I’ve always been an avid reader, always enjoyed the thrill of escaping into different worlds, into different people, into different ways of being.
In particular, I loved science fiction and fantasy, stories about galaxies and magic, spaceships and dragons. As a quiet, sometimes lonely kid, I was attracted to stories with compelling characters and complex plots, stories about triumphing the face of overwhelming odds. Connecting with fiction also gave me opportunities to connect with other people, to engage in animated discussions, debates, and theorizing about our reading.
When I got older, I realized how rarely I, as a queer person, was represented in these stories I loved so much. My favourite characters, all assumedly cisgender, settled down in happy heterosexual relationships. If there was a hint of queerness, it was only ever implied, and more likely than not, said queer-coded characters either lived lonely lives, or died tragically (or both!).
I don’t need to always see myself in the stories I love. Whether as a result of lifelong conditioning, or just my own inbuilt preferences, I am often happy to read about experiences other than my own. However, persistently feeling left out of things I loved didn’t feel good, and I began to feel terribly at odds with something that had otherwise brought me a great deal of comfort and joy.
Where I could, I attempted to find examples of queerness in stories, but to do so, I often had to look more into the realm of literary fiction, which has never been my favourite. Furthermore, these had the same problems as I had encountered in genre fiction — queer characters could only ever be implied, be sidekicks, be dead. When trying to talk to non-queer friends about this, I received silence and blank stares.
Seeing queer characters become much more prevalent in speculative fiction, in works like Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth and Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds, has been one of my greatest joys. Knowing that I can seek out stories that will live in my heart in the same way that some of my childhood favourites did, and knowing that those characters might be like me, might be queer and courageous and legendary — it kindles something powerful within me, something that might allow me to be courageous and legendary on my own.
I can be found on Bluesky as “pineapplefury” and on instagram as “thepineapplefury.”
Butterworth Books 