Queer yearning for me, as with countless others, is a part of my DNA. It is indistinguishable from me, my coming of age, my coming of gender, my coming of desire. It feels, in some ways, that I have never known anything but yearning.
And it would be a disservice to queerness and our history to reduce it to something as simple as pining for another person. Of course, that is part of it, but queer yearning embodies so much more: a longing for connection, community, freedom, evidence of our history, safety, and a different, better way of living, one that rejects categories, binaries, and the status quo.
It feels appropriate to quote bell hooks here: “‘Queer’ not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a way to speak and to thrive and to live.”
When I wrote my sophomore novel, A Sharp Endless Need, I considered the various ways in which my teen narrator, Mack, yearns, the many desires that trouble and ignite them. They long for their teammate, an impossible love, but they also yearn to escape their small town, a queer tale as old as time. They want to be the best basketball player the world has ever seen; they want to live forever in the minds of fans. They want an identity they understand, a gender that feels less confusing, or perhaps, the space to lean into that confusion.
And it thrills me to know and recommend so many beautiful, tender, smart novels that embody queer yearning. Here they are.
Cantoras by Caro De Robertis
My life has been forever changed by Cantoras. Five queer women in 1970s Uruguay, living under dictatorship, carve a space for their love on the fringes of a brutal state. In it, yearning isn’t just romantic—it’s much more than that. It’s an achy longing for resistance, freedom, community, and connection. I love these women like they are my closest friends, my family.
Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez
The queer yearning in Rainbow Milk is intertwined with race, religion, trauma, and the desire for freedom, the desire to carve out a space for oneself to be held and known, truly known. This book covers many years, from the visceral hunger of a shared spliff with a teen boy to yearning for connection and care in fraught places to finding someone to build a life with. This one is for ex religious queers and/or those with mommy or daddy issues, for those who want nothing more than to be taken care of.
The First Bad Man by Miranda July
I teach a masturbation scene from this novel for a reason. As absurd and delusional as the narrator Cheryl is, there is, underneath her wild fantasies and strange desires, a desperate longing for connection that breaks my heart even as it makes me want to throw up a little. Here is a woman enveloped by queer yearning without any conventional language for it. She literally has to fantasize that she’s occupying a man’s body in order to access it, which is both tragic and honest.
Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier
Pizza Girl is a coming-of-age story about an 18-year-old pregnant pizza delivery girl who becomes obsessed with one of her customers, a married-to-a-man mother of a kid who likes pickles on his pizza. Come for the age-gap yearning, stay for the grief, dark humor, messiness, and disorientation of figuring out who you are and what you want out of life.
Mrs. S by K. Patrick
Mrs. S is a boarding school fever dream: stoic, claustrophobic, and erotic. A young butch matron at an English boarding school falls in love with the headmaster’s wife, Mrs. S. What could go wrong? This book is dripping with queer yearning, and Patrick writes desire with a restrained elegance that makes every moment feel loaded. It’s not just about erotic desire—it’s also about a longing to be seen.
How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster by Muriel Leung
How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster follows Mira, a young Chinese American woman, who has moved back in with her mom after a devastating breakup with her ex, Mal. This speculative novel takes place in a NYC where acid rain falls every Tuesday. Mira and her mom share an apartment with two ghosts—her Grandpa Why and a gay cockroach named Shin. The yearning is ever-present—Mira for Mal, Shin for his lost cockroach lover, Mira for acceptance from her mother, and everyone for connection, for survival in a world that is collapsing all around them. It’s tender, achy, surreal, and incredibly moving.
Margery Kempe by Robert Glück
I haven’t been able to stop talking about this book since I read it a few months ago. If it wasn’t a library book, I would have underlined basically every passage. To call Margery Kempe a queer yearning masterclass is an understatement—it’s unhinged, beautiful, obsessive, and devotional in a way that changes you forever. Glück takes a medieval mystic and folds her into a modern gay love story, where the narrator’s desire for L. is all-consuming, poetic, and holy.
Lie With Me by Philippe Besson
Lie With Me by Philippe Besson is tender, aching, and absolutely devastating. It is, unfortunately, extremely relatable in its specific flavor of pining: a man looks back on an intense and secret affair he had with a boy as a teen in 1980s France. It embodies the tunnel vision of first love, especially for queer adolescents who had to love behind closed doors.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
No queer yearning list would be complete without this book. It’s like the TV show Killing Eve meets Virginia and Vita’s love letters, with a speculative twist. Red and Blue are two agents on opposite sides of a war who begin as enemies but soon fall in love through poetic, yearning, and romantic-as-all-hell letters left across time. It is, in some ways, one of the most painful forms of longing; they can’t be seen together, let alone touch each other. All they have is their words, their secret love.
The Boy with a Bird in His Chest by Emme Lund
I haven’t been able to stop recommending this since it came out three years ago. It follows Owen, a boy who literally has a bird named Gail living in his chest. He is othered and isolated from the very beginning, but he yearns for connection, community, freedom, and to be loved unequivocally. It’s an incredibly tender and wholly original queer coming-of-age story that will both hurt and mend you.