10 of the Most-Anticipated Queer Books of February 2025

Sal and Charo are best friends trying to make it in New York in 1999, both struggling in dead-end jobs that don’t live up to the dreams they had about living in the U.S. Charo is also now a mother at 25, raising a kid with a controlling partner, and stuck in the kind of domestic life she was trying to escape from. Sal is haunted by memories of tragedies in his past in Santo Domingo. One night that Sal spends at a gay club changes everything: he finds love, and Charo and Sal’s social circle opens up, which has them both confronting what they want to do with their lives.

This historical novel is set in Gilded Age New York and
follows a lavender marriage between Vivian Lesperance and Oscar Schmidt, both happy to be each other’s beards. Oscar is a manager at a soap company, and with Vivian’s help, he finds an investor named Squire Clancey to start a soap, perfume, and candle company with, which they name Clancey & Schmidt. Squire and Oscar soon fall for each other, and the three of them become an unconventional trio, with Vivian running the company behind the scenes. But the more their empire grows, the more they have to lose if their arrangement is discovered.

Fans of folktale horror should pick up Lucy Rose’s debut novel, The Lamb, this month. This novel is set in contemporary Cumbria. Margot lives with Mama in the forest. They live a quiet life waiting for Strays to knock on their door. At least that’s what Mama calls the strangers who come to visit them. Mama welcomes them in, offers them shelter and food, and then feeds on them. But when Margot falls for Eden, a Stray who shows up during a snowstorm, that will change everything. —Emily Martin

(Originally, I had three different sapphic gothics on this list, so let me say I’m also excited about Hungerstone by Kat Dunn, a retelling of Carmilla, out February 18th.)

Peter Shaughnessy is immortal, and he’s pretty annoyed about it. After 200 years, he just wants to pass on. Instead, he travels around, freeing vengeful spirits and leaving before he can get close to anyone—outliving loved ones was painful enough the first time around, and he doesn’t want to repeat it. When he arrives in Harrington, Ohio, it’s to deal with an angry ghost. He didn’t mean to fall in love with a man there. But now he has to decide whether to stay and risk breaking his heart all over again, or leave, putting the town in danger.

A is a trans boy whose coming out didn’t exactly go well. In fact, his parents force him to go to Save Our Sons and Daughters meetings every week, where parents complain about the “transgender craze” and deadname their kids. Soon, A and his friends realize that SOSAD is run by an actual demon, feeding on their pain. In fact, the world is overrun by demons who gain power from bigotry. But how is one kid supposed to save the world—and is a world that rejects him and his friends even worth saving?

You might remember Edgar Gomez as the author of High-Risk Homosexual. Now he’s back with another memoir, this time about how he survived as a poor young queer man in Florida, including working at a Flip Flop Shop for tourists, “committing a little bankruptcy fraud” to get the money for veneers, giving massages to closeted men on vacation to pay his phone bills, and sending the same emergency $20 back and forth between his friends. As the publisher description says, in these essays, Gomez is “exposing the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is: a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach.”

Roza was born in Canada to Iranian immigrants, and she grew up enraptured by her mother’s stories about Iran. When they eventually visited together, Roza fell in love with the country and was welcomed in by her extended family. But as she studied feminist texts in university, she shared them with her mother and began to learn more about her past in Iran, including her mother’s experience protesting and her ambivalence about getting married. As Roza discovers her own queer identity, she initially rejects it, then finds a way to integrate it by exploring queer Iranian history and joining queer spaces. All the while, she learns more about her family’s real history in Iran.

In Cleavage, Boylan discusses the division and commonalities between men and women while also drawing on her own experience living as a trans woman in the public eye. She compares what it was like coming out in 2000 to the current moral panic about trans people, while also reflecting on how gender affects our lives. Part memoir, part essay collection, this promises to bring insight, humor, and depth to the conversation.