Sarah Waters

Surpassing the Love of Men by Lillian Faderman (1981)

It was 1987, and I was in my final year at the University of Kent. My housemate and I had been lovers for months, but, still too timid to come out, we were tiptoeing across the landing to each other’s bedroom at night, tiptoeing back again in the morning. The secrecy was not without its thrills; even more exciting, however, was the sense I had of being on the brink of a new, less shadowy identity, a new way of being in the world. I saw a reference to a book called Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, by Lillian Faderman: I still remember the flustered way I asked for it, upstairs at the Albion Bookshop, Canterbury. It was the first time my private passions had resulted in some sort of public act.

The book bowled me over. I was 20, doing a degree, relatively well informed, but I had only ever seen homosexuality presented as something niche, something unwholesome, and something somehow modern – a sort of social problem. But here was a book that gave lesbianism a history – a proper, academic tome that found female same-sex intimacy in the literature, art, popular culture, medical records, law reports, diaries and letters of five centuries. It said to me, as a young gay person: you’ve got a past. Now go out and claim your future. And it inspired in me a fascination with queer history – what it is, how we find it, how we tell and reinvent it – that’s never gone away.

• Sarah Waters’s most recent novel is The Paying Guests.

Edmund White

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)

This was the key gay book for me. For once, the hero wasn’t a freak but a normal guy, an Englishman in Los Angeles, a professor with friends. Nor was there an explanation of how he became gay, obligatory in most novels of the period (suffocating mother, absent father). Though he happens to die at the end of the book, he’s not suicidal nor self-hating. The novel is bristling with ideas, not all of them reductive and having to do with his “illness”. There is no diagnosis.

• Edmund White’s most recent novel is Our Young Man.

Jeanette Winterson

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928)/ Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)

A book can be bad and still have a place in history. Published in 1928 and banned for its “vice”, The Well reads like a misery memoir long before they were invented. It’s the fictional story of Stephen Gordon and her struggles with the fact that she thinks like, acts like, loves like and wants to be a man. Radclyffe Hall had no idea that sexuality is a spectrum, not a binary.

(Marguerite) Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness. Photograph: Russell/Getty Images

The Public Prosecutor, Archibald Bodkin, feared the book would bring about an epidemic of “homosexualism”, as he called it, and debase the wellbeing of the nation – not least because the wellbeing of the nation had been seriously affected by the first world war – millions of young men were dead. Women might read The Well, and try out the positions for themselves. In fact, there is no sex in the book other than a full-on kiss and a hint at the bedroom.

When I read it – soon after leaving home at 16, after I had fallen in love with another girl – I thought I would: a) have to get married at once – a life of misery did not appeal to me; b) have to write a better book; c) never wear tweed; d) or a monocle.

Carol Ann Duffy told me that when she read The Well she thought an “invert” was somebody who had sex upside down. No wonder LBGT folks are so flexible.

Fortunately I soon found another book, also published in 1928, about a boy who’s a girl who’s a girl who’s a boy (Shakespeare-style). I thought “I can do this”. It was Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

• Jeanette Winterson’s most recent book is Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days.

Colm Tóibín

Forbidden Territory: The Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo 1931-1956 (1985)

Forbidden Territory is a searing and beautifully written account of an upper-middle-class childhood in and near Barcelona and an escape, as an adult, to Paris. It captures the stultifying atmosphere in so many households, and indeed so many spirits, during the long reign of Franco.

Goytisolo’s mother was killed in the bombing of Barcelona; his account of that day is unforgettable. He sees his own sexual abuse at the hands of his grandfather almost as part of the spirit of the age. This dark experience propels him towards sexual freedom and the full acknowledgement of his own sexual desires.

In the book, he is often suspicious of himself, of his own ambitions and ways of not confronting who he is. For many years he keeps much hidden, building his world through reading and dreaming. Even when he comes to terms with his interest in cruising and finding Arab lovers, he has to weave into the story his relationship with the French novelist Monique Lange. What I loved when I first read this book was its hushed tone, as though you alone were being told hard secrets and complex truths by a man whose gaze was fully sexual, and also sad and wise. I also loved the story of Goytisolo’s moving away from home, while realising how much home haunts, and how much his homosexuality made him see the world more richly once he learned to embrace it.

• Colm Tóibín’s most recent novel is House of Names.

Jackie Kay

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde (1982)

“I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner in which we understood it.”

