15 Books About Sex, Drugs & Homosexuals!
- Apr 8
- 9 min read
This week we're taking a look at queer books that focus on sex, drugs and homosexuals. From thrillers centering chemsex and addiction, to the history of poppers, slutty memoirs and Japanese BDSM, here are 15 LGBTQ+ books with a focus on sex, drugs, addiction and screwing:
Note: All of these books are explicit and tackle difficult themes - please check trigger warnings before reading these books.
Brontez Purnell
Filth, punks & sex stories
Queer Rep: Queer Men
Transgressive, foulmouthed, and wildly funny, Brontez Purnell's 100 Boyfriends is a filthy, unforgettable, and brutally profound ode to queer love in its most messy of variations.
From one-night stands to recurring lovers, Purnell's characters sleep with their co-worker's husbands, expose themselves to racist neighbours, date Satanists, and drink their way out of trouble, all the while fighting - and often losing - the urge to self-sabotage. A horny, punk love song full of imperfect intimacies, 100 Boyfriends takes readers on a riotous journey through dirty warehouses and gentrified bars, from dysfunctional houseshares to desolate farming towns in Alabama.
Drawing us into a community of glorious misfits living on the margins of a white supremacist, heteronormative society, iconoclastic storyteller Brontez Purnell gives us an uncompromising vision of desire, desperation, race, loneliness, and queerness that will devastate as much as it entertains.
Hailey Piper
Lesbians, kink & horror
Queer Rep: Queer Women
Euphoria meets Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke in this latest novel by the Bram Stoker Award–winning author Hailey Piper, following a couple whose search to spice up their sex life leads them down a path of madness.
A kink-fixated couple, Carmen and Blanca, have been in a rut. That is until Blanca discovers the enigmatic Smoke in an under-street drug den, who holds pages to a strange play, The King in Yellow. Read too much, and you’ll fall into madness. But read just a little and pull back, and it gives you the adrenaline rush of survivor’s euphoria, leading Carmen to fall into a game of lust at a nightmare’s edge.
As the line blurs between the world Carmen knows and the one that she visits after reading from the play, she begins to desire more time in this other world no matter what horrors she brings back with her.
Zachary Zane
Sex, manifesto & polyamory
Queer Rep: Bisexual Men
A sex and relationship columnist bares it all in a series of essays - part memoir, part manifesto - that explore the author’s coming-of-age and coming out as a bisexual man and move toward embracing and celebrating sex unencumbered by shame
As a boy, Zachary Zane sensed that all was not right when images of his therapist naked popped into his head. Without an explanation as to why, a deep sense of shame pervaded these thoughts. Though his therapist assured him a little imagination was nothing to be ashamed of, over the years, society told him otherwise.
Boyslut is a series of personal and tantalizing essays that articulate how our society still shames people for the sex that they have and the sexualities that they inhabit.
Kate Davies
Toxic relationships & BDSM
Queer Rep: Queer Women
A fresh, funny, audacious debut novel about a Bridget Jones-like twenty-something who discovers that she may have simply been looking for love — and, ahem, pleasure — in all the wrong places (aka: from men)
Julia hasn’t had sex in three years. Her roommate has a boyfriend—and their sex noises are audible through the walls, maybe even throughout the neighborhood. Not to mention, she’s treading water in a dead-end job, her know-it-all therapist gives her advice she doesn’t ask for, and the men she is surrounded by are, to be polite, subpar. Enough is enough.
So when Julia gets invited to a warehouse party in a part of town where “trendy people who have lots of sex might go on a Friday night”—she readily accepts. Whom she meets there, however, is surprising: a conceptual artist, also a woman.
Tab Kimpton
Crazy-horny erotic sci-fi
Queer Rep: Trans & Non-Binary
From the PRISM and Lambda Award nominated publisher of Nectar & Ambrosia, comes Nether Realms: a Sci-Fi Non-Binary Erotic Comics Anthology.
The theme: star-hot sex that explodes beyond our Earthling understanding of body, gender, and self-identity.
15 strange, sexy tales from far across the universe, where each comic has at least one character who goes beyond the gender binary or explores gender in an interesting way.
