Historically, queer and trans people have survived and even thrived amid significant oppression by forming community and redefining safety, both physical and emotional. PW spoke with authors whose forthcoming works of nonfiction and historical fiction depict queer life across decades and geographies, highlighting what’s often missed by, or intentionally left out of, the official narrative.

Existence as resistance

For many in the LGBTQ+ community, simply choosing to be is an act of defiance. Queer Palestinians who contributed to Homosexual Intifada, a June release from Interlink imprint Olive Branch Press, hail from the heart of their homeland as well as the diaspora, which impacts how they embody their intersecting identities. The book collects essays, poetry, fiction, and more, exploring queer desire, hope, and resilience across generations.

George Abraham, a poet and essayist, and Interlink co-owner Hannah Moushabeck edited the anthology and let some of the writers remain anonymous for safety. This allowed for a wider range of contributions, including an essay cowritten by three trans women in Gaza who are not named in the book. Abraham and Moushabeck are themselves queer and Palestinian American.

“There’s such natural kinship between Palestinians and trans folks because we’re seen as disposable,” Abraham says. Anti-transness, they explain, is an attempt to “discipline and dispose of trans bodies” because trans people don’t fit the old understanding of the gender binary. Similarly, “Palestinians are defying the entire world order with their existence and are similarly being disciplined. We are living abundantly despite a system that wants us dead.”

Former Idaho state senator Cole Nicole LeFavour’s memoir In the Arms of Mountains (Beacon, May) shows how an abundance mindset helps LGBTQ+ activists in conservative U.S. states achieve small wins for a better future. The book follows their progression from latchkey kid to student activist to politician, discovering the depths of their queer identity along the way. LeFavour has lived in Idaho since they were a child in the 1970s and feels a tension between love for their state and a desire for queer and trans residents to live freely and safely within its borders.

“In small towns, we rely on relationships, and for so many people in red states, it’s about safety,” they say. “We need to know the people around us. Relationships change minds. When someone knows someone queer, they’re far less likely to believe the frightening things being said, especially about trans people.”

LeFavour, who is gender nonconforming, says their friend Sophia, a trans woman and librarian mentioned in the book, has made connections with unexpected allies: “She’s worked hard to form relationships with the sheriff and others for survival.”

For queer folks like activist Jessica Lawless, survival is an ongoing battle. In her memoir Cultural Capital Doesn’t Pay the Rent (PM, May), Lawless writes about her experiences as a labor organizer, academic, and artist living in constant economic uncertainty. After the rape and murder of her close friend Mia Zapata in 1993, Lawless cofounded the anti-violence nonprofit Home Alive, which is now a volunteer collective that continues to offer self-defense classes on a sliding scale. As a longtime organizer, Lawless says she sees hope in how modern organizing spaces care about community and healing justice.

“Concretely, how do marginalized people not hurt each other and how do we take care of our issues?” she asks. “With the things I’ve been through, we were fighting to make it the norm to take care of ourselves and each other at the same time. To see that happening now is exciting. I have significantly younger friends and that’s a huge part of their world. I find that lovely.”

Safety in numbers

Other authors explore community safety through fiction. In Jules Wernersbach’s debut novel, Work to Do (Univ. of Iowa, Apr.), predominantly LGBTQ+ employees at an organic grocery co-op in Austin organize to form a union amid drama with management and one another. The novel is based on Wernersbach’s years in retail and alternates between the store’s opening in the early 1980s and the present day.

As a longtime bookseller and the cofounder and owner of the queer indie bookstore Hive Mind, Wernersbach is inspired by how younger workers, many of them LGBTQ+, see the import of bookstores standing up for marginalized communities not just in their labor practices but in terms of what they stock and who they platform. “Over the last several years, a lot of workers are finding community with each other, sharing the grunt work and the struggle with management,” Wernersbach says. “All my friends have come from my jobs. Seeing people take the community that forms naturally in these spaces and realize they can do something with that connection and take it beyond griping over beers is inspiring.”

Eleanor Anstruther’s Fallout (Empress Editions, Apr.), also set in the 1980s, follows 15-year-old Bridget, whose family is tested by one of her parents’ closeted transness. Amid tension at home, Bridget joins the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, where she’s embraced by LGBTQ+ women spanning generations and united by a single cause. From 1981 to 2000, a series of such camps occupied the area around fenced-in nuclear weapons at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, England, to demonstrate against cruise missiles on British soil.

“I was 11 in 1981, and I grew up in a very politically savvy household, so the dinner table was full of political discussion,” Anstruther says. “We watched the news every night. The media used phrases like ‘dirty lesbians’ and ‘stupid women’ to talk about the Greenham Common camps, and this really stuck in my head.”

Despite the length of the protests and their eventual success, Anstruther says there’s practically no fiction about them. “As a novelist, it was a rich sea, and as an activist, I was outraged that this is just a footnote in history, and a scandalous one at that.”

