Review: Books for Pride Month 2025 (Washington Post)

The dazzling variety of current and upcoming books on LGBTQ themes is a reassuring reminder of how far we’ve come.

This year, fans of queer romance can read books set in the worlds of Formula 1 (“Crash Test”), clandestine Victorian clubs (“To Sketch a Scandal”) and Italian restaurants (“Pasta Girls”). In July, Phaidon is publishing a lavish survey of global queer art as a companion piece to Jonathan D. Katz’s Chicago exhibition “The First Homosexuals,” while the queer Korean vampire murder mystery “The Midnight Shift,” by Cheon Seon-Ran, will draw first blood in August. Joe Westmoreland’s autofiction classic “Tramps Like Us,” a sort of gay(er) “On the Road” first published in 2001, is being reissued. Alison Bechdel is back. There are two new studies, one by Daniel Brook and another by Brandy Schillace, of the groundbreaking LGBTQ advocate and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, whose books were burned by the Nazis. Phil Melanson’s entertaining historical fiction debut, “Florenzer,” imagines the early life and same-sex longings of Leonardo da Vinci against the backdrop of a conflict between the Medici family and the Vatican. The novel, which owes a debt to Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy in the detail and immediacy of its telling, feels freshly contemporary in its papal intrigue and plutocratic power battles.

These books — and those I discuss at greater length below — are variously warm, comic, sad, jubilant, curious, violent and erotic. Each has insights of its own to offer, but they’re united by their awareness of the continuing vulnerability of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer people.

For the review in full, visit The Washington Post.