Fiction

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender

I’ve often said that the best kind of book is the book that teaches while it entertains. Perhaps not surprisingly, YA novels tend to fall into this category. They make for lovely and usually simple reading, perfect for stressful times when we need escapist leisure (hmm… why is that so appealing right now?). Yet, they are also often quite instructive; at least, the really good ones are. Kacen Callender’s Felix Ever After is a good LGBTQ+ Summer Read. Felix’s story, the story of a young trans black man, is a particularly important and powerful one right now. It is a story that needed telling.

Don Juan in the Village by Jane DeLynn

Jane DeLynn’s novel is a classic of lesbian fiction. It follows the escapades and sexual conquests of its female protagonist, a lady Don Juan, as she travels the world and sleeps with as many women as she can. The narrative spans the course of 20 years, beginning sometime in the 1970s and ending sometime in the 1990s. There is a clear and stark, sometimes painful, contrast between the freedom of the post-1960s sexual revolution and the advent of what the narrator labels, “the plague.”

Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian

Like A Love Story is not only a beautifully written YA novel, but it is a historically and socially important one. Nazemian reminds the reader just how hard gay and lesbian people had to fight to win their freedoms and equal protection, a fight that continues to this day and that is constantly under attack. 

The author includes several important historical lessons, weaving them seamlessly into the story of these characters’ lives so that readers who give this work a chance will find themselves learning critical history that is often overlooked, forgotten, or under-appreciated, while at the same time enjoying an excellent story. At the heart of it are themes of friendship, forgiveness, and first loves, as well as first losses.

Graphic Novels

The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

Somewhere amidst all the very heavy reading that I was doing last summer, I apparently needed a break. That break was found in Jen Wang’s delightful graphic novel, The Prince and the Dressmaker. The story is about a young man, a prince, who sometimes likes to dress in women’s clothes. He hears of a brilliant young dressmaker and hires her to be his own personal designer. 

The story is charming—delightful, really—and fresh in the way it bends gender roles separate from sexuality. The art, too, is simply wonderful. The story has its ups and downs, of course, and nothing goes entirely smoothly, not even for a prince, but the ending is a dessert worth waiting for. 

The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen

The heart of this graphic novel is three fairy tales, including two versions of Cinderella (the German and the Vietnamese) and The Little Mermaid. Also incorporated into the plot are concepts such as traditional coming out and coming of age in America, the immigrant experience, colonization and empire, post-war identity, and so much more. 

What on the surface might look like another wonderfully illustrated children’s story, is in fact a powerful, delicate, and uniquely rendered story about a queer, Asian American boy’s life, his family, and their heritage, not to mention language itself. I was utterly captivated by this one. The Magic Fish has found its place on my forever shelf.

Poetry

The Tradition by Jericho Brown

This collection contains three parts. Running through all three is a series of poems titled “Duplex.” Each one grows considerably sharper and more poignant as the collection roars forward to its conclusion. Somehow, Brown creates beauty where none should exist. His poems make explicit the horror we have grown accustomed to in our daily lives, but they do so in the way “Ganymede” promises from the outset: When the speaker asks us, who doesn’t want to be loved by God, we see the answer in the very craft of poetry. And what have we sacrificed for it? 

“I begin with love, / hoping to end there,” Brown writes in one of his “Duplex” poems, and I must cheer him for succeeding. This collection and every poem in it, whether it is tackling issues of rape or terror, mass shootings, workplace struggles, or the intimacies of the bedroom, is filled with love. Crafted with love. Expressing love in every word and line, in every syllable and caesura.

Fire to Fire by Mark Doty

This collection is a kind of “greatest hits” from a National Book Award-winning poet. It gathers the “best of” Doty’s previous seven poetry collections (pre-2008) and adds some of his more recent uncollected pieces. What it proves is that Doty is one of America’s greatest contemporary poets and certainly a standout for gay poetry. I responded most to his poems about loss and about the painful but necessary act of moving forward.

The Malevolent Volume by Justin Phillip Reed

This one speaks directly to the current movement and to the violence that has been perpetrated against black bodies for too long. Reed uses a full arsenal in his exploration and call to arms, from mythology to modern cinema, from pop culture to classical poetic forms. At its core, this is a critique of exploitation, an expose, and while it often looks outward at the populations of marginalized people, it is also personal, intimate, and revolutionary. 

