August is a steamy time of year thanks to the combined powers of Leo season and the final weeks of hot girl summer. It’s a good time to obsess. It’s a good time to lose yourself completely in a book.

2020 was terrible in every way except for queer books. There were so many amazing queer books published this year! Here are 67 of the best of them.

“I’m experiencing a debilitating bout of professional jealousy for another (deserving) woman, and I’m having a hard time with it. I wonder if there are any books that focus on this regrettable phenomenon?”

From classics such as Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals published in the 1980s to brand new graphic memoirs, here are eight queer authored books about cancer.

Find out what mid-20th century gay stereotype you’d be!

Reading sex books makes you better at sex, shower sex tips, whether or not ‘shrooms make you horny and more.

Whether you want to be scared out of your wits by a haunted house story, disturbed by body horror, feel warm and fuzzy about witches falling in love, or vicariously get feminist revenge by reading about teen girl werewolves eating slimy men, there is a queer spooky book for you!

Whether you’re interested in witches as a horror trope, a doorway to sex positivity, a topic of historical exploration, or rich characters and ideas in fiction or poetry, at least one of these witch books will bring something into your life!

Given that identities are often assumed based on the gender of a person’s current partner(s), how do bi+ folks navigate longterm relationships? What effect does being in a longterm relationship have on a bi+ person’s understanding of self? How does their bi+ identity interact with intersecting identities and those of their partner(s)? How do poly and monogamous relationships differ for bi+ people? All those questions and more are explored in these fiction and non-fiction books about bi+ people!

Reading The Recovering was like reading a diary full of thoughts I would never have been brave enough to write down. I felt something I’d only ever felt once before, when I kissed a girl for the first time and a million tiny moments from my life suddenly snapped into place. I felt a corner of my brain relax, like it’d been trying to work out a code and had just been given the key. Oh, this is what I am. That explains it.

“Stories about huge families full of love, whether nuclear or chosen or just-for-school, were the comfort food of my childhood, and I’m trying to find something similar for my queer adulthood. Is there such a thing?”

The first sentence of “The Books of Bokonon” – the fictional foundational text of Bokononism, the religion Kurt Vonnegut invented for his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle – reads as follows: “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”

This tiny book is a quiet horror story in which beauty is a terror and friendship is an undoing of the self. The final line has haunted me long past reading it.

This fall we’ve got terrifying queer horror, swoony lesbian romance, cute sapphic YA, intriguing lit fic, monstrous women in fantasy and sci fi, new feminist history books, and much more!

One thing Kate Moennig is gonna do is look absolutely incredible in a suit, and sometimes it is important to remember that Cara Delevingne is an EXTREME Leo.

I believe we are in living in a truly incredible time for queer and feminist books. For proof, I offer you this majestic — if I do say so myself — list of queer and feminist books hitting shelves this winter.

From gorgeous graphic memoirs to epic fantasy tales, twisty thrillers, swoony romances, exceptional essay collections, and more, there’s an amazing queer book from 2019 on this list for everyone!

“The truth is I don’t know how to review Detransition, Baby. Torrey was too successful in what she set out to accomplish. If trans women have been and remain her primary audience then I, a trans woman, don’t know what to say from a place of supposed objectivity. The fact that this is not a PDF free on her website but a hardcover book garnering an immense amount of buzz fills me with a joy I can explain and a terror I cannot.”

I made Bang! Masturbation for People of All Genders and Abilities because it profoundly made sense to me, because there was a gaping hole in that plastic wall where there should have been some acknowledgement of pleasure, consent, or the emotions of sex. Bang! was designed to fill this gap with emotionally-aware, positive sex-ed. While we had been taught about the vas deferens and fallopian tubes, we had never been taught how to even talk about sex with a partner. I made Bang! because I thought it needed to exist.

“My bookish exterior perhaps belies it,” write Alison Bechdel in The Secret to Superhuman Strength, “but I’m a bit of an exercise freak.” That is, it turns out, an understatement. Alison Bechdel shares her process of writing this latest book over the last ten years, collaborating with her partner, and the “huge blossoming of lesbian culture.”