About this catalogue

This is a monthly newsletter cataloguing new queer speculative fiction releases, with more granular representation detail than you will find anywhere else on the internet. It arrives in your inbox on the last day of every month, covering the following month’s releases. It is researched and written by one person, by hand, on purpose.

There is also a list of queer-owned bookshops around the world that stock speculative fiction. You should probably bookmark it.

Two more doors worth knowing: Keep the door open, on reading queer books legally and for free, and Good company, the blogs, magazines, and presses I actually read.

How it started

This project began on Reddit, in the book subreddits where people ask each other for reading recommendations with a specificity that algorithms have never quite managed to satisfy. The largest fantasy community there maintains a spreadsheet of queer books (a genuinely useful thing), but it stops short of telling you much. A book might be listed as queer because it has a gay side character who appears in two chapters and then dies, which is, to put it diplomatically, not quite what most people are looking for.

I kept noticing the gap. Someone would ask for a bisexual protagonist in a secondary world fantasy with found family themes, and the best answer available was a list with no further information. I started filling in the details. Eventually it made sense to give the resource a permanent home: one that isn’t subject to the content policies of billionaire-owned platforms, algorithmic burial, or the particular hostility toward queer content that has made several large online spaces increasingly inhospitable.

Ghost, which runs this site, is an independent nonprofit. That matters.

Why it exists

Queer books are under coordinated attack. Organised campaigns have succeeded in removing them from school libraries and pressuring retailers. They have also frightened publishers, and that is the part that shaped how this catalogue works. A significant number of books with queer protagonists are now marketed without any mention of that fact. The blurb won’t tell you. The publisher’s catalogue page won’t tell you. Sometimes the only way to know is to find an ARC review from a queer reader who recognised themselves in the pages.

Reading and sharing queer stories is an act of resistance. It is also, more often than not, just a very good time. Both things are true.

How the research works

Each month I track forthcoming releases through Netgalley, Goodreads lists, Book Riot’s queer books spreadsheet, publisher announcements, and the occasional well-informed blog. For each title, I then go looking for representation information: ARC reviews from queer readers, author websites and social media, interviews, and sometimes the authors themselves.

This takes longer than you might think. Release dates on publisher sites are frequently wrong and I correct them. Some publishers apply an LGBTQ tag to a book and consider their work done, which tells you approximately nothing about what’s actually inside. And because the climate around book bans has made publishers cautious, a meaningful number of books with queer leads are not described as such in any official materials. The representation detail in this catalogue often comes from readers who found the book anyway and wrote about it, or from authors who are more forthcoming on their own channels than their publishers will allow them to be in marketing copy.

If you spot an error or know of a release I’ve missed, I want to hear from you.

The bookshop list

Alongside the monthly releases, this site maintains a living directory of queer-owned bookshops around the world that stock speculative fiction. Independent bookshops are one of the better arguments for human civilisation, and queer-owned ones doubly so. Where possible, please buy your books there first.

If you know of a shop that should be in the list, or one that has closed and shouldn’t be, please let me know.

On technology

This catalogue does not use analytics tools that track you across the web, embed pixels from advertising platforms, or rely on services from companies with records of hostility toward queer people and their communities. The research is done by a human. The writing is done by a human. The curation is an act of judgment, not an output.

The site runs on Ghost, an independent nonprofit platform. Where queer-owned or open source alternatives exist for the tools this project depends on, I use them. Sometimes they don’t exist; the infrastructure of the independent web was not built with us in mind. In those cases I make the least bad available choice and say so plainly rather than pretend otherwise. None of your data is sold. None of it is used to train anything.

What’s coming

Several years of monthly releases means several years of structured data: titles, authors, publishers, release dates, and representation details, all compiled and verified by hand. The logical next step is to make that archive searchable: a proper database where you can find every transmasc protagonist in a secondary world fantasy, or every queer horror novel featuring South Asian mythology, or simply everything published by a particular press in the last three years.

This will take time to build well, and it will be built to last rather than built quickly. When it arrives, it will be free to use, and it will be the most granular searchable catalogue of queer speculative fiction anywhere. In the meantime, the monthly releases keep coming, and the archive keeps growing.