Fantasy Queers and Where to Find Them: Juno Dawson on LGBTQ+ Representation in Fantasy

Very much a personal choice, but my favourite sort of fantasy novels are ones where the fictional world is almost like ours with key differences. I’m thinking His Dark Materials or Oryx and Crake or The City We Became by NK Jemisin. For me, if much of the arena is “normal” I’m inclined to believe the fantastical more tangibly. 

The best way to make fantasy and science fiction feel real is to populate your elevated world with believable, human (even if they’re not human) characters. Would we have fallen so deeply for a vampire slayer who wasn’t flunking school and trying to date alongside her birthright? Doctor Who is at its very best when the Doctor sacrificed himself to save poor Peri in 1984, or in 2006 when he banished Rose Tyler to a parallel dimension. We can swallow a lot of wild ideas when the characters are real.

My lived reality is transgender. Most of my closest friends are gay, bi, lesbian or queer. Contrary to what you might have heard, being trans isn’t the stuff of science fiction! If anything, it’s historical fiction – there’s evidence of people ‘changing gender’ throughout antiquity.

Nonetheless, Science Fiction and Fantasy novels have, for decades, explored queer politics. Just last month, poolside in Crete, my husband read me the following passage from God Emperor of Dune (1981): “Homosexuals have been among the best warriors in our history, the berserkers of last resort. They were among our best priests and priestesses. Celibacy was no accident in religions. It is also no accident that adolescents make the best soldiers." It’s understood the author, Frank Herbert, may have had personal issues around his son being gay. Villain Baron Harkonnen is gay, and heroic Duncan Idaho expresses homophobic views. What interested me was that a science-fiction epic about a big old worm (well...) even ‘went there’ in terms of exploring LGBTQ issues.

In 2023, LGBTQ people are spoiled for choice. For years, we had to rely on so-called ‘queer-coded’ characters for representation. If you knew, you knew. Sure, the X-Men is easily interpreted as an allegory for civil rights movements, but nowadays we don’t need to perform such mental gymnastics. Science fiction and fantasy are – in my view – a great space for both LGBTQ characters, authors and readers alike. Look at Malinda Lo, TJ Klune, Samantha Shannon, Tamsyn Muir and the aforementioned Jemisin. Queers authors positively dominate queer fantasy. Good; for a very long time, that wasn’t the case.

Why wouldn’t we fill our novels with characters who are a bit like us and our mates? I wasn’t always so bold. I confess, when I was a baby writer in the noughties, I thought people might not read my books if the main characters were queer. That it wasn’t somehow ‘aspirational’. That, dear reader, is what we call internalised transphobia. The world has taught me that the ideal is being cisgender and straight, and anything else was...unfortunate.

Well, and I can’t say this loudly enough, SOD THAT. I believe the work we’re doing now as writers and creatives will chip away at that legacy of shame. Being gay, lesbian, bi, queer, trans or non-binary is glorious because we’re living in our most evolved, open, authentic selves.

In my trilogy – Her Majesty's Royal Coven – a diverse group of women, some gay, some trans, some straight and some queer, are bonded by a far greater secret: they are all witches. Very powerful ones at that. Some fly. One breathes fire. I felt the only way readers would believe the supernatural elements of the coven was if the women feel real in every other way. As such, they have Whatsapp chats, fork out for avocado on toast, and manage to hold down day-jobs. My favourite scenes to write are those that offset extraordinary witchcraft with the mind-numbing bureaucracy of their modern coven.

They also have relationships – both platonic and romantic. Some of them are, as TikTok would say, a bit ‘spicy’ (i.e. there are sex scenes). It’s important to me that the queer characters do not feel inherently fantastical. While being queer is joyful, I hope we tiptoe ever nearer to a time when same sex couples and trans people are really dull and no-one cares very much that we’re going about our business. We’re not there yet.

I think readers of science fiction and fantasy were way ahead of the cultural curve. We have been early adopters of books with LGBTQ protagonists, but I hope that’s changing. Outside of ‘genre’, Torrey Peters Detransition Baby became a bestseller, as have recent novels by Douglas Stuart and Hanya Yanagihara. It feels like ‘Gay Fiction’, once a dusty bookshop corner I was scared to be seen in as a teenager, is becoming slightly obsolete. There will always be a place for queer bookshops (because my community deserves specialist booksellers and books and spaces that are ours) but any section of the store should contain LGBTQ authors and characters. That’s what I like to see. I think, slow and surely, we’re getting there.