Love is in the air, and on the shelves this year, with several new Black queer love stories taking center stage. Ranging from tales of first loves and one-night encounters turned something more, to royal romances and fake dating, writers are also utilizing the genre to explore coming out in modern times, the intimacy of sapphic friendships, and the importance of representation for young readers. We spoke with six YA authors whose new novels show how there are no limitations on where Black queer love can blossom.
Take a Chance
Finding love is all about taking a risk, a concept that Kai, the star of Dean Atta’s coming of age novel I Can’t Even Think Straight (Quill Tree, June), understands well. Atta, author of the Stonewall Book Award winner Black Flamingo, is “just making up for lost time” writing about Black boys finding themselves and finding love. “I just want to make sure that they’re there now for this generation and generations to come,” he said.
In Atta’s latest novel in verse, Black and Cypriot teen Kai is on the quest to finally experience true love for the first time but is holding back because of his closeted best friend Matt’s fear that Kai’s revelation would out him by proxy. When Kai sees romantic potential in new classmate Obi, he begins with grappling new feelings and the reality of hitting romantic milestones.
“Kai sometimes says he wants something, and then when he actually experiences it, it might not be quite as he imagined,” Atta explained. “I think that is true of a lot of our formative experiences. We build them up in our head, or we've only seen them on TV online, and we don't necessarily know what it's going to feel like to be in that situation.”
Things get certifiably “messy” for Kai, who is navigating putting his heart on the line for the first time, idealized conceptions around love, and a friendship on the rocks. But Atta believes that making mistakes in love and life is a part of the journey. “I think we expect a lot from teenagers,” Atta said. “I want to give young people a chance to pause and think about the choices they’re about to make. I experienced a messy childhood, so I wanted to reflect that and show how you can work your way through it.”
And even with all its complications, taking a risk for love is often worth the reward. The protagonists in Talia Tucker’s latest romance, Solo Stan (Kokila, June), are taking a different kind of gamble. At a concert for their favorite band, strangers Dakarai and Elias are disappointed when the show gets canceled, but their interest is piqued when the band instead hosts a scavenger hunt with the promise of a secret show as a reward. Despite never having met before, the teens decide to take off into the night and work together. The concept occurred to Tucker when she sold two tickets to a concert and realized that the buyers would each have to attend the show alone. Her “author brain” ran with the idea, curious about what could have potentially happened between these two solo stans.
“I became kind of obsessed with that idea,” Tucker said. “I was thinking maybe they started dating, maybe they became friends. Maybe they became enemies. Who knows?”
Tucker wanted to start Dakarai and Elias’s love story from a place of vulnerability, in hopes of portraying that one has to be willing to be open to possibility if they expect to find anything good in return.
“Going anywhere alone, particularly at that age, is scary and can feel a little embarrassing,” Tucker said. “Dakarai is abruptly forced to get used to doing things alone and agonizes over going to the concert by himself, [whereas] Elias can feel alone in a room full of people. This was an intentional choice to show how they’re different, yet similar in a way.”
Ultimately, falling in true love, and not the idea of love, is the biggest risk for Dakarai. “He’s the kind of person who falls in love every day with everybody,” Tucker said. “He’s challenged to see Elias for who he truly is, not just through the lens of puppy love. Only at that point can his feelings be real because they’re based on Elias himself, not just how he makes Kai feel.”
Hate to Love You
Readers can get a taste of some good old-fashioned rivalry in both Ciera Burch’s Out of Step, Into You (FSG, May) and Zakiya N. Jamal’s If We Were a Movie (HarperCollins, Apr.), sapphic takes on the well-loved rivals-to-lovers romance trope.
Jamal made her YA debut this spring with If We Were a Movie, a concept that was brought to her by a packager originally featuring a straight couple.
“I knew immediately that I wanted it to be sapphic,” Jamal said. “Thankfully, there are a lot more Black queer stories now than there were when I was growing up, but I think we still don’t have a lot of shelf space, so it was really important to me to add to that canon.”
