How to Find Lesbian-Themed Books

Finding good books with a lesbian main character can be a real challenge, especially if you don't live in a big city with a gay and lesbian bookstore. If you are just starting to build your library of such books, here are some steps to get you started. If you already have quite a few lesbian-themed books, these steps can help you find more.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. If you're looking for pulp lesbian novels, than you really can judge a book by it's cover. Lesbian pulp will often feature two women on the front, and a man in the background or in the distance. These are almost always stories with lesbian heroines.
2. If you looking for something more modern, Amazon.com has a new feature, "listmania" (See Resources). You can search listmania just as you would search the site itself. You can, of course, just search the "books" portion of Amazon, but the lists are nice because they are grouped by themes according to what specific users like to read. Some examples include novels featuring black lesbians, books for teens with gay and lesbian parents, young adult novels, and much more.
3. Visit The Publishing Triangle Website. It has two lists of the 100 best lesbian and gay novels. One list was developed by a panel including several gay and lesbian writers. The other list is the result of the votes of visitors to the site. The only problem is that these are just lists without descriptions of the books, but they give you lots of titles and authors to check out.
4. Visit the literature section of the glbtq (that's gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer) website. The site describes itself as an encyclopedia of glbtq culture, and in the literature section you will find lots of wonderful information on many different gay and lesbian authors and genres in social and historical context.

Tips & Warnings

• These suggestions in this article are by no means exhaustive. You will probably find quite a bit of overlap in the various places you look, because there are many classics in lesbian literature that tend to pop up anyplace you look. Still, though, the suggestions provided here should provide enough to resources to start amassing a nice collection of lesbian-themed books.