How “Right” and “Wrong” Ways to Be Queer Are Changing Fiction
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I could give you a monologue like the one in Barbie about being a woman, except it’s about being a queer person in America in 2024, and it would go like this: Don’t be selfish, but always practice self-care. Cutting someone off is abuse unless it’s your parents—that’s just healthy boundaries. Don’t be racist, but don’t post to social media about your lack of racism, because that’s performative. If you’re femme, don’t wear slutty outfits, because they cater to the straight male gaze, but being a sex worker is good honest work. Be content with the Honda or the Toyota; don’t want the BMW or the Volvo, because that reinforces capitalist consumerism. It’s okay to be an artist if your work centers marginalized communities, but all other kinds of art, especially entertainment, are morally bankrupt. Don’t lie or cheat; instead be poly, an inherently radical choice. Being gay married can be cute, but don’t have a big wedding and don’t move to the suburbs, because these choices are homonormative. The butch/femme dynamic is dated and reflects internalized homophobia, but never police anyone else’s gender. Being bisexual is less legitimate than other kinds of being queer, but never police anyone else’s sexuality. Don’t be fat or have a disability or live in a rural place, but don’t say this out loud. Yelling is never okay, unless you’re at a protest. Being at the protest is always cool, unless you’re a cop. You can be a lawyer, but only if you work for the defense or for housing justice. Have a passion that motivates your life, but don’t be too ambitious—don’t want anything too much if it’s for yourself alone.
It’s exhausting to live this way, to navigate the endless contradictions of a country that has seen a half-won fight for sexual minority liberation. In what country is it true that, to quote the protagonist of Anna Dorn’s novel Perfume & Pain, “No one cares if you’re gay anymore” and also true that in 2023 alone, lawmakers proposed more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills and more than 300 trans people (mostly trans women of color) were murdered? America, comes the answer. It’s also exhausting to live in a country so committed to harsh judgment. “I’ve always found the transparent uncompromising force of American morality to be mesmerizing and terrifying,” novelist Jen Silverman wrote recently. “Despite our plurality of influences and beliefs, our national character seems inescapably informed by an Old Testament relationship to the notions of good and evil.”
Years ago, “queer” catapulted beyond being a synonym for LGBTQIA+ to become a political identity oriented around the pursuit of collective liberation from white supremacy, labor exploitation, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of oppression. But now, for youngish city-dwelling progressive folk, it seems that the word has also come to mean a code of moral conduct. In the absence of religion or any laws worth trusting or an economic system that meets our basic needs, whether and how we live by the ethical codes of being a “good queer” has become one of the dominant ways that lefty Americans judge each other’s behavior—from how we date and fuck to how we socialize, work, consume, and spend our free time.
“Queerness rose in my life like a faith,” writes Lillian Fishman in her 2022 novel Acts of Service. “When I came to New York I found there were shared beliefs, shared systems, not among all queer people but among a set to whom queerness meant a specific type of ethical awareness. Here was how I would know what was good to want.”
On its face, the idea of following the rules of being a “good queer” seems low stakes, but for many people, fictional and real, it can mean the difference between having and not having social support. The dynamic of queer people correcting and policing each other’s queer virtuousness has become a common interaction in American queer television, from The Bisexual to The L Word Generation Q to Dear White People to Work in Progress to Vida. But in the past two years, books—specifically literary fiction—have become the place where queer people seem the most exhausted by this morality, as well as where we’re having the most fun pushing back on it.
Queer fiction of the past couple years is full of protagonists who believe they’re doing queerness wrong or are chafing under the constraints of queer Puritanism. Fishman’s narrator, Eve, cheats on her nice doctor girlfriend with a troubled straight couple and lies to her friends about it. Dorn’s Astrid survives on a cocktail of substances she calls “the Patricia Highsmith”: alcohol, sativa, Adderall, cigarettes. Astrid gets canceled because she calls herself a “female faggot” at a public event, which doesn’t go over well with her gay male conversation partner, his friends, or online. She’s ostracized, which seems mostly fine with her, and which she somewhat also attributes to the fact that she’s out-achieved her peers in her career. “There was a point at which my politics matched the zeitgeist, and maybe this is just part of aging, but lately my politics feel unfashionable,” Dorn writes. “Meanwhile, smart and nuanced thinkers are being called derogative names merely for asking questions.”
