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NATIONAL BESTSELLER - "This inventive, boundary-pushing follow-up to Detransition, Baby . . . [takes] on gender, transness and lives on the margins in all of their gorgeously complicated glory."--People

"Hot, heartbreaking, and thrillingly victorious."--Miranda July, New York Times bestselling author of All Fours

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - ONE OF VULTURE'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR - A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Electric Lit, them, Chicago Public Library

In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters's keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.

In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

Three startling stories surround Stag Dance "Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones" imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In "The Chaser," a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, "The Masker," a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.

Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.

Cat Sebastian’s long-awaited foray into contemporary romance! A witty, emotional, and deliciously slow burn enemies-to-lovers romance between two costars on a popular sci-fi television series.

Simon and Charlie, actors on a long-running sci-fi show, can’t stand one another. Charlie is impetuous, outgoing, and basically feral, and Simon thinks he should have stayed in reality television where he belongs. They’ve spent the better part of a decade quarreling over the spotlight and pretty much everything else, and everybody in the industry knows it. Now that Simon’s contract is finally done, he can move to New York, start fresh with work he actually likes, and get away from Charlie.

Simon’s only problem is that people might assume he’s been pushed off the show due to being impossible to work with. And he is kind of difficult to work with. He doesn’t get along with people—unlike Charlie, who somehow tricked everyone on the show into adoring him despite some outrageously bad on-set behavior during the show’s first season. Simon would rather never have to see Charlie again, but reluctantly agrees to stage a very public friendship during the short time before he moves. When Charlie has to leave town to deal with a family emergency, this means Simon comes along. Their road trip brings Simon to places he would never have willingly chosen to visit—and he finds he’s actually not having a terrible time.

The more he gets to know Charlie, the more Simon suspects he’s underestimated his former coworker. Simon also realizes that after seven years, Charlie might know him better than anyone ever has. Even stranger, Charlie seems to be starting to actually like him, despite knowing him so well. Still, Simon is about to move three thousand miles away, so whatever’s starting between him and Charlie can’t really amount to anything... right?

Tropes:

Enemies to Lovers

Opposites Attract

Forced Proximity

Slow Burn

I was a quiet boy with loud dreams. But dreams don't grow well in a house full of fear.

As a gay child in a home where silence meant survival, I learned to vanish. For years, I kept my voice hidden - not just from the world, but from myself.

Then came music. Drag. Glitter. Applause.

And, for a time, freedom. Onstage, I could be someone bigger than the pain. For twenty years, I sang and performed my way into pieces of joy I never thought I'd know.

But trauma has its own rhythm.

In the quiet of the covid years, the past came roaring back. I lost my voice again - this time to adulthood pain, depression, and the unhealed echoes of my childhood. Stillness and Survival is a story of silence and expression, queerness and survival, collapse and return. It is about finding your own voice - again and again - even when the world tries to take it away.

This is not just a memoir.

It's a reclaiming.

By Leslie Feinberg, 2014, Paperback

20th Anniversary Author Edition

Did you know? In accordance with Leslie Feinberg's wishes, Queer Haven Books sells Stone Butch Blues at-cost. If you'd like to help keep our doors open, please consider adding a one-time donation or monthly membership to your order. We appreciate your support!

Published in 1993, this brave, original novel is considered to be the finest account ever written of the complexities of a transgendered existence. Woman or man? That’s the question that rages like a storm around Jess Goldberg, clouding her life and her identity. Growing up differently gendered in a blue--collar town in the 1950’s, coming out as a butch in the bars and factories of the prefeminist ’60s, deciding to pass as a man in order to survive when she is left without work or a community in the early ’70s. This powerful, provocative and deeply moving novel sees Jess coming full circle, she learns to accept the complexities of being a transgendered person in a world demanding simple explanations: a he-she emerging whole, weathering the turbulence. Leslie Feinberg is also the author of Trans Liberation, Trans Gender Warriors and Transgender Liberation, and is a noted activist and speaker on transgender issues.

