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LGBTQ Literature and Film: Adults

Books, graphic novels, films and TV series with LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) themes in the Davenport Public Library and RiverShare collections.

Literary Fiction

All Of You Every Single One

Julia Lindqvist, a woman unhappily married to a famous Swedish playwright, leaves her husband to begin a passionate affair with a female tailor named Eve. The pair run away and settle in the more liberal haven of Vienna, where they fall in love, navigate the challenges of their new-found independence, and find community in the city's bohemian Jewish quarter. But Julia's yearning for a child throws their fragile happiness into chaos. Meanwhile, Ada Bauer's wealthy industrialist family have sent her to Dr. Freud in the hope that he can cure her mutism - and do so without a scandal. But help will soon come for Ada from an unexpected place, changing many lives irrevocably.

The King of Infinite Space

Meet Ben Dane: brilliant, devastating, devoted, honest to a fault (truly, a fault). His Broadway theater baron father is dead--but by purpose or accident? Ben turns to his dearest friend, Horatio Patel, whom he hasn't seen since their relationship changed forever from platonic to something...other. Loyal to a fault (truly, a fault), Horatio finds himself next to a sly tailor who portends inevitable disaster. Meanwhile, Ben's ex-fiancé Lia has been drawn into the fold of three florists from New Orleans--seemingly ageless sisters who teach her the language of flowers, and whose magical bouquets hold both curses and cures. For a price.

Wrong End of the Telescope

Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women.

After Francesco

Kevin Doyle, a gay man who lost his partner, Francesco, to AIDS in mid-1980s New York wallows in his loss and at a mind-numbing job before hitting rock bottom and realizing it is time to return home to Minnesota to start over.

The Thirty Names of Night

Five years after a suspicious fire killed his mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother's ghost has begun to visit him each evening. The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria. One night, he finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z. 

Upright Women Wanted

Esther is a stowaway. She's hidden herself away in the Librarian's book wagon in an attempt to escape the marriage her father has arranged for her--a marriage to the man who was previously engaged to her best friend. Her best friend who she was in love with. Her best friend who was just executed for possession of resistance propaganda. The future American Southwest is full of bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies on horseback trying to do the right thing.

Golden Boy

Max Walker is a golden boy. Attractive, intelligent, and athletic, he's the perfect son, the perfect friend, and the perfect crush for the girls in his school. Karen, Max's mother, is a highly successful criminal lawyer, determined to maintain the fac̦ade of effortless excellence she has constructed through the years. Adding to the tension, her husband, Steve, has chosen this moment to stand for election to Parliament. The spotlight of the media is about to encircle their lives. The Walkers are hiding something, you see. Max is special. Max is different. Max is intersex. 

The Guncle

Patrick, or Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP, for short), has always loved his niece, Maisie, and nephew, Grant. That is, he loves spending time with them when they come out to Palm Springs for weeklong visits. However, tragedy strikes and Patrick suddenly finds himself taking on the role of primary guardian. 

Hild

Daughter of a poisoned prince and a crafty noblewoman, quiet, bright-minded Hild arrives at the court of King Edwin of Northumbria, where the six-year-old takes on the role of seer/consiglieri for a monarch troubled by shifting allegiances and Roman emissaries attempting to spread their new religion.

Hysterical

As her father Sigmund's sounding board and chief collaborator, Anna Freud harbored secrets that could have shaken the foundation of his growing legacy. This is an insightful fictional glimpse into the Freud family dynamic and, most notably, its impact on Sigmund's theories about lesbianism. How did he receive the announcement that his daughter loved women? How did he deal with her long domestic partnership with another woman?

My Education

Warned about the womanizing activities of Professor Nicholas Brodeur before her arrival at his prestigious university, graduate student Regina Gottlieb is nevertheless captured by his charisma and good looks before falling prey to his volatile wife.

The Days of Anna Madrigal

Follows ninety-two-year-old Anna Madrigal, the legendary transgender landlady of 28 Barbary Lane, as she joins her former tenant Brian on a road trip to Nevada where she attends to unfinished business she has long avoided.

The Dream Lover

At the beginning of this powerful novel, we meet Aurore Dupin as she is leaving her estranged husband, a loveless marriage, and her family's estate in the French countryside to start a new life in Paris. There, she gives herself a new name--George Sand--and pursues her dream of becoming a writer, embracing an unconventional and even scandalous lifestyle.