After Rubyfruit Jungle (by Rita Mae Brown), after Patience and Sarah (Alma Routsong), after Nightwood (Djuna Barnes), after The Women’s Room (Marilyn French), I came across Audre Lorde’s Zami, and I cried to think how lucky I was to have found her. Before finding Audre, I thought I might be the only black lesbian in the world.

I was in my early 20s and lines such as: “I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell,” resonated. Lorde called Zami a biomythography – she wanted to mash up history, biography and fact. Zami was a name for women who work together and gather as friends and lovers.

Jackie Kay: ‘At last I felt I fitted in.’

Rereading Zami reminds me of how much things have changed. Lorde was a pioneer, she believed “our silence will not protect us”. She believed in naming ourselves. She believed we should all come out. Poet, activist, mother, black woman. She was an inspiration. I loved best the description of the lesbian bars. They reminded me of Gateways in London, and how strongly I felt I never fitted in.

At last I felt I fitted in. I fitted in by realising through Zami that I didn’t need to ever worry about fitting in. Writers give readers courage – the courage to be utterly your complete and complex self.

• Jackie Kay is the national poet for Scotland.

Simon Callow

One in Twenty by Bryan Magee (1966)

I was pretty clear about where my inclinations lay from an early age, but how to act on them, or indeed what to make of them, was another matter. I read all sorts of gay or semi-gay novels that fed my imagination marvellously, but at the same time I read various more or less medical books about the ominous sounding condition of Homosexuality, the very word like a prison sentence. Worst of all these was a Pelican book by DJ West, which spelt out in relentless detail the dreadful life I could expect if I persisted in following my instincts. This plunged me into deep depression.

Then I found a copy of One in Twenty by a young Labour MP called Bryan Magee. It was a dispassionate account of the situation as he saw it, noting the existence of a section of the population who were powerfully drawn to their own gender, physically and emotionally, who in every other regard were normal, and whose activities did no harm to others except in the case of forcible conquest, which should be punished in the same way that heterosexual transgressions were punished. The tone was calm and logical. I no longer felt like a pervert, a criminal, a threat to society, just one of a number of interesting variants of the human condition.

After reading it, I never again felt the need to apologise for my desires, and it led directly to my having the courage, when I started acting, to state clearly that I was gay. That turned out to be quite helpful, and for that I have the remarkably clear-sighted Bryan Magee to thank.

• Simon Callow’s most recent book is Being Wagner.

John Boyne

A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White (1982)

I still have the copy of A Boy’s Own Story that I bought when I was 15. The front cover shows a devilishly handsome young man in a purple singlet staring to his right, as if he’s waiting for someone to come along and ravish him. I was totally up for the challenge.

Although my bedroom was filled with books, I kept this one hidden away, and perhaps that sense of danger made it even more exciting. I didn’t know much about sex or what went on between boys attracted to each other, but I learned a lot from the novel. Some of it seemed unpleasant, some of it seemed downright criminal, but all of it seemed like something I wanted to experience.

I read with Edmund at a festival in Ireland a few weeks ago, which was a great thrill for me, and told him that I’d once had a friend from school sleep over, a boy I had a terrific crush on, and I left the book on display so that he might ask me what it was about. He did, and I told him, hoping it would incite such desire on his part that he would throw me down on my bed to re-enact some of the novel’s most erotic scenes. To my disappointment, he seemed more interested in the Madonna posters that papered my walls. But I think Edmund liked the idea of his classic novel being used as a tool for an attempted teenage seduction.

• John Boyne’s most recent novel is The Heart’s Invisible Furies.

Charlotte Mendelson

Every book I read in my youth spoke to my sexuality, because I was straight: Darcy; Heathcliff; the fondue orgy in Asterix in Switzerland – I longed for them all. Later, when things became more romantically interesting, which was the book which spoke to me most strongly? There wasn’t one.

I wasn’t self-hating enough for The Well of Loneliness, or sufficiently desperate for the fairly terrible American lesbian fiction in the scary basement of the women’s bookshop on the Charing Cross Road. Just because I had fallen for a woman didn’t mean my standards had slipped. There was no Sarah Waters or Alison Bechdel. The classics – Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Jeanette Winterson), Rubyfruit Jungle – seemed more for girls who had Always Known, not women who had suddenly ... switched.

