While LGBTQ+ Americans and their advocates have made some progress in achieving greater civil rights, recognition, and representation for the LGBTQ+ community, recent actions suggest that further work is needed in the pursuit of equality.
A new report from Collage Group, a leading provider of cultural intelligence, takes a close look at LGBTQ+ marketing and advertising. Specifically, the study examines how LGBTQ+ Americans feel about recent ads aimed toward their community. It also provides the perspectives of non LGBTQ+ people, as well as the perceptions of liberals and conservatives.
The report examines marketing efforts, specifically LGBTQ+ representation in regard to advertising. It finds that most Americans are either in support of such ads or they are impartial. When LGBTQ+ individuals or groups appear in ads, 71% of the LGBTQ+ segment has positive feelings, as does 31% of non-LGBTQ individuals. Of that 31%, 37% are younger Americans (ages 18-43) and 27% are older (ages 44-77).
Although LGBTQ+ consumers react positively toward commercials that attempt to appeal to them, more than half of these consumers are still skeptical of the brands’ intentions. Those who identify as LGBTQ+ – at a rate of 55% – say that brands’ efforts to woo the LGBTQ+ demographic come across as insincere. Of those who are LGBTQ+ and in the Gen Z age group, 65% say that these campaigns are insincere.
The report also examines backlash as a reaction toward companies that support the LGBTQ+ community, finding that awareness of such backlash is low among general consumers. Of those who are aware of backlash, baby boomers tend to be the most cognizant, followed by Gen Xers.
While the full study (available by request, here) discusses all of the above components in greater detail, it also delves into other unique factors that will help brands engage the LGBTQ+ demographic. This includes how best to appeal to broad audiences through halo effects, a list of group traits of the LGBTQ+ cohort, and how specific ads fared (Bud Light, Target, etc.) among LGBTQ+ viewers vs. non-LGBTQ viewers.
GLAAD is urging Meta to take immediate action following the company’s independent Oversight Board’s decision to overturn Facebook’s original stance on a post that targeted transgender people with violent language. The case has highlighted the insidious methods used to attack LGBTQ+ individuals on social media, such as coded language and indirect messaging.
The Oversight Board’s ruling overruled Meta’s original decision to leave up a contentious post that targeted transgender individuals with violent and harmful language. The post, originating from a user in Poland, displayed a curtain in the transgender Pride flag’s colors, coupled with text in Polish implying that transgender people should die by suicide — a clear violation of Meta’s Hate Speech and Suicide and Self-Injury Community Standards, the reviewing body found.
The board ruled that Meta’s handling of the controversial Facebook post revealed significant shortcomings in its content moderation process. The company initially failed to recognize and remove the post. Despite receiving multiple user reports, Meta’s automated and human review systems overlooked the post’s harmful implications and the coded language used to target the transgender community, the board found. Those coded references or using satirical memes to bypass moderators is a tactic called “malign creativity.”
It also revealed systemic failures in Meta’s moderation practices. Despite multiple user reports, the post was only removed after the Oversight Board selected it for review.
The case demonstrated a gap in Meta’s understanding and enforcement of its guidelines against hate speech and harmful content, allowing such damaging posts to remain on the platform, potentially contributing to a hostile online environment for LGBTQ+ individuals.
In response to the Oversight Board’s ruling, Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD, appealed directly to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a press release to address this issue publicly.
“I personally want to hear Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tell the world, today, that his company cares about the safety, rights, and dignity of transgender people,” Ellis said.
Ellis underlined the urgent need for Meta to confront and manage the spread of anti-trans hate on its platforms.
Senior director of GLAAD’s Social Media Safety Program, Jenni Olson, emphasized the long-standing issues in Meta’s policy implementation while celebrating the board’s decision.
“This is a powerful ruling from the Oversight Board that calls upon Meta to address failures we have been articulating for many years in the annual GLAAD Social Media Safety Index,” Olson said.
The Oversight Board is an autonomous entity that reviews and renders binding verdicts on content moderation cases across Meta’s platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram. Initiated in 2020, it operates similarly to a Supreme Court within social media and comprises specialists in various fields, including human rights, free speech, government, law, and ethics. The Board possesses the power to reverse decisions made by Meta regarding content moderation.
This case is one of many instances of Meta’s shortcomings in moderating harmful content. In September, The Advocatepublished a Media Matters for America report criticizing Instagram for failing to moderate content posted by the controversial anti-trans group Gays Against Groomers. Despite clear violations of Instagram’s community guidelines against hate speech, harassment, and misinformation, the group’s content remained accessible for over a year. This inconsistency in Instagram’s enforcement of content policies, particularly content targeting marginalized communities, raised questions about Meta’s commitment to LGBTQ+ safety. The report highlighted the discrepancy between Instagram’s response and other platforms like PayPal and Google, which had taken action against Gays Against Groomers.
If you are having thoughts of suicide or are concerned that someone you know may be, resources are available to help. The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 is for people of all ages and identities. Trans Lifeline, designed for transgenderor gender-nonconforming people, can be reached at (877) 565-8860. The lifeline also provides resources to help with other crises, such as domestic violence situations. The Trevor Project Lifeline, for LGBTQ+ youth (ages 24 and younger), can be reached at (866) 488-7386. Users can also access chat services at TheTrevorProject.org/Help or text START to 678678.
Erik Lundstrom was about 14 when he secretly purchased the coming-of-age novel “Rainbow Boys” and hid it in his room, waiting until he was alone to become absorbed in the story of three teenage boys coming to terms with their sexuality.
“I read that book five or six times that summer, just finally having some sort of outlet of stories about people that I identified with in a new and interesting, exciting and terrifying way,” Lundstrom told CNN.
It would be many more years until Lundstrom, now 32, would join the ranks of a small group of volunteers dedicated to creating a library packed to the brim with books written by or about LGBTQ people – metaphorically that is.
The Queer Liberation Library (QLL, pronounced “quill”) is entirely online. Since launching in October, more than 2,300 members have signed up to browse its free collection of hundreds of ebooks and audiobooks featuring LGBTQ stories, Lundstrom said.
After becoming increasingly alarmed at efforts to censor LGBTQ stories in the nation’s public schools, Kieran Hickey, the library’s founder and executive director, said they set out to create a haven for queer literature that can be accessed from anywhere in the country.
“Queer people have so many barriers to access queer literature – social, economic, and political,” Hickey said. “(For) anybody who’s on a journey of self-discovery in their sexual orientation or gender identity, finding information and going to queer spaces can be incredibly daunting. So, this is a resource that anybody in the United States can have no matter where they live.”
Until recent years, books featuring LGBTQ stories made up a small percentage of titles challenged in schools and public libraries in the US.
Between 2010 and 2019, just about 9% of unique titles challenged in libraries contained LGBTQ themes, according to data from the American Library Association, which tracks and opposes book censorship.
But books featuring the voices and experiences of LGBTQ people now make up an overwhelming proportion of books targeted for censorship – part of a broader, conservative-led movement that is limiting the rights and representation of LGBTQ Americans.
In 2021 and 2022, the ALA reported record-breaking attempts to ban books and more than 30% of the titles challenged included LGBTQ themes. And in the first eight months of 2023, more than 47% of challenges targeted LGBTQ titles, preliminary data shows.
Pulling these stories from shelves, book ban opponents argue, deprives readers of all ages of essential, affirming representation of the LGBTQ community’s lives and history.
“Fundamentally, at its core, it is discriminatory against who we are as a people and a community, and it ‘others’ our families and our stories,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and CEO of GLAAD, a nonprofit LGBTQ advocacy group.
A resource like QLL, she said, could be “a wonderful gift” for those searching for LGBTQ stories, including parents looking for children’s books, a person questioning their sexuality or a heterosexual person looking to understand their peers more deeply.
Naturally, QLL carries some of the most commonly challenged books, including Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer” and George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue.”But its volunteer librarians have also curated lists of spine-tingling queer horror, indigenous folktales and time-bending fantasy among others.
Its virtual shelves are also adorned with fixtures of the queer literary canon such as Rita Mae Brown’s “Ruby Fruit Jungle” and groundbreaking new releases like transgender actor Elliot Page’s memoir “Pageboy.”
Lundstrom, who directs the library’s steering committee, said the range of genres and identities represented in the collection reflects the vast diversity of the LGBTQ community.
“Whoever finds use from this platform for whatever reason – whether that is for vital information they need, or if it is to read a fun little romp about two men kissing – whatever that is, we want to be able to serve that,” Lundstrom said.
A library without walls
Though the QLL may not be able to provide the small joys of browsing cozy corridors of shelves and perusing time-worn book spines, its online platform offers something that can be invaluable to some readers: privacy.
Readers who are queer or hoping to explore their gender or sexuality may not be ready to explore a shelf of LGBTQ books in a public space or crack open such a book in front of family and friends, Hickey said. Being able to check out books from the privacy of one’s home or read on an unassuming tablet or laptop in public can relieve some of those feelings of anxiety and risk.
