1. Observations

2. Background

June is Pride Month, and here are 34 outstanding stories with LGBT characters from 2017 that were either finalists for major SF/F awards 🏆, included in "year's best" SF/F anthologies 📙, or recommended by prolific reviewers 👍 in short fiction ( see Q&A ).This list could be useful for making nominations for the 2018 Gaylactic Spectrum Awards for Best Short Fiction (published in 2010-2017). Anyone can nominate through June 30, 2018. Stories from 2017 are below. See Outstanding LGBT Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2015-2016 for earlier stories. As always, our focus is on the stories, not the authors. These are stories with memorable LGBT characters—not necessarily stories by noted LGBT authors. These include stories in which a key character merely happens to be an LGBT person as well as stories where the LGBT angle is crucial to the plot.Note that we can only list a story under one category due to a current limitation of our database schema and dynamic table script. If a story could fall under more than one category, we try to choose the one that's most important to the story.If you see any mistakes ( even if you're an author ), please let us know in the comments. Thank you.