Reading picks by LGBTQ authors for Pride Month

Before bed, author Jaime Cortez reads from Brontez Purnell’s “100 Boyfriends.”

“The stories are hilarious, punk AF and at times they just ambush me with their gutter tenderness. Purnell is a queer Bay Area legend, known for his polymorphous artistry — writer, musician, dancer, actor, raconteur, agent of chaos,” said Cortez, author of “Gordo.” “He seems to do it all when it comes to the arts, and that extends to his unsparingly honest sex stories, which blaze with the blue flame of truth.

“It is all there, the sordid, the sublime, the salty, the sweet, the dirty, the hilarious, the too-damn muchness,” Cortez added. “On the first page he had me hooked with this little gem about waking up with a stranger after a wild night: ‘It’s comforting to wake up with someone this attractive, and I’m sure he was thinking the same thing.’ ”

As Pride Month kicks off, I asked Bay Area poets and writers to recommend their favorites, old and new.

For the epigraph of her debut poetry collection, Shelley Wong chose a few lines from Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Looking at Each Other.”

“I was never taught Rukeyser in my English undergraduate or graduate education. I came across the poem by chance, and it stayed with me as something I had never seen before in literature, a poem about asserting the everyday intimacy of two women looking at each other,” said Wong, author of “As She Appears.” “My book speaks to the aftermath of a queer relationship between two Asian American women, so I wanted the epigraph to speak to the before, how the relationship’s longevity and reverberations ‘threw waves across (their) lives.’ ”

“I’m turning now to Rukeyser’s collected poems — a slow reading — absorbing how she enacts a poetics of resistance and tracing the trajectory of her craft,” Wong added.

For M.D. Neu, his picks reflect his aims of supporting lesserknown authors with a “high caliber of storytelling.” He recommends “Summoned” by J.P. Jackson, “a story that will keep you up at night with its dark themes and make you wonder what’s lurking in the shadows. The characters aren’t your typical gay stereotypes, which I appreciate,” said Neu, who has two novels forthcoming this year, “Conspiracy” and “Volaria.”

“For something lighter that makes me think about humankind’s future, I enjoy ‘The Stark Divide’ by J. Scott Coatsworth. He shows a future where being queer is not the crux of the story; the adventure and mystery are. The queer aspect in his stories is never treated like a ‘problem’ to learn about or overcome.”

Likewise, Sophia Dahlin’s pick — Camille Roy’s “Honey Mine” — offers “glimpses of broke dyke ’90s San Francisco” and serves as “the scant archives of lesbian life, of difficultly achieved and fleeting romances, friendships, scenes and solidarities,” said Dahlin, author of “Natch.” “I rarely use this word in praise, but Roy’s writing has a lapidary quality — every word feels deliberately carved, and you feel the weight of her narrator’s experiences, even and especially her experience of eros.”

Lydia Conklin has been invigorated by the cornucopia of recent queer books.

“Some that I’ve loved especially are ‘Girlhood’ by Melissa Febos, ‘In the Dream House’ by Carmen Maria Machado, ‘Black Light’ by Kimberly King Parsons, ‘We Play Ourselves’ by Jen Silverman, ‘The Five Wounds’ by Kirstin Valdez Quade and ‘Detransition, Baby’ by Torrey Peters,” said Conklin, a former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University whose short story collection, “Rainbow Rainbow” was published Tuesday, May 31.

“In each of these books I was inspired to see other authors achieving the goal that I share: to add nuance and complexity to the queer experience as it’s portrayed in media; to allow queer characters not to be heroes the way characters with non-majority identities are often expected to be,” Conklin added. “Aside from their loftier achievements, each of these books was propulsive, fascinating and full of brilliant prose.”

“Being queer is not the crux of the story . ... The queer aspect in his stories is never treated like a ‘problem’ to learn about or overcome.” M.D. Neu, author, on J. Scott Coatsworth’s books