“This was a way to combat the book bans, but also to give people that sense of home and safety in their own space without having to potentially out themselves in any way,” Hickey said. “Privacy and hiding don’t have to be the same thing.”
The library can be accessed through a website called Overdrive and an app called Libby, which many public libraries use to house their digital collections. QLL’s informational website also features a “quick exit” bar at the screen, which redirects away from the site if a user needs to suddenly hide the website orleave the page.
Funded by donations and registered as a nonprofit, QLL is also not beholden to government funding or the school or library boards that typically enforce book bans. Selena Van Horn, an education professor at California State University in Fresno whose research focuses on elementary school literacy and LGBTQ literature in K-12 schools, noted that some libraries may not have robust LGBTQ collections merely because they have tight budgets or live in remote areas with limited resources.
“Not everyone has access (to LGBTQ books) purely based on their location,” Van Horn said. “So being able to access things online is a wonderful thing.”
Advocates warn bans reinforce stigma
Efforts to remove books because they contain LGBTQ characters or themes perpetuates the “othering” and exclusion that many LGBTQ people already struggle to overcome, said Ellis, the president of GLAAD.
“Children and adults are hearing that there is something wrong with them”when people propose banning their stories, Ellis said. “So that immediately … builds this culture that LGBTQ people, queer people don’t belong and should be on the margins of society.”
For children and young adults seeing stories that represent their identity can be an essential part of developing positive self-worth, said Van Horn.
“When children don’t have access to stories that represent their identities in a positive light – that show that people like them go on to do wonderful things – they can internalize those feelings and wonder, ‘Am I what they are saying I am in some negative way?’” Van Horn said.
This is especially important for LGBTQ children or youth whose families or school environments are hostile to their identities, she said.
“It’s vitally important that they have access to literature and potentially communities – even in an online space – that can support them and know that they’re beautiful, wonderful people and their identities will be valued, even if not in the space they are right now,” Van Horn said.
Already, the library has received messages from readers thrilled to see themselves reflected in the book collection, including one that was particularly meaningful to Hickey.
“There was one person who let us know that we’re their main access to library materials at this point because of where they live in a rural area,” Hickey said.
“That was a lot for me because I was just like, ‘This is the exact person I’m trying to reach. This is the exact person I want to help.’”
The one real estate requirement for Giovanni’s Room was “a place with a big front window,” says co-founder Tom Wilson Weinberg. The vision — an LGBTQ+ bookstore — set a plan in motion that would change queer visibility in Philadelphia and open the door for access to diverse stories worldwide.
Weinberg and friends Dan Sherbo and Bern Boyle had begun engaging in LGBTQ+ activism and saw an unfulfilled niche for community engagement. It was 1973, and gentleman’s clubs, bars, and adult book shops — often hidden behind unmarked doors — dotted the city, but despite the Stonewall Riots just a few years before, queer life across the U.S. wasn’t all rainbows. (Gilbert Baker’s Pride flag didn’t even appear until 1978.)
At the time the trio conceived the idea, the American Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality a mental disorder. Pennsylvania still has yet to officially pass the Fairness Act, which includes protections against discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression.
“It was hard to find a location,” Weinberg, now 78, told LGBTQ Nation. “Realtors didn’t have to give a reason; they’d just say no, though we insisted on saying it’d be a gay and feminist bookstore.” The twenty-somethings finally found a location on South Street — the first floor of a three-flat building with the requisite window, a physical manifestation of the visibility they hoped to achieve. And for a rent of $85 per month, Giovanni’s Room was in business. Over the decades, the storefront (named after James Baldwin’s novel) has changed owners and locations, proving a stalwart survivor of evolving economic and cultural times.
A receipt for the lease of Giovanni’s Room’s original Spruce Street location. Photo courtesy of the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives.
Fifty years later, the skyrocketing impact of online retailers and social media consumption makes every purchase — from Lex Croucher’s New York Times best-selling YA novel Gwen and Art Are Not in Loveto the reissue of Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance — a win for local, queer-owned small businesses. Still, the forecast remains precarious. Despite a slow and steady increase over the past decade, with nearly 2,600 independent bookstore locations reported in 2023, LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs face a Medusa-like backlash. Conservatives toe the line with a record number of book ban attempts against LGBTQ+ titles. Meanwhile, decreased print book sales continue despite a handful of industry insiders advocating for queer authors.
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One page at a time
Archival images courtesy of the John J. Wilcox Archives, William Way LGBT Community Center.
“In early 1973, to open a [LGBTQ+] bookstore was a utopian vision,” says Weinberg. “We didn’t think we needed an insurance policy, but we did insure the front glass window; nobody ever threw anything.”
Ninety miles north in New York City, Craig Rodwell had opened Oscar Wilde Bookshop and would prove a valuable ally once Giovanni’s Room was up and running. Weinberg says Rodwell, a member of the Mattachine Society, a pre-Stonewall activism organization, was instrumental in suggesting what might sell. Together, they visited a wholesale bookseller in Brooklyn and “bought anything we considered queer-worthy” — cash only. To balance Rodwell’s populist side, friend, activist, and author Barbara Gittings suggested other titles from the queer canon.
Hobbled together from used furniture and makeshift shelves, the store included a modest collection — Oscar Wilde, Gore Vidal, Radclyffe Hall, and, of course, James Baldwin — along with local papers and pamphlets like Boston’s Gay Community News and their own newsletter, the Philadelphia Weekly Gayzette. The founders each volunteered twice weekly, though they often spent days off at the store.
After 18 months, plenty of good times, and little profit, the men stepped aside, selling Giovanni’s Room to good friend Pat Hill, who gave up a job at the Department of Recreation to keep the store alive.
“It was not a viable business. It was a wonderful idea,” Hill said at a 50th anniversary founder’s event held in August 2023 at Philadelphia’s William Way LGBT Community Center. “It was a very courageous thing to get going but hard to keep going because things hadn’t been written yet,” referencing the limited number of published queer titles.
The bookstore’s next chapter began in 1979 with the arrival of Ed Hermance and Arleen Olshan, who bought the store and its meager stock for $500 and moved its location to 12th and Spruce Street. Shortly after, the building was sold, and the new landlords were none too happy with queer tenants. Another move was imminent.
Hermance’s eclectic life had led him from a “hippie commune” in Colorado to a teaching gig in Germany, a food co-op, and finally to being a clerk at the University of Pennsylvania’s main library. Olshan was an artist and leatherworker from a working-class family. They were not typical business owners. But Giovanni’s Room was not your typical bookstore.
From the onset, Giovanni’s Room had been fueled by volunteers and a steady stream of customers, many of whom would circle the block before summoning the courage to enter. They would prove instrumental in the bookstore’s legacy.
“Giovanni’s Room was a gift from the community to itself. People wanted it. They were willing to contribute to it, volunteer, and support it.” Ed Hermance
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“Time was running out, and we’re gonna have to do something,” recalled Hermance, 83, at the founder’s event. “I had seen a property on 12th and Pine Street, but we never thought about buying because we didn’t have any money. But the deadline was coming. So we borrowed the down payment from our customers. Giovanni’s Room was a gift from the community to itself. People wanted it. They were willing to contribute to it, volunteer, and support it.”
In addition to being literary-minded, Hermance also proved to be entrepreneurial. Driving to New York City to load up a trunk full of books whenever they needed inventory wasn’t sustainable. Bob Koen, an old friend from Hermance’s food co-op gig, had launched a book wholesaler business across the Delaware River in New Jersey and was the first person to give Giovanni’s Room credit. And by the late ‘70s, a wave of queer authors and publishers had emerged.
Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978), called “a meditation on ecstasy” by the New York Times, portrayed New York City gay life through a brutal kaleidoscopic lens and became an instant queer classic. Rita Mae Brown’s Ruby Fruit Jungle, published by the lesbian-owned independent press Daughters, Inc., paved the way for today’s sapphic coming-of-age novels.
The impact of Giovanni’s Room extended far beyond Philadelphia’s local LGBTQ+ community. By the early ‘90s, Hermance and Olshan had leveraged their relationships with publishers and started a wholesale business of their own, distributing queer titles worldwide. With a master’s degree in comparative literature and work experience overseas, Hermance was a natural. “During our biggest wholesale year, we sold to more than 80 bookstores in 17 countries,” Hermance tells LGBTQ Nation.
From books to activism
Giovanni’s Room was more than a bookstore. It became a haven during the height of the AIDS crisis at a time when mainstream America was burying the news, as well as thousands of gay men. In a 1982 press briefing, journalist Lester Kinsolving asked President Reagan’s press secretary Larry Speakes about the “gay plague” as the press pool laughed. After some banter, Speakes said, “I don’t know anything about it.”
“The store carried every fragment of information we could about this plague,” says Hermance, including safer-sex cartoon booklets — discreet accordion-style pages that could easily slip into one’s pocket. Employees from a nearby city health clinic known for STI testing would come by, stock up, and surreptitiously distribute the materials to patients.