Cate Blanchett (right) as Carol, in the Todd Haynes film of Patricia Highsmith’s story. Photograph: Wilson Webb/AP

But, of course, I read. I found recognition in unexpected places: Alan Hollinghurst’s novels, particularly his perfect The Folding Star, whose every page tingles with self-doubt and secrecy and hot sex; Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry, from the dazzlingly erotic “Oppenheim’s Cup and Saucer”, which I immediately memorised, to “Girlfriends” and “Words, Wide Night”. And I constantly replayed a moment in Patricia Highsmith’s Carol in my head: when the women exchange a look. I used to practise it on lampposts in case it happened to me.

Incidentally a) I’ve never written about this before; and b) actually I have, in all my novels – they’re about breaking free, daring to take the brave, uncomfortable step. I’ve always been irritated by authors who say: “I wrote the book I wanted to read,” but, without meaning to, I do, every time.

• Charlotte Mendelson’s most recent book is Rhapsody in Green.

Philip Hensher

The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad (1910)

Plain accounts of what it is to be gay used to be rarer in literature than they are now. You had to make do with excavating hints and suggestions. The subterranean and the concealed became important. I always found fiction that was suffused with the unnamed spoke to me more compellingly than fiction that admitted people like me as a minor character or two. What made it more powerful was the sense that other readers weren’t going to see what was plainly there.

Conrad’s story “The Secret Sharer” is one of his most rapturous inventions. A young captain on his first command in the tropics looks overboard one night to see a naked man clinging to the side of the boat. He brings the man, Leggatt, on board and conceals him in his own quarters. Leggatt is in flight from a nearby ship, where he has justifiably killed another officer.

The story stinks of sex – the pair are identical in size, and when they speak in the captain’s cabin lie face to face, whispering. When I first read it, aged 15, it spoke to me overpoweringly. It gave me a story that the others in my Eng lit class just weren’t hearing. It made me think that though it would be good to speak out plainly and clearly in real life, the evasions and secrecy and hints were what literature needed most. Some time later, I discovered from EM Forster’s Maurice that “to share with a friend” was Edwardian euphemism for “have sex with a man”. I guess Conrad knew what he was about. Every time I read it, it makes it clear that desire is the place where love is most equitably shared.

• Philip Hensher’s most recent book is Tales of Persuasion.

Emma Donoghue

Emma Donoghue. Photograph: Maarten de Boer/Getty Images

The Passion by Jeanette Winterson (1987)

It was 1987: I’d just left school. I knew that I was gay (a lot of us used that word as an umbrella term, back then) and that I wanted to write. But lesbian fiction as a genre – in as much as I’d been able to find any, by scouring the “women’s literature” sections of more progressive bookshops – seemed a dud. Most of it was lowbrow, meant to reassure or bond or amuse or arouse its readers; it scratched my itch, but I didn’t want to write it. Then into my lap like manna fell Jeanette Winterson’s stylish, oblique, brilliantly intelligent The Passion. A slim novel set in Venice (a city she’d never visited) in the early 19th century, written in prose as powerful as a Keats sonnet or the King James Bible, it rocked me. Narrated by a young man (Napoleon’s chicken cook), it was full of the complexities of unreliable passion and unstable gender. Same-sex desire shook off all its earnestness and looked both playful and dangerous: eros at its most fascinating.

Suddenly, writing about relationships between women – as well as writing about centuries past – seemed like high literary endeavour, and I was on my way.

• Emma Donoghue’s most recent book is The Lotterys Plus One.

Damian Barr

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin (1978)

I was 14 and on a school trip to Brighton when I found Tales of the City in a Virgin Megastore. Or, such is the magic of Armistead Maupin’s stories, Tales found me. Because, in his densely plotted, hectically paced Tales, there’s no such thing as coincidence.

As I flicked through it I crouched on the shop floor where nobody could see me. I blushed as Michael “Mouse” Tolliver donned something called a jockstrap to dance on stage for other men at a place called the EndUp. He relayed all his adventures, every kiss, to crazy-haired Mona who also lives in the house at 28 Barbary Lane. They shocked me and their new neighbour, Mary-Ann Singleton, another plain Jane. Mrs Madrigal, their kaftaned landlady, calls her tenants her “logical family”. Read Tales and you join that family – especially appealing for anyone struggling with their own.

