Happy Pride to the whole LGBTQIA+ Community and our allies! June is the month where queer people are at our most visible, but I know from personal experience how important it is for children to see people like them existing in the world all year long.
If you aren’t queer yourself, writing queer characters into your fiction can feel daunting. Honestly, it’s daunting to me. The queer community is broad and diverse. I don’t want to accidentally include content that is harmful, especially for children! I want content that gives queer and questioning children representation — characters that signal that there are people like them in the world — but I don’t want to advance any misconceptions that might make queer kids feel bad about themselves.
I always use authenticity readers for my books — including readers who share my identity, since I’m only one perspective. Authenticity readers tell me what resonates and if there’s anything that makes them feel icky. Not every reader has the same take, and they aren’t looking to scrub my book raw. They just help me to identify blind spots or problem areas as I write, so that I’m less likely to include harmful material by accident.
In case you are an ally who worries about even drafting queer characters for fear of doing it wrong, I’ve put together some guidelines from my perspective that might help you get started.
Labels aren’t perfect.
I love that we have so many labels in the year 2025 — many more of them in the everyday vernacular than was the case in the nineties, when the question tended to be “are you gay or straight.” After years of uncertainty about how I fit into that binary (both? but also, neither?), the sheer volume of specific and intersectional labels have helped me feel included under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella and reassured that I am neither broken nor alone. There are other people in the world like me.
That said, labels can also feel artificial or constraining. Even with a collection of intersectional words at our disposal, trying to pinpoint one’s exact flavor of queer identity can feel futile, unnecessary, and sometimes invasive. For example, many of the ace-spectrum terminology refers to how and under what circumstances a person experiences sexual attraction or enjoys sex. It’s kind of awkward to have to talk about your sex life just to tell someone who you are. Many people (myself included) use words like “queer” or “gay” in a broad sense — identifying the community we belong to without having to get into the nitty gritty. These broad terms also leave room for flexibility for those of us who feel that our experience of sexuality is highly intersectional.
What labels will your characters use — if any? If you’re writing for younger than middle grade, you may have a queer-cued character who is just living their best life and not worrying about even the broadest of labels. Once you get to YA, labels will almost certainly be part of a character’s everyday experience, but think carefully about what labels the character uses for themself and why. Are they delighted to describe themself as nonbinary because they finally found a gender-identity that feels authentic and freeing? Does she think of herself as a lesbian, but isn’t comfortable saying it out loud for fear of backlash from her conservative school administration? Does he know he’s kinda queer, but isn’t really worried about what that means right now because he’s too busy fighting the demon vampires? Your character’s whole identity and whole world will influence how they think about themself.
Stereotypes can come from a place of truth, but…
When people hear the phrase “lesbian couple,” a stereotypical image often comes to mind of a butch-femme relationship. Here’s the thing: butch-femme relationships are real. If we try so hard to sanitize our work of stereotypes that we eliminate butch-femme relationships (or butch lesbians in total), some kids aren’t going to see their relationships and identities represented. At the same time, stereotypes are not reality in themselves. Stereotypes are the caricature or outline of reality. They are flat, and they do not encompass the complexity of actual humans and actual relationships.
If you are throwing in a background character who has a certain identity (and many of our books need background characters to populate them!), I recommend avoiding queer archetypes. When you are able to delve into a character a little more — give them a more fleshed out identity that extends beyond the boundaries of that flat stereotype into three dimensions — then I wouldn’t feel squeamish about including a character that has some stereotypical traits. The important point is to do the leg work on making a character real so that if someone picks up your book, they are going to see your queer characters as human.
This is important with characters from all marginalized groups, but less important for people from a non-marginalized group. For example, if you have a background character who fits the “Frat Bro” stereotype, readers aren’t going to be culturally predisposed to assign those stereotypical traits (drunkenness, low academic achievement) to all white, middle-upper class men. Unfortunately, for queer characters (BIPOC characters, Jewish characters, etc.), stereotypes tend to be applied indiscriminately to everyone in the community. So make sure that whatever traits you give your character feel attached to them as an individual and well-developed person, not general characteristics of the group as a whole.
Avoid the harmful tropes.
Confession time: I was reading a fantasy novel aloud to my kid, and a few sentences into the male villain’s first dialogue, I realized I was doing a stereotypical “gay villain” voice. We are living in a heteronormative society where certain stereotypes and storytelling tropes are so ingrained in our consciousness that even when this is something you think about regularly, it can still creep in. The most common queer-coded villains are “effeminate,” drawling men with performative airs, such as Jafar from Disney’s Aladdin, or deep-voiced, tall women with dramatic make-up who call to mind drag queens, such as Ursula from Disney’s The Little Mermaid. (There are a lot of queer-coded villains in Disney…) Avoid giving your villains these traits.
That doesn’t mean you can’t have queer villains! Making it so that ever gay character is cheerful and kindhearted and the human incarnation of marshmallow fluff isn’t realistic either. As above, make sure your characters have enough development and a wide diversity of traits so that they read as real humans — even if they’re real, evil humans.
Like the “Black guy dies first” trope in horror films, the “Bury your gays” trope reflects how queer characters (especially lesbians, bisexual women, and femmes) are frequently killed off in media and literature. Not to get too high on my soapbox, but this relates to the subconscious assumption that women who aren’t available for the sexual pleasure of men are disposable. This doesn’t mean you can’t kill off a gay character, but think critically about why — especially if the character is your only queer character!
Having an isolated queer character is a form of tokenism and may also relate to the “Gay Best Friend” trope. Queer people aren’t accessories for straight people. All of the queer people I know have a community of other queer people; we have cishet friends, too, of course, but I would never go through a whole school day as the only queer person. And if I were fighting zombies at the end of the world, I would definitely want my queer fam close by.
Incidental representation is great.
Not every gay book is a “coming out book.” “Coming out books” are wonderful and necessary, but queer people exist in all situations, not just at the pivotal moment of their coming out to themselves. After all, in our heteronormative society, “coming out” isn’t a one time thing; every new person you meet will be predisposed to assume that you’re cishet unless something cues them to think otherwise. (Also a problem: assuming people are queer based on stereotypically queer traits, but that’s another post…)
In my debut novel Reasons to Hate Me, my protagonist starts to explore the possibility that she might be somewhere on the ace spectrum. It’s not a plot point, and she still isn’t sure when the main action comes to a close. But many people leave high school and even college still exploring their identity. There’s no time limit, and understanding of your identity can change throughout your life. So don’t hesitate to include queer characters or queer themes that are just part of the fabric of your story and not necessarily making a Point.
At least 1 in every 5 people identify as LGBTQIA+, and some studies show much higher numbers. That doesn’t mean 1 in 5 of your characters will be “out” on the page (especially if you’re writing about a setting where being out would be dangerous), but look at your character list, and ask yourself, “Where are the queer people?” (You can do the same with other marginalized groups, like “Where are the girls?” and “Where are the people of color?” These questions will have different answers depending on where your setting is, and your character group could be fairly homogenous — e.g., a white supremacist cult, or a frat brother camping trip gone wrong.)
If there’s not a reason, why your whole world is cishet, though, then it might be that you forgot to take off your heteronormative glasses. It happens to all of us; it’s just the cultural soup we live in. Being intentional can help us all to break down these barriers and create realistically diverse communities in our books. Do your best, hire some authenticity readers, and get that book into the world!