Hi, if you’re new here (welcome!), rest assured that we are not. Cosmo has been battling regressive moral panic—and the censorship it can spawn—for decades. Over the years, various fringe groups have sought to censor us for printing “pornography” and “explicit content,” aka honest, informative reporting on totally normal physical intimacy and crucial sexual health topics. So you could say we are experts in defending the right to empower readers. Which is why we’re standing with the LGBTQ+ authors whose work is under fire right now from lawmakers and at least 50 groups agitating for book bans at the national, state, or local level.
This isn’t just about Drag Story Hour or inclusive kids’ books anymore. (Although the challenges against both, against titles like And Tango Makes Three—the award-winning, completely unscandalous illustrated tale of two male penguins raising a chick—remain absurd.) It’s not just about parents being denied a say in what their kids can and cannot read. In some parts of the country, the hysteria is preventing even fully grown adults from accessing books—for themselves—that happen to have LGBTQ+ themes.
Last year, the Patmos Library in Jamestown, Michigan, lost its taxpayer funding after staff refused to strip a handful of LGBTQ+ titles from the library’s collection. Targeted books included Gender Queer, a 2019 illustrated memoir that, as a concession to conservatives, was already shelved behind the checkout desk like a controlled substance. (The library has managed to stay open with more than $277,000 raised via GoFundMe, but some of its detractors have stepped up their efforts and are now calling for the removal of all books containing LGBTQ+ themes.) This March, conservative lawmakers in Mississippi advanced a bill aimed at combating so-called internet pornography that would in effect prohibit e-books depicting “homosexuality” or “lesbianism” (among other topics) from public schools and libraries. Meanwhile in Oklahoma, state senate Republicans passed a bill that would ban both printed and digital material from the state’s public and school libraries “that the average person age 18 or older applying contemporary community standards would find has a predominant tendency to appeal to a prurient interest in sex.” It’s easy to guess which kinds of sex those “community standards” would censor.
As crushing as the news can feel, it’s important to understand that this baseless alarmism springs from a noisy, intolerant minority. The truth is that 73 percent of U.S. adults say they oppose book bans, according to a November 2022 national survey conducted by OnePoll. Forty-three percent said they made an effort to read banned or challenged books in the previous year. And there are plenty of people actively challenging the challenges.
“Librarians on the ground are organizing, quite effectively, to push back,” says Emily Drabinski, president-elect of the American Library Association. Drabinski is openly gay and will be sending a clear message when she takes office in June: “I’m gonna have the gayest inauguration brunch in the history of libraries—it’s going to be all rainbows. Now is the time when we have to be really loud and super public about who we are.”
Community involvement is crucial too, so consider joining your local branch’s resistance efforts if you haven’t already. “There are so many more of us than there are of them,” Drabinski says of the would-be censors. “I know we’re on the right side of history and I know we’re on the right side of the present. I totally believe we’re going to win.”
LGBTQ+ writing is essential not just to the queer community—as a guiding beacon of survival, wisdom, truth, and excellence—but to a general public that benefits from understanding the breadth of human experience. Sample some of that goodness on the following pages, where you’ll find stirring passages from 31 LGBTQ+ novels, memoirs, and more, most of which have roared into existence since last Pride season alone. May we be able to read freely, everywhere, and without apology.
Couplets: A Love Story
by Maggie Millner
“Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Sonya kick the beach ball into the water, stripping off her shirt as she bounds into the water, the white wake of her splash shining against the red of her bikini. My stomach dips as she disappears under the water, shimmering like a mermaid when she surfaces, and then I have to look away, because if I don’t, I’m going to go as scarlet as her bathing suit.”
“The days got shorter and colder, and I spent hours of each one burying the queer version of myself in letters to Sam….We loved each other in those letters like we didn’t know anyone would hate us.”
“As we kissed, I thought of bicycle wheels spinning, the promise of continued motion. I thought of a pond freezing over with ice, the weight of your legs beginning to slip. I was out of breath before I remembered to breathe, and I could hardly believe that I was myself, pressed against Nora’s face.”
Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeTooEra
Edited by Shantel Gabrieal Buggs and Trevor Hoppe
“For so long, I had dismissed the parts of me that wanted to be an object of desire….And while I had squirmed against the butch label, that was perhaps because I also saw how much I hid behind the swaggery, masculine aspects of it to keep myself safe from rejection. When I was suddenly faced with a person who actually wanted the soft, vulnerable—dare I say feminine—parts of me, who made me feel fuckable, it took time for the old stories to sieve their way out of me.” —Amy Gall
“Sitting above Mrs. S, I can see her neck, her hands folding in her lap….Estuaries of neon veins, knuckles rising like moons. Nails short, a practical choice, although this too I happily convert into a concealed lesbianism. Everything is a sign. For the first time, I see her bring a finger to her mouth, as if to bite, the movement well known….She is more restless than she lets on. I pretend it is my presence. Just one quick fantasy.”
“We called our story—the story of Sarah and Kayla, Kayla and Sarah—a love story. We say that because it is….Our love being purely platonic doesn’t make it any less worthy.”
Sounds Fake but Okay: An Asexual and Aromantic Perspective on Love, Relationships, Sex, and Pretty Much Anything Else
by Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca
“I lay back on my bed and stared at the ceiling while angsty lesbian songs streamed out of my phone. I cried a little, then went into the bathroom to straighten my hair, put on red lipstick, push my boobs up in my lowest-cut shirt. I only knew how to pose myself for boys like Clayton. Is this what girls liked too?”
