Writing Queer Stories for Queer Readers

I did, technically, mean to post this during Pride Month.

Unfortunately, time is fake, calendars are hostile, and I am apparently committed to honoring queer existence by being late in a deeply authentic way.

So here we are.

As a trans agender, acearo writer, “queer stories for queer readers” is not just a neat phrase for me. It is part of why I write, who I imagine on the other side of the page, and what I want my stories to make room for.

I write across genres. Gothic fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, speculative fiction, and whatever strange shape a story decides it needs. But underneath all of that, I keep coming back to similar questions: Who gets to be fully seen? Who gets to want? Who gets to survive becoming? Who gets to be strange, complicated, difficult, lonely, angry, tender, and still worthy of a story?

Queerness lives in those questions for me.

Not as decoration. Not as a box checked beside a character’s name. Not as a lesson for someone else. As part of the emotional truth of a life.

What I Needed

I did not grow up surrounded by queer stories.

I grew up in a context where queerness was not treated like something people simply got to be. If a gay couple appeared on a show, that could be met with snide comments. Queerness was not something I understood as ordinary, available, or allowed.

I did not realize queer was a thing people actually got to be until late in high school. I did not realize it was a thing I was allowed to be until college. I didn't get to know that how I felt was normal, that anyone else ever felt wrong in their own existance.

That kind of absence matters.

When you do not see people like you, or people who might be like you, it can become harder to imagine yourself clearly. Not impossible, but harder. You end up piecing language together late. You end up looking backward and realizing how much you misunderstood because you did not know there was another way to understand it.

And even when I did start seeing queer representation, it often felt limited.

Sometimes queer characters existed for the sake of existing. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes simple presence matters. Sometimes a character being queer without fanfare is exactly what a story needs. But characters are people too, and queerness should be part of who they are, not the whole of them.

Other times, queerness existed for the sake of a joke. Or as a lesson. Or as an issue. Or as something a story seemed to want credit for including without actually giving the character depth, interiority, desire, contradiction, or a life beyond what their queerness meant to other people.

I wanted more than that.

I wanted queer characters who got to be complicated. Queer characters in stories in general, not only in stories about being queer. Stories where queerness was present but not the entire plot. Characters who were messy, lonely, angry, strange, disabled, nonromantic, frightened, difficult, tender, selfish, generous, and unfinished.

Characters who felt like people.

Queer Readers as the Intended Audience

When I say I write queer stories for queer readers, I mean that queer readers are not an afterthought.

I am not writing stories where queerness has to be translated, softened, or made palatable for readers who are uncomfortable with it. I am not interested in pausing the emotional reality of a scene to explain every piece of queer experience as if the imagined default reader is always standing outside it.

That does not mean non-queer readers are unwelcome. It means they are not always the center.

“For queer readers” means writing toward recognition. It means trusting that some readers will understand the ache underneath a line without needing it footnoted. It means letting queerness exist as lived experience, not a glossary.

It means writing stories where queer readers can recognize something emotionally true, even when the setting is a haunted manor, a fantasy kingdom, a supernatural shop, a battlefield, a city full of magic, or some other impossible place.

Because emotional truth does not require realism. Sometimes fantasy, horror, gothic fiction, and speculative worlds make it easier to tell the truth slant.

A haunted house can be about grief and longing. A transformation can be about becoming yourself. A curse can be about the roles people force onto you. A monster can be about desire, fear, loneliness, survival, or the way other people decide what you are before you get to name yourself.

Those are queer questions too.

Not Lessons. Not Symbols. People.

I am not interested in queer characters flattened into lessons or made palatable for people who do not want to see us fully.

I do not want queer characters who only exist to educate someone else. I do not want trans characters whose entire inner life is reduced to pain. I do not want ace or aro characters treated as puzzles to solve, jokes to make, or people waiting for the “right” person to fix them. I do not want queer longing sanitized until it no longer feels alive.

I want queer characters who get to be whole people.

That means joy, yes. Tenderness, yes. Beauty, yes.

But also grief. Want. Hunger. Rage. Bad decisions. Fear. Avoidance. Obsession. Contradiction. The sharp and inconvenient parts of being alive.

