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NBC News
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- NBC News
18 queer AF beach reads to devour this summer
The summer months are a perfect time to sit back, unwind and enjoy a bit of escapism with a book (or e-reader) in hand. For some, this could entail a trope-filled gay romance, while for others, it could mean tales of lesbian vampires and carnivorous flowers (looking at you, Florida!). In order to serve up beachworthy queer recommendations for book lovers with a variety of tastes and preferences, we asked booksellers and bibliophiles across the country for the titles they'd throw in their beach bags. 'Stop Me if You've Heard This One' ' Stop Me if You've Heard This One ' by Kristen Arnett, about a down-on-her-luck professional clown juggling a messy personal and professional life, was recommended by Christina Pascucci-Ciampa, the founder and owner of All She Wrote Books in Somerville, Massachusetts. 'This book, while at times outlandish and bonkers, was also extremely real and relatable. It's why I fall in love with books like this one. I also fell in love with all of Arnett's quirky characters, and the one-liners are *chef's kiss* — sharp zingers that make you laugh so hard,' she said in an email. When asked how she defines a beach read, Pascucci-Ciampa said it's 'a book that you can get lost in, and if it can, makes you laugh out loud. When you are at the beach, it is all about having a good time, especially if there are books involved.' 'Deep House' ' Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told ' by Jeremy Atherton Lin, a memoir about young love and gay rights, was recommended by Matty Faries, the assistant manager and book club coordinator at Unabridged Bookstore in Chicago. 'It's an intimate memoir that braids the young author's story of falling in love with the boy of his dreams with the historical record of the fight for marriage equality,' Faries said. 'It'll scratch the itch for anyone who wants a sexy and sweet story of young love, but it has plenty to teach about the culture wars and bureaucratic hurdles that have made living and loving so difficult for LGBTQ and immigrant communities, too.' While Faries notes his top pick is not a typical beach read, he said that 'for a lot of folks a good beach read is any book that is easy to fall into and share with friends, maybe a romance or a fantasy novel that feels like a mini-vacation when you can escape into the pages.' 'Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil' ' Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil' by V.E. Schwab, an epic lesbian vampire tale spanning five centuries, is another top pick from the Unabridged Bookstore team (and a favorite of this article's author). At more than 500 pages, this Sapphic story is a heavy book for a beach read (both literally and figuratively), but it will undoubtedly transport the reader (only figuratively) across Europe, America and time as its three main characters seek to sate their hunger and their hearts (at times simultaneously). This novel, while centered on the undead, may also have readers questioning what makes us human. 'Call Your Boyfriend' ' Call Your Boyfriend ' by Olivia A. Cole and Ashley Woodfolk, a Sapphic romance about two teens seeking revenge on their cool-girl crush, was recommended by Leah Johnson, the owner of Loudmouth Books in Indianapolis. 'It's 'John Tucker Must Die' for a new generation, it's 'Bottoms' in book form. It has all of the makings of a classic teen movie, but infused with an effortlessly diverse, progressive worldview,' she said in an email. 'In a time like now, queer readers — especially young people — need to see themselves reflected in stories that highlight all the complexity of loving and living in a queer body while also getting to experience the shenanigans and hijinx that have long marked the genre for everyone else.' When it comes to a beach reads, Johnson said it must 'be page turning but quick, and bonus points if it fits easier in my suitcase!' 'Hungerstone' ' Hungerstone ' by Kat Dunn, a retelling of the classic lesbian vampire tale 'Carmilla,' is the top recommendation of Alex Spencer, the owner of Common Ground Books in Tallahassee, Florida. She also said it's her bookstore's top seller. 'Lesbian vampires are very in right now, which I don't think anybody is going to complain about,' she said. (This article's author is most definitely not complaining.) When asked about the concept of a 'beach read,' Spencer said she defines it as 'something you would read for enjoyment and to unwind,' but she noted that could mean very different things to different people. 'Some people like beach reads that they don't have to think about very much, like the romantic fiction, the happy ending,' she said. 'Some people just like horror and things that are a little bit darker. I've had some people come in and be like, 'I need a book, but I can't do anything dystopian right now, because it's just too real,' so I would cut dystopian off the list of the beach read, but other than that, pretty much just anything that makes you happy and let's you escape.' 'Eat the Ones You Love' ' Eat the Ones You Love ' by Sarah Maria Griffin is Spencer's second recommendation. The book is centered on a woman who has just lost her job and her fiancé and ends up employed by a flower shop where her co-workers include a beautiful shop manager and a carnivorous, sentient orchid. 'For people that are into the creepier fun reads, that would definitely be a fun one for them this summer,' she said. Spencer added that it was the book''s tagline — 'This is a story about desire, dreams, decay — and working retail at the end of the world' — that initially reeled her in. 