being queer means a lot of things to a lot of people, and here we’ve tried to represent a wide range of queer writers and stories within the world of comics, graphic novels, and manga.
here you will find a lesbian memoir, a gay romance, queer graphic novels full of asexual and non-binary characters, as well as books by trans writers with trans characters.
You are reading: Gay graphic novel books
Queerness has stuck its flag in the comics and manga scene, and we are living for it. This list might not be exhaustive by any means, but these are all queer graphic novels and manga that have affected us and we hope that you will love equally.
read more: lgbtq books from around the world
queer graphic novels
From queer memoirs to gay romances to action series with queer leads, here’s a deep and varied list of some of the best queer graphic novels available right now.
on a sunbeam by tillie walden
tillie walden is legendary in the queer graphic novel scene at this point, but if you’ve missed out on this impressive work, here’s your friendly nudge to pick it up below.
There’s a lot going on in this story that balances star wars, multi-timeline space adventure, romance, and new family.
every page is more impressive on the last one, especially the full art pages that deserve to be framed. the use of red and blue in a sunbeam is a feast for the eyes and forces you to stop and reread for full impact.
Our main character, mia, is part of a team that rebuilds beautiful and crumbling structures throughout space, rebuilding the past.
As Mia meets her team, each of which is well fleshed out with their own stories that become relevant later on, we flash back to Mia’s time at boarding school where she fell in love with a mysterious new student.
mia finally reveals that she joined his ship to locate her lost love.
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You can receive £5 off your order by using our queer book box referral link.
fun home & are you my mother? by alison bechdel
After its publication, Alison Bechdel’s Funhouse did something few graphic novels do: it garnered instant praise from literary critics. fun home won awards and topped many book of the year lists.
bechdel herself already had a long and beloved career as a cartoonist of lesbians to reckon with, but the fun home propelled her into the literary stratosphere.
fun home and its sequel, are you my mother?, are biographies that reflect on the fragile and worn relationships between parents and children, specifically from the perspective of a queer daughter struggling with her mental health.
fun home’s initial assumption is that bechdel’s own father came out as gay shortly before he died after being hit by a truck.
Whether his death was a suicide or not hangs in the book as Bechdel tries to rebuild her fractured relationship with him, her own weirdness, her success, and even her relationship with her psychiatrist.
These two books are gorgeously, intimately drawn and written with such raw, stripped-down intensity. speaking personally, they are two of the best literary works I have ever read, full stop.
to be clear, they are graphic memories. They are non-fiction. what you’re reading here is bechdel’s heart on his sleeve; her soul laid bare. and he is a beautiful soul.
Are you my mother? she focuses more on bechdel’s relationship with her mother, both while she was growing up and when she was an adult. It’s a quieter book in some ways, but it does go into detail about Bechdel’s ongoing mental health issues and how they relate to her upbringing.
It’s a book to empathize with, whether you’re queer, have your own mental health issues, or have to deal with your own family’s pain.
when i came out of the closet by anne mette kaerulf lorentzen
translated from danish by charlotte barslund
When many graphic novels and novels with lgbtq+ stories are aimed at young adults and tell stories of young adults, it is refreshing to read the memoir of someone who has taken a longer road to discover their sexuality.
Louise, our protagonist, has been married to her husband for twenty years and has four children, but she is realizing that she is not being true to herself and longs to have a relationship with another woman.
when we come out of the closet takes us on a journey through his life as he recounts those subtle signs that were always there and ultimately his journey towards coming out. It’s funny, heartwarming, and you really bond with Lousie from the get-go.
With elegant pink and green anthropomorphic drawings that take us through the story, this is a delightful and uplifting queer graphic novel that needs to be read.
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bloom by kevin panetta and savanna ganucheau
here’s a cute encounter: a young baker, fed up with his job and everything to do with it, falls in love with an interviewee who wants to take over his job, driven by his passion for baking. this is a sweet and charming story about the blossoming of queer love, to say the least.
bloom also works as a phenomenal celebration of pastries and baked goods in general, thanks to ganucheau’s lovingly rich and detailed visual descriptions of the food that plays such a big part in the story.
This loving detail carried over into the rich, vivid environments and characters’ expressions and poses. this is an artist with a sense of personality and place.
lumberjacks
here is a queer graphic novel that had an exciting start in life and continued to morph, change and develop over time.
Initially created by Noelle Stevenson and drawn by Grace Ellis, several writers and artists have now worked on the series, including transgender writer Lilah Sturgess, who wrote Lumberjanes: The Infernal Compass.
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lumberjanes began as a celebration of female strength and friendship. is a cheesy, sassy, and light-hearted comic book series that explodes with color and goofy humor. a corny and raucous ride for all ages.