I want queer characters who can be wrong. I want queer characters who can hurt and be hurt. I want queer characters who can make choices the reader understands even when those choices are terrible. I want queer characters who are allowed darkness and beauty, survival and transformation, softness and danger.

Not every queer story has to be safe. Not every queer story has to be hopeful in the same way. Not every queer story has to be about survival, even though survival matters.

Sometimes the story is about wanting something you should not want. Sometimes it is about being changed. Sometimes it is about what grief does to love. Sometimes it is about a person becoming more themselves and discovering that the world does not know what to do with that.

For me, queer storytelling is not about creating perfect models of identity. It is about writing people who feel alive.

Acearo Stories Matter Too

Aromantic and asexual representation matters deeply to me.

Ace and aro experiences are often erased, even inside queer conversations. When they do appear, they are too often misunderstood, mocked, treated as a lack, or framed as something that needs to be corrected. Romance and sex are treated as universal endpoints, as if every character’s fulfillment must eventually pass through the same narrow door.

I am not interested in that.

Being acearo does not mean a character has no emotional life. It does not mean they do not want anything. It does not mean they cannot be intense, devoted, lonely, tender, jealous, ambitious, afraid, complicated, or deeply connected to other people.

It means their relationship to attraction, desire, intimacy, and connection is different from the assumed default.

That difference is worth writing. It is worth treating with care. It is worth making room for without turning it into a problem the story has to solve.

I want stories where nonromantic lives matter. Where intimacy is not only romantic. Where love is not treated as less meaningful because it does not fit one expected shape. Where wanting things does not automatically mean wanting romance or sex. Where characters are allowed to build lives, bonds, loyalties, and futures that do not have to imitate someone else’s idea of completion.

Queer readers deserve that too.

What I Want to Make

I want to write beautiful, dangerous, transformative stories.

Stories with queer longing, gothic atmosphere, strange magic, haunted places, terrible tenderness, and characters who survive, fail, ache, want, change, and become.

I want queerness to be part of the emotional truth of the work, not decoration pasted on top of it.

In some of my stories, that means queer characters navigating grief, obsession, art, and the danger of being seen too clearly. In others, it means characters trying to survive systems that want to name them, claim them, or force them into roles they never chose. Sometimes it means writing romance. Sometimes it means writing its absence. Sometimes it means writing devotion that does not fit easily into familiar categories.

I keep coming back to transformation because so much of queer life, at least for me, has involved becoming.

Not becoming in a clean, simple, inspirational way. Becoming can be strange. It can be painful. It can be beautiful. It can be dangerous. It can cost things. It can reveal what was always there. It can make a person more themselves and less understandable to people who preferred them smaller.

That is story material I care about.

I want to write characters who are allowed to be in process. Allowed to be unfinished. Allowed to be strange. Allowed to want things. Allowed to be more than what hurt them. Allowed to be less tidy than representation is sometimes expected to be.

Who I Am Writing For

I am writing for queer readers who needed more.

Readers who wanted to see themselves somewhere unexpected. Readers who wanted fantasy, horror, gothic fiction, romance, and speculative stories where queer characters were not an exception. Readers who wanted queerness to be ordinary and important at the same time.

Readers who wanted characters who were trans, ace, aro, disabled, strange, lonely, furious, tender, nonromantic, romantic, grieving, changing, surviving, wanting, becoming.

Readers who wanted to feel seen without being simplified.

I cannot write every queer experience. No one can. Queerness is too vast, too specific, too personal, too varied for any one writer or story to hold all of it.

But I can write from where I am. I can write with care. I can write toward emotional honesty. I can write characters whose queerness matters because it is part of their lives, their choices, their bodies, their histories, their relationships, their fears, their joys, and their becoming.

I can write stories that do not ask queer readers to make themselves smaller before entering.

That is what I mean when I say I write queer stories for queer readers.

Not perfect stories. Not universal stories. Not stories that can be everything to everyone.

Stories with teeth. Stories with tenderness. Stories where beauty and danger often stand close together. Stories where queer characters get to be fully, inconveniently alive.