Why We Need Queer Books More Than Ever (Again)

At this point, I feel like I’m writing one of these posts at least every year, but it remains true. We need queer books now, more than ever before.

Why are queer books so important in this particular epoch? Well, we can argue queer books are important for queer people so they can recognize themselves in the pages of fiction. That’s what I’ve argued before, and that is never not going to be true. There are plenty of arguments about how the increase in queer media is “turning” kids queer. The fact of the matter is increased representation is simply giving people—young and old alike—the tools to understand themselves, often for the first time.

Queer Books Don’t Make People Queer

Here’s the thing: these people were always queer. Nothing was going to change that—not conversion therapy, not social pressure, not self-hatred, hiding, and denial. Queer people are always queer, whether they acknowledge it or not. The individual is the only person who can say for sure who they are. While we have to respect individual choices on identification, there’s a large portion of the population that engages in queerness, queer identity or no. And that means that, if all else were equal, a lot more people would adopt queer identities. But since harassment, oppression, abuse, and other ills mar the queer experience, many, many people prefer to construe themselves as straight.

The long and short of that is that a lot of people are queerer than you think. A lot of them are queerer than they’d care to admit. And if they were shown representation, encouraged to express themselves, and didn’t face queerphobia, harassment, abuse, violence, and more, we’d see a lot more of those people embrace a queer label.

The label doesn’t change their thoughts or feelings. It simply means the person has recognized them for what they are.

Being Queer Should Not Be Fraught

A simple example is my own experience. I realized I was bi/pan when I was in university. I thought about it briefly one day, went, “Huh, girls are pretty hot too, guess I like guy and girls,” and that was it. Before that “lightbulb” moment, I enjoyed reading m/m fiction as well as f/f fiction. I took an entire class on lesbian pulp fiction from the 1950s. That wasn’t exactly what set off the lightbulb for me, but it didn’t hurt.

At the time, I told exactly one person about this epiphany. She said, “Huh, okay, that’s cool,” and that was the end of it. No hate, no fear, no big drama around coming out.

And that’s precisely how it should be. And if everyone could have an experience like that—where it was simply recognizing a part of yourself and giving yourself the language to acknowledge it—more people would likely adopt those labels.

What Stops People from Identifying as Queer

There are a lot of reasons that we are discouraged from being so open and accepting, many of which have to do with patriarchal control and capitalist exploitation. The West has long been obsessed with “legitimate” reproduction, even as queer people have hidden in the midst of the Christian church and even, at times, been celebrated. (Asexual people make great nuns and monks, just sayin’.)

In Ancient Greece, no one fretted over “being queer,” the Romans were all about bisexuality, and Japan and China have rich histories of queer relations, although not all of it is “good.” The long and short, though, is human beings have always been kind of gay, if you will. It’s mattered much less at different points in history. The last two or three centuries have accelerated the idea that you need to “be straight,” that being queer is a big problem, and that the state—not religious figures—needs to rigorously police queer identity.

That is the particular problem that leads to the issues we see today. The rise in queerphobia and laws against queerness accelerate alongside the rise of the nation-state.

The State Wants to Be in Your Bedroom

That brings us to the current moment. There is an increasing desire for the nation-state to (re)colonize the bedrooms of its citizens. The heyday of the state operating inside the bedrooms of citizens was from about early 1800s to the mid-twentieth century, or around 150 years. Yes, prior to that, there were religious strictures. Certainly, there were laws on the books saying you could hang sodomites in the time of Henry VII. We also have to remember that two monarchs later, we had James I, who was probably some flavor of queer, and the contemporous King of France was also noted for being, well, a bit of a poof.

So how much these laws were truly enforced was a bit more nebulous. Even Chaucer—writing in the 1300s—gives us a glimpse of queerness in The Canterbury Tales. The pilgrims note that one of their member is almost certainly “a sodomite,” but none of them do anything about it. There’s a distinct impression that it doesn’t really matter to any of them.

The Surveillance State and Queer Repression

The “mattering” of it increases with an expansion in surveillance. Surveillance, in turn, increases alongside nationalism, the Industrial Revolution, and capitalism. We can also recognize that the expansion of state power and capitalism pushed patriarchy further. The Victorians truly espoused the “stay-at-home” wife and mother as the ideal for the middle class. That “ideal” still haunts us today. “Trad wives” on TikTok and other social media continue to push that ideal.

How does all that link to queerness? Simple: the state wants compulsory heterosexuality, which benefits patriarchy and capitalism. Capitalism wants more expendable workers, which is only possible if you have many heterosexual couples reproducing as much as possible. The nation-state wants to grow its population, so it also needs more reproductive couples. And patriarchy gains control over women and their reproductive prowess through both of these ends.