The Magpie Lord

Exiled to China for twenty years, Lucien Vaudrey never planned to return to England. But with the mysterious deaths of his father and brother, it seems the new Lord Crane has inherited an earldom. He's also inherited his family's enemies. He needs magical assistance, fast. He doesn't expect it to turn up angry. Magician Stephen Day has good reason to hate Crane's family. Unfortunately, it's his job to deal with supernatural threats. Besides, the earl is unlike any aristocrat he's ever met, with the tattoos, the attitude...and the way Crane seems determined to get him into bed. That's definitely unusual.

The Paying Guests

It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa - a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants - life is about to be transformed as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.

The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell

At a time when women did not commonly travel unescorted, carry a rifle, sit down in bars, or have romantic liaisons with other women, Lucy Lobdell boldly set forth to earn men's wages. Lucy Lobdell did all of these things in a personal quest to work and be paid, to wear what she wanted, and love whomever she cared to. But to gain those freedoms she had to endure public scorn and wrestle with a sexual identity whose vocabulary had yet to be invented. 

The Two Hotel Francforts

It is the summer of 1940, and Lisbon, Portugal, is the only neutral port left in Europe--a city filled with spies, crowned heads, and refugees of every nationality, tipping back absinthe to while away the time until their escape. Awaiting safe passage to New York on the SS Manhattan, two couples meet: Pete and Julia Winters, expatriate Americans fleeing their sedate life in Paris; and Edward and Iris Freleng, sophisticated, independently wealthy, bohemian, and beset by the social and sexual anxieties of their class.

We Are Water

Anna Oh, a middle-age wife, mother and artist, divorces her husband after 27 years of marriage to marry Vivica, the Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her professional success.

Frankissstein

Lake Geneva, 1816. Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley is inspired to write a story about a scientist who creates a new life-form. In Brexit Britain, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love with Victor Stein, a celebrated professor leading the public debate around AI and carrying out some experiments of his own in a vast underground network of tunnels. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his mom again, is set to make his fortune launching a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. Across the Atlantic, in Phoenix, Arizona, a cryogenics facility houses dozens of bodies of men and women who are medically and legally dead ... but waiting to return to life.

Cantoras

In 1977 Uruguay, a military government has crushed political dissent with ruthless force. In an environment where citizens are kidnapped, raped, and tortured, homosexuality is a dangerous transgression. And yet, despite such societal realities, Romina, Flaca, Anita "La Venus," Paz, and Malena--five cantoras, women who "sing"--somehow, miraculously, find each other and discover an isolated cape, Cabo Polonio, inhabited by just a lonely lighthouse keeper and a few rugged seal hunters. They claim this place as their secret sanctuary.

Exciting Times

An intimate, bracingly intelligent debut novel about a millennial Irish expat who becomes entangled in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyer.

Girl, Woman, Other

The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives.  From a nonbinary social media influencer to a 93-year-old woman living on a farm in Northern England, these unforgettable characters also intersect in shared aspects of their identities, from age to race to sexuality to class. 

100 Boyfriends

As they tiptoe through minefields of romantic, substance-fueled misadventure--from dirty warehouses and gentrified bars in Oakland to desolate farm towns in Alabama--Purnell's characters strive for belonging in a world that dismisses them for being Black, broke, and queer. In spite of it--or perhaps because of it--they shine.

Little Fish

Wendy Reimer is a thirty-year-old trans woman in Winnipeg who comes across evidence that her late grandfather, a devout Mennonite farmer, might have been transgender as well. At first she dismisses the revelation, but as she and her friends struggle to cope with the challenges of their increasingly volatile lives Wendy is drawn to the lost pieces of her grandfather's past.

Crosshairs

Set in a terrifyingly familiar near-future, with massive floods leading to rampant homelessness and devastation, a government-sanctioned regime called The Boots seizes on the opportunity to round up communities of color, the disabled, and the LGBTQ+ into labor camps. In the shadows, a new hero emerges. After he loses his livelihood as a drag queen and the love of his life, Kay joins the resistance alongside Bahadur, a transmasculine refugee, and Firuzeh, a headstrong social worker. Guiding them in the use of weapons and close-quarters combat is Beck, a rogue army officer, who helps them plan an uprising at a major televised international event.

You Exist Too Much

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a twelve-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother's response only intensifies a sense of shame: 'You exist too much,' she tells her daughter. 

The Death of Vivek Oji

One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son|s body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family|s struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. 

Parenting Help