Hermance says newly diagnosed people would come to the store to gather their thoughts about the harrowing reality of what was to come. “In those days, you’d be dead in six months. There was no question about it,” he says. “The store was a [place] to get your thoughts together: ‘How am I gonna tell everybody I know, and what am I going to do about it?’”
AIDS also hit the Giovanni’s Room family.
Joseph Beam, editor of In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (Alyson Press, 1986), worked as the store’s bookkeeper and left to travel and promote the book. After his return, Beam had hoped to get his old job back, but the position had been filled. A year later, Hermance reached out to reconnect and invite Beam to lunch, but the call was never returned. Beam, 33 and HIV-positive, had died in his apartment, discovered by friends on December 27, 1988.
“I had grown weary of reading literature by white Gay men,” Beam, who had interviewed luminaries like Audre Lorde and Samuel Delaney, once wrote, “More and more each day, as I looked around the well-stocked shelves of Giovanni’s Room… I wondered where was the work of Black Gay men.”
Beam said In the Life was for “the brothers whose silence has cost them their sanity” and “the “2,500 brothers who have died of AIDS.” To date, more than 700,000 people in the U.S. alone have died of HIV-related illnesses, including Giovanni’s Room co-founder Bern Boyle. LGBTQ+ bookstores remain valuable information hubs for HIV, MPOX, and other diseases disproportionally affecting the queer community.
A cliffhanger leads to the next chapter
New releases at Philly AIDS Thrift @ Giovanni’s Room. Photo by Matthew Wexler for LGBTQ Nation.
Giovanni’s Room continued to prosper, but after a decade, Olshan was ready to move on. Hermance amicably bought out his partner and acquired the adjacent building to expand. As the bookstore’s popularity grew throughout the ‘90s, so did the canon of LGBTQ+ authors.
But the industry was quickly shifting. Borders and Barnes & Noble expanded their operations, opening sprawling bookstores in malls and standalone locations nationwide. And on July 5, 1994, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon from his Bellevue, Washington, garage. Over the past three decades, the company, now valued at over $460 billion, has dominated the market, selling upwards of 300 million print books per year.
Hermance persevered, convinced that a personal connection with customers, authors, and publishers could keep the store afloat. But by 2014, the pressure had become too great. Original co-founder Weinberg and others tried their best to secure a buyer to no avail — until a creative solution emerged.
Local nonprofit Philly AIDS Thrift, led by co-founder and manager Christina Kallas-Saritsoglou, signed a two-year agreement to become the store’s proprietor and, in 2018, purchased the business and the building. Now officially called Philly AIDS Thrift@Giovanni’s Room, the bookstore’s legacy continues, with its proceeds distributed to communities in need.
Book lovers gather
The Philly Queer Book Club gathers at Philly AIDS Thrift & Giovanni’s Room, August 3, 2023. Photo by Matthew Wexler for LGBTQ Nation.
Locals and visitors think of Giovanni’s Room, an established anchor of Philadelphia’s Gayborhood, as that reliable friend who’s always around in times of need. But volunteer Danny Maloney understands firsthand the importance of preserving queer books and queer spaces for the next generation.
Maloney, 29, grew up in nearby Bucks County, where he attended Catholic school. He developed an affinity for old movies and “campy things,” and, in turn, sought out novels in a similar style. He volunteered at the local library, but it wasn’t until pursuing a double major in English and Education at Philadephia’s Lasalle University that Maloney discovered explicitly queer characters and authors.
“This is a benefit of physical bookstores and physical libraries, that you don’t necessarily need to be looking for things, but you can browse and find what you didn’t know you needed at the time,” Maloney tells LGBTQ Nation.
Maloney began his teaching career in Baltimore, then moved back to Philadelphia in June 2020. He had occasionally frequented the bookstore during college and made a conscious effort to engage more with the queer community upon his return. He began volunteering, but the bibliophile wanted more.
“I had been volunteering at the store for over a year. I was finding it really fulfilling, but I wanted to meet more people and have certain types of conversations. Part of my mind gets animated and invigorated talking about texts,” says Maloney. “I approached one of the managers at the time, asking if there had ever been a [book club]. And in a classic instance, the following week, she was like, “Well, if you want to do this, it can happen.”
Philly Queer Book Club participants discuss Andrew Holleran’s “Dancer from the Dance.” Photos by Matthew Wexler for LGBTQ Nation.
In August 2022, The Philly Queer Book Club was born. Maloney’s educational background came in handy for setting a reading schedule and drafting discussion prompts. He reached out to “every queer person I knew” and set up an Instagram profile. That first meeting attracted 20 or so attendees, half of whom were Maloney’s friends, but the word caught on. By the time the group read the store’s namesake title by James Baldwin, the numbers were exponential. “People really showed up,” recalls Maloney. “It was actually kind of stunning.”
Throughout the book club’s evolution, Maloney has witnessed the excitement surrounding a range of subjects and authors, proving the value of diverse representation among LGBTQ+ narratives.
“A lot of the participants often very strongly identify with things that we are reading,” says Maloney, highlighting past picks that have included Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Homeand Sarah Thankam Mathews’ All This Could Be Different, which portrays a Southeast Asian immigrant experience through a queer lens.
Maloney takes participant polls to inform book selections but also draws from his professional expertise, saying, “I want to make sure that we are reading from different eras, genres, and experiences to allow people to see themselves in the text if that is what they’re searching for.”
The future of LGBTQ+ bookstores
Violet Valley Bookstore proprietor Dr. Jamie Harker. Photos provided by Violet Valley Bookstore.
The resilience of Giovanni’s Room tells only part of the story. Rodwell’s Oscar Wilde Bookshop lasted until 2009. A Different Light Bookstore, at its height with locations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City, shuddered its last outpost in 2011. Washington D.C.’s Lambda Rising and Atlanta’s Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse also closed after decades-long runs. But a new crop of LGBTQ+ bookstores is emerging, sometimes where you’d least expect them.
Dr. Jamie Harker opened Violet Valley Bookstore in Water Valley, Mississippi, in December 2017. An English professor at the nearby University of Mississippi, Walker has lived in the state for 20 years. She spent seven of them writing The Lesbian South, which uncovers the legacies of Southern feminists and the Women in Print movement, which built a network of women authors, publishers, and bookstores.
Harker’s research inspired deeper contemplation about continuing the legacy of the women who came before her. The former railroad town had proven hospitable over the years, drawing residents who worked at the university 18 miles to the north. Located on Main Street, the long, narrow shop dates back to the late 19th century. A cigar shop, barbershop, and art gallery have occupied the space, but Walker saw the potential for something different.
Much like Giovanni’s Room, Harker, 55, and her wife, with the help of a former student, sought their community’s support. A crowdfunding campaign raised more than $8,000, affording them the ability to stock shelves and jumpstart the opening.
Harker acknowledges that Water Valley, population 3,301, may not have the same kind of resources as a big city, but LGBTQ+ visibility still exists. “It’s easy to think there’s no queer culture here,” she says, “but there is. You just have to find different entry points.”
“People are looking for places to build physical community.”Philly Queer Book Club founder Danny Maloney
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Violet Valley Bookstore and dozens of other LGBTQ+-owned shops, like Under the Umbrella in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Montana Book Co. on Last Chance Gulch in Helena, Montana, prove that queer business owners, authors, and readers have a place amid 21st-century capitalism.
Giovanni’s Room co-founder Weinberg says, “We’ve needed and wanted books, movies, and TV shows that reflect our world. Coming out of the ‘60s and ‘70s, they were — for many of us — tragic.” But the stories evolved, as has the face of the LGBTQ+ community. No longer seen as a monolith, more queer voices — trans, gender expansive, and nonbinary — continue to emerge.
Book club leader Maloney recognizes the value in not only telling such stories but also sharing them. “There’s a unique alchemy of the room, where everyone is there and able to meet and see each other,” he says. “There’s a real need and hunger for that — people are looking for places to build physical community. An actual meeting place like Giovanni’s Room is irreplaceable.”
Featured image: (from left) Pat Hill, Tom Wilson Weinberg, Ed Hermance, and Arleen Olshan — part of the legacy of Giovanni’s Room. Photos courtesy of Philly AIDS Thrift @ Giovanni’s Room and the William Way LGBT Center. Photo illustration by Matthew Wexler.
“I can feel it around me. Energy. So many different types of energy,” DC Comics’ Jules Jourdain notices as yellow, orange, and pink vibrations envelop him on a street corner, only visible thanks to their special powers.
“I still look the same on the outside,” Jules considers. Even though he’s gaining a reputation as the new superhero Circuit Breaker, the trans and nonbinary character (he/they) doesn’t yet know how to control the overwhelming power coursing through his body — it mostly just makes him feel isolated, scared, and dangerous.
Luckily, another well-known DC Comics superhero, The Flash, arrives and helps Circuit Breaker use his powers to control time and space. This isn’t the mainstream version of The Flash that most people know from old comics, TV, and film. They’re Jess Chambers, a non-binary variant of the well-known hero, just one of the many queer superhero variants that exist in the DC Comics multiverse.
