Over the last school year, 6,870 book bans affected nearly 4,000 unique titles, with Florida, Texas, and Tennessee topping the list of states with the most book bans. While a majority of those books were targeted for their LGBTQ+ content, some were enduring queer titles that have been banned over and over again through the years, only to continually find their way back to library shelves.

More modern titles — like Gender Queer, Flamer, and All Boys Aren’t Blue — have recently topped the lists of most banned books, becoming obvious quarry for book-banning scolds for their intersecting themes of sexual identity, gender, and race. But many books taken off shelves are classics of LGBTQ+ literature that have been challenged before (some, even over centuries).

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Democrats are taking back school boards as voters tire of Republican culture wars

Thankfully, last month’s elections signaled good news for free speech advocates, queer authors, and parents fed up with the book-banning frenzy that has overtaken so many small towns and local school districts over the last few years. Slates of book-banning fanatics backed by Moms for Liberty and other right-wing groups on local school boards went down to defeat, in a reprieve for free expression.

So, to celebrate free expression against anti-LGBTQ+ censorship, consider gifting your loved ones some of these influential classics:

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Symposium, Plato (c. 385 – 370 BCE)

The granddaddy of gay breakdowns is Symposium, Plato’s Greek classic featuring notable Athenian men — like the philosopher Socrates and the comic playwright Aristophanes — speaking at a banquet with dialogues in praise of Eros, the god of love and sex. Many of the personalities featured in this collection of competing “extemporaneous” speeches explore male love, revered in ancient Greece.

Fast forward to the early 20th century, and Plato’s dialogue played an important role in gay writer E.M. Forster’s coming-of-age novel Maurice. Symposium‘s inclusion in Forster’s book was suggested by influential and idiosyncratic out English writer Edward Carpenter, who promoted the ideal spiritual, “uranian” homoerotic love mentioned in Symposium.

Corydon, André Gide (1924)

French author Gide strips the “platonic” veneer off male-male relationships — layered for centuries over the work of writers and artists like Homer, Virgil, Titian, Shakespeare (and even Plato in his Symposium) — to celebrate homosexuality as it was intended.

Gide builds an argument, over four dialogues reminiscent of Plato, to say that homosexuality is a more fundamental and natural force than exclusive heterosexuality, which he depicts as a controlling imposition created by society.

Orlando, Virginia Woolf (1928)

Orlando is an early and rare exploration of gender from well-known bisexual author and novelist Virgina Woolf. inspired by the wild family history of her own aristocratic lover, Vita Sackville-West, the gender-bending feminist classic follows the poet Orlando from life as a pretty teenage boy in the court of Elizabeth I through the following centuries among key figures of English literary history.

At about age 100, Orlando magically changes sexes, leading to many eye-opening revelations and thrills. As such, Orlando has become a mainstay of transgender studies and scholarship.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein (1933)

“Modern” defined the lives of lovers Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, who lived in Paris together among artists and writers like Picasso and Hemingway in the years between the world wars.

Stein decided to tell the story of their relationship and the times through an “autobiography” that she penned in the name of Toklas, who served as her confidante, friend, and lover (but who had no claim to being an artist like Stein and others in their circle). The book’s modernist form has earned it praise as one of the greatest English-language nonfiction works of the 20th century.

Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin (1956)

Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room holds a special place in the hearts of gay men in particular who read it at a young age.

While Baldwin is Black, and wrote about race in his semi-autobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain three years earlier, Giovanni’s Room concerns a closeted young white American man living in Paris and his feelings for other men, in particular an Italian bartender named Giovanni whom he meets at a Parisian bar.

The story surfaces self-loathing, internalized homophobia, and social alienation for the protagonist and readers alike, as well as the joys of erotic love and longing.

The Front Runner, Patricia Nell Warren (1974)

This novel, published five years after the 1969 Stonewall uprising, is notable for being the first contemporary gay novel to achieve mainstream commercial and critical success.

The soapy and page-turning love story chronicles an affair between a running coach and his star athlete, told with flashbacks to the coach’s time as a closeted Marine, an unfaithful husband, a Greenwich Village hustler, and (ultimately) a living-out-loud gay man living with his gold medal-winning Olympic athlete lover and partner.

Like its straight contemporary inspiration, Love Story, it ends in tragedy, but it endures as a modern gay classic.

A Boy’s Own Story, Edmund White (1982)

This autobiographical novel comes from the towering gay literary figure Edmund White, who died earlier this year, documenting a boy’s coming of age in the American Midwest during the 1950s. It was the first in a trilogy of books exploring the author’s relationship to his sexuality, and it reigns as a classic among gay coming-of-age novels.

White was probably the best known among a group of authors in the literary group the Violet Quill, a collection of gay writers in New York in the late 1970s and ’80s who were instrumental in the development of contemporary LGBTQ+ literature. 

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