the infuriating thing is that there is genuinely so much good queer literature out there, contemporary and not, but there is also a sizeable chunk of readers who think that a book only "counts" as good queer literature if it's a) unproblematic, b) contains romance as its central focus, and c) has the characters state their orientation and/or gender identity directly to the audience using socially acceptable 21st-century terms (as opposed to resorting to cowardly tactics such as Subtext and Themes)