Jourdain explains their trouble to The Flash: “Life or death… change or stasis… control or submission… man or woman. Thinking in binaries always feels limiting to me,” he says. The Flash encourages him not to overthink it, but to trust his intuition and let his power lead him from the inside.
Finally, having mastered his powers, The Flash takes him to a dance club. There, Circuit Breaker dances shirtless alongside his leather-clad friends — happy for the first time since coming out as a superhero. There, Jourdain realizes, “With the death of the old comes a chance at the new.”
In the real world, conservatives tell queer youth like Jourdain that they’re mentally ill and that books about their experiences “sexualize” and “indoctrinate”other kids just by existing.
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Censors have long accused comic books of corrupting young people. American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which blamed comic books for causing juvenile delinquency, resulted in a moral panic that compelled publishers to establish the self-censoring Comics Code Authority (CCA). The CCA forbade comics from any negative depictions of government as well as depictions of “gore,” “nudity,” “profanity,” or “sex perversion.”
Individuals who seldom encounter LGBTQ+ people or queer stories may interpret inclusive comics as indoctrination, finding it hard to “embrace what they don’t see,” gay comic book and young adult writer Rex Ogle told LGBTQ Nation. “[These people] lash out. And books are an easy target.”
If young readers and free-speech advocates are holding out for a hero, DC Comics, one of the United States’ oldest and largest comic book publishers, might just be the streetwise Hercules they need. In the past year, the powerhouse publisher behind such iconic heroes as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman has quietly stood behind and even increased its LGBTQ+ content.
Over the past several years, DC Comics has used its deep multiverse to introduce queer and gender-swapped variants of longtime characters like Superman (Jon Kent), Green Lantern (Sojourner Mullein), Aquaman (Jackson Hyde), and the Flash (Jess Chambers), as well as introducing new LGBTQ+ characters like Galaxy, Xanthe Zhou, and Circuit Breaker. Additionally, DC Comics’ multiverse sometimes results in different individuals assuming the same superhero identities on different timelines or universes, such as when Damien Wayne and Tim Drake both fight crime as Batman’s sidekick, Robin.
In June 2023, the company released a slew of new and re-issued material as part of its Pride Month offerings, including DC Pride 2023, its third annual Pride-themed anthology of new material. Two other releases – DC Pride: The New Generation and DC Pride: Through The Years – contain landmark queer-themed work with most of the writing and artwork by LGBTQ+ creators. The diversity of voices and visual styles make a strong case for the form – with its marriage of words and images – as a riveting place to discover contemporary queer storytelling.
“DC Pride: The New Generation.” Image courtesy of DC Comics.“DC Pride 2023.” Image courtesy of DC Comics.
DC Comics’ continued production of queer content feels especially important in an era when several large corporations have reconsidered (or outright scaled back) their outward commitments to LGBTQ+ communities in response to conservative boycotts and media pressure seeking to make LGBTQ+-allyship “toxic” to companies’ brands.
DC Comics’ releases provide a powerful reminder that comic book characters reflect more than just corporate trademarks. Superheroes can serve as symbols to help readers understand abstract concepts like justice, empathy, dignity, and diversity. And who doesn’t want to see themselves – or someone like them – as the hero of the story? For most of these narratives, representation is just the start. Some contain LGBTQ+ characters fighting bigotry, while others show queer heroes finding community in a classic team-up. For many younger characters, coming to terms with their powers draws a relatable parallel to the exploration of sexual and gender identity.
Young queer people often find agency and comfort in these dynamic and colorful stories, especially since they don’t always feel supported in their homes, schools, offline, and online communities. According to Dr. Jonah DeChants, a research scientist at The Trevor Project, “Recent political attacks aimed at transgender and nonbinary youth have not only threatened their access to health care, support systems, and affirming spaces at school, they’ve also negatively impacted their mental health.”
In addition to inspiring young people, some of DC Comics’’ recent LGBTQ+ stories also have a broader cultural impact. Some right past wrongs by giving killed, neglected, and forgotten characters a second chance. Others feature tributes to recently deceased LGBTQ+ pioneers of superhero storytelling, like gay actor Kevin Conway and transgender author and activist Rachel Pollack.
These themes explore what it means to be queer in a quarrelsome world and how real-life super-queeroes can survive, thrive, and cultivate their unique abilities and identities to become heroes in their stories.
Redefining ‘Justice for All’
DC Comics As Robin sulks during a Pride parade, the bisexual caped crusader Superman (Jon Kent) kisses his gay journalist boyfriend Jay Nakamura.
In addition to the 500+ anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced at state and local levels during the 2023 legislative session, reported hate crimes based on gender and sexual sexuality have steadily increased since 2014, rising by 70% between 2020-2021.
Phil Jimenez, one of the first out gay comic book writers and artists at DC Comics, in his introduction to DC Pride 2023, questions how to position anti-LGBTQ+ narratives in Superman or Wonder Woman’s universe. How would established queer heroes, anti-heroes, and villains respond to such attacks? Would pursuing “justice for all” seem like activism in that world or “just the right thing to do”?
Several writers in the DC Pride releases tackle this question by telling stories about the symbolic importance of having publicly out LGBTQ+ superheroes.
In “Super Pride (originally published in 2022), Jon Kent (Superman’s son) and Robin (Damien Wayne, Batman’s son) attend their first Pride march.
Robin prepares for the parade by bringing smoke bombs, electrified netting, and electromagnetic pulse generators because a community under political attack is “vulnerable to literal attack,” he argues.
On the other hand, Jon attends the parade in his Superman outfit but with a cape of different Pride flags. He says the iconic “S” shield symbolizes the hope and the possibility of making the world a better place. But for today, he tells his boyfriend, “I want [Pride] to mean that I see you. That I am you. That there’s no wrong way to be yourself.”
With that encouragement, Jon flies above the Pride-going crowd and creates a rainbow. Nick Robles’ artwork and Triona Tree Farrell’s vibrant color palette make the moment pop with joy.
Though endearing, the interaction almost feels like it comes from another era. In its annual crime report for 2022, the FBI noted a 19% increase in anti-LGBTQ+ incidents compared to 2021. Anti-transgender bias crimes increased by 35% overall. It’s no wonder that the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans during Pride Month last June.
Maybe Damien Wayne’s fears weren’t too far off the mark.
Compared to “Anniversary,” Josh Trijullo’s story published in DC Pride 2023, one gets a sense of how superheroic advocay has shifted over recent years.
DC Comics Apollo warns Midnighter as he faces off against anti-LGBTQ+ protesters in Josh Trijullo’s “Anniversary,” illustrated by Don Aguillo. Image courtesy of DC Comics.
“Anniversary” features married gay superhero couple Midnighter and Apollo considering their visibility as LGBTQ+ role models during their wedding anniversary. Don Aguillo’s expressive, painted artwork follows the duo as they mentor a group of drag queen vigilantes, visit the iconic Stonewall Inn, and step into the middle of a tense LGBTQ+ rights protest and counter-protest on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
Midnighter wants to bust skulls, while Apollo worries that the violence will spread. They’re joined by Alan Scott, the WWII-era Green Lantern, who advocates a more measured response, lecturing them on the history of LGBTQ+ civil rights. He encourages the couple to think of themselves as “more than costumed mystery men.”
Agreeing that visibility and pride are ways to start fighting back, the couple goes one step further, adopting a hacktivist approach. They remarry on the spot, broadcasting the ceremony to every conservative news network and social media channel they can jam in the DC universe.
One important thing hasn’t changed in the year between these stories’ publications: the underlying faith that comic book superheroes function best as symbols. But maybe it’s not enough just to be a symbol anymore.
In his book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud notes that comic books reinvent new symbols regularly in response to a changing society. Maybe some of these new superheroic symbols just give older ones new purpose and direction.
DC Comics’ take on chosen family
DC Comics Nonbinary spirit envoy Xanthe Zhou talks to lesbian superheroine Batwoman about healing familial wounds in Jeremy Holt’s “Lost & Found,” illustrated by Andrew Drilon. Image courtesy of DC Comics.
Not only has the increase in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and legislation negatively affected 66% of LGBTQ+ teens and young adults’ mental health, but only 38% consider their homes as LGBTQ+-affirming spaces.
To fill the gaps of mutual support and love, many queer people cobble together a chosen family of non-biological kinship as a vital way to thrive. This search for a chosen community forms a key part of several of the DC Pride team-up stories, a convention in which two characters who typically appear independently take on a challenge together. In fact, some of the more interesting team-up stories gently subvert the conventions of this classic comic book staple in surprisingly queer ways.
The 2021 story arc of Robin (Tim Drake) acknowledging his bisexuality made national headlines. But writer Nadia Shammas’ “Hey, Stranger” picks up on Drake’s journey, flipping the traditional superhero team-up story to show that you never really stop coming out, even to those closest to you.
“Hey, Stranger” marks the first official meeting of Tim and Connor Hawke — a young asexual, BIPOC martial artist who calls himself Green Arrow — since each first discovered their individual queer identities.
