debut novel, which follows indie folk singer Joan Vole as she flees her life in New York after a scandalous performance on stage and ends up teaching at a writing camp for teens in rural Virginia. There, she encounters her toxic relationship to making art, a complicated history with a friend/mentee, and a burgeoning closeness with a nonbinary artist also on the camp staff. Complicated mentorship and artistic turmoil? Yeah, I will be reading this one ASAP. We also recently published a gorgeous essay written by Lydi ahead of the book’s release.
So Gay For You: Friendship, Found Family, and the Show That Started It All, by Kate Moennig and Leisha Hailey (June 3, Memoir)
You know ’em, you love ’em, and they’ve written a book for you, homos! This joint memoir tracks the trailblazing success of The L Word and how the show and its fans forever changed the careers and lives of real-life friends Kate Moennig and Leisha Hailey. It includes all sorts of never-before-told/seen stories and photos. Between this and the Jennifer Beals L Word photography book, fans of the original series are well fed this year!
Backlight, by Pirkko Saisio, translated by Mia Spangenberg (June 10 Literary Fiction)
This breakout Finnish queer novel has been translated by Mia Spangenberg and tells the story of young Pirkko from teenagehood through her young adult life working at a Swiss orphanage in the summer of 1968. It’s a story about the writing life, language, and suppressed queerness, political and personal narratives all tangled up together.
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, by V.E. Schwab (June 10, Historical Fantasy)
A genre-bending work of fantasy and horror, this new title from V.E. Schwab tells three interlocking stories: one of hunger, set in 1532 in Santo Domingo de la Calzada; one of love, set in 1827 in London; and one of rage set in 2019 in Boston. The throughline? Vampires, my dear! The book received a starred Kirkus review, which describes the book as “a beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.”
Girls Girls Girls, by Shoshana von Blanckensee (June 17, Literary Fiction)
In the summer of 1996, best friends and secret girlfriends Hannah and Sam drive across the country from Long Beach, New York to San Francisco to get away from their hometown and out from under the thumb of Hannah’s devout Orthodox Jewish mother. In San Francisco, they find queer community for the first time and can be out together as a couple. They also start stripping together at The Chez Paree, adding another secret to the list of things Hannah’s keeping from her family.
Terror Counter, by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi (June 24, Poetry)
From a queer Palestinian performance artist comes this debut poetry collection of Palestinian survival, imagination, preservation, and liberation. The collection experiments with various forms, including the invented visual form of the Gazan Tunnel. You can read excerpted poems online.
And now enjoy the rest of our most anticipated LGBTQ books for June 2025!