An exhilarating and tender debut graphic novel that is an ode to the love and connection shared among three women and the child they all adore.

2022 Cartoonist Studio Prize WINNER

2022 Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize WINNER

2022 Lambda Literary Award WINNER, LGBTQ Comics

2022 ALA Stonewall Award Honor Book

2021 National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree

Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties to Ray’s niece, six-year-old Nessie. Their playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in all three of their lives, which ping-pong between familial tensions and deep-seeded personal stumbling blocks. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron isolate from each other and attempt to repair their broken family ties ― Ray with her overworked, resentful single-mother sister and Bron with her religious teenage sister who doesn’t fully grasp the complexities of gender identity. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up and learns they have more in common with their siblings than they ever knew.

At turns joyful and heartbreaking, Stone Fruit reveals through intimately naturalistic dialog and blue-hued watercolor how painful it can be to truly become vulnerable to your loved ones ― and how fulfilling it is to be finally understood for who you are. Lee Lai is one of the most exciting new voices to break into the comics medium and she has created one of the truly sophisticated graphic novel debuts in recent memory.

Black and white illustrations.

The definitive account of the Stonewall Riots, the first gay rights march, and the LGBTQ activists at the center of the movement. 

“Martin Duberman is a national treasure.”—Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

On June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village, was raided by police. But instead of responding with the typical compliance the NYPD expected, patrons and a growing crowd decided to fight back. The five days of rioting that ensued changed forever the face of gay and lesbian life.

In Stonewall, renowned historian and activist Martin Duberman tells the full story of this pivotal moment in history. With riveting narrative skill, he re-creates those revolutionary, sweltering nights in vivid detail through the lives of six people who were drawn into the struggle for LGBTQ rights. Their stories combine to form an unforgettable portrait of the repression that led up to the riots, which culminates when they triumphantly participate in the first gay rights march of 1970, the roots of today's pride marches. 

Fifty years after the riots, Stonewall remains a rare work that evokes with a human touch an event in history that still profoundly affects life today.

Retired soldier Damiskos and his lover Varazda have been living together in Boukos for a month, and their future is beginning to look bright. Then Damiskos receives a letter summoning him home to Pheme-where his parents are deeply in debt, his brother is being hunted by loan sharks, and an unwanted arranged marriage looms.

And that's before Damiskos is charged with murder.

Fortunately, he's not alone. Old friends are back in Pheme. And Varazda-eunuch, sword-dancer, and spy-has solved mysteries before. But saving his lover from execution and from marriage will take time, and with only days until Dami's trial, time is running out.

Strong Wine is the third book in the Sword Dance trilogy, the conclusion of Dami and Varazda's story from Sword Dance and Saffron Alley. This time with fake fortune tellers, real courtroom drama, and ... fertilizer?

RECOMMENDED BY GILLIAN FLYNN ON THE TODAY SHOW • “A lush, seductive Southern Gothic that’s deliciously queer . . . K. L. Cerra’s gift for gorgeous, gruesome atmosphere had me spellbound.”—Layne Fargo, author of They Never Learn
 
A woman investigating her brother’s apparent suicide finds herself falling for her prime suspect—his darkly mysterious girlfriend—in this “creepy, compelling, and utterly original” (Karen Dionne) thriller.

“Get it out of me.”

It was the last message Holly received from her brother, Dane, before he was found cleaved open in the lavish Savannah townhouse of his girlfriend, Maura. Police ruled his death a suicide sparked by psychosis, but Holly can’t shake the idea that something else must have happened—something involving another message he sent earlier that night about a “game” Maura wanted to play.

Determined to discover the truth, Holly begins to stalk Maura, a magnetic, black-eyed florist with a penchant for carnivorous plants. But what begins as an investigation quickly veers into a fixation that lures Holly into the depths of Maura’s world: Savannah high society, eerie black roses, and a whisper of something more sinister. Soon Holly is feeling a dark attraction to the one woman she shouldn’t trust. As Holly falls deeper for Maura and her secrets, she’s left with only one choice: find out what happened to Dane or meet the same fate.

