Lesbian Books for the Summer
Eleven books for lesbians who want more than representation and want a hot girl summer
Lesbianism is a social relation, desire with history in it, women becoming central to each other while every institution with a claim on the female body works to route them back to men. A reading list built on that has to hold the bar. The Theory. And the carabiner (is that what they are for I’m a fem I don’t know).
Lesbian Books for the Summer
This essay is free to read. Paid subscriptions are genuinely how I cover groceries and keep this going full time, so if the work means something to you, I’d really appreciate it. Thank you.
Everything here has either lived in my footnotes in the citations page Auto_Anon has yelled at me to have or is getting passed around the feminist corner of Substack right now.
Eleven books. Some of their authors fought each other in their own lifetimes. They sit together here because every one of them is asking what desire costs a woman and who collects.
1. Jeanne Thornton, Summer Fun
A trans woman in a desert town writes letters to the Brian Wilson figure whose music raised her, and the letters know something about him that the world doesn’t yet. It’s a novel about tape hiss, God, and the girl inside the genius everyone agreed to call a ruined man. Read it in the heat. It was built for the heat.
2. Torrey Peters, Stag Dance
The title novella is set in an illegal logging camp where the men hold a dance and some of them compete to attend as women, and Peters writes the wanting before there’s a word for it with more patience than anyone else working. The stories around it cover crossdressing shame, a gender apocalypse, and a boarding school romance. This is her best book, and it’s mean where it should be.
3. Imogen Binnie, Nevada
Maria steals her ex-girlfriend’s car and drives until she hits a Walmart in the middle of the state, where she meets a kid she decides to save from her own life. Half of contemporary trans literature is downstream of this novel, including the parts that don’t know it. It’s a road book, which makes it a summer book, and the ending refuses you exactly the thing you’ll want by then.
4. Auto_Anon, Reverse Tomboy:
A trans woman begins medical transition and realizes that becoming a woman has not made her any less of a tomboy. The problem is that everyone around her seems to have decided trans women are supposed to want femininity, and she has spent her whole life wanting the women who didn’t. (And while I fear the embarrassment of admitting a Queer fictional story written by someone who has at length tried to get me to read Hannah Arendt)
5. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
Black lesbian life in 1950s New York, where the gay bars ran their own color line and nobody was coming to save her. Lorde called it biomythography because memoir was too small for the job. This is the hottest book on the list in every sense, full of women whose names she changed and whose hands she didn’t.
6. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind
Wittig said lesbians are not women, and most people who quote her have never sat with what the sentence costs. She meant that woman names a position inside a labor relation and the lesbian is the one who walked off the job. The essays are short.
7. Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse
The most lied-about book in feminism. She never wrote the sentence everyone attributes to her. What she wrote is a study of what sex means when one party enters it without owning herself, and it’s tender in places nobody warns you about. Dworkin was a lesbian and the book knows it. Bring it to the beach specifically so someone asks you about it.
8. Joan Nestle, A Restricted Country
Butch/femme desire described so precisely that the charge of imitation collapses on contact. Working-class bars, her mother’s wages, the erotics of women who had already paid for what they wanted. Nestle and Dworkin spent the eighties on opposite sides of a war, and I’m shelving them together anyway, because both of them were writing about what wanting costs a woman.
9. Talia Bhatt Trans/Rad/Fem
Bhatt is a trans lesbian arguing that transfeminism belongs inside radical feminism’s original program, with the receipts to make the ‘birthday boys’ (don’t ask) sweat. If you read me for the materialism, this is a sister project. Self-published, which means buying it actually pays her. (My biggest claim to fame is also being in a group chat with her while the book was being produced)
10. Amber Hollibaugh, My Dangerous Desires
Poor white femme, former sex worker, lesbian organizer, AIDS activist. Hollibaugh writes from the place where class, dangerous sex, and political respectability keep trying to kill each other. The title is not ornamental. This is a book about refusing the version of lesbian feminism that only knows how to defend desire once it has been cleaned up for company. Read it after Nestle and before Combahee.
11. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.), How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
The Combahee women invented the term identity politics and they were Black lesbian socialists who meant class struggle when they said it. This collection puts the original statement next to interviews with the women who wrote it, so you can measure the distance between what they built and what got sold under the name. Start here if you want to know why I keep citing them.
I included many authors who had/have significant disagreements with each other because feminism is a diverse tradition with many writers who all have a place within it.