Marcus D’Amico and Laura Linney in Tales of the City (1993). Photograph: PBS/Everett/Rex

Mouse gets his heart broken plenty but his friends help him heal and although they worry for him they never judge him. At 14 I couldn’t imagine coming out to my schoolfriends, never mind my family. I’d be thrown out or worse. But here was a man unashamed to be himself, even if that meant pain. Mouse was the first happy gay man I ever met, on or off the page. Now I’m 40 and living in Brighton with a man called Michael and many Monas. I’ve got my own logical family.

• Damian Barr’s most recent book is Maggie & Me.

Rabih Alammedine

Shakespeare’s sonnets

A number of queer books that I’d read in my 20s changed my life, from Gide and Genet to Maupin and White (Ed and Patrick), as did the poems of Abu Nuwas and other Arab poets. If I were forced to choose, I’d go back to my teenage years when I was more impressionable. A teacher mentioned in passing that many of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written for another man and in that instant, my life, my soul, unfurled like a corolla. Yes, yes, please compare me to a summer’s day. You’re right, I am more lovely and more temperate. Go on, please. (Have I mentioned that I was impressionable?) I devoured the sonnets. I began to feel that I could be loved by a man, maybe even a man as great as Shakespeare. I, master-mistress of his passion, was worthy. The sonnets quenched a thirst I did not know I had. So long as men can breathe, or eyes could see, so long lives this, and yes, this gave life to me.

• Rabih Alammedine’s most recent novel is The Angel of History.

Garth Greenwell

Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet (1943)

Our Lady of the Flowers wasn’t the first gay book I read, but it was the first that made high art out of the brilliant, brave, defiant aesthetic that is gay male faggotry. Decades later, the virtues of that aesthetic – extravagance, effeminacy, indulgence, ornament, elegance, sexiness, ferocity, rage – would be a blessed counterpoise to the staid realism that holds sway in many an American witing workshop. For the gay kid I was in Kentucky in the early 1990s, it was an antidote to the politics of respectability.

Genet’s gigolos cruise parks and pissoirs with a regal disdain for the society by which they’re condemned; his doomed queens make a fetish of their doom. This is the whole history of queer art: taking stigma and turning it into style. Genet writes with a refinement so exquisite it becomes indistinguishable from vulgarity. Every sentence is a little machine for transfiguration: dentures become a tiara, farts become pearls, a prison cell takes on the grandeur of a palace. Comedy does a somersault and lands with a tragic face.

And all of this in honour of the imperious demands of appetite. “Bursting with emotion,” Genet writes, “I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe.” I didn’t understand Genet’s masterpiece when I read it as a teenager; I still don’t. But I found in it what I needed: art of a scope commensurate with desire.

• Garth Greenwell’s most recent novel is What Belongs to You.

AM Homes

The coming-out book was less about a single volume and more of an awakening into the world of the sexual, and the awareness that language could elicit a physical response. Looking back, it appears 1972 was pivotal. Not only was Nixon running for re-election, but also my family rented a holiday cottage in the Cape Cod town of Chatham, Massachusetts. I brought with me several books and read and reread them between long swims in the nearby pool.

Jennifer Jason Leigh in the 1989 film of Last Exit to Brooklyn. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

Among them was Michael Crichton’s A Terminal Man, a criminally dark novel about mind control, in which Crichton mentions a coarse, male pubic hair left on the floor of the shower, noting that male hair is different from female – this is what I call sex education. It was followed by Will There Really Be a Morning?, a memoir by Frances Farmer, the tragic and beautiful American actor committed to a mental institution by her mother. My path to psychic darkness now spinning out of control, a friend had lent me her copy of the novelisation of the film Deep Throat. I read that one several times, until my parents caught on and removed it from my sweaty hands.

As summer faded into fall, Nixon won re-election with a landslide and I found my way to Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, John Rechy’s City of Night and Larry Kramer’s Faggots, which firmed up my love of cities and their psychosexual undergrounds.

From there it was on to the work of Henry Miller, who I adore for his freedom, his energy and the boundless deeply male (sometimes annoying) heart at the center of his work. My favourite work of his has less to do with sex than the creative process: “The Waters Regliterized” – his essay on watercolour painting. And from there it was off to John Cheever and the discovery of sex infused with emotional conflict, and ambivalence of attachment or desire. As I revisit this stage of my development, it becomes clear that my coming out/coming of age was as affected by the language and description of sex in books as it was by the strange political ether that infused life in Washington DC, which is where I grew up. Is it fair to say that I would not have become myself were it not for the strange combo of Frances Farmer, Richard Nixon and Larry Kramer? Or to ask: who might I have become had I been born 10 years earlier? Or 10 later?