An ever-expanding and panicked Wonder Woman lurches through a city skyline begging Steve to stop her. A twisted queen of sorority row crashes her convertible trying to escape her queer shame. A suave butch emcee introduces the sequined and feathered stars of the era’s most celebrated drag revue. For an unsettled and retrenching postwar America, these startling figures betrayed the failure of promised consensus and appeasing conformity. They could also be cruel, painful, and disciplinary jokes. It turns out that an obsession with managing gender and female sexuality after the war would hardly contain them. On the contrary, it spread their campy manifestations throughout mainstream culture.
 
Offering the first major consideration of lesbian camp in American popular culture, Suffering Sappho! traces a larger-than-life lesbian menace across midcentury media forms to propose five prototypical queer icons—the sicko, the monster, the spinster, the Amazon, and the rebel. On the pages of comics and sensational pulp fiction and the dramas of television and drive-in movies, Barbara Jane Brickman discovers evidence not just of campy sexual deviants but of troubling female performers, whose failures could be epic but whose subversive potential could inspire.

Supplemental images of interest related to this title: George and Lomas; Connie Minerva; Cat On Hot Tin; and Beulah and Oriole.

By: Caitlin Cass (Author), 2024, Hardback

New Yorker contributing cartoonist Caitlin Cass traces the fight for suffrage in the U.S. from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This intersectional history of women and voting rights chronicles the suffrage movement’s triumphs, setbacks, and problematic aspects.

Best Art Books of 2024, Hyperallergic

“She put in her work, but there’s so much left to do.” Begun in the Antebellum era, the song of suffrage was a rallying cry across the nation that would persist over a century. Capturing the spirit of this refrain, New Yorker contributing cartoonist Caitlin Cass pens a sweeping history of women’s suffrage in the U.S. ― a kaleidoscopic story akin to a triumphant and mournful protest song that spans decades and echoes into the present.

In Suffrage Song, Cass takes a critical, intersectional approach to the movement’s history ― celebrating the pivotal, hard-fought battles for voting rights while also laying bare the racist compromises suffrage leaders made along the way. She explores the multigenerational arc of the movement, humanizing key historical figures from the early days of the suffrage fight (Susan B. Anthony, Frances Watkins Harper), to the dawn of the “New Women” (Alice Paul, Mary Church Terrell), to the Civil Rights era (Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker). Additionally, this book sheds light on less chronicled figures such as Zitkala-Ša and Mabel Ping Hua-Lee, whose stories reveal the complex racial dynamics that haunt this history.

The interiors include 4 foldouts, most notably a 4-page map detailing where women could vote in the US in 1919, leading up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Impeccably researched and rendered in an engaging and accessible comics style, Suffrage Song is sure to spark discussion on the vital issue of voting rights that continues to resonate today.

Full-color illustrations throughout

Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom--a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma's girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a lifetime--until, decades later, as the girls become women, Sula's anarchy leads to a betrayal that may be beyond forgiveness.

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Masterful, richly textured, bittersweet, and vital, Sula is a modern masterpiece about love and kinship, about living in an America birthed from slavery. Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison gives life to characters who struggle with what society tells them to be, and the love they long for and crave as Black women. Most of all, they ask: When can we let go? What must we hold back? And just how much can be shared in a friendship?

Lee Mandelo's debut Summer Sons is a sweltering, queer Southern Gothic that crosses Appalachian street racing with academic intrigue, all haunted by a hungry ghost.

Andrew and Eddie did everything together, best friends bonded more deeply than brothers, until Eddie left Andrew behind to start his graduate program at Vanderbilt. Six months later, only days before Andrew was to join him in Nashville, Eddie dies of an apparent suicide. He leaves Andrew a horrible inheritance: a roommate he doesn’t know, friends he never asked for, and a gruesome phantom that hungers for him.