Freed from the tethers of the nethers, or delving into them deeper than ever before, let’s hyper jump into Future Fucking, hand in [robotic] hand. Our mission? To boldly bang where no thems have boinged before.
Michelle Tea
Fiction, non-fiction & lots of sex
Queer Rep: Queer Cast
Boyfriends masquerade as straight bros to have fun on an early internet porn site. Sex on Viagra; sex on acid. A lesbian bar sells out, turning barflies into doms for hire.
In Spain, an exchange student lets two young men flip a coin to see who will have her. A stranger on a train. A collegiate lesbian ‘it’ couple. A trans woman bashes back. Post-apocalyptic punk crushes. Slut eras.
Whether an insult or badge of honor, an identity or a state of mind, SLUTS engages some of the hottest minds of the moment to riff on the subject, exploring the nature of desire and its cultural consequences, creating a collection bound to become a classic of sex writing.
Josh Silver
Addiction, sex work & abusive relationships
Queer Rep: Queer Men
It’s been seven years since Mallory shot to fame as a literary sensation. But after years of struggling with writer’s block, she’s desperate to resurrect her career before it spirals into obscurity. She needs inspiration to strike - and fast.
Enter a young struggling addict sleeping under bridges and trading sex for survival. He’s vulnerable. He’s enigmatic. He’s exactly what Mallory has been looking for.
Mallory needs Leo if she wants another bestseller. Authenticity sells, and there’s nothing more authentic than real life. She’s the perfect person to tell Leo’s story. Gay, sad, dark – just what the world needs right now. But as secrets threaten to unravel more than just her career, Mallory must just how far will she go to pen the perfect story?
Adam Zmith
A history of poppers & their uses
Queer Rep: Queer culture
3, 2, 1... inhale, deep. From the Victorian infirmary and the sex clubs of the 1970s, poppers vapour has released the queer potential inside us all.
This is the intriguing story of how poppers wafted out of the lab and into gay bars, corner shops, bedrooms and porn supercuts. Blending historical research with wry observation, Adam Zmith explores the cultural forces and improbable connections behind the power of poppers. What emerges is not just a history of pub raids, viral panics and pecs the size of dinner plates. It is a collection of fresh and provocative ideas about identity, sex, utopia, capitalism, law, freedom and the bodies that we use to experience the world.
In Deep Sniff, what starts as a thoughtful enquiry into poppers becomes a manifesto for pleasure.
Grace Byron
Sex, drugs & cults
Queer Rep: Trans Women
Herculine’s narrator has demons. Sure, her life includes several hallmarks of the typical trans girl sob story - conversion therapy, a string of shitty low-paying jobs, and even shittier exes - but she also regularly debates sleep paralysis demons that turn to mist soon after she wakes and carries vials of holy oil in her purse.
Nothing, though, prepares her for the new malevolent force stalking her through the streets of New York City, more powerful than any she’s ever encountered. Desperate to escape this ancient evil, she flees to rural Indiana, where her ex-girlfriend started an all-trans girl commune in the middle of the woods.
The secluded camp, named after 19th-century intersex memoirist Herculine Barbin, is a scrappy operation, but the shared sense of community among the girls is a welcome balm to the narrator’s growing isolation and paranoia. Still, something isn’t quite right at Herculine. Girls stop talking as soon as she enters the room, everyone seems to share a common secret, and the books lining the walls of the library harbor strange cryptograms. Soon what once looked like an escape becomes a trap all its own.
Crystal Rasmussen
Filthy, funny, frantic memoir
Queer Rep: Non-Binary
Life's a drag... Why not be a queen? Stories like the one where you shagged a 79-year-old builder and knocked over his sister's ashes while feeding him a Viagra. Or the time you crashed your car because you were giving a hand job in barely moving traffic and took your eye off the car in front. That's the kind of dinner-party ice-breaker I'm talking about. Northern, working-class and shagging men three times her age, Crystal writes candidly about her search for 'the one'; sleeping with a VIP in an attempt to become a world famous journalist; getting hired and fired by a well-known fashion magazine; being torn between losing weight and gorging on KFC; and her need for constant sexual satisfaction (and where that takes her). Charting her day-to-day adventures over the course of a year, we encounter tucks, twists and sucks, heinous overspending and endless nights spent sprinting from problem to problem in a full face of make-up. This is a place where the previously unspeakable becomes the commendable - a unique portrayal of the queer experience.