• AM Homes’s most recent novel is May We Be Forgiven.

Justin Torres

City of God by Gil Cuadros (1994)

I was born in 1980, which means I entered the world at the beginning of the Aids epidemic and grew alongside the panic; the only time anyone ever spoke about queers was in reference to Aids. By the time I was a horny teen, Aids and queer sexuality were cemented in my mind.

In 1994, when Gil Cuadros published his only book, City of God, he knew he had Aids and knew he would soon die. He lived another two years, to the ridiculously premature age of 34. The book (not at all related to the film of the same name) is an unusual collection: the first half short stories, the second half poems. It feels like the beginning of a brilliant literary voice, and at the same time it is about the strangulation of that voice. It is as messy, furious and urgent as you would expect from a man aware of his imminent death, but it is also graceful, richly symbolic and sexy.

Cuadros knew about marginalisation – he was Latino, born and raised in East Los Angeles. The book magnificently evokes the Chicano LA of the 1980s and 90s: family, God, sex, racism, homophobia in the community, white lovers, violence … The writing is haunting and revelatory. Cuadros admired and understood Genet – which is to say he knew about the shock and poetry of honestly putting into words what we perverts do with our bodies, and what we only wish we could do.

• Justin Torres’s most recent novel is We the Animals.

Olivia Laing

Words like trans or gender-fluid were hardly current in the early 1980s

Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce (1983)

I lay down by the Cam one evening to mull over the book that first spoke strongly to me of my sexuality. There were plenty of teenaged contenders, nocturnal smut such as Anaïs Nin, The Story of O or The Passionflower Hotel (the source of much hilarity on a French camping holiday with my friend Sophie). But none of these could exactly be described as the first. And then I remembered a quartet of fantasy novels I was obsessed with at the age of nine, 10, 11.

The Song of the Lioness series was about the adventures of an impetuous red-headed girl called Alanna, who cross-dresses as a boy in order to train as a knight. Eventually Alanna/Alan hooks up with Prince Jonathan, in a stirringly lovely scene of mutual vulnerability and homoerotic intensity. Words like trans or gender-fluid were hardly current in the early 1980s, but there it all was, right down to the chest-binders. Hardly any wonder I remained so devoted to those battered paperbacks. You know before you know, and those early sparks of sexuality light the road ahead.

• Olivia Laing’s most recent book is The Lonely City,

Val McDermid

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

The Great Leap Forward in lesbian fiction happened a bit too late for me. When I was coming out in 1974-75, all that was readily available was doom and gloom with a seasoning of suicide. The one exception in my reading was Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

With its gender-bending fluidity, it offered a whole range of romantic options but most of all, it fizzed with joie de vivre. It suggested that falling in love outside the mainstream was not a direct route to misery. And the language glowed, in startling contrast to everything else I came across. It stopped me feeling ashamed.

• Val McDermid’s novel Insidious Intent will be publlshed in August.

Neel Mukherjee

A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White

The book seems etched in fire in my head: I’ll remember its size, the yellowing paper, the head-and-shoulders-and-chest portrait of the stunning boy, his head turned as if he’s looking at something to his left, on the cover, its smell and, most importantly, its absolute lack of any indication in the quotes on the back that its content was going to burn my fingers (just to begin with). I was 18, I hadn’t heard of The Catcher in the Rye, knew De Profundis only by its title, so I had no idea that the sentence on the cover “Edmund White has crossed The Catcher in the Rye with De Profundis, JD Salinger with Oscar Wilde, to create an extraordinary novel” was an unassuming door that would open into what I would later understand as a transformative, seismic experience.

It was not possible, growing up in Calcutta in the 1970s and 80s, to be out or perhaps even to identify and acknowledge, if only secretly, that I was that terrible aberration, that abnormality – a homosexual. Discovering A Boy’s Own Story, with its intense, explicit – and exquisitely written – accounts of gay sex, of same-sex longing and desire, of the concurrent self-loathing and loneliness, was dizzying, as if I was standing on the edge of a very steep cliff and I could fall any moment. Of course, that toppling happened – it was the profoundest of liberations, like a bird learning to fly for the first time.

• Neel Mukherjee’s most recent novel is The Lives of Others.