Before I came out as a queer adult, I came out in fiction. It was the first place my queerness didn’t feel like something I had to manage or tone down. I assumed that since I’m queer, I had the ability to write queer stories. But once I started paying attention to how queer work is read, debated, challenged, or loaded with cultural expectations, I started wondering if my queerness was enough, or if I might screw up the very stories I felt responsible for telling. I’ve since learned that many queer writers wrestle with this pressure, and too many queer voices get shaped by this fear.
In my case, I found myself watering down my scenes, smoothing out the parts that scared me, and second-guessing words I wouldn’t have blinked at in any other context. Eventually I had to admit the problem wasn’t my queerness, it was whether my craft was strong enough to write queer without getting in my own way.
Stories drawn from marginalized histories ask more of a writer.
Queer stories are being singled out as dangerous enough to remove from shelves, even as readers seek them out in growing numbers. Writing them is not a neutral act. While writers in all genres can face controversy, queer lit is disproportionately challenged not only for what it depicts, but for what it affirms. Stories drawn from marginalized histories ask more of a writer. I am at a point where the question isn’t whether I can tell these stories, but whether I can tell them with the depth, skill, and care they deserve, in a climate where telling them carries consequences beyond the page.
Queer writers carry a representational responsibility we partly choose and partly inherit, and that dynamic needs broader attention.
In my debut novel Pavlova’s Ghost, a ballerina haunted by the ghost of Anna Pavlova and a queer love story risks possession to return to the stage after a brain injury, even as the haunting turns against her. During edits, an early reader flagged a character as a “U-Haul lesbian.” That hit hard. Crafting original characters is difficult for any writer. Crafting queer ones when the margin for error feels personal is a different kind of terrifying. Also, writing it meant deciding whether to soften queer history for safety’s sake or to name it, knowing that doing so could draw objection beyond the page. I chose clarity over caution, trusting the shared humanity and love at the heart of the story to carry it to a broader readership.
My second novel-in-progress, set during the witch-burning era in Denmark, raises the stakes differently. Persecution here isn’t just a historical backdrop but a focus on how queer love persists even under siege. Writing it keeps me circling back to the same broader questions. Do I trust queer love to drive a story this brutal, or am I defaulting to suffering because it feels closer to what queer lit is expected to deliver? Rather than treating the witch trials as distant history or metaphor, the novel stays with the lived terror of being erased while still alive. It allows readers from any community to feel how fear survives across centuries, and how tenderness, attachment, and love persist even when a culture tries to burn them out.
What I realized over (too much) time is that queer fear gets smaller inside a community. Having people (not just writers) to reality-check me, who understand the stakes, who have more nerve than I do, helps me build my writing bravery into something I can use to carry my story.
But also, craft itself is an antidote to fear. When I understand why a scene works, where the tension comes from, how to control pacing and rhythm and my own voice, how to structure my story so it tells my truth, I’m better at writing into the parts of the story that previously scared me.
Crooked Craftwork:
Before you edit a scene, ask yourself why you’re changing it. Anxiety edits and craft edits look identical on the page but do opposite things to your writing. One serves the story. One serves your fear. Knowing which you’re making is crucial.
On tropes: My U-Haul lesbian wasn’t the problem, per se. A character with no interiority, no contradiction, no specificity is the problem. Depth is the answer to stereotype, not avoidance. Write through the trope until you find the person underneath it.
Check your instinct every time you reach for darkness. Suffering is sometimes true to the story and sometimes it’s just what we think makes queer content feel serious. Make suffering true to the plot as well as the character.
Find people who understand the cultural and personal stakes of writing queer, not just the technical ones. You want people who know exactly where to push, because they’ve been pushed in the same places. Feedback from inside the experience hits differently than feedback from outside it.