Too hot to do anything but sit inside? These new offerings from LGBT writers will give you plenty to read whether in the midst of a heat wave, or if you’re lucky enough to be on the beach or by the pool.

Rocking and reeling

• Hal Leonards’s Music on Film series presents books about two movies close to queer readers’ hearts: “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (Limelight Editions, 2012) by  Dave Thomson examines what is, to this day, still one of the gayest movie  music musicals of all time, cult or non-cult; and “Purple Rain” (Limelight  Editions, 2012) by John Kenneth Muir looks at Prince’s groundbreaking 1984  movie debut.

• Punk cabaret diva and first-rate belter Storm Large recounts her life with a  bipolar mother as well as her own sexual awakening and exploration in the  memoir “Crazy Enough” (Free Press, 2012)

• “Film Noir: The Directors” (Limelight Editions, 2012), edited by Alain Silver and  James Ursini features queer filmmaker Nicholas Ray and the iconic Ida Lupino  among its many subjects.

Trans-formative texts

• Featuring a new epilogue, the paperback edition of “Transition: Becoming Who I Was Always Meant to Be” (Plume,  2011/2012) by Chaz Bono is the triumphant story of the most famous trans man  of our time.

• “Transitions  of the Heart: Stories of Love, Struggle and Acceptance by Mothers of  Transgender and Gender Variant Children” (Cleis, 2012) edited by Rachel  Pepper, consists of 32 essays written by mothers from all walks of  life.

Poetry of Pride

• “He Will Laugh” (Lethe Press, 2012),  Doug Ray’s powerful debut poetry collection relates the story of how two young  men met, fell in love, and the profound impact of the suicide of one of them.  

• Something  to look forward to in September — prolific lesbian writer (and author of  “Heather Has Two Mommies”), Leslea Newman offers “October Mourning” (Candlewick Press, 2012), a cycle of poems about Matthew  Shepard.

Telling the truth

• Edited by Sarah Moon, with contributing editor James Lecesne, the Y/A anthology “The Letter Q” (Arthur A Levine Books/Scholastic, 2012), features more than 60 writers and illustrators corresponding with “their younger selves.”

• Written and illustrated (with watercolors) by the late gay writer Clyde Phillip  Wachsberger, “Into The Garden with Charles” (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012) is a  memoir about “growing old and falling in love.”

• Picking up where Clint Eastwood’s Hoover biopic “J. Edgar” left off, Darwin Porter’s  “J. Edgar Hoover & Clyde Tolson” (Blood Moon, 2012), promised to be an  investigation into “the sexual secrets of America’s most famous men and  women.”

• Told in brief, insightful essays, “Red Nails, Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and  Pleasure On and Off the Ice” (Duke University Press, 2012) tells of queer  critic Erica Rand’s experiences in the slippery world of ice  skating.

Fictionally speaking

• Earning  her comparisons to Mary Renault, Madeline Miller’s acclaimed novel “The Song  of Achilles” (Ecco, 2012) retells the “Iliad” with a queer  twist.

• The debut novel by BoiParty.com co-director and head promoter Justin Like Zirilli, “Gulliver Takes Manhattan” (Amazon Encore, 2012), tells the story of the  titular Gulliver who escapes to New York to make a new beginning, leaving  everything behind in L.A.

• In the historical romance “Purgatory” (Bear Bones Books, 2012), poet and writer Jeff Mann writes about two young Civil War soldiers, fighting on opposite  sides, but falling in love.