For the sake of Pride Month, I do want to remind everyone that I have started a collection of older queer works that I particularly liked (with "older" I mean "Public Domain in the US"). It currently lives here.
Very much a work in progress, but it still might be helpful to someone.
Wait. I just realized that I am not done yet. If you want to learn more bout queer literature history, here are some books that I, personally, have found helpful:
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by Graham Robb talks about the beginnings of the gay movement in the 19th century, and offers a pretty good oversight of what gay culture was like at the time. He also refers a lot to literature to do so.
Two Friends and Other 19th-century American Lesbian Stories: by American Women Writers, edited by Susan Koppelman is, exactly as it sounds like, an anthology of lesbian short stories from the 19th century.
By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Anime and Manga by Erica Friedman recounts the history of yuri, as well as its rise of popularity in the US. The author herself has been very active in yuri spaces since the 90s, and bases a lot of the book on her own experience.
The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies by Vito Russo is of course THE big classic nonfiction about queer Hollywood movies. I still haven't read it, but I did watch the movie adaptation multiple times.
Écrire à l'encre violette: Littératures lesbiennes en France de 1900 à nos jours is, obviously, in French. But if you do happen to speak French, then this books is going to give you a much-needed overview of francophone lesbian literature.
Recommending each other contemporary queer books is of course important and necessary (who else is going to do it? Capitalism??), but we also need to make sure that we have a decent foundation of knowledge about queer literature from the past. If we don't, then we'll be forever stuck in the most recent decade, and there are definitely more than enough people who would be only too happy to burry all the knowledge that we are not actively clinging to.