Reed’s style of free verse is deeply informed by formal structure. His poems are always in conversation with other poems, and other poets. This is likely to become a well-cited model for emerging poets.  

Non-Fiction

A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski

If I’m not mistaken, this is the first text in the “revisionist history” series, and it’s a decent inaugural text for that project. Although this study ends in the 1990s and could therefore use a new edition, the book is exactly what it says it will be, an illuminating and detailed history of queer people in the United States, from its founding to the AIDS crisis. 

Those new to LGBTQ+ history will learn a lot from reading this book, some of which will be surprising. If you’re hoping to add depth to your characters’ backstories or to write historical fiction, this is going to be a helpful read.

Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America by Christopher Bram

In the years following World War II, a group of gay writers established themselves as major cultural figures in American life. Truman Capote, the enfant terrible, whose finely wrought fiction and nonfiction captured the nation’s imagination. Gore Vidal, the wry, withering chronicler of politics, sex, and history. Tennessee Williams, whose powerful plays rocketed him to the top of the American theater. James Baldwin, the harrowingly perceptive novelist and social critic. Christopher Isherwood, the English novelist who became a thoroughly American novelist. And the exuberant Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry defied censorship and exploded minds. Together, their writing introduced America to the gay experience and sensibility; and changed our literary culture. What writer doesn’t love reading about other powerful and history-making writers?

Thinking About It

This LGBTQ+ Summer Reading list of course just scratches at the surface of a brilliant and ever-developing “canon” of LGBTQ+ literature in the United States and elsewhere. I could write for pages and pages about other writers, like Ocean Vuong and Emily M. Danforth, who deserve to be read.

If you have other great suggestions for LGBTQ+ summer reading, feel free to leave them in the comments!

Adam W. Burgess is a Professor of English at the College of Southern Nevada. He has a Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University and is pursuing a post-doc writing certificate at the University of California, Berkeley. He loves engaging in all topics related to LGBTQ literature and craft. You can find Adam on his website or follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The post Prepare Your LGBTQ+ Summer Reading List with Ten Must-Reads appeared first on DIY MFA.

The course was essentially a study of novels by and about peoples and countries that had once been ruled by the British Empire. Some of the selections included Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Julian Barnes’s England, England, Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. 

It was these last two that really piqued my interest in a postcolonial and eventually queer approach to literature: Jack Maggs is the re-telling of Dickens’s Great Expectations but from the perspective of the criminal, and Wide Sargasso Sea is a kind of prequel to Jane Eyre that gives voice to the infamous “mad woman in the attic,” Bertha.

I remember finding something so profoundly powerful, and right, about these contemporary novels that revisit classics and give voice to voiceless characters, particularly the marginalized ones whose real-life counterparts, in historical perspective, had been equally silenced. It was perhaps this singular exploration of postcolonialism that led me to queer theory and the queering of fiction.

The Queering of Fiction

When we talk about queer fiction, we typically mean stories by and about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, asexual, aromantic, and other non-heteronormative persons. Those who are, in other words, not heterosexual and cisgender. But when we talk about queering fiction, what we mean is looking at the existing work from a lens that allows us to consider whose voices and stories are being left out, minimized, or marginalized. 

A classic example is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which is now often read for homosocial or homosexual perspectives on the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg. Similarly, The Great Gatsby can be queered to review the relationship between its narrator, Nick Carraway, and the titular antihero, Jay Gatsby.

There have been a great number of postcolonial and queer texts published in recent years, but even more compelling to me are writers who are “writing back” to our LGBTQ+ foreparents and reimagining the stories and fictive futures that those LGBTQ+ writers offered to us so courageously, if much more subtly than is required today. One of the best of these published recently is William di Canzio’s Alec.

Alec by William di Canzio

Alec is an inspired tribute to E.M. Forster’s iconic gay novel, Maurice (1971). In it, di Canzio gives the two lovers—Alec and Maurice—not only riveting back stories, but a beautifully articulated origin for their romance, all of which is wrapped up in the historical context of World War I, which was such a monumental time for Forster himself.

