Q: I’d like to read more books with LGBTQ characters—and not just coming out stories or overdone tropes, but narratives where queer women are leading rich, full, lives. Any suggestions? What about queer music recs?
A: I do have a plethora of suggestions for you! First though, I’d just like to remark that we are in a wonderful time for queer media. Even as recently as 10 to 15 years ago, the landscape was much more barren than it is now.
I still remember the evening in Athens, Greece back in 2008 when I first became aware of this dearth. It was the summer after I’d come out, and my family and I were on vacation to my dad’s homeland. Out on the balcony of my cousin’s apartment, I breathed in the warm Mediterranean air. It was scented by jasmines that climbed down the balcony’s rails, mixed with the faint smell of smoke and souvlaki from a grill on the next street over.
While taxis sounded in the distance and Greek club music thumped from the nearby late-night tavernas, the copy of Jane Eyre that I’d just finished reading (as part of my summer homework for AP English) lay closed next to my cousin’s pack of cigarettes on the round glass table before me.
As I reflected on the novel’s romance, it occurred to me that nearly all the books I’d consumed up until then had centered on hetero love. Never had I read one wherein two girls had captured each other’s hearts.
Propelled by the desire to consume stories like these in the midst of my newly self-granted freedom from closetedness, I relocated inside and opened my laptop to search for lesbian lit on Amazon.
Each click took me to one coming-of-age lesbian love story after another. I filled my cart with them.
After reading them, though, I remember feeling unsated.
Almost all of the relationships seemed in some way fraught or tragic. Many of them also felt somewhat contrived. The characters stayed on the page, their flatness and caricaturization preventing them from occupying a space in my heart and mind as palpable, three-dimensional humans.
Fourteen years later, our options have expanded considerably. A volcano went off somewhere between then and now, sending down with its magma a treasure trove of books filled with richly drawn queer plot lines. The overdone coming out and closeted love tropes are far fewer, though you’ll still encounter some. While they, too, have a place, there are plenty of other stories to choose from as well.
Here are some of my picks.
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado is a haunting, evocative portrayal of domestic abuse in a queer relationship written in an extremely poetic and avant-garde way.
Also structurally creative, Women by Chloe Caldwell chronicles a passionate but toxic, off-and-on relationship between two insecurely attached women (an excerpt: “Finn and I could easily break over 75 emails daily. Back and forth, back and forth. Banter and proclamations of love and compliments and general worries of the future. We write how lucky we are that we have found each other. I don’t know what it is, she says, but our minds click. We’re mind clickers”).
Juliet Takes a Breath tells the story of a young, queer, Latinx character and explores the themes of tokenization and the feelings that arise when you’re let down and reduced to a stereotype by a person you once admired.
Lastly, Cantoras centers on the relationships between a group of queer women in a beachside village during the 1970s dictatorship of Uruguay. These woman find chosen family in a time when it was incredibly dangerous to be seen as subversive in any way, including being gay.
As for music: Blessedly, we have also gained more visibility on this front, with out, LGBTQ artists like Lil Nas X, Hayley Kiyoko, Fletcher, Demi Lovato, and Tegan and Sara openly singing about their feelings of same-gender affection (and so many others). The one I currently feel most excited about is Fletcher’s revamping of Katy Perry’s 2008 “I Kissed a Girl.”
Where before, Perry chanted about kissing a girl friend as a fun departure from her (primary) hetero relationship, in this new iteration, Fletcher sings about desiring a woman front and center. It’s not just a phase (and she even tells her mom this!)—She didn’t just like it; she “really, really liked it.”
That, to me, is some real humanizing progress.
So put on your headphones; grab a book, and get comfortable. You can tell Jane and Mr. Rochester to move over as you immerse yourself in these multi-layered, nuanced stories of queer love.
Follow Eleni on Instagram @eleni_steph_writer
