I don’t think I’ll write something serious and thought-provoking, largely because I really don’t know what to write that hasn’t already been said – 2025 has started on a note that’s absolutely terrifying for queer and trans people, and the victories and kindnesses elsewhere seem to do little to offer peace. So, what I’ll do instead is to take you on a tour of my library, and introduce you to some of the books I read heading into the new year.
The last book I finished was Andrew Joseph White’s Hell Followed with Us, a horror novel which centres on its transgender protagonist’s efforts to run away from a doomsday Evangelical cult that has infected him with a bioweapon to initiate Armageddon, and find unlikely solace in a ragtag group of queer teenagers in an apocalyptic small-town’s LGBTQ+ centre. If the plot sounds heavy handed, it is – this isn’t subtle in its politics in the least and at least in this case, the overwhelming sharpness of the stakes is refreshing, as is the extremely sensitive use of body horror to work through dysphoria and gendering and ungendering.
Then there’s the soul-touching Cerulean series by T. J. Klune about a depressed middle-aged gay social services worker who finds a new meaning in life by caring for a group of unusual children in an isolated island house, alongside equally strange and fantastical figures, and then fighting the incarnation of J. K. Rowling in a literal propaganda and physical war to ensure supernatural beings have the same rights and protections as any other humans. Again, these books are anything but subtle, but I think there’s a poetic justice to seeing someone freely write a fantasy where Rowling is permanently put in her place, and she can no longer cause queer and trans people any further harm.
There’s Mason Deaver’s I Wish You All the Best, where a non-binary teenager deals with the fallout of being thrown out of their home by their parents and coming to terms with abandonment. There’s Aiden Thomas’ absolutely stunning Cemetery Boys, where the protagonist desperately desires to prove his manhood, being transgender, to his Mexican-American family by successfully joining the family tradition of witchcraft and death magic. You have the obnoxious Gwen & Art Are Not in Love, by Lex Croucher, which offers a dramatically queer take on the Arthurian legend, and several questions about the fixity and necessity of assigned gender roles. You have the halting, poetic Icarus, by Kayla Ancrum, in which a disabled gay teenager attempts to flee from his abusive home alongside his fated and horribly tormented intersex lover with the help of his friends. Or even, In the Lives of Puppets, also by T. J. Klune, in which the sole surviving human in an apocalyptic, cyberpunk future attempts to find his lost robot father against the might of a surveillance State that wants him dead, while finding love, family and friends along the way. And I’m only scratching the surface of all that’s out there.
I probably bore you by listing book after book and plot after plot, but that’s not necessarily what matters. Over the past decade, we’ve seen an explosion of queer and trans stories, authors, and imaginations in mass market literature, so much so that year-end compilations of books with queer lead characters now regularly run into hundreds, from what struggled to go beyond 20 in the early 2010s, and could number no more than five a few decades ago. From stories that were almost universally about cisgender, white, gay men (like the painful if famous Call Me by Your Name), many protagonists are now from gender minority groups or other ethnic and racial groups. They may be disabled or from a different class, and more. The authors too are increasingly drawn from a much wider variety of identities, and that reflects on the kinds of tales that are told. We live, if anything, in a period in which we have unparalleled production of queer literature, and queer literature catering to almost every possible kind of reader in every possible genre, and yet there are so many stories that are yet to be put on paper, and so many more whose voices remain quiet and unheard. We live in a time, where we’re blessed to be able to have access – as many of these books now begin to officially find their way to India – to an ever-growing body of queer experiences, and ways of making meaning of ourselves. I haven’t even touched on our own, homegrown queer mass market literature.
What’s also true about the books I mentioned before, and of the trend of queer mass market literature at large is something that I think is far more revolutionary, and something much more mundane, that ties them all together.
All these books are replete with hope. Through every single trial and tribulation that these characters are put through, not once does any story refuse to keep hope. And that’s the key, that even in the face of abject horror and helplessness, not once do any of these stories stop believing in the possibility of a better world that comes after. Every action, every moment is motivated by a desire to change, by a desire for something that doesn’t already exist. And it’s this hope that’s infectious, that’s wild and uncontrollable – that makes each and every one of these books, many of which are critically terrible and poorly constructed, into not only tolerable but enjoyable pieces of literature.
These are books that make it a point to offer readers a chance to dream, and a possibility of a new reality, and they do so in ways that far supersede any of their literary value. They are each a manifesto in their own right. These books tell you over and over that it matters to love, to be loved, to belong, to feel at home, to build community, to look evil in the face and spit on it. Like Ancrum writes in her dedication to Icarus: “Some of us lead lives that would require suspension of belief from others. The strange, the magical, the devastating and the unbelievable. You deserve to have someone walk beside you. You deserve outstretched hands. You shouldn’t have to live to house secrets. You should be allowed to just live.”
This leaves me wondering. We live in horribly unsettling times – and with very good reason. The Great Orange is in the White House and has made it his duty to make sure transgender lives specifically, and queer lives at large, become unliveable. We’re faced with the first showings of a fully revived fascism. We’ve begun to lose any and all protections queer and trans people had in places of work. And then you pair that with the general feeling of living through the collapsing climate and a geopolitical universe increasingly alright with mass displacement, violence, and murder, that to not be disturbed and horrified by the state of the world is a privilege.
In times like these, I can only say it’s normal to fear for what comes next, but it’s also important to note, that this isn’t the first time the world’s facing such a reckoning. The 1980s offered a similar cocktail of nightmares, as did the 1960s, the 1930s, and several other generations before it. Every single time, we’ve survived, even if by the skin of our teeth and with unbearable losses – our existence a testament to our resilience. While it’s unjust to have to constantly fight to justify our right to exist, we’ve held out hope in the past, and have succeeded, and it’s time to do it again.
The hope for a better future gave us the impetus to imagine, reimagine, fight, and demand the world we had in 2024, and we need to keep hope that the world we live in is defensible, worth saving, and worth cherishing. Like every single story in the books mentioned says, hoping and dreaming is what brought us here, and it’s what will take us further. Why don’t we look for ways how to?
Main photo credit: Mihir Seth