Queerness is a threat to this trifecta. Effeminate men don’t neatly fit into the paradigm of patriarchy. Masculine women make patriarchy uncomfortable. In short, queer people challenge patriarchal power. They also challenge the notion of compulsory heterosexuality. They often refuse to participate in the capitalistic nation-state’s desire for a growing population and more expendable workers—precisely because queerness has historically meant an inability to reproduce with one’s preferred partner. (Of course, bi/pan people and t4t couples can certainly reproduce, often without any sort of intervention. Adoption could be an avenue open to some queer couples, provided the state allowed either openly queer people to adopt or they were able to hide their queerness.)

Queer Books Are Not a Sign of Moral Decay

We are now in an era of backlash against the more progressive thought dismantling much of the heterosexist ideals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the late twentieth century, until about now, there has been a push for increasing rights for queer people, with increasing acceptance, visibility, and representation. More people have opted to adopt queer labels for themselves.

In the same era, we’ve seen a push toward more rights for women, as well as reproductive control. In turn, the patriarchal, capitalistic nation-state finds itself threatened—and it has appealed to a sense of nostalgia, that things were somehow “better” in the “good old days.”

The sense of decline is not necessarily untrue. Since the 1970s, North America and Europe have undergone a “hollowing out” as neoliberal capitalism has enriched the wealthy and made the poor poorer. This trend continues today. Unions are busted, worker rights are rolled back, jobs are more precarious, pay remains low. While the right is generally to blame for this—as they have been the staunchest advocates for neoliberal policies—they blame “the decline” of society and people’s ability to “live good lives” on some supposed moral breakdown of society. In this rhetoric, society is decaying because queer people, women’s rights, and immigrants are “destroying” it.

This creates a desire to “turn back” the clock to, say, the 1950s. This is imagined as an era when a single income was enough to sustain a family of four in the suburbs with a car and maybe a pet or two. The women stay home, the men go to work, and everything is just hunky dory.

Good for Who?

This rose-tinted vision of the 1950s ignores how bad it was for anyone who wasn’t a middle-class white person. It also ignores the plight of many women trapped in abusive relationships. It also ignores the fiscal realities. The 1950s suburban dream was possible thanks to relatively high wages, stable jobs, and more socialist policies that protected working-class people.

Remember: the right is the one that has been hollowing that out since the late 1970s. Recessions and contractions have become more common since the 1980s. At the same time, union membership has declined and wages have stagnated. Jobs “disappear” overseas, so companies can reduce the cost of labor and increase profits.

We can’t “turn back the clock” without overhauling the neoliberal economy. If we truly want the 1950s suburban dream (and not everyone does), then we have to roll back economic policies that dismantled it in the first place. That means reinstating unions, paying higher wages, and ensuring job security.

Is anyone on the right is actually advocating for that right now? No; that’s why groups like queer people are being scapegoated for the “decline” of society. You’d have your job, a wife, and two kids if it wasn’t for all these effeminate boys and butch women running around!

Queer books are, by extension, part of this decline. As far as this worldview goes, the availability of books that challenge or contravene the patriarchal heterosexist myth is nothing short of degeneracy. It’s sign that society is filled with moral rot—rather than simply reflective of the fact that, uh, people are gay and have been since time immemorial.

Queer Books Become Resistance

In this climate, it’s easy to simply bow down. That’s what many companies are doing. Meta and Amazon have ended DEI programs. Amazon is union-busting. It already cracked down on “porn,” but that is likely to accelerate in the future, especially as we see more initiatives like the bill in Oklahoma that seeks to ban porn entirely. The bill uses a very broad definition of porn, one that would catch things like educational materials, anything queer, and even closed-door romance novels.

In this climate, then, reading and publishing queer books is an act of defiance. It’s the slogan—“we’re here, we’re queer, get used to”—personified. Queer books in all genres showcase queer people at every juncture of human history: the past, the present, the imagined future and in other worlds and realms entirely. They boldly ask questions and challenge the foregone conclusions of a heterosexist worldview.

In this moment, we need more of that resistance. Every act of resistance is important—and supporting queer books is important. Queer writers can continue to produce queer material as well, so long as there’s an audience for it. We may yet be driven underground, but queerness has been driven underground before—and it was never eradicated. It can’t be eradicated, because it’s simply human nature.

So read queer books, enjoy queer art, and make queer art yourself. It is a balm in a world that is so virulently and violently anti-queer—a statement to the powers that be, a testament to future generations of readers that we were here, and a beacon of hope in dark times: we will prevail.