This team-up is unusual in that it happens after Tim finishes battling some thugs. Bruka Jones’ artwork depicts a series of quiet but intense moments as the two characters test (and ultimately reaffirm) the value of their friendships, while Tamra Bonvillain’s dawn-tinged palette underscores the story’s emotional weight.
Another team-up story that plays with finding community appears in Jeremy Holt’s “Lost & Found,” featuring the new character Xanthe Zhou. As a nonbinary Chinese-American “spirit envoy” trapped in the realm of the living, they literally exist between several worlds and are unable to find their place. A magician and trickster, they conjure useful spirit world objects by burning small pieces of folded joss paper.
Like the team-up in “Hey, Stranger,” the fighting becomes secondary to the bigger story. Xanthe encounters Batwoman (Kate Kane) in a Gotham City graveyard, defending the Kane family mausoleum from would-be thieves. After trying to help, they listen to Kate mourn her mother’s death that occurred during her childhood.
Smitten, Xanthe gives Kate a folded joss paper tree to burn and shares their insight about the cycles of life and death, healing and rebirth. Leaving Kate in thought, Xanthe realizes they may have a place in the world after all.
In some stories, fighting villains becomes a metaphor for desire. Since depictions of healthy queer intimacy remain rare in visual media, it’s important to recognize that some queer heroes can be lovers as well as fighters.
Queer writer Stephanie Williams’ “Confessions” presents a sly and sultry take on this dynamic. In it, Nubia, Queen of the Amazons, recounts a “forgotten” team-up as pillow talk with Io, her beloved consort. The fight — in this case, a tag-team charity wrestling match for a women’s shelter — includes the aptly named Justice League giantess Big Barda as her teammate.
DC Comics Ghost-Maker stands back-to-back with his lover and colleague Catman while battling baddies on a rooftop in Rex Ogle’s “The Dance,” drawn by Stephen Sadowski.
Rex Ogle’s “The Dance,” drawn by Stephen Sadowski, also provides erotic subtext and a steamy twist on the superheroic team-up with a queer homage to every Batman/Catwoman rooftop tangle since the pair first met way back in 1940. The story features anti-hero Catman (Thomas Blake) and Ghost-Maker (Khoa Khan, from Batman Inc.) fighting baddies together on a Gotham City rooftop.
Sadowski’s fight sequences, full of kinetic pencil work and thicker inks, seem well choreographed. The push-and-pull dynamic between Khoa and Blake makes the pair’s familiarity with one another’s bodies exceedingly clear — and it’s just as clear where they’ll head after the fight.
“I wanted the conflict to marry the sensuality of the body,” Ogle explained to LGBTQ Nation. “We’ve seen the tension between Batman and Catwoman forever, so I wanted to show another coupling.”
In one final glorious splash page, the erotic subtext of the superhero team-up gets revealed at last in all its naked queer glory as Catman and Ghost-Maker embrace in bed.
When a growing sense of queer identity & superpowers converge
DC Comics Aquaman talks to his boyfriend about his closeted childhood and unaccepting mother in Alyssa Wong’s “A World Kept Just For Me,” illustrated by W. Scott Forbes. Image courtesy of DC Comics.
For many LGBTQ+ people, the closet remains a lonely and fearful place. Within superhero stories, the isolation that comes from having superpowers is an experience that has often functioned as a metaphor for the isolation of closeted life.
Marvel’s X-Men may have started as five white prep school kids from suburban New York, but, as comics critic Sara Century notes, queer readers could easy to see mutants through the lens of LGBTQ+ civil rights. Their powers make them different, which, in turn, makes them the targets of hate and bigotry. Some could pass as common humans; others couldn’t. But until a decade or so ago, few of the X-Men had actually come out. The X-Man Northstar came out in 2002, and the better-known Iceman made national headlines when he came out in 2015.
Comparatively, some of the most interesting Pride-themed releases from DC Comics move beyond easy metaphors by focusing on how the closet and the coming out process shape the ways in which heroes use their wondrous abilities.
Greg Lockard’s “Public Display of Electromagnetism” suggests that the closet can provide a place where queer kids begin to develop self-reliance. For a younger hero like The Ray (Ray Terrell), the closet’s isolation felt both figurative and literal. The character still wrestles with the trauma of his parents literally confining him in a dark room, away from others, so that his light-based powers won’t manifest.
While he’s out to his Justice League teammates, Ray still melts down when his boyfriend kisses him in front of them. He overcompensates during a subsequent fight with the villain Shadow Thief, who easily overwhelms him with a wave of darkness, snuffing out Ray’s powerful photon charges. Although Ray finds himself reliving the trauma of his closeted youth, he digs into the root causes of his inner darkness to find the inner spark that allows him to harness his powers, shatter the Shadow Thief’s trap, and save the day — after all, Ray still needs to return his boyfriend’s kiss.
Aquaman (Jackson Hyde) also faces a history of negotiating the caped closet in Alyssa Wong’s “A World Kept Just For Me.” In this melancholy story, Jackson shows his boyfriend the small desert town in New Mexico where he grew up. Like Ray’s parents, Jackson’s single mother kept him far away from anything that would trigger his water-bending abilities.
Jackson’s story illustrates queer resilience. His powers developed in tandem with his growing sense of queer identity. He’d practice them in the shower to avoid unwanted attention while publicly struggling to become what he felt his mother wanted: “Normal, Unassuming. Human. Straight.”
Yet, as Jackson shares the pain of his closeted life with his boyfriend, he realizes that those experiences shaped the sense of morality and justice that makes him a hero.
DC Comics Trans male hero Circuit Breaker begins to understand and accept his superpowers in “Subspace Transmission,” written and illustrated by A.L. Kaplan.
Compared to other characters, Circuit Breaker (Jules Jordain) is the new kid on the multiversal block. Hailing from the playas of rural Nevada, the ability to sense and absorb kinetic energy from the world around them paints a decidedly queer picture.
Jules’ second comic book appearance in “Subspace Transmission” (DC Pride 23) functions as a kind of queer superhero origin story, with writer and artist A.L. Kaplan wisely focusing on the best part: the hero discovering who they are and what they value in relation to their new abilities.
Strange and overwhelming at first, Jule’s powers are a conduit for entropy, the ability to sense and steal kinetic energy and reduce the world to stillness. As they struggle for control over their powers, Jules recalls the fears faced when coming to terms with their gender identity and body while transitioning.
“Bodies are mutable,” Jules realizes after another failed attempt to harness their abilities. “Life or death. Stasis or change. Control or submission. Man or woman. Thinking in binaries always felt limiting to me.” And with that insight, they come to peace with the strangeness of their new abilities.
It is in these moments that Kaplan’s artwork shines. As they explore their powers, the waves of energy swirling Jules evoke psychedelic posters and 1970s rock album art.
For decades, LGBTQ+ comic book fans could only see themselves as metaphors rather than well-rounded queer characters. Being queer may not be a superpower in itself, but it provides LGBTQ+ characters in the multiverse with unique perspectives on their extraordinary abilities. It also provides affirms that our lived experiences matter — maybe that awareness itself is the real superpower.
Dismantling old tropes
Comic books haven’t always been kind to queer characters. Consider Extraño, DC’s first openly gay superhero. First appearing in 1987, when industry standards prohibited writers from using words like “gay” and “homosexual,” Extraño became a pastiche of stereotypes.
Early stories depicted Extraño as a sassy Peruvian sorcerer whose architectural hair, flowing purple robe, and pirate boots made him look like Liberace cosplaying Doctor Strange. The character all but vanished a year or so later, but only after contracting HIV from an “AIDS vampire” called the Hemo-goblin. No, really.
Extraño’s fate became a textbook case of “bury your gays,” a storytelling trope that remains alive and well in current pop culture (just watch It: Chapter Two and cringe at the gay-bashing scene). But now, queer writers are digging those bodies back up and giving them new life.
In a terse Substack post from May 2022, nonbinary writer Grant Morrison took aim at writers who use alternate versions of major characters as cannon fodder. For them, burying queer characters “for no defensible reason” deprives them of their storytelling potential.
DC Comics The long-lost Red Racer kisses his partner Flashlight in “Love’s Lightning Heart,” written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Hayden Sherman.
One of the architects of the DC Comics multiverse, Morrison has created several LGBTQ+ and gender-swapped versions of major heroes in recent years. One of them, Red Racer (an alternate version of The Flash), was revealed to be happily married to his universe’s Green Lantern equivalent. Morrison had established the character as a founding member of a multiversal Justice League. However, Red Racer died in a Superman comic book, sacrificing his life to save the title hero.
In “Love’s Lightning Heart” (the lead story in DC Pride 2023), Morrison sets out to rectify this loss. The result provides a trippy, high-concept story of love overcoming death. It follows Flashlight, Red Racer’s grieving husband, on a mad, universe-breaking quest to return his beloved to the living. The story takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of an Art Deco-infused parallel universe and suggests that Red Racer’s return may herald the start of a new story arc brimming with possibilities.
