Everyone needs books, particularly the newly gay. Books make us feel less alone, and there is nothing more strengthening than reflections of our own complicated selves.
Yet most of the best books that might help with coming out are simply about the private yearnings we try to hide. Bookshops’ rainbow-jacketed YA fiction displays will change young lives; thank God for that. But all over the world there are women and men to whom exposure would mean imprisonment, disaster. For them, and all those who aren’t riotously born that way, great coming out books are often those whose protagonists come out to no one at all, not even themselves, yet which have a thrilling whiff of queerness.… Lês fierder