E.M. Forster’s Maurice

Forster wrote Maurice in 1913 and then significantly revised the novel at least twice, in the 1930s and 1950s. Unfortunately, due to censorship and legalities, Forster chose not to publish the work until after he died. To me, this is one of the most heartbreaking events in literary history, as what Forster created was one of the bravest and most significant same-sex love stories in literature to that time, and it would have been groundbreaking to see it published even sooner and during the author’s lifetime. 

That said, Forster was certainly right that it likely would have ruined his career. As anyone who has read my book knows, plenty of gay writers were publishing gay stories in the first half of the twentieth century—even happy ones! But there were always stipulations, such as publishing anonymously, publishing with small presses, etc. And indeed, no one of Forster’s stature, save perhaps Charles Warren Stoddard, was attempting it. And what happened to Stoddard when he finally decided to publish his openly gay romance in 1903? His reputation was ruined.

A Story Left Untold

It is for this reason, then, that di Canzio’s Alec, which openly and lovingly gives Alec & Maurice the story they deserve, as well as the ending Forster likely wished for them, is such a moving experience. In addition, it’s a superb accomplishment in its own right. Di Canzio’s style and language are rich and provocative, his descriptions resonant and vivid, and his almost defiantly open descriptions of the lovers’ sexual experiences enthralling. Significantly, I think di Canzio does a remarkable job of fleshing out a story left untold, of a particular time, that reminds the reader both how far we have come but also how fragile progress is.

Alec isn’t just an updated love story for Alec and Maurice, it’s a love song to E.M. Forster, filled with respectful gratitude to a tortured pioneer and with a hopeful eye on the horizon. This is a worthy homage and simply one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Literature is and always has been a conversation, and the conversation that’s now happening between contemporary writers and their LGBTQ+ forerunners is a welcome and remarkable one. As di Canzio has shown, it takes not just great skill as a writer, but detailed and efficient work as a historian and researcher, to do this well.

And what a gift it is when it happens. 

Tell us in the comments: Have you read William di Canzio or any other novels that “write back” to LGBTQ+ foreparents?

Adam W. Burgess is an English Professor at the College of Southern Nevada. He has a Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University and is pursuing a post-doc writing certificate at the University of California, Berkeley. He loves engaging in all topics related to LGBTQ literature and craft. 

You can find Adam on his website or follow him on Twitter, and Instagram.

The post Writer to Writer: William di Canzio and E.M. Forster appeared first on DIY MFA.

“But Adam,” you’re thinking, “surely there are those who wrote without critique groups and writing circles, and who managed to write brilliantly without any feedback!” 

Well, maybe, but I tend to doubt it. 

Even notorious recluse Emily Dickinson would send her poems to trusted advisors via “snail mail” to get their feedback, though she published almost none of her poetry during her lifetime. 

The truth is, while there might be one or two writers who can accomplish their very best work in total isolation, that’s going to be the exception, not the rule.

The Benefits of a Writing Community

Writing communities help us see what we otherwise couldn’t see in our own work, from the smallest errors in mechanics or dialogue to the bigger issues of theme and structure. They inform us from the audience’s perspective, which is invaluable in the early stages—even if we’ll never make every reader happy—but they also provide expert, practical advice from those who are engaged in our craft.

In addition, writing groups composed of LGBTQ+ writers and readers are especially important to those of us writing from that perspective and with those readers in mind. For example, most of us in this group acknowledge that we can’t possibly know everything about every experience, and while our imaginations and invention strategies can take us very far indeed, there are some things that we don’t know and might make mistakes without help. 

Writing groups that are made up of diverse members can help us illuminate our blind spots and make us aware of where we might be stepping out of bounds or getting something wrong.

Tips for Finding Your Writing Community

As this year is ending, community of many types might be on your mind. If you’re an LGBTQ+ writer who hasn’t yet found an LGBTQ+ writing community, why not make it one of your goals of the season to do that for yourself?

Perform Google search for “LGBTQ+ writing groups” 

You’ll find several excellent online and local/in-person groups to choose from through a simple search like this one. 

If you tend to be the shy type, it might be a good idea to start with the online groups and see if you can search the rosters for active members, and even ratings/reviews of critique partners. 

Just as you might research publishers to submit to, or agents to query, you should also do your due diligence in seeking out a writing group that will work for you and that has a good reputation.