Having been taken up by various writers and artists over the years, however, its diversity has grown and spread, celebrating not only women but queer people of all shapes and sizes.
heartstopper by alice oseman
Alice Oseman is a big name in the genre these days, covering various avenues of queerness with her comics and novels.
his book loveless is both a lesson and a moving letter about asexuality and aromanticism. but if you’re looking for a beautiful queer graphic novel, check out his heartstopper series.
Heartstopper is a sort of spin-off of Oseman’s debut novel Solitaire, focusing on the burgeoning gay romance of that book’s protagonist’s brother.
As its cover succinctly explains, this is the story of boy meets boy, with Charlie, an out-of-control but bumbling gay British teenager, who gently falls for the more traditionally jockey Nick.
What makes Heartstopper such a breath of fresh air, both as a romance genre and as a queer graphic novel, is its approach to romance tropes.
Too often, the book will derisively lean into a cliché about arguments, misunderstandings, or miscommunication, only to resolve, sidestep, or even poke fun at that trope. this leads to a very cool and refreshing gay romance type of story.
heartstopper is overly touching in nature, from its characterization to its art direction.
Lovingly drawn and charmingly awkwardly written, heartstopper offers moments that will have you puckering and squealing with excitement, and others that will make you gasp and swoon with love and sympathy for its characters.
This queer graphic novel isn’t just a charming story; is a celebration of young gay romance.
laura dean keeps breaking up with me
Freddy is stuck in an on-and-off toxic relationship with his girlfriend Laura Dean, who repeatedly gets angry, treats her badly, and picks on other women.
Freddy contacts advice columnist Anna Vice to get over his emotions and become a better friend after spending so much time engrossed in their relationship and disappointing everyone else.
a relatable high school drama dealing with some tough topics like abortion. it’s refreshing to see an example of a troubled lesbian relationship that we often only see in heteronormative stories, that also has a happy ending.
laura dean keeps breaking up with me is also beautifully drawn and colored in black and pink.
how to be an ace: a memoir of growing up asexual by rebecca burgess
Very slowly, more fiction and nonfiction are making their way into the world as awareness increases and more people share their own stories.
While there is a long way to go in terms of ace’s being well represented in popular media, this graphic memoir is important reading for anyone and a must-read for aces of all ages.
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Feeling different and alone in your feelings is sometimes unavoidable for ace (asexual) or aro (aromantic) people with a world that pushes romance and sex as the norm and ignores the other relationships that bind us together, like marriage. friendship and family.
So reading Rebecca Burgess’s colorful memoirs and other recent novels like Alice Oseman’s Loveless can certainly help with that feeling, even if many of us wish they existed while we were in school.
Being an Ace takes us through Rebecca’s life from her school life where she was bullied and confused to an adult struggling with her identity and experiencing anxiety and OCD. it’s insightful, honest, and depicts asexual relationships in a way we haven’t seen anywhere else yet.
gender queer: memories of maia kobabe
being queer, and more specifically being gender queer, means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. but most of us have struggled with our identity and how we externally project ourselves to others at one time or another.
In Gender Queer, writer and artist Maia Kobabe traces her own journey through life as a genderqueer individual.
This is a queer graphic memoir tracing the steps of a life lived, as well as one explored and tested. Maia’s journey to understand her own non-binary identity and asexuality, while traversing a binary and gendered world, is fascinating.
It will either attract empathy and understanding from other queer readers, or offer invaluable insight into this queer world for those who reside outside of it.
read more: 9 transgender stories and books by trans writers
stone fruit by lee lai
stone fruit has a simple premise that delivers a heartbreaking and heartwarming story with a very real look as relationships break down due to mental health issues and unresolved family trauma.
bron and ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the weird and funny aunts of ray’s six-year-old niece, nessie, who enjoy escaping into the fantasy world they create together.
bron, a trans woman estranged from her religious family struggles with wanting to reconnect with her terrible family and address her deteriorating mental health. Ray struggles with Bron’s emotional absence and her own strained relationship with her sister.
The unifier in the stone fruit is Nessie, who loves them both and creates a special bond between the three of them that endures beyond the breakup of Ray and Bron’s relationship, highlighting the beauty of found family. .
monstress of marjorie liu and sana takeda
monstress is a lot. this is a deep dive into fantasy fiction that has a lot more lore, history, and politics than your average comic.
This queer comic has the weight and intensity of an epic fantasy, and its sheer scope can be as daunting as it is impressive. But in her worldbuilding, Marjorie Liu has accomplished a lot.
First of all, it has created a compelling yet terrifying matriarchal society with so many intricate moving parts.
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Secondly, he has created a powerful queer protagonist in Maika Halfwolf, a stoic and often terrifying main character. this is a delightfully gay story set in a gritty and dark steampunk world.
