Every week for the Tuesday edition of Our Queerest Shelves, I put together a list of the most exciting new LGBTQ books out that week. Since I first started keeping track of upcoming LGBTQ new releases, this list has grown and grown. I follow a ton of different queer book blogs as well as Bookstagram, BookTok, and BookTube accounts, noting any upcoming queer books they mention. I also search for upcoming LGBTQ releases on Amazon the week before—I have to sort through a lot of irrelevant books, but I also always find some I wasn’t aware of before that.
Even outside of that, I’m constantly hearing about upcoming queer books: from my fellow Book Rioters, from authors, from Netgalley and Edelweiss listings. And despite the resurgence of book bans and the anti-queer, anti-trans backlash in recent years, we’re living in the golden age of queer lit: there are more new LGBTQ books coming out every month than ever before. All of that adds up to a sprawling spreadsheet with hundreds and hundreds of new queer books in every conceivable genre.
So, now that we’re at the halfway point of the year, I thought this was the perfect time to share as bonus content for All Access members my list of the LGBTQ books that came out from January through June. Unbelievably, there are more than 650 titles out just in the first half of 2026! This isn’t a complete list; I try to make note of all the biggest traditionally published releases, but there’s always a chance that I missed some, especially when the queer representation is not mentioned in the description. Self-published books are harder: there are so many out every day that it’s impossible to include them all, so I tend to just include ones where I recognize the author…or I really like the cover. All that is to say that there have actually been far more than 600 LGBTQ books published so far this year, but this is a selection.
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Click here for the spreadsheet of more than 650 LGBTQ books that came out in the first half of 2026!
Feel free to make a copy to sort or filter by genre or representation. In some cases, I knew from early reviews that it had queer content, but I wasn’t sure about the exact kind of representation: those are the lines where I have a question mark in the “Identity” category.
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