Check out Lambda Literary

This group is devoted to all things LGBTQ+ literature and there are resources for readers, writers, and teachers. 

You’ll also find things like writer’s retreats, resources in specific genres, and even book recommendations. Reading in your genre is crucial to growing as a writer and to understanding the conversations happening amongst your colleagues right now, so this is a good place to start for a few reasons.

Search for Local LGBTQ+ Centers

Locally, you can search for your nearest LGBTQ+ centers to see what sorts of writer’s programs exist, if any. There might be book clubs or creative writing groups hosted at or by the Centers themselves, or through their affiliates, like local community colleges or universities. 

You can also suggest one or offer to host one if they don’t have it, yet!

Look for Your State or Federal Arts Council

Another local or regional option is to search for your state or federal Arts Councils (places like Arts Council England, the National Endowment for the Arts, or state-level Arts and Humanities organizations; for example, the Nevada Arts Council). 

Research the Major Writer’s Publications

Check with major writer’s publications to see what kind of sub-groups or independent communities are available to their members. Many of these are already well-established, such as LGBTQ Voices at Poets & Writers magazine.

If All Else Fails…

If you can’t find anything online that seems to fit, or if there’s nothing local to you, or if you’re just the more adventurous type, you can always consider starting a writing community of your own! 

Items to consider are: 

• Do you want to conduct this online or in-person?
• How many members do you want and must they identify openly as LGBTQ+?
• If you’re meeting online, what platform will you use to meet, to share work, etc.?
• If you’re meeting in-person, can you secure a location?
• Will you require dues or other contributions in order to rent a space or purchase technology?
• What are the operating rules and etiquette guidelines for your group?
• Will you establish a reading critique format and rubric for discussions/responses yourself, or will this be something the group puts together at an early meeting and revises occasionally? 

You can find many more tips on starting your own group in Gabriela Pereira’s DIY MFA book or on the DIY MFA Community Resources website.

Remember, as uncomfortable as it can be to share our work and face critique, it is ultimately going to help us strengthen our writing, ensure we are being sensitive in our work, and allow us to grow personally and professionally.

So, the only question now is, what are you waiting for?

Adam W. Burgess is an English Professor at College of Southern Nevada. He has a Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University and is pursuing a post-doc writing certificate at the University of California, Berkeley. He loves engaging in all topics related to LGBTQ literature and craft.

You can find Adam on his website or follow him on Twitter.

The post Want to Write Your Best? Find Your Writing Community! appeared first on DIY MFA.

There are so many benefits to reading non-fiction to inform your fiction writing. Not only is history edifying, allowing us to ensure that we’re crafting stories that are accurate and plausible, but reading non-fiction is also a great way to expose ourselves to new ideas.

If you want to craft characters that are true to the time you’re writing in, develop logical and historical backstories and sub-plots for your main narrative, and take care to craft accurate representation, using accurate terminology, for diverse and under-represented people, reading history is an important foundation.

Added benefit: If you’re ever stuck for ideas, reading non-fiction can expose you to something—some time, person, place, or event—that you find incredibly fascinating and might want to explore further in your fiction.

For writers of LGBTQ+ fiction, being historically informed is especially important. First, it wasn’t until about the middle of the twentieth century that openly gay and lesbian writers were publishing openly gay and lesbian stories. Some of these texts did exist before the 1950s, but they were often printed with smaller presses and did not receive much publicity (or the publicity they did receive was not particularly kind). This means that contemporary writers who want to fill in the gaps of historical narrative also need to go to history books and primary source material to enter the conversation.

In addition, one aspect of being part of the LGBTQ+ community is that language is necessarily fluid and ever-evolving. This means a story set in the 1990s might use very different language and concepts than one set in 2021, not to mention one set in 1850!

Finally, as a marginalized community internationally, the lives of LGBTQ+ individuals in any place and at any point in time could be vastly different. Two lesbian women—or two asexual non-binary persons, or two transgender men—living in different countries at the same time, or in the same country at different times, might have experienced incredibly different lives, threats, and opportunities. History helps us navigate what would be true, possible, and probable for our characters.

If you are an LGBTQ+ writer or a writer crafting LGBTQ+ stories, there are some excellent texts in circulation that can help you broaden your understanding of and appreciation for LGBTQ+ history. Here are some suggestions for where to begin.