'That kind of hits me real hard right now, as somebody who works retail while the world is just like exploding around us,' she said. 'Bed and Breakup' ' Bed and Breakup ' by Susie Dumond, a second-chance romance about two exes reuniting to fix up and sell a bed-and-breakfast, was the first of two recommendations by Jaime Harker, the founder of and bookseller at Violet Valley Books in Water Valley, Mississippi. She explained the story, which is set in Asheville, North Carolina, as 'fun and engaging, with interesting characters.' Harker described a 'beach read' as a 'story that grabs my full attention, without the stress of terrible things happening to characters I like.' 'I like other kinds of novels, too, but a beach read should not, in the end, break my heart,' she added. 'If I Told You, I'd Have To Kiss You' ' If I Told You, I'd Have To Kiss You ' by Mae Marvel, a love story between two international spies unaware of the other's secret profession, is Harker's second pick. Like 'Bed and Breakup,' she described it as a 'fun and engaging' second-chance romance with interesting characters. But this one, she added, is a thriller/fantasy that could be described as a 'Sapphic Mrs. and Mrs. Smith.' 'I read both on vacation (though not at the beach) and I found them funny and interesting,' Harker said of her two recommendations. 'Woodworking' ' Woodworking ' by Emily St. James, about the friendship between a transgender teacher and trans student in South Dakota, is the top beach read recommendation of Melissa Amstutz, the owner of Bishop & Wilde Books in Portland, Oregon. 'Emily St. James is a writer on 'Yellowjackets,' so I was already intrigued by what kind of book she would write. But if you were to compare it to a TV show, it's much more akin to 'Somebody Somewhere' than 'Yellowjackets,'' she said. 'It tells of the friendship between a high school trans girl and her English teacher in small town America and the intersecting lives of trans and queer folk surrounding them. It's heartwarming, compelling, and has fascinating twists.' Amstutz added that a beach read can be 'anything that is compulsively readable, and can be nonfiction, too.' Readers' picks In addition to asking booksellers across the country for their top titles, NBC News also solicited recommendations from queer book lovers on social media and IRL. Here are some their picks:
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘I read him my seven-page sex scene': Gay Bar author Jeremy Atherton Lin's transatlantic love story
The Admiral Duncan is empty when Jeremy Atherton Lin arrives to meet me, save for a few meandering flies. In the final pages of his bestselling book, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, Lin visits the old Soho boozer in London with his husband, where they encounter a 'despondent' scene: spilled beer, backed-up toilets and a wasted drag queen. Even so, they are charmed by an older couple across the bar and wonder if they'll be lucky enough to end up like them. The site of a homophobic nail-bomb attack in 1999, the Admiral Duncan is another kind of survivor, and Lin admires it in spite of the mess. Such ambivalence is typical of his memoiristic writing, which spirals outward into digressive analyses of social and political events. This time, the place is quiet and clean, and Lin has come alone – all of which is probably for the best, since we're here to discuss his latest book, Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told. At once more personal and more political than anything he has ever written, it follows him and his partner as they navigate a precarious legal landscape for immigrants and LGBTQ+ people in their effort to build a home and life together. The couple met 29 years ago at Popstarz, a club night, when Lin was passing through London on a backpacking trip. (In Gay Bar, Lin refers to his partner in the third person, mostly as Famous Blue Raincoat. In Deep House he remains unnamed, though most of the book is addressed directly to him.) 'I depict myself in the book as feeling a little unsure and resistant at first; counterintuitively, this bashful boy is the pursuer,' Lin says. 'He's so lovable that I wanted the reader to feel a little exasperated with me, like, 'You're never gonna get any better than this.'' Not long after returning to northern California, Lin seemed to get the message and invited his new British beau to visit. 'Famous' came and never left. Overstaying his visa, he became a fugitive for love. It took a while for them to fully understand the implications of that decision. They struggled to find an apartment given that only Lin – on a writer's income – could be named on the lease. Every loud noise or bright light outside their door sparked fears of an imminent raid. Accidents were a worry because 'we were convinced you couldn't go into hospital without being deported,' Lin writes. 'We found ourselves laying down roots on a fault line – literally earthquake territory, but also a contentious political framework,' he tells me today. 'By 2000, when we rented our first weird, damp apartment, 18 states still had sodomy laws on the books.' They were considered 'illegal' in more ways than one. Lin writes extensively about the case law that led to the 2015 US supreme court decision in Obergefell v Hodges which legalised same-sex marriage across the US. Some of these are relatively obscure, such as Baker v Nelson (1971) and Boutilier v Immigration and Naturalization Service (1967), and he sympathetically details the lives of the plaintiffs, aware that most of them weren't asking for much. Lin and his partner were less interested in pushing a gay rights agenda than safely crawling back into bed together. 