Adam Zmith
A history of foot fetishes
Queer Rep: Queer Culture
Why are feet so hot? When Jesus washed his bros' feet, what kind of love was he showing? Why did feet show up in poetry written during a medieval outbreak of gonorrhoea? How did early sexologists convince us that loving feet is deviant? And what did Victorian lesbians make of all this?
These are the questions thrusting Adam Zmith into a history of toe-botherers who will guide the reader through the sex archives, the online forums and a millennium of art, with his trademark queer lens.
Solemates will bring to light the history of this peculiarly popular kink. From Tarantino films to Bible stories, from Renaissance paintings to OnlyFans, Solemates is the rich and messy tale of our obsession with everything below the ankle, and what it reveals about how we view our bodies and our sex lives.
Nikolaj Tange Lange
Sex, drugs & STDs in Berlin
Queer Rep: Queer Men
Romeo has Hepatitis again. It’s no surprise, and when you haven’t slept for days staying awake is easy. And anyway, there’s the promise of more drugs, more sex. Leaving his boyfriend at home he heads out for hookups, getting abjectly high and pushing his body to grotesque extremes in an urgent but dissociated quest for romance. What follows is a delirious trip through squalid rooms, hospital wards, and nighttime parks, broken by memories of first loves, European travels, and meditations on what it means to be a Romeo.
With chaotic chemsex escapades and musings on romantic love, art and belonging, Romeo & Seahorse takes us to places not often explored in fiction. Written in a relentless, frenzied first-person narrative with moments of mind-bending wisdom and poignancy, this is a one-of-a-kind novel about addiction, desire, belonging, and want that’s destined to become a queer classic.
Gengoroh Tagame
Big bara men & BDSM
Queer Rep: Queer Men
The often violent, visceral, and always provocative style of Japanese manga legend Gengoroh Tagame, one of the originators of Japanese bear culture, comes to life like never before in The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame, a new edition of the artist's first English-language collection.
Known as "The Tom of Finland of Japan," Tagame is celebrated around the world for his groundbreaking work, noted for its masterfully crafted imagery and unbridled exploration of bondage, lust, passion, and romance. This first English paperback edition includes ten short stories dating from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, with an introduction by celebrated novelist and biographer Edmund White, as well as an essay and new jacket design by acclaimed novelist and graphic designer Chip Kidd.
Kate Young
Hot women & casual sex
Queer Rep: Queer Women
A sexy sapphic romantic comedy about newly-out Bette, who is in love for the first time in her life. Finally, everything makes sense. Until it doesn’t.
Bette’s 30th year brought with it an unexpected the reason her dating life had been lackluster was simple. She’s attracted to women. And then she fell for Mei, who’s entirely perfect. Until, out of the blue, Mei suggests they take a break. She wants Bette to do all the exploring she missed out on in her twenties - to plunge into the queer dating scene and return clearer about their future, her desires, and herself.
So, reluctantly, Bette sets out on a date hot women and have hot casual sex, before returning to her loving girlfriend. Put that way, maybe it doesn’t sound so bad…Bette’s dating odyssey takes her to unexpected places, some cringingly disastrous, some heady and thrilling. And with her new friend, the gorgeous and self-assured Ruth, as a queer dating guide, Bette can’t possibly fail. Right?
Jonas Goonface
Super horny erotic fantasy
Queer Rep: Non-binary, Genderqueer, Polyamory
Cum one, cum all! Jump aboard the Ship of Fools for your final ride. An ensorcelled train hurtles through the night, with no stops and no hope for its passengers; everyone is welcome, and no one can leave. Freaks, kooks, misfits, no one is too strange! No bosses! No brakes! Only thrills, mutual support, and carnal bliss.
These vagabonds only have each other now, and in a collection of magical erotic encounters, we get to meet them all - a ragtag group of castoffs who must find the answer: Who's driving this thing, and who's ultimately in charge of your fate?
The destination of this raucous anarchic locomotive is anyone's guess, but one thing is certain: The journey will be like nothing you've ever seen before!
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