Other LGBTQ+ writers strive towards the same goal as Morrison by reviving queer characters who have been buried, depowered, disfigured, or just plain forgotten. In Christopher Cantwell’s “My Best Bet” (DC Pride 2023), the wily magician and conman John Constantine plays a long game with Superman (Jon Kent) to rescue the soul of Oliver, a former boyfriend who had been dragged to Hell in the final issue of Constantine’s 2015 solo series and ignored … until now.
Queer villains get dug up and dusted off, too. Cannon and Saber — the antagonists in Rex Ogle’s story “The Dance” — have been depicted as an openly gay couple since their first appearance in 1984, but they last appeared over 30 years ago — welcome back, boys!
Even Extraño has returned from the comic book dead. Writer Steve Orlando reintroduced the character in his 2017 GLAAD Media Award-nominated series Midnighter and Apollo. Since then, Extraño has become a mentor for younger queer characters and the founder of a network of LGBTQ+ superheroes called Justice League Queer.
But don’t call him Extraño. Nobody has done that in years. “I’ve since buried that name,” he tells Midnighter, seeming to hint that he does the same to anyone who uses it. Now Gregorio de la Vega, he’s reclaimed his proud place as the first out queer superhero in the DC multiverse.
Grappling with justice & legacies reimagined
DC Comics For nearly two decades, Rachel Pollack’s Coagula was DC Comics’ only transgender superheroine. Apparently, the Justice League couldn’t handle her.
In an interview with Lambda Legal, queer poet and essayist Kay Ulanday Barrett argues that stories by and for LGBTQ+ people “honor our grief” as well as “help us remember our glory and community triumphs.” Recent book bans and content challenges seek to erase those histories. The DC Pride releases counter that threat by honoring the legacies of two recently deceased groundbreaking queer elders.
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Rachel Pollack, who passed away from non-Hodgkin lymphoma last April, is best known for her beautiful, strange, and spiritual run on Doom Patrol in the early 1990s, in which she introduced Kate Godwin, a trans lesbian superhero who went by the name of Coagula. Kate was the first — and for nearly two decades — the only transgender superhero published by DC Comics.
A former sex worker, Kate gained the ability to turn liquids into solids (and vice versa) after she spent a night with multi-gendered energy being Rebis. She initially tried to join the Justice League, but they rejected her. “I suspect they liked my powers,” she tells a friend, “but couldn’t handle me.”
Kate soon found her chosen family with the Doom Patrol, a collection of wounded heroes and superpowered outsiders whose adventures bordered on the surreal.
Pollack had been invited to contribute new material to DC Pride 2023, but the sudden progression of her illness prevented this. Instead, the anthology features tributes to her legacy from industry giants like Neil Gaiman and upcoming talents like transgender writer Jadzia Axelrod.
Gaiman reveals that Pollack created Kate Godwin as a response to Wanda Mann, a sympathetic but doomed transgender character in his Sandman story arc “A Game of You.” (Wanda will likely appear in the second season of Netflix’s adaptation, The Sandman.)
For Axelrod, reading that first comic with Kate Godwin in 1993 felt “like a lightning bolt from heaven.” Not only had DC Comics published a story featuring an out trans lesbian, but this smart, funny, kind person became the point of view character for the reader. The comic inspired Axelrod to create a trans-alien superhero named Galaxy, who currently appears in the Hawkgirl comics.
Kate Godwin seldom appeared after Pollack’s run on Doom Patrol ended. Another writer seemingly killed her off-panel a decade later.
However, Coagula may soon return. A trans woman named “Kate” (drawn in Godwin’s signature black tank top and jeans) appears briefly at the start of Axelrod’s 2022 story “Up At Bat” (reprinted in DC Pride: The New Generation). There, Kate runs a wellness group in Gotham City, and serves a friend and mentor to Alysia Yeoh, a trans urban vigilante and Batgirl ally.
What better way to honor Pollack’s legacy than reviving Kate Godwin, recognizing the achievements of these two pioneering women? Maybe the Justice League will finally accept her for her full, authentic self.
And anyone who grew up watching cartoons like Batman: The Animated Seriesor Justice League Unlimited, can instantly recognize Kevin Conroy’s rumbling, husky voice as Batman. Conroy passed away in November 2022 from intestinal cancer.
Before his death, Conroy collaborated with illustrator J. Bone on the autobiographical graphic story “Finding Batman.” First published in 2022, the story receivedwide fan acclaim and subsequently won the 2023 Eisner Award for Best Short Story. It also appears in DC Pride: The New Generation.
Conroy writes movingly about the need to maintain a public mask while struggling against homophobia within the entertainment industry while watching his family members succumb to mental illness and substance abuse. In his audition for Batman: The Animated Series, he used these experiences to channel the torment that Bruce Wayne faced as a child, the ones that led him to become a masked vigilante.
Conroy developed a voice from his own traumas that became one of the definitive takes on the character. J. Bone’s artwork – sharp, thick pencils and blue washes – provides a compelling screen for Conroy’s experiences.
“It is nearly impossible to write and draw heroes,” writer Jimenez says, “and not grapple with the very concept of justice and what it means to act heroically.” Although Conroy did not create heroes in the conventional sense, “Finding Batman” suggests that his celebrated portrayal of Batman came from a life of grappling with those same struggles.
Experts have long explored what has come to be known as the “lesbian wage premium” – the fact that on average, lesbians around the world earn about 9% more than heterosexual women. The number is even higher in the United States, with lesbians earning about 20% more than straight women.
In a recent video, TikToker Aria Velz analyzed several studies to explain why this might be. “We can start at the obvious,” she said, “lesbians tend to be more educated than straight women, are less likely to have children, live more predominantly in cities, and have more professional jobs.”
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But she explained that even when controlling for all of that, lesbians still earn more. So she brought up another hypothesis: Women in heterosexual relationships are still expected to take on more emotional and domestic labor than men, whereas lesbians tend to more equally share those duties. As such, heterosexual women are more likely to sacrifice career advancement for domestic responsibilities.
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Velz also pointed to studies that show lesbians who have lived with a previous male spouse make less money than lesbians who have never lived with a man.
“The lesson here is not that lesbians are better at making money,” she said. “It reconfirms that the domestic labor situation at home contributes to how women earn more outside the home – and lesbians have just learned that lesson first.”
But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Despite the extra earnings for lesbians, Slate pointed out in 2015 (when the lesbian wage premium was first identified), that lesbians were still a lot are likely to be poor than straight women as well as the general population. And because women in general still make less than men, two women in a couple still tend to miss out on key earnings.
As Slate put it, “Any benefits to being lesbian are canceled out when couples’ earnings are considered in aggregate—there, lesbians fare the worst of anyone.”
When Jenny Fran Davis set out to write her second book, she had already tasted literary success with her debut novel, 2017’s young adult coming-of-age story “Everything Must Go.” But instead of following her previous book’s proven path to acclaim, the queer 25-year-old author chose to write an adult fiction title that would probe the “interior world of femme characters.” In the end, the unapologetically titled “Dykette” — a comedy of manners centering on a desperately self-conscious femme lesbian named Sasha — became one of the most buzzworthy titles of 2023, demonstrating a growing fervor for LGBTQ fiction that is transforming the book world.
“This book really came along at a time where we’re in this renaissance of gay literature. There was an immediate audience that wanted to accept it with open arms. There was a receptiveness that I don’t know would have been there five years before,” Davis told NBC News, drawing a contrast between 2023 and the year her first novel came out. “Just the title alone would have been scarier for publishers even five or 10 years ago, but there was definitely this sense of, ‘People want this now,’ and I think publishers are always looking for what readers want.”
The release of “Dykette” (Henry Holt and Co.) in May coincides with a yearslong surge in the popularity of LGBTQ fiction, which continues to drive sales even as the broader fiction market slows in the wake of the Covid-19 book boom. Beginning with a smaller but noticeable uptick in 2019, those sales reached record figures this year, resulting in 6.1 million units flying off shelves in the 12-month period ending in May.
And the numbers are holding strong: In the 12-month period ending in October 2023, LGBTQ fiction sales reached 4.4 million units, up 7% from the prior 12-month period and 200% from the 12-month period ending in October 2019, according to exclusive data provided to NBC News by Circana BookScan. In contrast, the data showed that total fiction sales were down 3% in that latest year-over-year time period and up just 27% in the four-year span.
“There’s been LGBTQIA fiction forever, but what really makes this different over the last five years is that those storylines have been moving from a more niche area of fiction into the mainstream,” Kristen McLean, Circana’s lead book industry analyst, told NBC News of what she calls a “generational story.”
More than just migrating from the margins, queer fiction titles are thriving against a backdrop of record attempts to censor works by and about the LGBTQ community. This meteoric rise, according to McLean and other industry experts, is due to a confluence of factors, including younger readers’ openness toward issues of gender and identity, a new generation of writers employing queer themes and, perhaps most importantly, the pandemic-era rise of TikTok’s literary-minded arm.
