A beginning, not a syllabus. Books, films, and voices that have shaped this project and seem worth knowing — not a statement of agreement with every argument in every text.
This list grows over time and reflects the perspectives of multiple contributors. If you have a resource that belongs here — a book, documentary, podcast, or voice — use the suggestion button above. All submissions are reviewed before being added.
Two areas are underrepresented here and named honestly: immigrant LGBTQ+ faith experiences, and Indigenous voices beyond what is listed. Both gaps reflect the limits of a single author's reach and authority. They will be filled by collaborators, not approximated.
A note on links: we prioritize linking directly to authors and publishers whenever possible. We'd always encourage you to buy from your local independent bookshop or directly from the source. The creators deserve the support more than the warehouse does.
Start here. Short, accessible, and theologically grounded. Written for people coming to queer theology for the first time.
Harder going, but worth it. The most precise theological framework for what happens to queer people inside religious institutions.
Rigorous. For those ready to go deeper into the theological arguments.
The real story of an Iowa evangelical congregation that left exclusion behind and became fully inclusive — and ended up healthier and more faithful for it. Written by the pastor, her husband, and a lesbian congregant who was part of the transformation. Essential reading for any church considering the journey. Foreword by Brian McLaren.
The belonging framework — readable, theologically inflected without being churchy, and a foundation for understanding what genuine welcome actually requires.
On community, rootedness, and what it means to truly belong somewhere.
Dense historical scholarship. Not a starting point, but essential eventually. The foundational academic text on the church's historical relationship with homosexuality. A documentary about Boswell's life and work — Not a Tame Lion (2022) — is free on YouTube and is a much more accessible entry point.
The intellectual framework for understanding why one voice cannot speak for all queer people. Start with the TED talk — it's the clearest entry point.
Essential. Begin with "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." The argument has not aged.
Founder of Q Spirit, the most comprehensive online resource for LGBTQ spirituality, saints, and history. Ordained by Metropolitan Community Churches, she ministered at MCC San Francisco during the AIDS crisis and served as MCC's national ecumenical officer at the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches. Her LGBTQ Saints series is the source behind many of the observances on this site's liturgical calendar. A foundational voice.
Canon Precentor at Saint John's Cathedral in Denver. His work appears in The Guardian, Teen Vogue, On Being, and The Washington Post. One of the most important voices at the intersection of Black theology, queer identity, and Episcopal practice.
Queer Black theologian and religious educator from Brooklyn. PhD student at Garrett Seminary. Also the voice behind the Fish Sandwich Heaven podcast. Current, sharp, necessary.
Accessible progressive Christian conversations for the wanderer, the questioner, and the spiritual refugee. Wide reach, honest questions, multiple voices.
Two-Spirit identity exists both within and outside Christian frameworks — and the Christian church's history with Indigenous people requires its own reckoning before it can claim to welcome them. The texts here are not Christian resources. They are windows into traditions, histories, and frameworks that the church suppressed and that Indigenous people are reclaiming. They belong on this list because a church communicator who has never engaged this history is not equipped to welcome Indigenous people honestly.
An anthology of writing by Indigenous Two-Spirit and queer people. Not a Christian text — a reclamation. Read it to understand a tradition, a community, and a set of spiritual frameworks that the church worked to erase.
Cherokee history told through a queer, decolonial lens. A rigorous and necessary book for anyone serious about understanding what the church has owed and broken.
The intersection of migration, cultural identity, and faith is a gap this site names honestly. These books, films, and stories come from voices the site does not have the authority to speak for — and are offered as a starting point for understanding experiences that belong to others.
Memoir & Nonfiction
A memoir of growing up as an Ahmadi Muslim in Pakistan — a minority within a minority — and seeking refuge in Canada as a queer woman. One of the most searingly honest accounts of navigating faith, identity, and displacement simultaneously.
A gay man's escape from Nigeria and the harrowing process of seeking asylum in the United States. Grounded in faith and in the specific cruelties of the immigration system.
An ethnographic account of queer, trans, and nonbinary Muslims forging new communities and reinterpreting their faith. Academic in origin but written accessibly. Fills a significant gap in the literature on queer people of faith outside Christianity.
Film
An animated documentary in which a gay Afghan man recounts, for the first time, the story of his flight as a child refugee and the secret he has kept for twenty years. Oscar-nominated in three categories. One of the most powerful films about migration, identity, and survival made in recent years.
The story of Moises Serrano, who grew up undocumented and gay in rural North Carolina. Documents his work as an activist at the intersection of immigration and LGBTQ rights. Winner of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Social Justice Film Award.
YA & Fiction
A Vietnamese American boy navigates coming out to his immigrant mother through the shared language of fairy tales. Tender and visually stunning. A model for how queer and immigrant identity can be held together rather than set against each other.