Recommended LGBTQ+ History Reading

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 by George Chauncey 

Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Based on years of research and access to a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, this book is a fascinating portrait of a gay world that is not supposed to have existed.

A History of Bisexuality by Steven Angelides 

Why is bisexuality the object of such skepticism? Why do sexologists steer clear of it in their research? Why has bisexuality, in stark contrast to homosexuality, only recently emerged as a nascent political and cultural identity? Bisexuality has been rendered as mostly irrelevant to the history, theory, and politics of sexuality. 

With A History of Bisexuality, Steven Angelides explores the reasons and invites us to rethink our preconceptions about sexual identity. Retracing the evolution of sexology, and revisiting modern epistemological categories of sexuality in psychoanalysis, gay liberation, social constructionism, queer theory, biology, and human genetics, Angelides argues that bisexuality has historically functioned as the structural other to sexual identity itself, undermining assumptions about heterosexuality and homosexuality.

The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America by Margot Canaday

The Straight State is perhaps the most expansive study of the federal regulation of homosexuality yet written. Unearthing startling evidence from the National Archives, Margot Canaday shows how the state systematically came to penalize homosexuality, giving rise to a regime of second-class citizenship that sexual minorities still live under today.

How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States by Joanne J. Meyerowitz 

From early twentieth-century sex experiments in Europe, to the saga of Christine Jorgensen, whose sex-change surgery made headlines in 1952, to today’s growing transgender movement, Meyerowitz gives us the first serious history of transsexuality. She focuses on the stories of transsexual men and women themselves, as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, journalists, lawyers, judges, feminists, and gay liberationists, as they debated the big questions of medical ethics, nature versus nurture, self and society, and the scope of human rights.

The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by David K. Johnson 

Historian David K. Johnson here relates the frightening, untold story of how, during the Cold War, homosexuals were considered as dangerous a threat to national security as Communists. Charges that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were havens for homosexuals proved a potent political weapon, sparking a “Lavender Scare” more vehement and long-lasting than McCarthy’s Red Scare. 

Relying on newly declassified documents, years of research in the records of the National Archives and the FBI, and interviews with former civil servants, Johnson recreates the vibrant gay subculture that flourished in New Deal-era Washington and takes us inside the security interrogation rooms where thousands of Americans were questioned about their sex lives. The homosexual purges ended promising careers, ruined lives, and pushed many to suicide. But, as Johnson also shows, the purges brought victims together to protest their treatment, helping launch a new civil rights struggle.

Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America by Christopher Bram 

In the years following World War II a group of gay writers established themselves as major cultural figures in American life: Truman Capote, the enfant terrible, whose finely wrought fiction and nonfiction captured the nation’s imagination; Gore Vidal, the wry, withering chronicler of politics, sex, and histor;. Tennessee Williams, whose powerful plays rocketed him to the top of the American theater; James Baldwin, the harrowingly perceptive novelist and social critic; Christopher Isherwood, the English novelist who became a thoroughly American novelist; and the exuberant Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry defied censorship and exploded minds. Together, their writing introduced America to gay experience and sensibility, and changed our literary culture. 

Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians by Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons 

Drawing upon untouched archives of documents and photographs and over 200 new interviews, Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons chart L.A.’s unique gay history, from the first missionary encounters with Native American cross-gendered “two spirits” to cross-dressing frontier women in search of their fortunes; from the bohemian freedom of early Hollywood to the explosion of gay life during World War II to the underground radicalism sparked by the 1950s blacklist; from the 1960s gay liberation movement to the creation of gay marketing in the 1990s. 

Faderman and Timmons show how geography, economic opportunity, and a constant influx of new people created a city that was more compatible to gay life than any other in America. Combining broad historical scope with deftly wrought stories of real people, from the Hollywood sound stage to the barrio, Gay L.A. is American social history at its best.

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele 

Activist-academic Meg-John Barker and cartoonist Julia Scheele illuminate the histories of queer thought and LGBTQ+ action in this groundbreaking non-fiction graphic novel. From identity politics and gender roles to privilege and exclusion, Queer explores how we came to view sex, gender, and sexuality in the ways that we do; how these ideas get tangled up with our culture and our understanding of biology, psychology, and sexology; and how these views have been disputed and challenged.

Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II by Allan Bérubé 

During World War II, as the United States called on its citizens to serve in unprecedented numbers, the presence of gay Americans in the armed forces increasingly conflicted with the expanding anti-homosexual policies and procedures of the military. In Coming Out Under Fire, Allan Berube examines in depth and detail these social and political confrontation—not as a story of how the military victimized homosexuals, but as a story of how a dynamic power relationship developed between gay citizens and their government, transforming them both. Drawing on GIs’ wartime letters, extensive interviews with gay veterans, and declassified military documents, Berube thoughtfully constructs a startling history of the two wars gay military men and women fought—one for America and another as homosexuals within the military.

Colonialism and Homosexuality by Robert Aldrich 

Colonialism and Homosexuality is a thorough investigation of the connections of homosexuality and imperialism from the late 1800s—the era of “new imperialism”—until the era of decolonization. Robert Aldrich reconstructs the context of several liaisons, including those of famous men such as Cecil Rhodes, E.M. Forster, or Andre Gide, and the historical situations which produced both the Europeans and their non-Western lovers. Each of the case-studies is a micro-history of a particular colonial situation, a sexual encounter, and its wider implications for cultural and political life. Students both of colonial history and of gender and queer studies will find this an informative read.

Other Recommendations: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman; When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan; The Deviant’s War by Eric Cervini; The Wedding Heard ‘Round the World by Michael McConnel and Jack Baker; The Gay Revolution by Lillian Faderman; Charity & Sylvia by Rachel Hope Cleves; Beyond Magenta by Susan Kulin; A View from the Bottom by Tan Hoang Nguyen; Queer Diasporas edited by Cindy Patton and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler.

Thinking About It

Where do you go when you’re stuck with ideas for your fiction? How do you engage in the process of literary research—ensuring that your depictions of times and places, and descriptions of people, are accurate? Is it true that the “best writers are readers”? 

Adam W. Burgess is an English Professor at College of Southern Nevada. He has a Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University and is pursuing a post-doc writing certificate at the University of California, Berkeley. He loves engaging in all topics related to LGBTQ literature and craft.

You can find Adam on his website or follow him on Twitter.

The post Why LGBTQ+ Fiction Writers Need to Read LGBTQ+ History appeared first on DIY MFA.

Let’s consider, for example, Greek mythology. These stories were told and passed on orally at first, or presented on stage, but epic poetry has a narrative and acts much like traditional storytelling in prose form. While there may not be queer love of the kind we would recognize today, much because language and ideas, influenced as they are by time and culture, do not equate in retrospect, there are nevertheless numerous explorations of nontraditional experiences surrounding gender and sexuality. Some of these, like the stories of Achilles and Patroclus, were considered critically at the time (by the likes of Plato, no less!) and continue to be attractive today (See: Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles).

We can jump forward in time a bit and think of similar gender play or same-sex relationships in the works of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. Jump ahead a bit more and we find Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and George Sylvester Viereck’s The House of the Vampire (1924).

What each of these stories has in common is an interest in the fantastical. To varying degrees, the characters and plots, even those steeped in historical persons and events, err toward the highly imaginative. These writers reconsider what is, or was, possible in the story worlds they created. Whether this was to create a world that would allow for the open portrayal of non-traditional individuals and romances, or to encourage readers to expand their intellectual or emotional horizons, or all of this, the fact is that LGBTQ stories and the fantasy genre have become wonderful partners.

Let’s consider four ways that an LGBTQ fantasy world has been successfully created.

Independent Fantasy World

When we think of the independent fantasy world in literature, examples include those such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth from The Lord of the Rings and the world created by R.A. Salvatore in his Crimson Shadow trilogy. These are self-contained fantasy worlds separate from what readers would recognize as reality, with little or no connections in time, place, history, or culture. There is also no overlap between the realistic contemporary world a reader might be familiar with and the fantasy world also taking place as a part of, or in relation to, that world.