As Andrew searches for the truth of Eddie’s death, he uncovers the lies and secrets left behind by the person he trusted most, discovering a family history soaked in blood and death. Whirling between the backstabbing academic world where Eddie spent his days and the circle of hot boys, fast cars, and hard drugs that ruled Eddie’s nights, the walls Andrew has built against the world begin to crumble.

And there is something awful lurking, waiting for those walls to fall.

For fans of Normal People, a queer, coming-of-age debut of impossible first love, first loss, and first heartbreak…

It’s the early 1990’s in the small town of Crossmore, Ireland, and Lucy knows what she’s expected to do. Fall in love with the son of the farmer next door, marry him, pray for children, and never, under any circumstances reveal the truth–that she doesn’t think marriage or motherhood or staying in Crossmore is for her. That the reason she knows this, is because of her close friend, Susannah.

For years, Lucy buries her obsession, until one summer, right before graduation, when her friendship with Susannah escalates. Now, Lucy will do anything to keep their secret safe. Their relationship is both the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to her–Lucy loves Susannah, but every day, it feels like Crossmore, Lucy’s mother, and their social mores are closing in. And when Susannah decides she no longer wants to hide, Lucy must make a devastating choice.

Tender and heartbreaking, Sunburn portrays the realities of growing up in a small rural town–from the long, hot summers, to the pressures of a conservative, traditional community where everyone knows each other’s business. It’ll leave you aching for your own first love.

By: Noah Bodie (Author), 2024, Paperback, Book 1 of The Desert Rose Saga

"Suneater" is a captivating story about trust, family, and self-discovery. It follows Andreas and Simon's chance meeting as they navigate a world of mystery, magic, and turmoil. As they confront their pasts and grapple with their intertwined destinies, they must unravel the complexities of their relationships and confront their feelings for one another. This captivating narrative explores themes of loyalty, resilience, and the enduring power of human connection, offering a rich and immersive journey into the depths of the human spirit.

The Desert Rose Saga

Andreas Dwyer struggles to establish his identity outside of his family's notoriety. A chance meeting with an orc mercenary named Simon propels the half-elf on a journey of self-discovery, laughter, and romantic tension. Can they let down their guard and foster a budding romance? Will Andreas discover the meaning behind cryptic messages concerning his future? These unlikely heroes may hold the key to changing the world's fate, and they don't even know it.

LGBTQIA2+ - Fantasy Romance - Dark Fantasy

A major poet and literary critic leads an aesthetic adventure through poems about queer experience, by writers who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, trans, nonbinary, gender fluid, and more.

A groundbreaking anthology edited by acclaimed poet, critic, and scholar Stephanie Burt, Super Gay Poems brings together fifty-one works encompassing the wide range of queer and trans verse after the Stonewall uprising of 1969. Since that galvanizing moment, poetry has served as both a vehicle for queer liberation and a witness to its sometimes fragile, sometimes ebullient flourishing, across the world.

The poems in this anthology represent the great variety of queer and trans life itself. They include near-sonnets, iambic couplets, and rhymed quatrains; skinny dimeters and shaped poems; chatty free verse and intentionally inaccurate translations; the demotic and the rococo. Arranged in chronological order, the selections trace queer culture’s recent evolutions. Frank O’Hara, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, James Merrill, Thom Gunn, Jackie Kay, Adrienne Rich, Chen Chen, essa ranapiri, and The Cyborg Jillian Weise―poets widely known and poets who deserve to be―share their alienation, their euphoria, and their encounters with a protean community as it discovers new solidarities and new selves.

Each piece is paired with a concise, eye-opening essay in Burt’s trademark style, with verve and an inimitable literary ear. A treasury of aesthetic experience and insight, Super Gay Poems points protestors, political organizers, poetry lovers, and LGBTQIA+ readers toward many beautiful tomorrows.