NYT: The Big Gay Lit Boom
Just over 10 years ago, I opened a small bookstore a few hours northwest of New York City. The shelves are arranged by affinity: notable people choose their 10 favorite books; elsewhere, titles gather around more whimsical themes. Early this year, I found myself creating a shelf I could not have imagined when I started: queer sports romances.
That’s where you now find Heated Rivalry beside Thirty Love and Futbolista: closeted hockey players, closeted tennis players, closeted college soccer players. The covers promise muscle, yearning and secrecy. Though the protagonists tend to be men, many of the genre’s writers and readers are women. At first, I saw these books as a playful little subgenre, a narrow tributary of romance publishing. Lately, I’ve come to see them as evidence of a much larger shift: Queer literature has become one of the growth engines of the publishing industry.
L.G.B.T.Q. fiction has never been more visible, more varied or better promoted. It is not a stretch to call the past few years the richest period for queer fiction since 1978, when Andrew Holleran published Dancer From the Dance, Larry Kramer published Faggots and Edmund White published Nocturnes for the King of Naples. That post-Stonewall flowering was followed by AIDS, which robbed queer literature of many of its writers and a substantial portion of its audience. Publishers retreated. To be labeled a gay or queer writer was a constraint. In 1999 John Updike rebuked a future Booker Prize winner, Alan Hollinghurst, in The New Yorker for writing “of a realm from which most human beings are excluded,” populated by “relentlessly gay” people.
The old assumption was that queerness should be downplayed to get a wider readership. Today, the opposite looks true. Queerness sells. Even the canon is getting queered. In The Chosen and the Beautiful, Nghi Vo rewrites The Great Gatsby away from Nick Carraway and gives it to Jordan Baker, reimagined as a bisexual Vietnamese adoptee. Rey Terciero’s graphic novels Northranger and Dan in Green Gables are similar reimaginings of Northanger Abbey and Anne of Green Gables.
This is not simply a story of representation getting its due. The audience for literary fiction has long skewed toward women and gay men. What has changed is the industry’s willingness to acknowledge that, and the many straight women who are willing to read about gay characters.
According to data compiled from BookScan, sales of L.G.B.T.Q. fiction (excluding digital sales) were roughly $8 million in 2015, the year Hanya Yanagihara published A Little Life, heralded by Garth Greenwell as a great gay novel. By 2025, annual sales of L.G.B.T.Q. fiction had reached more than $80 million: a tenfold increase over a decade in which fiction more broadly has struggled. Over the same period, sales of literary fiction fell to around 33 million books per year from around 36 million.
The very qualities that once made queer fiction seem too risky now make it useful. Queer books also come with organic systems of circulation: book clubs, queer bookstores, online fan communities and events that double as gatherings of friends. The decline of newspapers and book reviews has created space for new influencers such as Jack Edwards, a TikTok book critic who has championed Douglas Stuart’s John of John, and whose millions of social media followers give his recommendations impact and influence. For publishers, that is increasingly valuable. Queer books don’t simply find individual readers; they find communities.
The boom has created incentives for publishers to package gayness, and for straight writers to borrow it. Josh Silver’s Fruit Fly, published this April, is a funny and nasty novel about appropriation: A blocked straight female writer latches onto a young gay addict, imagining that his pain might supply the authenticity her fiction sorely needs.
Mr. Silver’s Fruit Fly is satire, but his irritation is real. He described the insult of being told early on not to seem gay, only to find, today, that gayness had become professionally useful. “It had currency all of a sudden,” he said. “I was offended by it.” That is the catch. The thing that once made you vulnerable can become the very thing other people want to borrow.
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