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Tell Me I’m Worthless
by Alison Rumfitt
“If spiteful politicians were ever to drive us from the public libraries and stages, we’d still have our bars. If we were driven from our bars, we would have our parties and our parks, our bodies and lives. Part of drag’s history is the fact that we always find ways to transform the world around us as well, to make room for one another. Through drag, we are trying to shape our communities into what we need them to be: built to withstand anything and unafraid to scream for what is right.”
“Joy is integral to my trans experience; it is the part of me that believed my life could be different, the part of me that carries my body into the streets to protest injustice, the part of me that I am most proud of.”
All the Things They Said We Couldn’t Have: Stories of Trans Joy
by T. C. Oakes-Monger
“I remember going with J to get barbecue in Lockhart, Texas, how the woman behind the counter took one look at J’s undercut and put down her spoon, refusing to serve us. Someone else came up to help us, while she stood back with her arms crossed, staring. Later I told J what had happened, knowing she hadn’t noticed. ‘In the future,’ she said, ‘please don’t tell me when things like that happen.’ I was doing it again, acting as an agent for the fear, the threat that sought to put us in our place.”
Gender Magic: Live Shamelessly, ReclaimYour Joy & Step Into Your Most Authentic Self
by Rae McDaniel
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“Learning I was intersex had opened me up to understanding myself, and sex and gender, in new and broader ways….I felt both exhausted and filled with appreciation for being able to learn more and share my story for the first time in person with others like me—others who had similar journeys.”
“There are other women like me in the Quran. Women who are uninterested in men, who are born wrong, living lives that are entirely out of their control.”
Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives
by Amelia Possanza
“I started questioning if I was attracted to girls around the age of 9 or 10. I wasn’t really sure until I was around 14, so my preteen years were filled with confusion. Of course, the ‘Am I Gay?’ online quizzes surged in popularity around that time. In hindsight, those quizzes probably made me more confused—most of them asked stereotypical questions like ‘Do you wear a lot of flannels?’ and ‘Do you listen to Lady Gaga?’…The quizzes made me feel like I was faking my ‘identity crisis’ to seem more quirky. I think the fact that we even have to have those sorts of quizzes reflects how heteronormative our culture is—straight people never have to take ‘Am I Straight?’ quizzes.”
It’s Totally Normal!: An LGBTQIA+ Guide to Puberty, Sex, and Gender
by Monica Gupta Mehta and Asha Lily Mehta
“She declared to me that she would be my father. And I, her son….Big Poppa was a dapper butch dandy—someone who fought long and hard to own that identity….The butchness between us was ultimately a feeling of recognition that granted us language and confidence despite the generation between us.”
“Coming out is a question of self knowledge, but it also is a means of speaking a self into existence. It requires honesty, and yet it’s one of the few instances in which we rarely blame the speaker if he or she lies. We say we understand if you lie, but what we mean is that we understand why you would.”
Horse Barbie: A Memoir
by Geena Rocero
You’re That Bitch: & Other Cute Lessons About Being Unapologetically Yourself
by Bretman Rock
“I’ll dance anyway, because this world is open and possible. And it’s a party without the burden of personal history, without people who knew me as a boy and, I suspect, deep down, still see me as one. I laugh. I hold hands with Deandra, another friend from my course. She’s a few years older than me. Her long black hair is in two French plaits. I sing along. Some wine spills onto the parquet floors. Carte blanche! Vita nova! Dua Lipa!”
“I was splitting an apartment with this chaotic old gay man and neither of us could afford HBO when Sex and the City premiered, so I had to do what broke bitches did in 1998: wait for it to come out on VHS and take the tapes I bought at Circuit City to my friend Jenny’s apartment, where we sat on her floor and watched the entire season while sharing a Stouffer’s frozen lasagna. The show reflected nothing of my life but provided something of a road map for my future, planting a tiny seed in my brain that one day after Al Gore invented a little thing called the internet…maybe then I could write about my pussyhole on it.”
“Being with Lister is not what Eliza thought best-friendship would be: a soothing support. Lister unsettles and thrills her as if something’s about to topple from a shelf, as if a thunderstorm’s on the way.”
Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Remaining Lesbian Bars in America
by Krista Burton
I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself: A Novel by Marisa Crane
by Marisa Crane
“Coming out helped awaken me to my own erotic, but it wasn’t just about having sex with women, though that was essential to rewriting my story about pleasure. It wasn’t just learning to be in my body, though that was essential to revising my story about my own value. The erotic was ultimately about finding friendship and community with other queer people….It was rebuilding my life from the ground up, not just trying to add gay sex into an existing framework of fucked-up religiosity and capitalist striving.”
“Once you start hormones, it seems as though society expects you to give up your chances of fertility. It wasn’t until I was around age 21 that I started to see trans families in the media. I saw a community of people that were just like me! Men who knew that they were meant to create life. I felt inspired and empowered to live my dream.” —Ezequiel Moore
Baby Making for Everybody: Family Building and Fertility for LGBTQ+ and Solo Parents
by Ray Rachlin and Marea Goodman
“Pulse embodied the sense of community I had discovered after moving to Orlando. It was one of the first places where I held hands with someone I had a crush on without glancing over my shoulder first, an exhilarating act of defiance that might have put me in danger almost anywhere else. It was one of the only spaces where I dared to let my guard down, to be a little messy and unpolished, unafraid of who might be watching.”
The Family Outing: A Memoir
by Jessi Hempel
Book research by Michelle Hart. All books quoted courtesy of the publishers.
Erin Quinlan is a journalist in New York City and the features director at Cosmopolitan.