I’m fifty-six, and I came out at seventeen. I’ve been a bookworm for as long as I can remember, but until a few years ago I had never read a book with a queer character in it.
I’m sure the books existed, but the books I found myself reading rarely had anyone in them who looked like my family or lived a life like mine. That changed during the pandemic, when the world felt like it was coming apart and we were all trapped inside our houses waiting for the next bad thing. I read the way other people drank or made sourdough bread. A guaranteed happily ever after — HEA, in the shorthand of the genre — turned out to be exactly the kind of certainty I needed when everything else was in flux. When I became bedridden after my COVID vaccine, the escape stopped being a luxury and became a means of survival.
It started with a military romance series about straight couples. Threaded through the series was a second story about two men, written like they were simply another couple, and it was the first time I had seen queer people on the page treated as unremarkable. That book led me to a trilogy now enshrined in the Goodreads Hall of Fame for the genre: Him, Us, Epic. So much angst, so much pining, and finally so much love that I was hooked.
One of the first authors I fell for (and still a favorite) is Garrett Leigh. The first book of hers I read centered on a main character who was chronically ill, a dancer whose body was failing him. The humanity of that story absolutely wrecked me. It wasn’t all sunshine and balloons; it held real pain right alongside the joy, and that is precisely why it drew me in and remains memorable all these years later.
The truth is, I read for queer joy and I’m unapologetic about it. After fifty-odd years of reading about people who weren’t like me, I am finally reading about my own community. Something specific happens when you see a piece of your life on a page — the closet, being the only one in the room. To find that in engaging stories and for those stories to end in happiness rather than a funeral … it brings me joy every time I sit down to read.
People like to offer theories about why women read romance between men — that we’re after a tenderness we don’t get at home. I’ve been married to my wife for twenty-six years, so that one doesn’t hold, at least not for me. I think the reason is even less complicated for me; I am a romantic. I love reading stories of people finding their person(s). I don’t need to be in the story to be moved by it — I just love the love. I’ll admit the anthropologist never fully clocks out. I highlight the passages where a character reaches an inflection point, because I am always curious on some level about how people decide.
All these years and hundreds of books later, I’m still intrigued by the form itself. Romance runs on tropes — friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, grumpy and sunshine, second-chance. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that a genuinely good writer can take a trope every reader already knows and still make it engaging and fun to read. I am continually amazed at the variety of subgenres, too — military, sports, the music industry, paranormal, fantasy, mystery, and even police procedurals. Now that I’ve read so many stories, I notice the cadence more than I did in the past. Which author(s) reaches for the same third-act breakup in every story? Which ones find a new rhythm each time? Authors like M.A. Guglielmo, a neuroscientist, and Annabella Stone, a military spouse, write with a sophistication that I enjoy. Plenty of romance is written more plainly, and there is no shame in that — accessible writing is how this genre reaches everyone. When I want something more complex and nuanced, the alternatives are there too.
As someone trained to watch how groups make meaning, I notice the patterns — including the way film and television kill off their queer characters so reliably that the habit has a name: Bury Your Gays. Queer romance makes the opposite promise. Here, queer people find love, and couples get their happily ever after. It’s not hard to understand why people like me started reading and haven’t stopped.
I have found community with other like-minded readers, too. I belong to a handful of book groups full of voracious, generous people who can identify a book from someone’s half-remembered fragment of a plot. Almost every time, the hive mind delivers. These spaces generally condemn public criticism of authors. Those same social channels cause some discomfort for me, too — specific requests that cross from fandom into something closer to fetish. I don’t yuck anyone’s yum, but I usually steer clear. What overshadows the weirdness, every time, is the feeling of being somewhere safe, among people rooting for queer love to win.
We have a tiny independent bookstore in the neighborhood. The owner has a trans kid, and the shop has quietly become a beacon — small, but with a real queer section. They asked me once for “own voices” recommendations, wanting to be sure male authors were on the shelf, since so much of this is written by women, for women. It’s a fair thing to ask. Are straight women making money telling queer men’s stories? Yes, but (in my experience) not in a way that harms. The books themselves are respectful and celebratory, and many of the authors are somewhere in the queer mix anyway — trans, bi, poly, queer, or married women who’ll tell you they aren’t exactly straight.
I have been interested to learn that it’s not just me. While the rest of fiction has roughly flatlined since the pandemic, sales of LGBTQ fiction have surged — up about 200% since 2019, to a record-breaking few million copies a year. Queer romance has run hotter still: up 40% in a single year, and more than 700% across the five years before that. Booksellers have a name for the moment — a “renaissance of gay literature.” [1] And the part I can’t stop turning over is that it’s happening at the very same time these books are being pulled from shelves at record rates. The shelves empty in one place and overflow in another. Which leaves me with the question I can’t answer: why now?
That’s not just my experience, but a cultural moment. Why, in this regressive and scary moment, are more people than ever reaching for stories where queer people fall in love and find their happy-ever-afters? I don’t know, but I am very much here for it! I’ve started keeping a record of what I read and watch (more on that soon) on Instagram @natreads247. I’d love to see you there.
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[1] 2023. NBC Out. “A ‘renaissance of gay literature’ marks a turning point for publishing” – https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/lgbtq-fiction-gay-literature-publishing-turning-point-rcna127922
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