When I began to compile this list of queer love stories, I couldn’t help but think of the potential for “love” to expand laterally, for desire to take shape in ways that are imaginative and open and freaky and sublime. To me, queer is a way of being, a way of moving, a way of loving. It’s so much more than a descriptor for who we want to date, or even who want to have sex with.
To be queer is to both make and be made by engagement with queer culture and political practice. Queer love, then, might better be understood not simply in terms of romance between a couple, but rather as visionary and imaginative ways of caring. Whether it’s about caring for place—a river, a library, a city, a forest. Or, caring for a time—blue hour, dawn, winter, jacaranda season. Or, caring for people—finding a home in a community, finding home in a person.
Loving in ways that are queer carves out space for futures in which all of us live.
In my recent novel, A Language of Limbs, one of the two unnamed protagonists reads a poem in which she’s written the line, “Queer, as in, I Queer’d this / As in, I made it beautiful.”
In compiling this list then, I felt a strong desire to challenge what we might consider a queer love story. In my own work, for example, A Language of Limbs is a queer love story in the sense that it’s about the two people whose lives almost intersect over thirty years. Put another way, it’s about side glances and knowing smiles, and how almost kissing is sometimes hotter than actually kissing.
But it’s also a novel about a love of family—the ones we’re born into, and the ones we make for ourselves. A love of place – the cracks in the sidewalks of Darlinghurst’s streets in the 1970s, the dark wet heat of clubs, and the sacred and electric quality of dancefloors at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. And, a love of ocean—where my characters learn to let the water carry what they can’t.
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Jennifer L. Shaw, Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun
It might surprise you that I’m beginning with a “coffee table” art book that catalogues and examines the visual art and selected writings of French Surrealist Claude Cahun. With glossy pages, this book tracks the evolution of Claude’s prolific work across her entire career, from poems to photographic portraits and photomontages, to essays, word games and text collages.
However, whilst Shaw analyses the art and selected writings through a critical, historical lens, she does so whilst telling the epic story of Claude’s lifelong artistic collaboration with the love of her life—a woman named Marcel Moore. Exist Otherwise therefore is a biography as much as it is a collection of art criticism.
And the story of Claude and Marcel is truly one of the most captivating and epic love stories I’ve ever had the privilege of reading. Without giving anything away, theirs is the kind of love story that defies the imagination, that you surely wouldn’t believe if it weren’t true. If I’d come across it in a fictional novel, I’d have cursed the author for trying to convince me of something so outlandish! And yet, this story, by many miracles, is.
However, it’s not simply the romance between Claude and Marcel that makes this love story a queer love story for the ages. It’s the way this couple’s art was so deeply enmeshed in their relationship…their intimacy and their art became one and the same. They were each other’s muse, and they were each other’s maker, becoming their own people at the same time they spilled into each other.
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
I’m including this classic because it is a novel that speaks to all the stuff we need to let go of in order to desire, which feels like an implicitly queer experience. For Baldwin’s characters, that specifically involved needing to unlearn and let go of society’s shame in order to love.
The protagonist is plagued by the fact that he wants, which, for so many LGBTQIA+ people, is foundational to queer becoming. And Baldwin writes of being riddled with desire in such a complex way, holding both, and….In other words, what the protagonist is doing is both profound, and also completely intoxicating and harmful.
You can see the way shame affects his every step, every gesture, and every hesitation, and given the context in which Baldwin was writing and what he would have had to have worked through as a Black gay man, you can feel these tensions pulsing still within the pages. I think it’s for this reason that Giovanni’s Room stands the test of time.
All love, after all, involves a surrender of sorts to something unknown, but when that love is compounded by societally imposed shame, the bravery one must summon in order to surrender oneself fully is necessarily even greater. And Baldwin writes this fear so beautifully.
Alana Portero, Bad Habit
This is a novel about a young trans woman coming of age in the 1980s in a working-class neighborhood of Madrid, and it has a charged quality that is so electric, I read the entire book with my heart in my throat. The prose is stunning, striking, sublime.
And yet, this novel—translated from Spanish—also yields a sense of urgency, and a feeling of precariousness, as if you’re resting on a knife’s edge. It asks how to live in a world so hostile towards trans people, especially those who express femininity.
We follow a protagonist who cannot deal with the fact that she’s trans, and so hates on and despises an older trans woman in her neighborhood. But as she grows up and gets older, the cycles of neighborhood continue, and she assumes the older trans woman’s place. The novel shows us how if you don’t love yourself, you hate other people who are like you, which paints is a complex portrait of love, as it illustrates how thin the line between disgust and desire really is—where one might grow to feel nostalgic for a place that has caused them pain.
The novel also begs the question of what does love mean through the prism of a trans woman? In this era, in our own context of a panicked abjection of trans bodies, the dominant narratives for trans people, and trans women in particular, are so often devoid of desire in a typical sense.
Perhaps that’s why this novel is such a powerful depiction of coming to love yourself, and what a fraught process that can be…because the book is rooted in a love of place, but not because the protagonist loves her suburb….It’s more like, I have to love this place, because it’s where I am. In the same way, she comes to love herself—I have to love this self, because it’s who I am.
Lars Horn, Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay
This memoir is one of my favorite books of all time and it’s Lars’ story—a transmasculine person grappling with their body in relation to the corpses of aquatic creatures and bodies of water. I’ve included it on this list because it is a queer love story in the sense that it’s about coming to love oneself in a world wishing to annihilate trans people.
But more than that, it’s a queer love story about a love of language—words, symbols, images, but also gestures, movements, breath, flashes of light. Told in lyric prose, intercut with biblical references, excerpts of history and nature writing, and myth, this memoir contains essays, vignettes and a series of lists, that read like deep-sea poetry, and which ultimately portray a love of language and everything that exceeds it….
Voice of the Fish captures all that cannot be articulated and pinned down by text. In that sense, it speaks implicitly to a way of thinking about gender that exceeds the two-sex model, which since emerging from the Western anatomical-medical tradition less than two centuries ago, has come to dominate our collective, cultural imagination.
This book is a visionary queer love story that paints a picture of a world beyond our prevailing cultural assumptions about trans identity, and ultimately, this book made me fall in love with my own transness.
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
I thought of Vuong’s debut novel not only for of its vivid portrayal of a young person searching for himself in first love, and for its complex portrayal of familial love, but also for the way the abjection of queer bodies is resisted by writing intimacy as poetry in motion.
Reading this novel cracked me open as a reader, and as a writer, because Vuong showed me how an author could write the gore and the grossness of sex—not shying away from the details that are carnal, fleshy, and dirty—in ways that were profoundly beautiful.
In my own life, what makes sex feel queer is a feeling of meandering, where you can wander off, play, explore the farthest reaches of your own imagination and take the body to the edge of itself. It’s where you can be silly, be gross, be freaky and sublime. Queer sex is getting lost and becoming rich in that loss.
I therefore find it hard to describe how exciting I found reading this book, because despite being charged and emotionally moved by it, what affected me the most when reading Vuong’s novel was seeing how abjected queer bodies could be rendered gorgeous.
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A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle is available via Dutton.
