LGBTQ+ Focus: Still here, still queer… but getting squeezed out
Our tense political environment – despite the gains made over the past decade – has meant that representation of LGBTQ+ voices, and true visibility, is shrinking.
I did not grow up with stories like mine. Like many queer people of a certain age, I spent my teens scouring bookshelves and watching late-night Channel 4, hoping to find any version of myself that was not tragic, comedic or dead. Representation came in crumbs. If a gay character made it to the end of a story, they were usually sexless, sad or sidelined – fabulous, at best – but rarely central and rarely complex.
But all that has changed, or so we are told. We have come to think of queer visibility in publishing and film as a box that has already been ticked. Heartstopper exists. Queer BookTok is a thing. We had It’s a Sin, didn’t we? And yes, there has been progress. But look closer, and you will see that space for LGBTQ+ voices is quietly shrinking – not in volume, but in power. And also in the kinds of stories publishers and producers are willing to take a chance on.
It is a subtle thing, this kind of silencing.
It does not always come in the form of bans or protests (although those are on the rise too). More often, it is the email that says your story is “too niche” for their list this year. It is being told that readers want “uplifting” books, but not ones that involve queer grief or, indeed, a trans character with agency. It is being praised for your “fresh voice”, but asked if you can make it a little more… universal. Which often means a little less gay.
As a novelist writing queer stories with emotional bite, I feel this squeeze firsthand. My books are about grief, friendship and chosen family, not romance. They do not end with a wedding or a neat redemption arc. They are about people – queer people – learning how to live again. The early reader feedback has been wonderful. But when it comes to submitting to traditional publishers, one told me, in so many words, that “we already have our big gay title for this year”.
Our big gay title. Singular. Never mind that grief, joy and self-destruction get endless airtime – as long as they are straight. For queer stories, there is a quota and it is quietly shrinking.
This is not paranoia. It is playing out in data. A recent study from two Wake Forest University economics professors, Tin Cheuk Leung and Koleman S Strumpf, argued that LGBTQ+ authors are paid less than straight authors, even when they sell more books, according to examined advances and royalty payments from the US “Big Five” publishers. Not only are we expected to work harder to be published, but we are also then financially penalised if we go on to succeed. The report found no market-based justification for this, only bias. Or, in the researchers’ words, “animus-based motives”.
At the same time, LGBTQ+ book-bans are soaring. Advocates with PEN America reported more than 10,000 instances of books being banned last year, with 39% of these banned books featuring LGBTQ+ people or characters.
Advocates with PEN America reported more than 10,000 instances of books being banned last year, with 39% of these banned books featuring LGBTQ+ people or characters
And as the saying goes, where America leads, the rest of the world tends to follow. Just last year, the Index on Censorship found that more than half of UK school librarians polled had been asked to remove LGBTQ+ books from shelves. The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association’s (ILGA) latest annual review showed that seven European countries have enacted or proposed laws criminalising visibility and restricting discussion of LGBTQ+ issues. Attempts to censor sex education were recorded in Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Romania, Russia and Slovakia. Faced with these laws, publishers must choose between self-censorship and losing access to entire markets. This creates a chilling effect – gatekeepers self-censor, not because the stories are not good, but because they are afraid of the fallout. Sometimes, it is easier to say no to the next queer manuscript and just buy another celebrity memoir.
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We are also seeing a disturbing rise in internal tensions within the publishing industry itself. Last year, the launch of a network called SEEN in Publishing – framed as a space for those concerned about “gender ideology” – was condemned by hundreds of professionals for being trans-exclusionary. It followed an open letter a year earlier signed by a number of people across the book trade warning that “transphobia is still perfectly acceptable in the British book industry”. That might sound dramatic, but it is not.
A Stonewall report early this year suggested that 40% of LGBTQ+ employees in the workforce still feel they need to hide their sexuality at work, while one third reported hearing discriminatory remarks from colleagues. And while 16% of the UK publishing staffers identify as LGBTQ+, representation drops steeply at senior levels – just 7% at executive level, according to the Publishers Association’s 2024 Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging survey. So yes, we are in the room. But we are not always in a position to greenlight stories that reflect our lives.
I want to be clear – this is not about demanding endless visibility. Or insisting every book fly a rainbow flag and a coming-out scene; a fabulous fashion-forward GBF (gay best friend) is not compulsory. It is about not being erased through politeness, through market logic, through the excuse that “the conversation has moved on”.
Because the conversation has not moved on, it has just become more coded, more guarded and sometimes more dangerous. That said, Penguin Random House UK has set a goal to ensure that new hires and acquired books reflect UK society by 2025, specifically including sexuality as a dimension of diversity. The company’s WriteNow programme, launched in 2017, explicitly aimed to find and publish writers from under-represented communities, including LGBTQ+ authors.
But such initiatives are few and far between. I believe – reluctantly, but firmly – in writing queer stories now, even when it feels like I might be swimming upstream. I believe in writing them not just for teenagers, who search the shelves the way I once did, but for those adults who never found those books and who still carry that ache.
I believe in stories where queerness is not a twist, or a metaphor, or a footnote. Stories where the main character does not have to die to teach the straight ones something. Stories where the people on the margins speak – and are not punished for it. And I believe we need to start calling this moment what it is: a retreat.
We cannot rely on rainbow-wrapped June marketing or Pride panels to disguise the fact that many publishers, streamers and platforms are quietly scaling back. We are seeing fewer queer-led television shows greenlit. While many BookTok-able queer romances are being commissioned, fewer midlist LGBTQ+ books are being pushed. The pipeline is narrowing. The money is being redirected. The risk, once briefly welcomed, is now being managed.
But we are still here. Still writing. Still telling stories about friendship, survival and love in all its weird shapes. My books were never meant to be protest novels but, in these days, perhaps writing with open queerness is protest enough.
