Lambda Literary Awards 2012: Complete list of winners

The Lambda Literary Awards have long served as the literary world’s most prominent recognition of LGBTQ+ voices, and the 2012 edition proved to be a particularly rich year for the awards. The winners—spread across eight categories honoring bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgender literature—showcase the remarkable diversity and depth of queer writing at that moment. From Colm Tóibín’s The Empty Family capturing hearts in the gay fiction category to the groundbreaking Take Me There, edited by Tristan Taormino, expanding transgender representation in erotica, these Lambda Literary Awards winners reflect a literary landscape where LGBTQ+ authors were increasingly claiming space to tell their own stories with nuance and power.

What makes the 2012 Lambda Literary Awards particularly noteworthy is the presence of both established literary voices and important new perspectives. Jeanne Córdova’s When We Were Outlaws and Glen Retief’s The Jack Bank brought deeply personal memoir work to the fore, while Farzana Doctor’s Six Metres of Pavement offered fresh lesbian fiction that resonated widely. These winners collectively represent not just recognition, but validation—a stamp of approval from the LGBTQ+ literary community itself on works that matter, that push boundaries, and that deserved to be read far beyond their initial audiences.

Here are the complete 2012 Lambda Literary Awards winners:

Bisexual Literature

• The Correspondence Artist by Barbara Browning
• The Horizontal Poet by Jan Steckel

Gay Fiction

• The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín

Gay Memoir/Biography

• The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood by Glen Retief

Lesbian Fiction

• Six Metres of Pavement by Farzana Doctor

Lesbian Memoir/Biography

• When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love & Revolution by Jeanne Córdova

Transgender Fiction

• Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica by Tristan Taormino(editor)
• Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels by Justin Vivian Bond