The protagonists of these novels often seem profoundly lonely and isolated, even, if not especially, from the queer community, and often in ways that seem self-imposed. The protagonist of Marissa Higgins’ 2024 novel A Good Happy Girl has “hardly a friend I hadn’t hurt. I turned to the apps for sex with greater frequency.” She makes money from selling women access to a livestream of her feet. “Owen and I rarely go out,” writes Bryan Washington in “Foster,” a short story that appeared in The New Yorker, “and we aren’t much for gay bars. We’ve both, to varying degrees, exhausted the scope of local possibilities. Owen likes to say that it feels like he’s fucked every kind of person, and seen every kind of come face, and snorted all of the drugs, so he’d rather just stay home.”
In these books, significant action is motivated by a character's need to either prove themselves as a virtuous queer or reject imposed systems of queer thought. Trouble often arises for the main character when they cannot make up their mind about which of these paths to pursue. In Daniel Lefferts’ 2024 novel Ways and Means, a character called Mark and his boyfriend, Elijah, are brought together by “their enthusiasm about the newly elected Barack Obama, their inability to match quite the enthusiasm of their peers” and “their tribe-betraying dislike of pop divas and drag queens.” Further, we learn that in the past, Elijah mistakenly rented a film featuring men on the verge of death and then became obsessed with painting them. When one of his queer classmates pointed out that the film’s director had been a propagandist for Hitler, making the movie “fascist or proto fascist art,” his classmates began to “[regard] him with a collective hostile stare.” Soon, “They’d spread word of Elijah’s paintings to other students, who’d lodged further complaints,” an experience that kills Elijah’s creative spirit for decades. This college experience comes to color the way Elijah sees the (im)possibility of connection with others: “He felt that his classmates had scored a point that was minor and fleeting at the expense of his subjectivity, which was immense and timeless.”
In other recent novels, the alienation is not wholly self-inflicted, but stems at least in part from being rejected, harmed, or shunned by queers with power.
“My MFA advisor broke my spirit completely,” writes David Santos Donaldson in his 2022 novel Greenland. “He was a persnickety, effete man from Surrey (or so he said). A wilting Peter Pan with a boyishly clean-shaven face and poufy Justin Bieber hair. In short, a fellow queer Brit… I couldn’t figure out what it was about me exactly that raised the feathers on this bird’s back, but he came for me like a bird of prey homing in for the kill.” Further, Jenny Fran Davis’ 2023 novel Dykette might be read as a cautionary tale of knowing too much about queer groupthink; her protagonist Sasha thinks so much about which micro-gestures or behaviors will endear her to the group of queers with whom she’s gone on vacation that her brain short circuits and she melts down before the reader’s eyes.
In Temim Fruchter’s 2024 City of Laughter, our protagonist, Shiva, yearns to be included in a group of Brooklyn queer femmes. “There was a cliquishness, though, to Rebekah’s girls,” writes Fruchter. “They had secret online groups and exclusive brunches. They were the ones who threw all the queer New York dance parties, and while pre-breakup Shiva had religiously attended, she had often also felt a little out of place: never quite glossy enough or impeccably painted as the other femmes.”
In Vanessa Williams’ 2024 novel Ellipses, the main character is Lily, a bisexual, mixed race woman with “long, dark hair and a folksy sweater” who works in the fashion industry. As she sits in a lesbian bar, she is confronted by another patron, not femme, who implies that Lily is straight and doesn’t belong in a queer space. Lily leaves, thinking, “Better the actual cold than the icicles of intragroup rejection.” Williams continues, “But Lily’s conventional femininity was not a falsehood that she had slipped on as a disguise to protect herself from bigotry. It was as much a part of who she was as her attraction to women; to dispose of it would have meant rejecting part of her identity, something she refused to do.”
These characters, then, seem to feel that acceptance within the queer community comes at the cost of their individuality and authenticity.