‘Different flavors of storytelling’
After a tumultuous few years, it may not be surprising that fiction is the genre driving sales of LGBTQ books, as opposed to the less-transportive nonfiction space. A more elusive part of the narrative, however, is what’s bringing in new buyers of queer fiction. To answer that, McLean pointed to the fact that varying styles of fiction books carrying an “LGBTQ+” tag — or BISAC code, the U.S. book industry’s three-tiered book categorization system — are reaching readers in record numbers.
“It used to be that the only books carrying an LGBTQIA tag very specifically had that storyline front and center, and that is giving way to all kinds of different flavors of storytelling,” she said, noting what she sees as a “broadening of perspectives” that’s attracting new and less traditional readers of queer fiction.
Now, “we see growth in fantasy, in general fiction, in sci-fi, and that really speaks to the richness of the story world and the fact that these things are cross-pollinating,” she added of books that carry “LGBTQ+” as their secondary BISAC code.
To McLean’s point, there wasn’t just one type of queer fiction title that captured the popular imagination this year. Following in the footsteps of Alice Oseman’s “Heartstopper,” the screen adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s young adult hit “Red, White & Royal Blue” was a wild success. Sapphic titles like “Dykette” and Tembe Denton-Hurst’s “Homebodies” repeatedly topped 2023’s most-anticipated and best-of lists. And Justin Torres’ genre-defying work “Blackouts” took home the coveted National Book Award for fiction last month, while Eliot Duncans “Ponyboy” was reportedly the first book with a transgender protagonistto be longlisted for the prize.
Even bookstore aisles are starting to look different because of the way queer themes are appearing in a variety of texts, according to Suzi F. Garcia, editor of the LGBTQ nonprofit Lambda Literary.
“As access to these kinds of books has grown, we’re seeing more nuances come forward. So it’s not just an LGBTQ shelf in a bookstore anymore. They’re taking up room on every shelf,” Garcia said of queer titles in general. “You’re seeing writers from other genres getting interested in exploring fiction, because they see it as a more gay-friendly space. You see a lot more cross-genre writers too, and they’re bringing their audiences with them.”
Because of those new audiences, Garcia added, publishers across the industry are expected to have LGBTQ titles in their catalogs, lest they lose sales to smaller operations that specifically cater to fans of queer fiction. And increasingly, according to McLean and others, that has meant mining unexplored spaces like self-publishing for fresh talent, as well as paying attention to what young readers are posting about on BookTok.
A next-generation book club
BookTok, the corner of TikTok dedicated to literature, began gaining traction in the early days of the pandemic, when homebound readers started consuming and posting about books en masse. Progressively, that led to a growing number of BookTokers — who skew younger, more male and more diverse than the average book-buying population, according to Circana — discussing genres within fiction, like romance and fantasy, which have thrived on the platform. And industry watchers have not hesitated to connect that interest to recent sales trends.
“Most of the authors that are growing in the romance space right now are next-generation authors, and it’s closely tied to BookTok,” McLean said of writers like McQuiston and Oseman, who — along with Mo Xiang Tong Xiu and Rick Riordan — are among the year’s top-selling writers of LGBTQ fiction, according to Circana. “In fact, we see a lot of these authors taking share from romance bestsellers like Nora Roberts, Debbie Macomber or Nicholas Sparks.”
Kevin Norman, a BookTok influencer with nearly 250,000 followers, is quick to agree that social media engagement is what’s driving sales of queer fiction specifically. He attributes the popularity of genres like romance, fantasy and “romantasy” in print and on social media to the way that younger readers have learned to use platforms like TikTok to advocate for the books they love.
“Romance was a genre that, for a long time, got shunned and [was] not taken seriously. With social media, people are now able to talk about their favorite niche books and bring them to the mainstream,” Normansaid, adding that TikTok “really made books cool.”
To some, it may seem like a leap to say that posting about books on social media is translating to print sales, but the numbers show an overlap between genres that are popular on BookTok and those driving trends.In June, Circana reported that romance titles accounted for 30% of the uptick in LGBTQ fiction sales, and, according to Circana’s data for NBC News, romance was among the highest-selling LGBTQ categories in both adult and young adult fiction as of the end of October.
Booksellers — like Leah Koch, co-owner of the bicoastal romance bookstore The Ripped Bodice — also say they can see the influence of younger readers not just online, but in their shops, too.
“People age into the romance genre every year, but this happened a lot more rapidly. All of them just joined at once, basically,” Koch said, describing BookTok as “a new generation’s form of a book club.”
The Ripped Bodice is a romance bookstore with locations in New York and Los Angeles.Madeline Derujinsky
“More importantly, they actually buy books. They’re not just talking about them or taking pictures,” Koch said. “It has an actual economic consequence on our sales, on the type of people who are coming into the store, on the books that they’re asking for.”
It isn’t just new romance titles that younger readers are buying. Among many BookTokers, there’s a fervor for rediscovering older works, which has significantly bolstered sales of a number of backlist titles, including Colleen Hoover’s works and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2017 sapphic sensation, “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.” And some up-and-coming influencers are going in a different direction altogether.
Zoë Jackson — a BookTok influencer with almost 65,000 followers and the founder of a book club dedicated to “complicated female characters” — says she’s been successful on social media specifically because she recommends “indie” LGBTQ fiction like Sarah Rose Etter’s surreal novel “Ripe,” rather than blockbuster romances.
“For a while, the main queer books that were being talked about [on TikTok] were the few big queer romances that, at this point, are ubiquitous,” Jackson told NBC News, naming Madeline Miller’s 2011 Trojan War retelling, “Song of Achilles,” and “Red, White & Royal Blue.” “I love those books too, but people like to see things they don’t see right when they walk into Barnes & Noble.”
Beyond ‘token acceptance’
While powerful, the rise of BookTok hasn’t meant that traditional publishers, and many of the ways they do business, have been upended completely. But, according to Michael Reynolds — the editor-in-chief of independent publisher Europa Editions, which released this year’s standout erotic text in K. Patrick’s debut novel, “Mrs. S” — the rising interest in LGBTQ fiction is putting pressure on publishers to be much more active in that space.
“When the book industry sees that there’s segments of the market in growth, then it tends to run off to that segment,” Reynolds said. “I think that’s what we’re seeing now, in terms of the output on the publishing side of things.”
Reynolds, whose tenure has brought “My Brilliant Friend” author Elena Ferrante to the English-speaking world, said that while traditional publishing has been famously good at ignoring audiences for decades, once it senses an appetite for certain kinds of books, its added value is “ferreting out talent” and getting quality works on the shelves. But, he acknowledged, the key part of that process is having a readership that’s then willing to buy those works.
“One of the nice things about the moment we’re living through is that it’s not simply token acceptance; it’s commercial success,” he said. “It really does make a difference — that bottom line — when you’re doing something new.”
Kendall Storey is the editor-in-chief at Catapult, which released two of the year’s most talked-about works of sapphic literary fiction: Marisa Crane’s “I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself” and Ruth Madievsky’s “All-Night Pharmacy.” She said she views the way the publishing industry is adapting to the fervor for queer fiction as a fairly predictable course correction.
“To say that we’re seeing more and more successful books exploring issues of gender and queerness is to say that literature is doing what it’s always done, which is representing different experiences and ways of seeing over time,” Storey said, noting that almost half of Catapult’s 10 bestsellers from last year were LGBTQ titles, up from just one in 2021.
While publishers seem optimistic about how rising LGBTQ fiction sales reflect on their sector at large, others in the book world are critical of how long it’s taken the industry to get to this point and are eager to see more steps forward.
“If you were to look at the queer shelves when we opened in 2016, like 99% of [the books] were from indie presses or self-published. There were very few traditionally published queer romances; I could probably count them on one hand,” Koch, the Ripped Bodice co-owner, said.
“Seven and a half years later, they’re still only doing a couple a year. That adds up to a lot of books, but we’re still really early in the life cycle of this,” she added, referring to traditional publishers’ hesitancy to invest in a larger array of LGBTQ fiction.
Like Koch, Garcia from Lambda Literary is eager to see publishers meet the moment by encouraging authors to take risks and further experiment with genre and form as part of the next phase in queer fiction’s evolution. Looking forward to next year, she said, “I’m hoping that’s what we see: a lot more audacity from fiction.”
New data shows a record-breaking number of businesses are displaying true LGBTQ+ allyship to their employees, proving they “aren’t buying” mounting anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Foundation issued its Corporate Equality Index (CEI) this week, and determined that the workforce is “more allied than ever before.”
The CEI, launched by the HRC Foundation in 2002, is a survey that measures company policies and practices regarding LGBTQ+ equality.
In its first year, 319 businesses participated to determine if their policies were up to scratch. This year, 1,384 companies took part in the review – and the results were overwhelmingly positive.
The CEI reports that a record-breaking 95 per cent of businesses reviewed have non-discrimination protections in place specifically regarding gender identity. That’s an exceptional jump from 2002’s five per cent.
