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I’d spent so much of my young life up to that point craving powerful sword-swinging women in fantasy who didn’t fall into the traditional feminine roles and expectations I was trying to escape in my real life. I sought out the kinds of characters who fled the quiet life in search of the adventures that the boy heroes got to have. It was hard to find that in fantasy, though, even though the worlds were supposed to be magical, disruptive, out of the ordinary. There are still a couple characters who stand out in my memory: Kitiara, from the Dragonlance Chronicles by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, Alanna from The Song of the Lioness by Tamora Pierce. I loved them. They were the closest things to what I sought, but there was something about them that still left me unsatisfied.
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Then—and I remember this moment with crystal clarity—I had the flu. I spent it reading the entire Rainbow Road series by Alex Sanchez. For the first time, I realized that I could write stories with gay characters in them. Which meant...lesbians in fantasy.
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In my fugue state, my fevered little self took that short story and swapped the best friend and the boyfriend, and I wrote my first gay kiss. I haven’t looked back since.
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Luckily, and so thrillingly, I did not end up having to populate the entirety of LGBTQIA+ science fiction and fantasy. Over the last decade, the amount of queer adult SFF has rocketed (haha) upward, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, as a reader and a writer.

I’m not as alone as I thought I was, and the reception by the wider world has also been reassuring—queer stories are having a positive impact on readers. The list below includes books from the last few years. I’ve included a mix of big productions and small, and left off some of the more well-known queer SFF novels (sorry, Gideon the Ninth, I still love you!) to leave some room to bring others to light. While the list below is certainly incomplete and doesn’t cover nearly every identity in the queer family, I hope you find something here that makes you feel less alone, too.

If there are any LGBTQIA+ science fiction and fantasy books that made you feel seen, or that you love, share them in the comments—you never know who else they might help.