An exemplary LGBTQ series that makes use of this device is Mercedes Lackey’s The Last-Herald Mage trilogy. Published between 1989 and 1990, these three novels tell the story of Vanyel, an outcast elder son destined for greatness, though he doesn’t know it, and destined to disappoint his royal father, which is less surprising. The story is set in a world called Valdemar, where magic is common but not entirely trusted. What’s truly groundbreaking about this high fantasy trilogy is its publication at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Mercedes Lackey adds an author’s note to the 2016 omnibus edition that explains the conversations she had with her agent about the perils of publishing fantasy novels with a gay protagonist at this time. As she notes, they did it anyway, and readers around the world have been grateful ever since.

Directly Integrated Fantasy World

A directly integrated fantasy world is one where the magical and the realistic worlds are one and the same. There is no separation between the fantasy elements unfolding in the story and the ordinary world which we would recognize and in which these extraordinary events take place. An example of such a fantasy world might remind us of magical realism, where most of the plot seems plausible but sometimes something odd or inexplicable, even impossible, happens. If we take that one step further, we get a directly integrated fantasy world, where the ordinary and the extraordinary are equals. Think of, for example, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series.

An example of this kind of story in the LGBTQ+ sphere is Andrew Eliopoulos’s The Fascinators (2020). The story is set in an ordinary small town in the ordinary United States of America. It’s the kind of place anyone familiar with suburbia might recognize. And yet, driving the story are a group of teenagers who happen to have magical abilities. In this world, “magic just happens.” Much like skills in art, music, or sports, some people have the talent and the ability to grow it, and others do not. What is interesting about Eliopoulos’s approach is that, in the story world he creates, magic is a natural ability that is frowned upon by many. In this way, the author sets up a kind of allegory which, I think, is meant to suggest the illogic in hating a person for who they are. Another great example of this approach is Adam Silvera’s Infinity Cycle.

Indirectly Integrated Fantasy World

The indirectly integrated fantasy world is like the directly integrated world, except there is some distance created between what happens on the magical side of things and what happens in the realistic world. A classic example is, of course, Harry Potter, where all characters inhabit the same world, technically, and it’s a world with which most readers will be familiar; and yet, there’s a clear and necessitated distinction, a figurative line drawn between those living in the magical world and those living in what J.K. Rowling infamously calls the “muggle” world.

In LGBTQ+ fantasy fiction, this approach is rather popular, possibly because it allows writers to play off what is known, shared, and in a way non-threatening while also exploring what is different, unique, and extraordinary. Examples of these kinds of LGBTQ+ stories include Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On (2015) and Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (2009). Both stories focus on young people—high school-aged in Rowell but college-aged in Grossman—who are exploring their magical abilities in magical schools that are set apart from the everyday, ordinary world. So, characters might leave home to visit non-magical family, for example, or keep a job in the ordinary world, all of which remains separate from their magical life.

Parallel Fantasy World

The parallel fantasy world is the mode we might be familiar with from a series like C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. In this construction, we find that the ordinary world and the extraordinary world are separate but crossable. In other words, the two are kept distinct more fully than they would be in an indirectly integrated fantasy world. It takes some effort for the main character(s) to move from their known world (which is usually similar to the readers’ known world) into the other, fantastical world.

In LGBTQ+ literature, this often appears in stories containing parallel universes (hence the name I’ve given it!) In adult fiction, for example, we might think of V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic trilogy. The first book introduces us to a cast of characters, one of whom is bisexual, that can traverse four distinct Londons, one of which is like the reader’s own non-magical version. Some of these worlds are in chaos, but one thing Schwab does beautifully is to introduce her queer character’s sexuality with complete nonchalance. It’s a refreshing bit of, “this is no big deal” in a genre that is sometimes too on-the-nose about sexuality and in a specific fantasy world that is filled with action and explosive moments. Another excellent example from the Young Adult genre is Corinne Duyvis’s Otherbound (2014), in which a boy from contemporary Arizona can see into, and eventually control, the mind of a girl living in another world.

Thinking About It

In your reading, have you explored LGBTQ+ fantasy specifically? What have you noticed about the fantasy worlds themselves? Do they fit any of these patterns?

In your writing, are you working on fantasy fiction with gender or sexually diverse characters? What kind of story world construction seems most practical to your plot(s)?

Adam W. Burgess is an English Professor at College of Southern Nevada. He has a Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University and is pursuing a post-doc writing certificate at the University of California, Berkeley. He loves engaging in all topics related to LGBTQ literature and craft.

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