A Salvadoran teenager navigating asylum in the US while confronting her sexual identity. Fiction, but grounded in the specific realities of immigration and displacement.
A Filipino immigrant who grew up with albinism in a rural village and became a woman in America. Talusan's memoir is a searingly honest account of love, identity, and gender across two countries and two selves.
A memoir in letters by a Nigerian non-binary writer tracing the unfolding of a self across continents. Electrifying and necessary. Emezi's voice is unlike anyone else's.
Two narratives — a Jamaican immigrant in 1950s Britain and a gay Black man at the turn of the millennium escaping a repressive religious community. Race, class, sexuality, and faith across generations. The faith thread runs directly through it.
A Chinese American teenager in 1954 San Francisco navigates her sexual identity while her father's citizenship is threatened by Red Scare paranoia. Award-winning. The intersection of racial and queer identity under political pressure feels immediately relevant.
In Nigeria, vagabonds are people whose existence is outlawed — the queer, the poor, the displaced. An inventive novel that blends realism with myth to tell the stories of those for whom survival is itself an act of resistance.
A Chinese immigrant navigates high school in Texas as both a Chinese American and a queer woman — told with humor and warmth through comics. Sits alongside The Magic Fish as a graphic memoir that holds cultural displacement and queer identity at the same time.
A Mexican American lesbian navigating identity, family, and a religious school environment. Funny and honest in equal measure.
The frameworks behind why empathy-first organizing works — and why it has always been the engine of durable social change. These are not faith texts, but they map directly onto the work of building genuine welcome.
The theoretical foundation for story-based organizing. Ganz argues that values are experienced emotionally, and that lasting change requires narrative — story of self, story of us, story of now. The free PDF is the best starting point. His book Why David Sometimes Wins (Oxford University Press, 2009) goes deeper.
The foundational text of community organizing. Alinsky's core argument: meet people where they are, not where you wish they were. The goal is to move them, not to be right at them. Dated in places but the strategic thinking holds.
Rustin organized the March on Washington and was one of the most brilliant strategic minds in the civil rights movement. He was also gay, closeted by necessity, and wrote extensively on the distinction between confrontation and persuasion — arguing that lasting change requires both, operating in different registers for different audiences. Essential.
This shelf is not the full queer experience — no shelf could be. It is a place to start for anyone who wants to understand that experience more fully before presuming to communicate about it.
Faith & the Church
Academy Award-winning director Roger Ross Williams traces how American evangelical missionaries exported anti-gay ideology to Uganda, fueling the country's Anti-Homosexuality Act. Essential context for understanding how Christianity becomes a weapon — and what it costs when it does. Available on Netflix and Prime Video.
Directed by Emmy winner Yuval David. Explores the challenges and aspirations of LGBTQ+ Catholics — and the hurdles religious doctrine presents to full acceptance everywhere. Reimagines 1,700 years of religious iconography by depicting Jesus as a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Available on Apple TV and Google Play.
A documentary portrait of John Boswell — Yale historian, devout Catholic, openly gay, and one of the most important LGBTQ scholars of the twentieth century. Boswell's research in the Vatican archives produced Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality and Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, books that changed the trajectory of the marriage equality debate. He died of AIDS in 1994 at forty-seven, racing to finish his final book. The title comes from his description of God — the same words on his tombstone.
A mother's reckoning with what her faith cost her son. Difficult and necessary.
How five Christian families navigated their faith and their queer children.
How the word "homosexual" entered the Bible — and what that has meant ever since.
Filmmaker Parvez Sharma documents the lives of gay and lesbian Muslims in multiple countries, exploring how they reconcile their sexuality with their faith. The only film on this list outside the Christian tradition — essential for understanding that this struggle belongs to no single religion.
Former leaders and survivors of the ex-gay movement reckon with the damage conversion therapy caused — and with their own evangelical faith. A clear-eyed account of what happens when the church decides queer people need to be fixed.
Conservative Christian mothers who choose to affirm their LGBTQ children, often at significant cost to their standing in their faith communities. A witness to what it looks like when love wins inside the church.
Made by two queer BYU graduates, this film follows LGBTQ students navigating Brigham Young University's hostile honor code while trying to hold onto their Mormon faith. The title uses the language the LDS Church applies to gay people — language the film inhabits and interrogates. A testament to queer resilience inside an institution that does not want to see it.
Catholic priests who have lived as gay men in secret give voice to their experience inside an institution that has never acknowledged them. Quietly devastating.
Queer Life & Culture
Trans representation in media and what it has cost trans people. Narrated by Laverne Cox.
History, justice, and the cost of erasure.
Ballroom culture, chosen family, survival, and joy. The largest cast of trans actors in television history.