The Best Queer Road Trip Books For Your Next Vacation
My obsession with road trips started as a kid, watching the subway hurtle from my sleepy suburb toward Boston. Back then, I didn’t know I was queer. All I knew was that I didn’t fit in…and I imagined one day escaping to somewhere that I did. When I was a kid, the train offered possibility. But once I got older, I discovered queer road trip books – and began to dream of the open road.
I took my first cross country road trip at age 20, driving from Boston to Berkeley, California. Since then, I’ve driven across the country three more times. I’ve also taken shorter road trips through the South and Midwest.
Road trip books are special. They take you on a journey of movement and transformation, showing off new possibility. Queer road trip books offer that same premise, and something more. They show queer people leaving behind places and people that did not fully see us, experiencing the freedom and joy of the open road, and finding the place or people where we can be more fully ourselves.
If you’re looking for your next queer read, I’ve founded up LGBTQ fiction and nonfiction books that involve road trips. In some books, the road is a minor theme while in others, it’s the full point. In all of these queer road trip books, you’ll find diverse queer representation, descriptions that will make you want to pack a bag and leave, and memorable characters you won’t stop thinking about.
Tramps Like Us by Joe Westmoreland
The cult classic of queer road trip books is reissued with an introduction by Eileen Myles and an afterword by the author.
It’s the 1970s. Joe graduates high school and takes to the road, hitchhiking his way across the USA. Extended stops in New Orleans and San Francisco are an homage to early gay culture – drugs, clubs, sex, and music.
Just as Joe and his companion, Ali, start to build a life in San Francisco, HIV arrives on the scene. The two men – along with everyone they know – are diagnosed with HIV, and the carefree spontaneity that has defined their days is threatened.
This book is a gleeful, raucous adventure and an homage to the era that AIDS stole from a generation of gay men. Buy it to connect with queer history!
Here We Go Again by Alison Cochrun
This sapphic road trip rom-com holds space for grief and big feelings.
Two ex-best friends grudgingly reunite to drive their mentor across the country to fulfill his dying wish of taking a sapphic cross-country road trip.
It’s an enemies-to-lovers romance on the road, in a big gay van. But given the “dying mentor” aspect, Here We Go Again is not all sunshine and roses. This is a queer romance that covers death and dying – in a fun way, on the road, as part of a larger lesbian love story.
The characters roam about, from Washington State to the Grand Canyon to Maine. If you’ve craving a road trip adventure that’ll make you feel ALL the big feelings, this is one to pack.
Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States by Samantha Allen
This queer road trip book takes a romp through red states and the queer and trans activists proud to call them home.
Journalist Samantha Allen came out, transitioned, and found her partner while living in red states. In this narrative nonfiction book, she sets out on a road trip to the cities and states that shaped her experiences.
This is less of a straight-up road trip book than the title suggests. Chapters explore local queer communities in places like Provo, Utah and Bloomington, Indiana, where Allen attended college and graduate school.
In each city, you’ll meet the queer folks on the ground who are doing the difficult work of building community and advocating for change in places that are widely perceived as unwelcoming or unsafe for trans people.
Real Queer America goes to the places that many of us simply drive through without stopping, which is precisely why it’s worth a read.
Girls Girls Girls By Shoshana Von Blanckensee
A sex positive sapphic nineties throwback novel.
It’s 1996, and closeted queer girlfriends Hannah and San drive from New York to San Francisco so they can build a life together, out in the open. There’s a brief road trip segment before the couple gets to California; the rest of the book is about their attempts to resettle, which don’t go as well as hoped.
The city is expensive, and the queer women start stripping to make rent. When Hannah meets an older butch at the club, it seems like the perfect escape route: she can be cared for and protected from men…
Girls Girls Girls is one part queer road trip, one part ode to first love, being young and queer in the nineties, and finding yourself.
Make Sure You Die Screaming by Zee Carlstrom
This road-trip thriller follows a nonbinary protagonist’s unhinged quest to find their MAGA father.
Make Sure You Die Screaming’s unnamed narrator burns out on their corporate job, steals a car, and embarks on a road trip from Chicago to Arkansas with their goth bestie. The goal? Find the narrator’s father, who’s gone missing.
The themes are dark. There’s substance abuse. Resentment. Class rage. The narrator is divisive. But in these times, those are selling points for some readers.
Try this queer road trip book when you need to rage at the status quo.
Memoir of an Innocent Brat by Aaron Wang
A darkly funny queer mystery novel with a road trip at its center.
Still brooding over his cheating ex, barista Pete winds up internet famous when he throws an iced latte at an annoying patron. Pete gets trolled, and decides to drive from Brooklyn to Chicago to confront the troll IRL. The last thing he expects to happen? Getting feelings for the troll.
In a massive plot twist, Pete’s cheating ex gets murdered and he finds himself under suspicion. Only the troll can provide his alibi – and Pete’s burned that bridge!
Part road trip novel, part unhinged and darkly comedic mystery, Memoir of an Innocent Brat is a campy cultural critique.
