My mom gets every saying wrong. Not occasionally. Consistently, creatively, and with complete confidence. “Don’t be a stick in a butt! It’ll be fun!” Some of my most joyful memories are sitting around the kitchen table with my sisters and cousins, laughing until we cried at whatever she’d mangled that day. “Pickers can’t be choosers, Mayito!” That is exactly what they are, Ma.
She also taught me to dance salsa so I could impress my abuela and my tías. She was my champion when a guidance counselor denied me entrance to accelerated classes I had qualified for simply because I was bilingual. She accepted everything about me without question. Her response to me coming out was simply “Don’t you think I know that already?” as she steered the car around a corner, ‘Hey Ya’ by Outkast playing in the background.
My mother wasn’t always laughing, and I often felt it was my responsibility as a kid to pick her up when she was down. I was there cheering when she decided to make changes for herself. I was there when she walked across a stage to receive her first college degree while raising three kids. And my grandparents, who had been through more than I understood at the time, beamed like it was the best day of their lives. It probably was. Most kids don’t get to witness their parents achieve milestones like that, but I did. I feel lucky to have been celebrated by my mother and also get to celebrate her successes as well. To lift her up when she’s down and to lift her even higher when she is up.
I say all this because the ten books I compiled for this list are, at their core, about that specific current of love that runs between mothers and sons: complicated, sometimes devastating, and when you’re lucky, mutual in ways that surprise and eventually define you.
For Queer sons and their mothers, that current carries extra voltage. There’s more to navigate, more that can go unsaid, more that has to be invented from scratch because there’s no existing script to follow. These ten stories are heartbreaking yet hopeful, often strange and surreal, but they all capture a different facet of the unique bond between mothers and their Queer sons.
Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
When Magos’s eleven-year-old son Santiago dies in New York, she cuts a piece of his lung from his body, takes it back to Mexico City, and raises it until it becomes a creature she names Monstrilio. Córdova follows Monstrilio as he grows and learns to pass as human, navigating his hunger for flesh and coming into his own Queerness across Mexico City, Brooklyn, and Berlin. Magos agreed to love him no matter what when she decided to create him, and that is something every parent can learn from.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Little Dog is writing a letter to his mother Rose, who cannot read. An act of intimacy with no possibility of receipt colors everything else in the novel: the tenderness, the grief, the violence, the things that can finally be said precisely because they will never be heard. Vuong traces the damage backward across three generations, from the American war in Vietnam through Rose’s own childhood as the daughter of a Vietnamese woman and an American soldier, and the nail-bitten life of a Queer Vietnamese American boy coming of age in Connecticut. In rural Vietnamese tradition, you name a child after something worthless to keep evil spirits from wanting them. Rose’s love is real and so is her cruelty, and Vuong refuses to resolve them into a single verdict: she is both the weapon and the person who taught Little Dog to survive it.
This novel follows Benson, a Black man whose Japanese American boyfriend Mike has just left for Japan to sit with his dying father, stranding Benson in their Houston apartment with Mike’s mother Mitsuko, newly arrived from Tokyo. Washington puts the biological mother-son relationship almost entirely offpage as Mitsuko teaches Benson to cook while simultaneously accepting his place in her son’s life without a single direct conversation about it. It’s one of the most quiet yet radical portrayals of Queer family structuring I’ve read: a mother who accepts her son by first accepting the person her son loves.
How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz
Set during the Great Recession in Washington Heights, this novel unfolds across twelve sessions between Cara Romero, a Dominican immigrant, and her job counselor. What emerges is less a portrait of unemployment than an excavation of a mother-son rupture and the trauma, fear, and misunderstanding at its root. Cara is vivid, funny, and unreliable, a woman who talks around the truth as much as toward it. Her estrangement from her son Fernando grew from her inability to reconcile his sexuality with her sense of what survival in America required, a conflict that culminated in a single violent moment neither of them has recovered from.
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
John Grimes is fourteen, brilliant, and already aware that the world his preacher stepfather Gabriel has built around the family is one he cannot survive. His mother Elizabeth knows this too, and her love for John is inseparable from her fear for him: a fear rooted in her own history of loss, in John’s father’s suicide, in the poverty that followed. Baldwin crafts the story through flashbacks that weave together the characters’ pasts over one night so that Elizabeth’s past arrives in full only partway through, a delayed revelation that reframes everything John believes about who he comes from. She protects him the only way available to her, through prayer and the careful management of Gabriel’s volatility. This is a novel about Black life in 1930s America and what it costs a mother to keep a sensitive, Queer son alive in a world determined not to see him flourish.
