Creating an LGBTQ+ Family Through Literature
BY ELLEN RICKS
Discovering my own queerness through characters I could finally relate to helped me create my own LGBTQ+ family.
The first time I read a character as queer was when I was six years old, reading Frog and Toad are Friends by Arnold Lobel aloud to my mother. After I had finished, I looked at my mother and asked, “Are Frog and Toad going to get married?”
My mother, thrown off by my question, asked, “Why would they get married?”
“Because they are in love,” I explained simply.
My mother tried to explain that yes, Frog and Toad loved each other, but as friends—they weren’t getting married. They were just friends.
“Just friends” would come up a lot in my life as a reader and a student. Ruth and Idgie in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe were just friends. Achilles and Patroclus were just friends, and Nick Carraway’s fascination with Jay Gatsby was purely heterosexual. I lived in a rural conservative town, where kids still said “f**” and “homo” in the hallways without repercussions. There was no teaching of LGBTQ+ books or writers. It was never discussed.
The first time I realized that I was queer was at 16, reading a Twilight fan fiction. It was a slow-burn, high-school AU (that’s alternative universe for the non-fanfic readers) in which Bella and Rosalie started off as rivals before falling in love. Reading Bella questioning her own sexuality, I started to examine my own feelings and struggles, finding myself just as confused as she was.
At 3 a.m. on a school night, under the covers, I looked up from my laptop, hit by a startling realization: “Oh, I might be gay.”
I immediately panicked. I had spent 16 blissful years thinking I was straight, thinking I was “normal,” and now I was realizing something that could change my whole life. Shouldn’t I have known sooner? Wasn’t this something you were born knowing—not something that was dropped on you after getting feelings from a steamy sex scene about two girls?
I tried finding confirmation of my sexuality on the internet, taking dozens of “What is sexual orientation?” quizzes and frantically deleting my search history every 20 seconds.
Finally, I came to the conclusion that I was bisexual. So, what did I do with this new information?
For a while, nothing.
I continued “playing it straight” throughout the rest of high school and most of college, keeping my bisexuality… not really a secret, but not something that I openly discussed without being prompted.
I’d grown up in a conservative home. While I wasn’t sure what my parents would do if I came out to them, it felt unsafe to come out to them. Or, at the very least, it felt like it would be emotionally draining to explain.
And in college, I knew some people in the LGBTQ+ community who looked down on bisexuals and other queer individuals. The issue seemed to be that we were taking up space when we could pass as straight. I thought maybe they had a point—I wasn’t in a same-sex relationship at the time, so why should I talk about it? Even when I was in relationships with pansexual people and demisexuals, we were still straight-passing, so I didn’t feel there was a reason to say anything.
So, I just kept this fact about myself deep in my heart and tried to ignore it.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how lonely keeping that part of my identity hidden was; how painful it was having no one to talk to, being unable to share the feelings of figuring out my identity. I didn’t have LGBTQ+ people in my life who I could talk to, and, in the few books that I read with queer people in them, they were either side characters or villains, or they died at the end.
The first time I ever saw myself in a queer character was at 22, reading The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee. The main character, Monty Montague, is your classic bisexual disaster—hilarious, messy, and incapable of getting his life together. I found a character that I could relate to. Although it is supposed to be a fun romp through 1700s Europe, I quickly found myself in a puddle of tears as the book examined self-harm, chronic illness, and navigating a world that doesn’t necessarily want you to exist—all things I was dealing with at that time. In the pages, I found characters who I could connect with.
After reading Gentleman’s Guide, I started looking for more LGBTQ+ books to fill the literary gap in my life. I read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, where I met and connected with Evelyn Hugo. I loved how Evelyn was in relationships with both men and women, and so open about her bisexuality, demanding that other people acknowledge it. I was also heartened by how the book addressed the stigma of bisexuals being serial cheaters. After that, I read Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, walking alongside Simon Snow as he fell in love with his mortal enemy Baz and discovered that he might not be straight.
Of all of the LGBTQ+ books that I was devouring, the scene that struck me the most was in Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. In the scene, my favorite chaotic bisexual, Alex Claremont-Diaz, upon realizing that he might not be straight after kissing Henry, spends a whole chapter freaking out about it. Reading that freak-out triggered a wave of relief. It reassured me that I wasn’t weird for taking all of those quizzes at 16; that it wasn’t weird that I was so stressed out, trying to figure out if I was bisexual or not. It showed me that my sexuality was valid, even if it took a while to get comfortable with it.
“Found family” is a group of people bound by love, not blood, and it is common in the LGBTQ+ community. When our original families will not accept us for who we are, we find people who will. But as much as I needed it, I could not find my own found family in real life, so I tried ignoring my sexuality, which made me feel even more disconnected from my community.
When I discovered queer fiction, I started connecting with different queer characters and building my own family. I learned that there was no “right way” to be queer—that every queer person and relationship was different. As I read, I started to heal the brokenness that had been in me for so long. I never came out to my family, but I clung to my fictional LGBTQ+ family like a lifeline during some of the roughest periods of my life, from my mental health crisis to slowly coming out to friends and in my writing career. They also made me laugh, and feel safe and understood. These characters helped me see my identity in ways that I never could before. For the first time, I felt like I was a part of the LGBTQ+ community.