A record-breaking number of businesses are displaying true LGBTQ+ allyship to their employees. (Getty Images/PinkNews)
Equally as promising is the 94 per cent of businesses that offer transgender-inclusive health insurance coverage to employees, compared to 0 per cent in 2002.
Noting that these exceptional figures come at a time when the LGBTQ+ community is under attack by people “hoping to eradicate our identity and push us back in the closet”, HRC President Kelley Robinson said that it looks like “businesses aren’t buying it.”
“The future workforce is more out and allied than ever before in our nation’s history, and this year’s CEI shows a business community looking for ways to further support LGBTQ+ workers and their families,” she added.
This year’s review also found that 70 per cent of CEI-rated businesses have guidelines and supportive policies and guidance in place to pro-actively support employees going through a gender transition, as well as their managers and colleagues.
And 63 per cent of the businesses have policies that ensure a safe and affirming environment for transgender and non-binary employees, including trans-inclusive or all-gender restrooms, gender-neutral dress codes, and how an employee’s information, such as name and pronouns, is displayed.
Of the businesses reviewed by the HRC Foundation this year, an impressive 545 companies scored a perfect 100 and will be honored with HRC’s Equality 100 Award as Leaders in LGBTQ+ Workplace Inclusion.
Companies that took part in the CEI rating range from Fortune magazine’s 500 largest publicly traded businesses, American Lawyer magazine’s top 200 revenue-grossing law firms (AmLaw 200), and hundreds of publicly and privately held mid- to large-sized businesses.
Among the companies that earned a perfect score were household names like Apple Inc., AMC Entertainment, Dominos Pizza Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Google Inc., Mars Inc., Paramount, Pfizer Inc., Visa, and Warner Music Group – to name but a few.
Commenting on this year’s optimistic findings, Rashawn Hawkins, the HRC’s Senior Director of Workplace Equality, said: “For well over two decades, businesses have played an important role in furthering LGBTQ+ equality by centering employee needs and voices when it comes to workplace inclusion.
“While there is much more work to be done, year-over-year growth in CEI participation is evidence of a business community that recognizes the responsibility and value in upholding equity and inclusion.”
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has come under fire for endorsing Starbucks, despite the coffee chain’s alleged anti-union and anti-LGBTQ+ actions over the past year.
As part of its 2023-2024 Corporate Equality Index report, the human rights group listed Starbucks Corporation among several other companies to gain a perfect score of 100 for its LGBTQ+ rights protections.
The HRC wrote that the score was given to companies that it believed “took concrete steps to establish and implement comprehensive policies, benefits and practices that ensure greater equity for LGBTQ+ workers”.
But the decision has been met with widespread criticism from LGBTQ+ activists who have argued the company has used LGBTQ+ rights as a threat in its anti-union campaign over the past few years.
Following a string of Starbucks locations unionising throughout 2022 and 2023, staff have alleged that gender-affirming care benefits under the company’s healthcare plan could be dropped if unionisation continued.
Speaking to Bloomberg in June 2022, one trans member of staff claimed that her manger used a “veiled threat” to prevent unionisation, suggesting that trans-healthcare-related benefits could worsen if a union was formed.
A spokesperson for Starbucks told CNBC at the time that the claim was false.
A similar story in June this year had the report that Starbucks workers had alleged that the company prevented staff putting up Pride decorations in one outlet.
“If Starbucks was a true ally, they would stand up for us, especially during a time when LGBTQ+ people are under attack,” a statement from Starbucks Workers United (SWU), which first aired the allegations, said.
“A company that cares wouldn’t turn their back on the LGBTQ+ community to protect their already astronomically high profits.”
In a statement given to PinkNews, Starbucks said that no change to corporate policy on Pride decorations had taken place and that it was still “unwaveringly” supportive of the community.
“Starbucks has a history that includes more than four decades of recognising and celebrating our diverse partners and customers – including year-round support for the LGBTQIA2+ community,” the statement read.
Strike action was scheduled in June after the SWU claimed that unfair labour practices and a “refusal to bargain over changes in Pride decoration policies” resulted in “hypocritical” treatment of queer workers.
Starbucks award
At the time of reporting, more than 366 Starbucks outlets, with more than 9,100 employees across the US, have unionised.
Workers are currently pressing for a higher minimum wage to help tackle the cost of living crisis, as well as fighting for “fair scheduling procedures” and guaranteed minimum hours for workers.
The company has been accused by several groups and political figures of employing union-busting tactics.
In March, senator Bernie Sanders clashed with ex-Starbucks chief executive, Howard Schultz, after the former presidential candidate accused the coffee giant of “the most aggressive and illegal union-busting campaign in the modern history of our country”.
In response, Schultz said he was confident that Starbucks had not broken the law and that officials “want to treat everyone with respect and dignity”.
The HRC gave the company five out of five for workforce protection criteria and a perfect score for corporate social responsibility.
HRC also awarded top marks to the Walt Disney Corporation, which just last year was heavily criticised for removing a same-sex kiss from the animated film Lightyear.
The act of ‘coming out’ is often done in steps and, for many, can be an ongoing process. For myself, I came out in stages, first to a small group of select friends in 1991, then to family in 1993. Over the following years, I came out to more and more of my friends. However, it wasn’t until many years later — in 1998 — that I came out at work.
When I did, the CFO in our Corporate & Investment Bank — someone I’d worked with for years — said to me: “What could I have done better over these years to have made it easier for you?”
This is what we need now more than ever: people proactively asking these types of questions to the colleagues around them. Unfortunately, so many are unsure where to begin or how to advance their allyship. And, while many may think of themselves as allies, few realize that allyship is not a label, it requires action. We all have the power to create positive change when it comes to our colleagues feeling like they belong — no matter how they identify or what differences they bring to the table — by fueling inclusion and promoting safe and accepting environments.
A 2023 survey by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation found that 84 percent of LGBTQ+ workers are out to at least one person in their current job — substantially higher than in 2018, when only 54 percent of LGBTQ+ workers were out to at least one person at work. However, LGBTQ+ workers, on average, are half as likely to be out to their Human Resources department than to coworkers on their team, suggesting a potential lack of trust, or lack of opportunity to report. While we recognize the advancements that have been made to protect LGBTQ+ employees in the United States — in June 2020, the United States Supreme Court affirmed that LGBTQ+ workers are protected from discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — recent rulings against the transgender and nonbinary community, as an example, have shown that we still have a long way to go.
It’s also critically important for us to recognize that allyship is not just an action for cisgender, straight people. While allies must come from outside, they must also come from within the community. The LGBTQ+ community is not a monolith, it’s a vast community of diverse identities and orientations, all of which are not equal. LGBTQ+ community members from other marginalized groups, such as women and ethnic minorities, face more barriers. And as LGBTQ+ people around the world are fighting for basic rights and safety in courtrooms and on the streets, members of our transgender and gender expansive community are the most marginalized and at risk. When we look at our workplaces, these groups have even fewer opportunities to grow and thrive.
The allyship we called upon in the past remains essential, but it’s insufficient for today’s needs. We can no longer make meaningful progress with “allies on the sidelines.” It is no longer sufficient for allies to just “stand” with us, we need them to stand up for — and stand in front of — the LGBTQ+ community. The more visible and engaged allies there are, the easier it will be for all people to bring their full authentic selves to work every day.
To help inform our employees of what this might look like in practice, this year, we completed the global roll out of our LGBTQ+ Ally Journey program. Underpinning this program is the idea that allyship is not a label, it’s a series of intentional actions. The actions people can take range from small acts to larger displays of support, including displaying pronouns in email signatures, attending LGBTQ+ trainings, vocalizing support for LGBTQ+ issues, speaking up against harmful or offensive language, and even just talking openly and honestly with LGBTQ+ colleagues or loved ones about their lives.
At JPMorgan Chase, we are leading programming to engage, educate and empower our more than 300,000 global employees to make the pathway to active allyship more accessible. Our digitized Ally Journeys provide this type of direction and support, as well as tangible tools and resources for allies to chart their own path to be able to advocate for LGBTQ+ people around the globe.
Since JPMorgan Chase established the Office of LGBTQ+ Affairs, in 2021, we’ve seen our impact amplified and our progress accelerate. For example, the number of employees self-identifying as LGBTQ+ has grown by 35% year-over-year in 2022, following 50% year-over-year growth in 2021. I can confidently say this progress would not be possible without a commitment from our global allies to making JPMorgan Chase an environment where all employees feel welcomed, equal and included.
Right now, we need everyone, from inside and outside our community, to use their privilege, influence, and/or positions of power to support all members of the LGBTQ+ community, especially those most marginalized — our transgender and nonbinary colleagues, friends and family. So, think about your allyship and potential allies in your organizations, consider how you could be helping employees at every level, and identify specific ways you can take action and have meaningful impact. Together, we can all thrive and ensure that we’re leaving no one behind.
Learn more about how JPMorgan Chase is dedicated to advancing equity and inclusion for the LGBTQ+ community here.
Brad Baumoel is head of JPMorgan Chase’s Office of LGBTQ+ Affairs.
