For a long time, I was a writer who didn’t read much.

As a child, I would devour books, series-by-series and shelf-by-shelf. When my mood dipped due to depression, I stopped reading. I lacked the motivation; I filled my life with other pursuits, like playing video games and writing my own stories.

My reading habits fluctuated over time.

Every now and then, I’d pick up a book out of curiosity and read it. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for instance, intrigued me when I was learning about gothic horror at university. Then for a while, I got hooked on Japanese fiction, particularly the works of Haruki Murakami. Murakami’s stories really excited me, but again, my mental health soon caused my reading to fall by the wayside.

Image by: Jason Leung

At university, my tutors and lecturers would always recite the same thing:

“To improve your writing, read more.”

Yet, I resisted. I always thought about this as bull-crap. I considered myself more evolved: a writer who didn’t need to read the writing of others. I was going to be the first great novelist to not have a consistent need to read.

I later realised that I was a fool. My teachers were right – when you learn the craft through others, and take in their style and prose, you grow as an artist yourself.

This exact learning moment ended up coming from an interesting therapy session.

When talking about literature, my therapist recommended me a book: the 2022 Booker Prize winner, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka. In this book, the ghost of a gay photographer desperately searches for the negatives of pictures that could end a war.

I was hooked on this premise, and bought the book immediately.

While the protagonist Maali hunts for his killers as a ghost, there is a side story that includes his love affair with a man named DD. Their love is seen as wrong, so it must be kept private.

Maali’s journey made me, selfishly, think about my own.

As a disabled gay man, I never felt connected to my community in any palpable way. I desperately yearned to enter queer spaces like clubs, rallies, marches, and university groups, but my disability and mental health struggles stopped me.

Born with Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus, I lack a lot of fine and gross motor skills needed to go out into the world without showing weakness or pain. I get fatigued when I go to a club, and my body becomes sore when I march at events and protests.

Eventually, I just stopped trying to connect to the LGBTQ+ community.

By reading a gay novel like The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, something tweaked in my brain for the first time. I realised I could connect to other gay people in a realm I was familiar with: the written word.

Queer literature provided a comfortable, safe way to hear people’s stories and take part in my community.

To broaden my reading horizons, I began researching. I decided early on that I wanted to connect to as many people in the LGBTQ+ community as I could this way. I didn’t want to limit myself just to gay romances (which are valid, and I still enjoy).

Through BookTube (the community of YouTubers dedicated to sharing books and reviewing them) and internet reviews, I found my first round of recommendations.

I also found a queer bookstore in Melbourne called Hares & Hyenas, which is a small haven of LGBTQ-themed books. I left with a stack of queer literature.

It was amazing and humbling to be surrounded by so many great queer stories. Queer bookstores are a lifeline for supporting queer writers, and for providing safety and community to many people – especially those of us with disabilities.

I’ve learned a lot from each book I’ve read thus far.

Maali Almeida reveals much about the intersection of being gay in a different culture and historical period. Pageboy by Elliot Page is an engrossing, raw tale of trans identity told over decades. Bellies by Nicola Dinan, the book I’m currently reading, explores the intense and complicated situations that can emerge when your significant other transitions.

And of course, there have been some books written by or about queer people that have fallen flat, the story uninspiring or the narrative voice quite irritating. I won’t go into details, but trust me when I say there can be duds, just as there are duds among books about heterosexual cisgender people.

As I read more and more, I’ve enjoyed seeing LGBTQ+ people in different genres. Gone are the days when you would have the limited options of just romance or tragedy.

For a long time, the ‘kill your gays’ trope (wherein at least one gay person dies) was all you could find. Now there are lesbian horror novels, like Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield, gory transgender apocalyptic novels like Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin, and engaging queer dystopias like Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

As a cis white gay man, I realise there’s a lot of privilege in this era of media, with most LGBTQ+ pop culture centring on relationships between white queer men.

I’ve read some of the popular books as well, like Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper and Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles. These books do validate me to a certain extent – showing that connection, from the historical and epic, to the adolescent and benign, is available to me.

But these well-known books aren’t the only ones out there.

When I read queer literature, I don’t necessarily look for representations of my own identity. Instead, I can connect to other LGBTQ+ narratives, and to a community that, until now, has felt inaccessible.

If you are out there and struggling to find community for whatever reason, I believe that diving into the world of queer literature can help you build a bridge that connects you.

I read to feel my pride.

Noah Yard is a gay, disabled writer from Naarm (Melbourne), He enjoys cosy videogames and queer books and aspires to write “radically gay” stories of his own, with a desire to write queer stories in the speculative fiction and fantasy genres. He has been published in the past by ABC Everyday, and you can also find his pop culture reviews of movies, TV, and videogames at his site constantlyirksome.com.