LGBTQ people are not a homogeneous group, and what we find funny, sexy, boring or heartbreaking varies greatly. While there are some recurring titles-who hasn’t had their world rocked by Audre Lorde?-most of the books are quite different from one another. With that in mind, we asked some of today’s most powerful voices in LGBTQ literature to create a list of books they wanted to read as teens.

We created a BookUp specifically for homeless and at-risk LGBTQ teens so that they can experience what the world so rarely tells them: you are part of a community, you have a rich history, you exist, and you matter. After only one year of BookUp, our students were 89 percent more likely to visit a library on their own and 66 percent more confident with public speaking. Since its inception, BookUp has given students nearly 30,000 books free of charge. BookUp LGBTQ is based on our already thriving national reading program, BookUp, in which published authors run after-school reading groups where students get to choose and keep the books they read. This February, in partnership with Lambda Literary, The National Book Foundation launched BookUp LGBTQ at the Hetrick-Martin Institute taught by award winning poet t’ai freedom ford. Reading about them made me realize how starved I was for reminders of my own humanity. Quite simply, the characters in Trash were lesbians and fully realized human beings. They spoke in a language that was sensual and angry and true. Her characters had sex that was visceral and messy and embarrassing.

Dorothy Allison’s short story collection Trash made me feel seen in a way I had never imagined possible and didn’t even know I needed. It wasn’t until I graduated college that I found a book which actually spoke to my experience. When I was young, the only literature I could find about lesbians was either deeply tragic or short on character and long on formulaic, anatomically incorrect sex scenes (I’m looking at you, Xena Warrior Princess fanfiction).

Barriers to Love by Marina Peralta