Better Catch Up, Krishna Kumar by Anahita Karthik
A bisexual YA road trip romance set in India.
Spending the summer before college in India, Krishna Kumar has one goal: get kissed. So when her flight is delayed, she takes a last-ditch road trip to an Indian wedding for one last shot at a kiss from the hot neighbor. But as the trio crash the wedding, Krishna finds herself falling for the sidekick.
Note for the sapphics out there: the long-haired hottie on the cover is actually a guy, and not a woman like I first thought.
Read this one for a charming and funny bi road trip featuring queer South Asian rep.
Whenever You’re Ready by Rachel Runya Katz.
This friends-to-lovers romance unfolds over a Southern Jewish history road trip.
Childhood friends Nia and Jade fell out after their best friend died of cancer. After three years of low contact, Nia finds a letter from Michal begging them to go on the Southern Jewish history road trip they’d originally planned to take together. Joined by Jade’s twin and Michal’s partner, the friends-turned-enemies set off on a rocky road trip.
Read this for friends-to-enemies-to-lovers vibes, plus Black queer Jewish Southern history.
(Out) On the Road: The Radical Joy of Queer Travel by Lindsey Danis.
Vanlife road trip. Cross country bike journey. Diverse LGBTQ+ rep.
Spoiler alert: this one’s my book. It distills everything I’ve learned about LGBTQ+ travel in a mix of personal stories and practical tips.
Chapters cover planning and budgeting for travel, coming out and advocating for yourself, trans and gender diverse travel, queer road trips, international travel, and so much more.
If you read this blog or get my newsletter, you have a good idea of what I tend to cover. Along with me, you’ll hear from two late-to-lesbians who found the confidence to live authentically through an adult gap year and vanlife road trip. A queer South Asian man who reclaimed his body confidence after exploring Berlin’s nudist spaces. Gay travel couples who move seamlessly between discreet travel in places where it’s not safe to be LGBTQ+ and moving through the world with pride. And so many more…
Nevada by Imogen Binnie
A punk trans woman takes a solo road trip in this cult classic, newly reissued.
Punk trans bookseller Maria embarks on a solo road trip in the wake of a breakup. She lands in Nevada, befriends a young man she suspects is trans, and assumes the role of trans mentor. Nevada is a gritty, tenderhearted exploration of the coming of age and coming out experience, while offering trans readers the complex, full-storied representation they deserve.
Nevada was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction. The reissued version comes with a new afterword by the author.
The Lesbian Bar Chronicles by Rachel Karp.
This nonfiction road trip to America’s last remaining lesbian bars finds surprising hope for sapphic spaces.
Author and podcast host author Rachel Karp takes a road trip with her wife and her best friend to visit the last remaining lesbian bars in the US. This book is story-rich, informed by over one hundred hours of interviews with bar patrons, staff, and owners.
Karp ultimately finds room to hope. The queer bars she visits are not dying, they’re changing with the times. Just like they have for decades.
Read this before your road trip, then plot sapphic side quests to the bars mentioned here.
Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg
Road trips are a minor theme in this queer meditation on art and love.
A queer photographer’s mentor gives her a life-changing inheritance. The road trip to claim it brings unexpected love and career success.
Housemates is a modern retelling of the real-life sapphic couple Berenice Abbott, a documentary photographer, and her partner Elizabeth McCausland.
While this is billed as a Pennsylvania road trip book, it’s more of a coming of age novel, with themes of making art and becoming yourself. Most of the story is set in Philadelphia, in a ramshackle house where an ensemble queer cast of recent college grads are dating, falling in love, and trying to make a living.
Read this when you need some inspiration.
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith.
An early queer classic, made into the acclaimed movie Carol.
Carol, a married woman, begins an affair with a shopkeeper, Therese. Fearing discovery, the two embark on a cross-country road trip with a private investigator on their tail.
The road offers the women a tantalizing glimpse of the freedom they could have in a different era. Then the investigator catches up, and Carol is forced to make a devastating choice.
The Price of Salt was published in the heyday of lesbian pulp novels, when queer books all ended in tragedy. So not only is it an early lesbian classic, it also treated queer people like people, not damaged, misguided deviants. For its era, that was revolutionary.
Flaming Iguanas by Erika Lopez
A queer Latina motorcycle road trip from New York to — where else? — San Francisco.
Combining illustrations, rubber stamps, and text, Flaming Iguanas is a unique road trip novel. The story follows a sassy New Yorker, Tomato Rodriguez, as she weaves across the US on her bike, flirting with women and finding herself.
Tomato Rodriguez rides her motorcycle across the country, meeting girls and endless adventures along the way. A perfect antidote to overly serious road trip books, save this one for when you need a dose of whimsy.
Amid ongoing attacks on LGBTQ lives, most notably the erasure of trans rights in the US, queer road trip books can remind us of the radical power in taking up space and living loud and proud. They can connect us to earlier eras, providing inspiring examples – real and imagined – of queer resilience and strength. Spanning genres and queer identities, these books portray a life in motion as not just survival strategy, but liberation.