'We were half innocent and half obscene,' he writes. 'We'd been infantilised by our governments – our 'twink' years prolonged.' At times, this could be a minor thrill. 'I can't deny there was an exhilaration when we went underground,' he tells me. For a middle-class kid in San Francisco's Mission District in the early 2000s, being undocumented may have seemed like a punk bona fide. Marriage certainly did not – though at the time it was unavailable to them anyway. 'A lot of queers, of course, didn't want in on the historically proprietary and patriarchal institution in the first place,' Lin writes. Open relationships and polyamory were typical in their urban gay enclave; they duly navigated threesomes and foursomes, including, at one point, with another couple with whom they shared an apartment. The idea of marriage seemed almost too conventional by contrast. Nonetheless, Lin acknowledges that marriage 'affords privileges, including mobility across borders. Marriage is, among other things, a passport'. Unable to cross international borders or even state lines without worry, Lin and his partner often felt stuck. As a white British person, Lin's partner was perhaps in a more privileged position than those subjected to racial profiling. Lin writes about several suits filed by Asian immigrants, many of them in San Francisco, dating back to a string of racist laws passed by the US government in the 19th century, including the Chinese Exclusion Act. He also tells the story of his own parents, who met in the 1960s after his father emigrated to the US from Taiwan. As a biracial couple, they were only able to marry in Florida because anti-miscegenation laws had been struck down by Loving v Virginia a few years earlier. It's unclear if Lin's father or partner would have been able to remain in the country had Donald Trump been president at the time. Lin says he finished edits on Deep House before Trump returned to the Oval Office in January, and he never expected the immigration crackdown to be this bad. 'There are a lot of moments in the book where we think that whoever comes through the door is going to be [Ice],' he says. 'That was very far-fetched then. But our paranoia has become the reality.' In 2007, Lin and his husband relocated to the UK, where they obtained a civil partnership (backdated as a marriage, once same-sex unions became fully legal in 2014). Their timing was lucky. 'When my next letter arrived from the UK Home Office, with a visa that established my leave to remain, it was genuinely welcoming, almost chipper,' he notes. 'But less than five years later, then home secretary Theresa May would usher in the 'hostile environment' policy, a brutally monikered set of measures intended to drive out undocumented denizens that would send ripples of malice toward foreign nationals and minority groups more generally.' Lin began writing Gay Bar while working a string of retail jobs in London. 'I would be writing on the cash register or on the back of the receipts,' he recalls. Eileen Myles was a big influence on his personal, essayistic prose style, as was Michelle Tea (briefly an upstairs neighbour in San Francisco). The 2010s were an exuberant time for London's gay scene, but also a challenging one for nightlife spaces; by the time the Covid-19 pandemic hit, nearly half of the city's clubs had already closed. Lin found himself documenting these losses, which eventually became Gay Bar. That book won the National Book Critics Circle award for autobiography and spent weeks atop international bestseller lists. Lin never anticipated the success. 'It's amazing but also terrifying,' he says. 'We weren't prepared for it.' Meanwhile, 'London had lost its sense of wonder'. He and his partner relocated to St Leonards-on-Sea, where he says they often walk along the beach twice a day. When the news cycle or writer's block is stressing him out, he says, 'We go down to the beach and pick up a pebble, name it with whatever is bothering us, and throw it into the water. It's surprisingly effective.' As for how Famous Blue Raincoat feels about all the public attention, Lin says his partner is able to read his work with a certain detachment. 'I'm working within the idiom of nonfiction, for which the criterion is accuracy, but I'm also writing my remembrance of the past. He's more forgiving of my confabulations, because he's an artist. There's a part of him that's quite good at loosening up. Although there's a seven-page sex scene in Deep House that I read out loud a couple years ago, and I think he felt a bit exposed,' Lin admits with a laugh. Does he have any advice for open relationships? 'Communication,' Lin says without hesitation. 'So much of the communication that we've been fortunate to have is based on implicit trust,' he says. 'I think maybe it's so robust because of our experience feeling like it was us against the world.' Some wisdom has also surely come with age. 'I had come to identify as someone who crossed borders – but slowly understood that adult life had to involve the creation and maintenance of boundaries, a matter of recognising that the world is not just one's own,' he writes towards the end of Deep House. Marriage may have been a way of protecting their relationship and immigration status, but it also confirmed that they really did want to settle down. If 'we go out to be gay', as Lin writes in Gay Bar, he realised that remaining home with his husband wouldn't make him any less of a homosexual. 'This book is the domestic antidote [to Gay Bar],' he explains. 'It's 'why we stayed in'. Which is to say, inside the interior of our home, but also inside each other.'
