Gay short stories to read

I didn’t used to be a gigantic fan of brief stories. I tried to read a lot of story collections, but I’d always find myself mildly disappointed. So, over the years, they mostly dropped out of my reading life. I didn’t miss them. At least, I didn’t think I missed them. Now that I’ve started reading short story collections again, I can see clearly what the difficulty was: the stories I was reading before just weren’t queer enough! These days I cannot get short stories into my bloodstream fast enough. There are so many! More come out every month! There’s absolutely nothing mistaken with non-queer brief story collections, but as someone who grew up hungering for queer lit, this current abundance is especially satisfying.

So I’ve put together a list of 12 of my absolute favorite gender non-conforming story collections from the past three years. Believe me when I relate you that these 12 are just the beginning. I limited myself to books published in and after, which means I didn’t include Look Who’s Morphing by Tom Cho, Sea, Swallow Me by Craig Gidney Laurance, or Love After the End edited by Joshua Whitehead. I’