In memory of Edmund White, the books that inspired today’s LGBTQ+ authors

Hello and welcome to the first Bookmarks of June. In honour of pride month, and in memory of the great chronicler of gay life Edmund White, who died this week aged 85, this week’s newsletter is all about the books that were important to LGBTQ+ writers when they were first exploring their queerness. And scroll down to find out what novelist Julia Armfield has been reading lately.

“Edmund White was not a gateway to gay literature, or to the gay experience, since that would imply that he was not in himself a main destination,” novelist Tom Crewe wrote in his tribute to White on Wednesday. “However, he was very often the man who opened the door to the expectant reader, who took them by the elbow, led them inside and eagerly showed them everything that was going on – that was really going on.”

Many queer writers have a particular book that “opened the door” for them when they were coming to terms with their identity. For Yael van der Wouden, whose novel The Safekeep is in contention for next week’s Women’s prize for fiction, it was A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar. The author read the coming-of-age novel about a young Palestinian-Egyptian woman when she was in her early 20s. “I’d willed myself into deciding that really, I wasn’t queer. I fell in love with this story and found comfort in it and somehow didn’t believe that said anything about me, about my desires,” van der Wouden says. “What a gift to have novels that can hold your hand gently and quietly while you struggle with the act of knowing.”

Meanwhile, for the poet Keith Jarrett, it was James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain that struck a chord. The novel “conveys queer longing with such magnificence”, which, along with “the fervour of Pentecostal Christianity in 1930s Harlem, the claustrophobia his teenage protagonist feels, and Baldwin’s sociopolitical commentary … makes it a masterpiece,” he says. “As a religiously conflicted teenager in 2000s east London, I had such a visceral connection with this novel.”

“When I first realised I was a dyke in the 1970s, there weren’t many lesbian novels apart from 1950s pulp,” the crime writer Val McDermid says. “But the one novel that really did speak to me was Patricia Highsmith’s Carol [first published in the US as The Price of Salt]. There was an emotional reality to it and a real engagement with the difficulties of being different within a very homogenous US society.” And, in contrast to the mostly negative depictions of lesbianism at the time, “nobody died and it offered the prospect of a happy ending”.

Charlie Porter, author of Nova Scotia House, remembers reading The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs when he was about 16: “Cut-up, complex, dangerous, The Naked Lunch showed me queer writing should break conformity.”

I recently read Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh, which I enjoyed enormously for its humour and its tenderness. It treats its subject – teenaged boys growing up off the Irish mainland in County Mayo – with a care that never becomes portentous, and I loved how ready it was to dive into the often absurd and sometimes revolting tangles of teenagehood. It’s extremely perceptive about the way boys can enact a thousand small cruelties while still being capable of fumbling kindness. One of my favourite books of the year.

On an entirely different note, I also read The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice, which I’m afraid I think is Pure Literature. It’s pacier than The Vampire Lestat and more ambitious than Interview with the Vampire – it feels, thrillingly, like an author really building towards something grand.

• Private Rites by Julia Armfield is out in paperback now (4th Estate, £9.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.