Hombrecito by Santiago Jose Sanchez
Santiago’s mother forgets to pick him up from school in Ibagué, Colombia. That’s the opening scene, and it establishes exactly what this relationship costs as a love that’s fierce and inconsistent, that shapes every decision Santiago makes as he moves from Colombia to Miami to New York. The novel traces his coming of age as a Queer Colombian immigrant, and Sanchez is attentive to how much of that formation happens in reaction to her: her volatility, her devotion, her absence. He then structures the novel so that the final chapter belongs entirely to the mother, shifting perspective to show us the same relationship from the other side.
Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett
Peter Fischer is a gay immigration lawyer in New York representing a young Albanian man named Vasel who is fleeing persecution, and the case forces Peter to confront his own buried history. Haslett structures the novel around a decades-old rupture between Peter and his mother Ann, who runs a women’s retreat in Vermont and has built an entire identity around listening without judgment to other people’s pain. Ann left her husband for a woman, and she appears self-aware, though not enough to navigate her son’s feelings toward this perceived betrayal. The estrangement between them is filled on both sides with attempted virtue; they both have committed their lives to good work and moral purpose, but Haslett is interested in how much damage can accumulate inside that kind of good-willed avoidance.
We the Animals by Justin Torres
Three mixed-race brothers grow up in rural upstate New York with a Puerto Rican father whose tenderness and violence arrive in equal measure and a white mother, Ma, who the boys are fiercely protective of even as children. The youngest brother’s Queerness emerges slowly and is treated with the same rawness as everything else in the novel. Ma pleads for her sons to stay six forever, which tells you everything about what she’s afraid of. Torres understands that children who love their mother ferociously learn early to be afraid of that love.
Singing from the Well by Reinaldo Arenas
Arenas’ first novel takes place in rural Cuba before the revolution, and he renders its poverty without romanticism while allowing the young nameless narrator’s imagination to run wild alongside it, creating an interior world so vivid it becomes indistinguishable from the one outside. The narrator is a child with no father, a grandfather who despises him, and a mother whose love arrives in flashes between long stretches of absence and hardship. His cousin Celestino, whose mother has died, is both companion and double: the two boys share a bed, share the village’s contempt, and share a private language that the adults around them cannot access or understand. Writing is already present in this first novel as an act of resistance, something the child reaches for not to document his life but to escape the terms it has been given.
Pageboy by Elliot Page
Elliot Page’s memoir moves across time nonlinearly, assembling a self from fragments: the sets he worked on as a young actor, the relationships that shaped and sometimes damaged him, the years of performing a gender that didn’t belong to him. Page writes about his body, his desire, and his fear with the specificity of someone who spent decades learning to look away and is now determined not to. His mother Martha is a steady presence throughout. She is loving, but she’s also a person learning, at her own pace, who her son actually is. Page is candid about the cost of that gap, and equally candid about his mother’s capacity to close it.
Mario Elías is a writer and multidisciplinary artist of Cuban and Syrian descent based in Chicago. He is the founder of The KindaSuper Project, a philanthropic initiative providing free photography and video services to underserved communities. Beloved Disciples is his debut novel, out May 12th with Amble Press.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mario Elías is a multidisciplinary artist of Cuban and Syrian descent based in Chicago. His work spans fiction, nonfiction, photography, painting, and printmaking, often exploring themes of identity, memory, and cultural inheritance. His book Queering the Male Gaze reimagined masterpieces of the classical and modern canon through essays and self-portraiture, giving voice to the often-overlooked queer and female figures who shaped them. His visual work has been featured in Vogue, San Francisco Magazine, and Dazed, among others. His portrait collection, Perennial Beauty, was the inaugural show for Golden Gate University’s Social Impact Artist Series. He is the founder of The KindaSuper Project, a philanthropic initiative offering free photography and video services to underserved communities. The project has partnered with wildfire survivors, immigrant families, women-of-color-led small businesses, and wildlife rescue organizations. His debut novel, Beloved Disciples, is out now.