Every week for the Tuesday edition of Our Queerst Shelves, I compile a list of that week’s most exciting new LGBTQ books. Since I first started keeping track of upcoming LGBTQ new releases, this list has grown even bigger. I follow a ton of different queer book blogs, as well as Bookstagram, BookTok, and BookTube accounts, and mention any queer book I come across in them. I also search for upcoming LGBTQ releases on Amazon a week in advance – I have to filter out a lot of irrelevant books, but I also always find a few books I didn’t know about before.
Beyond that, I’m constantly hearing about strange books coming out: from my fellow book writers, from authors, from NetGalley and Edelweiss listings. And despite the resurgence of book bans and anti-gay, anti-trans backlash in recent years, we’re living in a golden age of gay literature: There are more new LGBTQ books coming out every month than ever before. It all adds up to a giant spreadsheet with hundreds of new queer books in every genre imaginable.
So, now that we’re at the halfway point of the year, I thought it was the perfect time to share my list of the best LGBTQ books that came out from January to June as bonus content for All Access members. Incredibly, there are over 650 titles coming out in the first half of 2026 alone! This is not a complete list; I traditionally try to note all the biggest releases, but there’s always a chance I’ll miss some, especially when queer representation isn’t mentioned in the description. Self-published books are hard: there are so many books coming out every day that it’s impossible to include them all, so I only include the ones where I recognize the author…or I really like the cover. That said, there have actually been over 600 LGBTQ books published so far this year, but this is just a selection.
Content for paid subscribers continues below.
Click here for a spreadsheet of over 650 LGBTQ books published in the first half of 2026!
Feel free to make a copy to sort or filter by style or representation. In some cases, I knew from early reviews that it contained queer content, but I wasn’t sure about the exact type of representation: these are the lines where I have a question mark in the “identity” category.
