Here's something that doesn't get said enough: queer literature is not a recent invention. It is not a trend, or a publishing moment, or something that arrived with BookTok. It has been here for over two thousand years. What's relatively recent is the effort to make it feel otherwise. These are the writers who were always there.
Sappho (c. 630–570 BC)
Sappho was a poet from the Greek island of Lesbos, which is, in fact, where the word 'lesbian' comes from, and she wrote some of the most viscerally beautiful love poetry in the ancient world. Much of her work was addressed to women.
Her complete works filled nine volumes however, in 1073, Pope Gregory VII ordered them burned. What we have left are fragments: lines recovered from quotations in other texts, scraps found on papyrus in Egyptian rubbish heaps. One of the most celebrated, known as Fragment 31, describes the physical experience of desire for a woman with an intensity that still stops you short:
"and cold sweat holds me and shaking / grips me all, greener than grass / I am and dead -- or almost / I seem to me."
Fortunately the burning didn't work and two and a half thousand years later, Sappho is still the first name in lyric poetry.
Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609)
Whilst Shakespeare's sexuality remains ambiguous, what we do know is that Sonnets 1 to 126 are addressed to a young man. Shakespeare describes him as more beautiful than a summer's day, writes about his own "desire" for him, and tells him that his beauty will be immortalised in verse long after both of them are gone. The level of devotion in these poems goes well beyond what could be explained away as simple friendship or convention. Literary scholars spent several centuries trying to explain it away anyway. They didn't really manage it.
Whether Shakespeare's feelings for the 'Fair Youth' were acted upon is something none of us can know. What we do know is that the poems exist, that they're unambiguous about what they express, and that they remain some of the most celebrated love poetry in the English language.
Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass (1855)
When Whitman published Leaves of Grass, it was called obscene. He was eventually fired from his government job when a superior found out he'd written it. The 'Calamus' section, a sequence of poems about love between men, which Whitman described as the most personal writing he'd ever done, was particularly controversial.
He kept revising and republishing the book for the rest of his life. It never went out of print. It is now considered one of the foundational texts of American literature.
Virginia Woolf - Orlando (1928)
Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando as a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, the writer she was in love with. The novel follows a character who changes sex across four centuries of English history, moving through time and identity with a kind of breezy, luminous freedom that feels radical even now.
Vita's son Nigel Nicolson later called it "the longest and most charming love letter in literature." It was a bestseller on publication and it still is.
Woolf's relationship with Sackville-West lasted years and shaped some of her most important work. She wasn't hiding it - she wrote it into everything she made.
Radclyffe Hall - The Well of Loneliness (1928)
The Well of Loneliness contained no sex scenes and it contained no graphic content of any kind. It did contain two women in love, and it treated that love as something real and worth taking seriously. However it was prosecuted for obscenity. The judge ruled that a book could be considered obscene simply by making same-sex love appear acceptable to readers. It was banned in the UK.
Readers smuggled it in from Paris and it circulated in secret for years. When the ban was eventually lifted, it became the most famous lesbian novel ever written - not despite the attempt to destroy it, but in part because of it. The prosecution gave it an infamy that outlasted every effort to suppress it.
James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room (1956)
Baldwin's own publisher rejected Giovanni's Room and told him to burn the manuscript. It was, they said, too gay, and too unmarketable. It was set in Paris and told the story of an American man's love affair with an Italian bartender. His publisher wanted him to stick to what had worked before.
Baldwin found another publisher. Giovanni's Room came out in 1956 and is now considered one of the great American novels, taught in universities, included on best-of-all-time lists, and still in print nearly seventy years later.
What connects Sappho's fragments to Orlando to Giovanni's Room isn't just queerness - it's survival. These are works that were burned, banned, prosecuted, rejected, and dismissed, and that outlasted every attempt to erase them. They survived because readers found them and held onto them, sometimes at considerable personal risk.
There have always been readers who found themselves in these stories before they had the language for what they were finding. That's why the stories mattered enough to preserve. That's why they still do.
Queer literature was never a phase, a trend, or a publishing moment. It was always here - written by people who loved who they loved and made art about it anyway, long before anyone gave them permission.
We made a collection for the readers who knew that. And for the ones who are only just finding out.