Fantastic and overflowing with imagination and narrative world-building, Monstress can often seem overwhelming, but to have a female lead as elegant yet frightening as Maika, and her being queer (and not the only queer character either) is endlessly exciting.
monstress is a fan-loved image comic series and a wonderful example of how to write a powerful queer lead.
read more: fantasy books you should read
bingo love by tee franklin, jenn st. onge, and joy san
This is something you rarely see in any type of media (queer, cis, gay, straight, whatever) and it’s a romance between two older people. love stories are often reserved for the young and the vivacious.
but here’s a queer comic featuring two women of color in their sixties, falling in love and enjoying their own queer romance.
The story begins with tragedy, as our protagonists fall in love at a young age, but are forced to separate and enter more traditional marriages due to family and social pressures.
When they meet again so many years later, they get a second chance at love and life together. bingo love is a wonderful queer romance that will make you sing.
lights, planets, people
a beautiful graphic novel that looks right into your soul and delights in tearing apart your worst anxieties. The narrative flits between renowned astronomer Maggie Hil lecturing a classroom of students as she tries to inspire young women to work in science and her first therapy session.
here maggie speaks, with difficulty, about her own neurodivergence, mental health, relationship issues (focusing specifically on her recent relationship with jane) and her intense desire to have made a difference in the world through her work .
full page spreads and art on lights, planets and people will take your breath away. avery press is putting out some of the most exciting queer graphic novels around right now, and this is one of the best.
best queer manga
queer manga has a long and interesting history with different genres coming to the fore from the 1970s onwards, including yaoi, or boy love and yuri girl love from the 1970s onwards . here are some very recent collections to get you started on your lgbtq+ manga journey.
my lesbian experience with loneliness & my solo swap diary by kabi nagata
my lesbian experience with loneliness is a graphic memoir written and drawn with raw honesty. It opens your eyes to an important but painful reality in Japan, all through the use of dark humor, minimalist art, and self-acceptance.
this queer memoir tells the story of kabi, a woman who decided not to go to college and spent her early twenties in a haze of depression, looking for jobs in stores and bakeries, and when she finds the energy to do so, she writes herself. sleeve.
does not avoid or seek friends, companionship or sex. she just exists.
finally, she reaches, at the age of twenty-eight, a turning point. She decides to hire an escort and a room in a love hotel, to learn and understand everything that she thinks she has lost in her youth.
These sexual desires and experiences that she has distorted into fear and anxiety in her mind.
the art of my lesbian experience with solitude, composed of pastel pinks against thick blacks and empty whites, is impressive. it has a calming energy that offsets the dark humor and tragic personal stories.
but it fits wonderfully with this sense of openness, risking pain and vulnerability, in search of acceptance and happiness. The sequel, My Solo Trading Diary, takes us deeper into Kabi’s life.
read more: Best Asian Graphic Novels
my brother’s husband, gengoroh tagame
my brother’s husband tells the story of yaichi, a single father to his daughter kana, kawaii as hell, and the arrival of bear-like Canadian mike, who has come to share the pain and consolation for the loss of her husband. , and yaichi’s twin brother, ryoji.
It is made clear from the start that Yaichi never fully accepted his brother’s sexuality, nor his immigration to Canada. On top of that, the theme of acceptance is rounded off by Kana, a small and infinitely positive boy who sees the good in everything.
thanks to her, this reads like a story of growing and learning in a closed-minded adult who thought he had life figured out.
my brother’s husband is a beautiful and well-crafted queer manga; a story of family and love. At its core, it really is about nothing but love in all its forms. he is relentlessly cute, sweet and cheerful; a celebration of both familial and romantic love, and a real joy to read.
our dreams at dusk by yuhki kamatani
tasuku kaname is a gay teenager who is desperately trying to accept his sexual identity and find peace within it, while being bullied and rejected by his classmates.
Little by little, you are introduced to a selection of colorful queer characters who have their own struggles and their own lessons to teach kaname.
Our Nightfall Dreams is a beautifully drawn queer manga filled with love for the entire queer community. celebrates the act of love and, specifically, of loving oneself above all else.
This queer manga explores the dangers of marginalization and the strength it takes to overcome, find community, and feel loved. is very much a story of empathy, love, and community.
the bride was a boy from chii
too many transgender stories end in tragedy or are punctuated by it. the bride was a boy bucks that trend by being a sweet, warm, and lovable transgender story of love and romance. this is the story of a young trans girl whose boyfriend absolutely adores her. Now, she is going to become a bride.
Drawn in an absurdly adorable chibi art style, with squishy kawaii characters bursting with life and color, this is a celebration of love and transgenderism.
This queer manga is an essential transgender story and a trans manga for anyone who wants to see what a more positive and celebratory trans story can bring to the table. it is funny; It is sweet; it’s touching.
the bride was a boy will have you singing, laughing and cheering on the sweet romance of a young trans woman and her doting husband-to-be.
If you enjoyed this list of queer graphic novels and manga, please share it with whoever you think would enjoy it.
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