There is a sense in many of these books that the code of “good queerness” is now so ingrained that many queer people no longer need an external arbiter; they police their own thoughts and feelings just fine. This dynamic is on bright display in Lydia Conklin’s 2022 story collection Rainbow Rainbow, particularly in “Sunny Talks,” wherein an older person just coming to terms with their nonbinary identity takes their nephew to a conference of young trans people in Philadelphia. Observing the young panelists, the narrator remarks, “The other panelist… possibly a college student, leans toward boy, though I’m not supposed to guess like that.” Supposed to, says whom? An imagined or idealized queer doing queerness perfectly, I think, who has taken up residence in the narrator’s mind.
In writing my own novel, Housemates, I was interested in depicting and satirizing how the earnest, earthy, highly-educated, and mostly white, Asian, and multiracial queers of West Philadelphia (where I live) have reacted so hard against harmful systems of oppression that we end up, despite our best intentions, creating and enforcing a particularly rigid, insular, and hyperlocal value system that dictates who in our community is prized and who is punished. These judgements have real, sometimes material consequences—the fate of more than one coffee shop has been decided by them. We do this, I think, in part because of the guilt and shame we also feel about the geographic space we occupy—a majority Black neighborhood with a past and present of state-sponsored assault on Black life—and the role we’ve played in gentrifying it.
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My protagonists Bernie and Leah are both a little messy and a little selfish, and while they are interested in morality and in social change, they are also interested in other things that the value system of their neighborhood does not seem to allow—things like beauty and play and intellectual rigor and pleasure and achievement. Leah is also fat, and Bernie was raised by working class white people in central Pennsylvania—identities that even their group house’s attempt at queer utopia has forgotten to include. They finally find the neighborhood so stultifying that they leave it and venture out into rural Pennsylvania, which may also speak to the ways that queerness as an ethical code thrives almost exclusively in dense urban environments.
But leaving is not the answer, they find, as yet another hard reaction against something rarely is. What I see my characters finding as they leave, travel, and ultimately return home is synthesis—neither art nor politics but both, an art that is informed by a real yearning for a more just world and a politics that also cherishes beauty and forgives our failings. Further, once they come home to Philadelphia, the wider world outside their queer bubble changes in a big way over which they have no control.
This past March, I went to a talk at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference (AWP) that featured the novelists Susan Choi and Sarah Thankam Mathews. Mathews said that she conceptualized her stupendous 2022 novel All This Could Be Different as the journey of a single character from an “I” to a “we”; indeed the novel’s first and last sections are so titled, separated by two middle sections, called “they” and “she.” I found this to be both extremely moving and quite accurate to my experience of reading the novel, which is about a young queer woman who starts off almost afraid of other queer people and ends up finding real support and belonging amongst a group of loving friends. These friends both help her on an individual level (bullying her shitty landlord) and teach her what it really means to act in collective solidarity (organizing against housing inequality).
It occurred to me then that by crafting these tight homogenized moral codes, we are trying to bring about a moral world—the kind of world that does not exist but could, if we could only become a powerful enough “we” to make it so. If we think the same and act the same, the logic goes, we will eventually find “the we of me,” as Carson McCullers, a queer writer of yore, put it.
Though the end result of this logic can be the restriction and power jockeying that these recent novels depict, the impulse, I think, is pure, born of real idealism and the ability to imagine, as only queers can, a world that really could be different.
At the end of Mathews’ novel, the protagonist, Sneha, has found her “we,” but the people that make up that group are still vastly different. They disagree about most everything, including how their group should exist within the wider, hostile world, an ending I cherished and kept in mind as I wrote the ending of Housemates. For even as it may feel like it’s moving us closer to collective liberation, mandating that we all must think the same things are right and the same things are wrong is not the same thing as being the same. Queerness is now too big and too various; there are too many people under this umbrella. We have different cultural and racial experiences, different needs and different bodies, different wounds and different flaws and different dreams.
There must be the spaciousness in queerness for us to disagree and to forgive, to find different things moral and amoral, beautiful and ugly. For what good, after all, is a moral code that lacks love? “The moment we choose to love,” writes bell hooks, “we begin to move towards freedom.”
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