Like Fallout, screenwriter Rasheed Newson’s 2022 debut novel, My Government Means to Kill Me, is a queer coming-of-age story set in the 1980s. His follow-up, There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood (Flatiron, June), is set a couple of decades earlier. When a closeted Black actor dies under suspicious circumstances, his close friend, a backlot fixer, investigates, unraveling more than he bargains for.

Newson says that many in Hollywood at the time lived “in a glass closet”: people knew they were gay, but no one talked about it. This provided a veneer of safety. “In the late 1950s, you could reasonably believe that the homophile movement was going to succeed ahead of the civil rights movement,” Newson says. “We’d survived the Lavender Scare at the State Department while the civil rights movement couldn’t get an anti-lynching bill through Congress. If you had to place your bets, you might say, this is going to work ahead of that.” But, he adds, “there are dire consequences for placing the wrong bet,” as one of his book’s characters learns when he attempts to depict queerness on-screen.

In the 1990s, when queer historian Hugh Ryan started college, being out often involved compromise, he explains, and “cutting off the pieces of yourself that the mainstream hates the most” to make queerness more palatable to straight people. He writes about this period in his memoir My Bad (Bold Type, May), and about how globalization and the launch of the Internet changed the landscape for queer activism.

Ryan says going online allowed LGBTQ+ people to find each other at a much younger age than previous generations did, and talk about their sexuality and gender in new ways. It also, unfortunately, allowed anti-queerness to stake a stronger claim as bigots adapted to the same expansive tools.

“I want everyone to have the opportunity to live a queer life, to experience queer desires, to experiment with their body, their sex, their gender, their sexuality, their lack of sexuality, their asexuality,” Ryan says. “But I don’t want for us to not have these private spaces, whether they’re relationships or families or bars or community centers, that are our laboratories for the future.”

How queer community evolves

English professor Juda Bennett left his suburban Delaware home at 18, in the early 1970s. He eventually made his way to Ithaca, N.Y., and the queer commune Lavender Hill, an experience he details in his memoir Qtopia (Univ. of Wisconsin, May). Though Bennett and most of his found family from the commune have moved away from Ithaca, a few still live in “the big house,” which is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The distance hasn’t lessened their bond.

“Lavender Hill is still very much part of my life,” Bennett says. “I go there for Thanksgivings, seders, big events. It’s a four-hour drive, but people also come to my home in New Jersey or we meet in the city.”

Today, Bennett’s life is much more traditional than what he’d imagined as a young hippie, when he shared living space with whomever, whenever, and for however long. “My 17-year-old daughter is part of this next generation who don’t get what the big whoop is about two gay dads,” he says. “She has friends with lesbian moms. We have our house, they have theirs.”

For screenwriter Phill Branch, coming into his queerness and finding community was complex. In The Double Dutch Fuss (HarperOne, June), he chronicles his experiences growing up in Newark, N.J., in the 1980s as a Black, gay man whose gender expression was never quite “right”: while his father wanted him to play sports with the boys, Branch wanted to jump double Dutch with the girls. It wasn’t until he got to college at Hampton University in Virginia that he felt comfortable enough to explore what it meant to thrive and not just survive, though at the time, there weren’t designated spaces for queer students to gather. That has since changed.

“About a month ago, I got an email from the Hampton University’s LGBTQ student caucus,” Branch says. “They wanted me to come and give a talk about my experiences. That blows me away—that this place has grown to have space for these students and that I have lived in such a way that they see me as somebody who can offer something to them that’s of use.”

In recent years, Branch’s personal support network has grown to include men, whom he says he’d long mistrusted because of how his father and others had hurt him. “I have so many places in my life where I have to think,” he says. “I love when I can be around people and just feel safe.”

Trans novelist Julián Delgado Lopera explores the parameters and expectations of masculinity in Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You (Liveright, May), set in 1990s Colombia with flashbacks to the 1970s. Teenage Valentina and her father, Ignacio, struggle through their grief after her mother drowns. Mamadora Eléctrica, a travesti from Ignacio’s past and the Colombian queer underground, emerges to care for Valentina as she once did for Ignacio. PW’s starred review called the novel a “scintillating narrative of a man torn between belonging and self-expression,” a tension acknowledged by several authors interviewed for this piece.

“There are moments in the book where Ignacio goes to the club and hangs out with his sisters, and there’s something that comes undone inside him when he’s able to be in his body exactly the way he wants,” Delgado Lopera says. “I’ve spent nearly all my adult life around queer, trans people, and that’s been intentional. It’s both being seen and feeling liberated in our mannerisms and our way of speaking. Being seen by other people and using language that feels relevant to you can make you feel alive. That’s an experience a lot of queer people have, and it’s why we seek one another out.”

Samantha Puc writes about LGBTQ+ and fat representation in pop culture, with a focus on comics, books, and games.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the time periods in which Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You is set.

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