In November 2024, PEN America released its key findings from over ten thousand documented cases of book bans that occurred in the 2023–2024 school year: Thirty-nine percent of reported books included LGBTQ+ content. Concurrently, the United States saw a surge in anti-trans legislation, a trend that continues into 2025. According to the independent research organization Trans Legislation Tracker, at the time of this writing, there are 700 active bills across forty-nine states that would gravely impact the lives of trans people; thirty-two have passed so far. And the current Trump administration has been openly hostile in its stance toward the community: removing content related to LGBTQ+ identity as well as HIV from the White House and CDC websites, erasing nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ federal employees, and threatening essential funding to institutions that promote “gender ideology,” including organizations applying for grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and hospitals offering gender-affirming care for trans youth. It is in this climate that queer authors persevere—not only writing and publishing novels, stories, essays, and poems, but also turning toward the broader community and capturing the wide array of experience and possibility in queer humanity.
Highlighting the numerous shades of queer life is part of the mission behind the new anthology Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry After Stonewall (Belknap Press, April 2025), a collection of fifty-one poems edited by poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt. Burt had been encouraged by Sharmila Sen, the editorial director of Harvard University Press, to write a follow-up collection to her book The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (Belknap Press, 2016). Both collections include essays by Burt, written in response to each entry. For Super Gay Poems, Burt wanted to expand the scope of writers beyond the United States, to consider the craft internationally as well.
“I wanted demographic variety: poets from various nations, and ethnic groups, and regions, and poets with other identity markers, such as physical disability,” Burt says. “I also wanted other kinds of variety, the kinds that distinguish poems but don’t show up in the census. Shyness and boldness. Terseness and copious eloquence. Old forms and devices…also the new weird, the casual, and the semi-recherché post-avant-garde. Humor and mourning. Youth and old age.”
Abundant in forms and voices, the pieces in Super Gay Poems represent windows into individual lives that may variously feel new to readers or reflect familiar experiences that affirm their sense of self. “Poems let people who can’t live out their own stories—and who among us can live all our stories out fully?—put words that speak for ourselves out into the world,” Burt says.
The question of whose stories are lived, told, and listened to was vital for the novelist Caro De Robertis as they wrote So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color (Algonquin Books, May 2025). “When it comes to trans and queer experience, storytelling can save lives,” De Robertis says. Composed of interviews and testimonies from twenty queer elders, the book serves as evidence of a longer queer cultural lineage as well as a guide for finding a path forward during difficult times. “Our trans and queer elders paved the way for the extent of freedoms we have today,” De Robertis says.
De Robertis further acknowledges why they believe it is crucial for a book like So Many Stars to exist right now: “There’s no question that this book feels extremely urgent in our current time, when trans and nonbinary rights—when the very existence of trans and nonbinary people—are under attack. There’s so much fear and pain in our communities right now. We need each other—to hear one another’s voices, to know we’ve got one another’s backs—more than ever. I think about that constantly, in terms of my responsibilities as a writer. And yet in some ways our responsibility as trans and queer writers hasn’t changed: It has always been our work to write against erasure.”
So Many Stars and other LGBTQ+ books are doing just that—curating and amplifying the stories that some are trying to tear down. Irreverence is in some cases a tool in this serious work, as in Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley’s Be Gay, Do Crime: Sixteen Stories of Queer Chaos, an anthology of short fiction forthcoming in June from Dzanc Books. A follow-up to their 2023 anthology, Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women, also published by Dzanc, the upcoming collection relishes queer havoc, protest, and the counterculture that has been integral to the longevity of queer life.
This culture of resistance and defiance, as present in the queer literature of today, and in the stories and movements from our past, is emphatically grounded in an ethic of joy and love. “If you’re young and trans or gender nonconforming, never think you’re not loved,” De Robertis says. “Your elders see you, cherish you, and are cheering you on.”
Christopher Gonzalez is the author of the story collection I’m Not Hungry but I Could Eat (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2021). He splits his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Providence.