In many ways, queer fiction and non-fiction are genres without a specific definition. For some, queer books are written by authors who identify as a member of a community under the queer umbrella. For others, they focus on queer people and experiences. Still others define queer literature as the books and narratives they read because they are queer, finding something in the words that reflects their identity, their thoughts, their lives, back to them.
In a review of J.M. Tolcher’s queer memoir Poof for the online LGBTQ magazine Prism & Pen, Benny Callaghan declares that the power of queer writing is how “telling your story can change your own life and that of others.” While humans have always looked to the power of other people’s stories for guidance, inspiration, lessons, and more, in a society which continues to wage war on any person who exists outside of the prescribed norm, the stories of queer lives and experiences often act as a lighthouse in the stormy night, the promise of a safe place to land.
The history of queer literature is often one of excavating the unspoken and deciphering cultural codes lost to time, and can at times feel like an unending count of traumas experienced in unwelcoming times and places. But while those important stories and experiences are still represented within the landscape of queer writing, “publishers are giving readers more options than sad books about queer people that traffic in trauma — we’re getting joy, queer sex, and dysfunction,” Jackson Howard points out in an interview with Vogue. And this, the representation of queer lives and stories in all their full and technicolor glory, is important not only for the readers who identify as a part of the queer community and those who are questioning or seeking to identify themselves, but also for readers who identify as cis-gender and straight. When all that exists are tales of trauma and grief, that is all that anyone can imagine for their queer family, for queer people; fear becomes a natural response. But there are so many options and avenues for queer experiences in the literature — fiction and non-fiction — just as in life. And reading queer books can not only help queer people to see themselves, but to help others see, understand, and empathize with the experiences of queer people. Which is why no matter how you define it, queer fiction is for everyone.
The books listed on the following pages are only a few of the innumerable stories of queer people and experiences throughout history and across the globe. But what they each have in common is the affirmation that queer people have always been here, that they will always be here. That while others may try to erase their stories from the narrative — rewriting romances as platonic friendships, invalidating lived experiences of gender and sex, and a thousand other ways of not seeing queer people for who they have always been — their words, and their lives, persist.
Like Sappho centuries ago, these books offer the world a hopeful promise:
I tell you
someone will remember us
in the future.
