Big Queer Love Stories
Oprah Daily | Lydi Conklin | June 12, 2024
Michael DeForge and Nino Bulling are featured in Oprah Daily
June is Pride Month! What better way to celebrate than with a great romance that honors the nuance, diversity, and exuberant joy of queer love? In recent years, we’ve seen many more books centering queer characters hitting the shelves—and that in and of itself is cause for celebration. While Pride is certainly a time to recognize the bravery and sacrifice of LGBTQIA+ community members who came before us—and to fight against hate in the present—it’s also a time to recognize queer love.the books on this list, selected and reviewed by Rainbow Rainbow author Lydi Conklin, are love stories. While we can’t promise a reading experience free of heartache, we can promise that the characters’ moments of pain come from the fact that they are human—existing within a complex world, endowed with complex emotions. Let the yearning begin!
Firebugs by Nino Bulling
Firebugs, an exuberant graphic novel, follows struggling Ingken into the nightclubs, bedrooms, and picnic spots of queer Paris and Berlin as they navigate drug use, their fledgling relationship with another trans person, and their continuing questions about how the world sees them and how they understand themself. The drawing style is loose and fleshy and bursting with life; Ingken and Lily’s love story is as intimate and tender as Ingken’s early, faltering steps toward transition. A must-read, bursting with queer joy and the realities of navigating a way through romance while also discovering a still-shifting gender identity.
Big Kids by Michael DeForge
Bullied by friends and family, Adam, a teenage boy, is the narrator of this short, singular graphic novel, which follows him as he moves through the gauntlets of his first real relationship. Right from the startling first panel—we won’t spoil it here—the novel helps us all remember how a new world is opened up by romance and heartbreak, how literally everything in a life can change in one moment, and how, once you’ve glimpsed a new world, you can never go back. Tender, painful, uplifting—just like first love.
Check out the other titles listed here!
Firebugs by Nino Bulling
Firebugs, an exuberant graphic novel, follows struggling Ingken into the nightclubs, bedrooms, and picnic spots of queer Paris and Berlin as they navigate drug use, their fledgling relationship with another trans person, and their continuing questions about how the world sees them and how they understand themself. The drawing style is loose and fleshy and bursting with life; Ingken and Lily’s love story is as intimate and tender as Ingken’s early, faltering steps toward transition. A must-read, bursting with queer joy and the realities of navigating a way through romance while also discovering a still-shifting gender identity.
Big Kids by Michael DeForge
Bullied by friends and family, Adam, a teenage boy, is the narrator of this short, singular graphic novel, which follows him as he moves through the gauntlets of his first real relationship. Right from the startling first panel—we won’t spoil it here—the novel helps us all remember how a new world is opened up by romance and heartbreak, how literally everything in a life can change in one moment, and how, once you’ve glimpsed a new world, you can never go back. Tender, painful, uplifting—just like first love.
Check out the other titles listed here!