If We Were a Movie centers around Rochelle, who has had a longstanding rivalry with her former friend Amira. Looking to boost her college resume with extracurriculars, Rochelle takes a job at the Horizon Cinema, a historically Black theater, placing her under Amira's stewardship as a new employee. Despite their initial animosity, the two have to come together when they discover the theater is at risk of closing and find that working to save the theater ends up saving their relationship.
The reason behind Rochelle and Amira’s friendship breakup is a classic experience for young queer girls, according to Jamal: the confusion between romantic and platonic dynamics while still navigating one’s identity.
“Rochelle has that quintessential girl crush moment where she does not realize she has a crush on a girl,” Jamal said. “There are all the other things in her life, like her drive and goals, that are blocking her from seeing that. It was so fun to play with that idea of, I like this girl, but I didn’t realize that this is a romantic thing.”
Jamal is a fan of the hate-to-love dynamic that lays underneath a rivals-to-lovers story because “it’s more of a misunderstanding, where the characters don’t fully get where the other is coming from.”
Jamal said, “What’s really fun about it is you think there’s no way this can work. They’re on opposite sides of the spectrum. But then they find something that they click over, and it opens like a whole new world for both of them.”
Rochelle and Amira aren’t the only ones with history. Mari and Taylor, the protagonists of Burch’s Out of Step, Into You have got their own baggage to clear up: the girls were once best friends before Taylor moved away and ghosted Mari, but now Taylor’s back—and worse, they’re track teammates.
Burch also wanted to touch on how female friendships can blossom into something entirely different and the difficulty of navigating how to deal with that on one’s own. “You might be having all these feelings and thoughts, but you’re friends, you know?” Burch said. “And it’s like, where is the line of intimacy when it comes to friendship and romance in the dark, and what does that look like and in the safety of your own thoughts?”
Burch’s novel also falls under the sports romance genre, which Burch utilized to showcase how the girls relate to one another and to themselves via the way they approach track. “Running just felt like a very apt metaphor for them,” Burch said. “Running from your feelings, running from your own life. In Mari’s case, running to try to have a better future, try to get a scholarship. And in Taylor’s case, running from what you see as your responsibility, or out of obligation.”
For both writers, highlighting Black queer girls falling in love offers readers a point of connection and a place to feel loved and seen. “It’s this really sweet romance and I think, unfortunately, a lot of Black girls don’t get to have that experience,” Jamal said. “We’re told that we’re grown, or we’re fast, as soon as we start to develop, and we don’t really get to have the tender moments. I really wanted to display that for them.”
Burch added, “Even if their lives aren’t anything like Mari’s and Taylor’s, I hope that readers still feel that connection to another Black queer person on the page. I hope they feel free to be themselves in whatever way they’d like to be.”
Let’s (Fake) Date
Mariama J. Lockington, the author behind novels such as the Stonewall Honor Book In the Key of Us and the Schneider Award winner Forever Is Now, recently took her first swing at a traditional romance. Despite this being the author’s first romance, her love of Lifetime holiday movies helped her feel prepared for stepping into the new genre.
“I wanted it to be a nod towards those movies that I keep watching that have very little representation of people who actually look like me,” Lockington said. “I wanted to put two queer Black girls in that setting and also make them complete people who have complex things going on while they’re also making hot chocolate bombs and going ice skating and doing all the cozy, wintery things.”
The result is I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm (FSG, Oct.), which centers around a fake dating scheme between Lyric, a beauty influencer eager to garner more attention on her social page, and Juniper, a teen questioning how to finance her forthcoming gap year. Naturally they strike a deal: if Juniper pretends to be Lyric’s girlfriend for a series of cute holiday posts that will bring in more views to her page, they can split the money Lyric makes from the posts.
Lockington was drawn to the fake dating trope because of how it could parallel how people fake a perfect life for likes and views online when the reality could be completely different. She wondered, “What assumptions do we make about people’s lives or personalities based on what we see on social media? On Lyric’s social media platforms, you would think she has everything together and never doubts herself—but as we get to know her offline, we see that this is very much not true.”
Lyric and Juniper are also grappling with how their different perspectives on love impact the way they envision their futures, and the potential for a real happily ever after. “This dynamic provides a healthy amount of tension as the two have to learn from one another how to trust, how to let go, and how to face reality,” Lockington said. “Lyric has to come around to understanding that accepting love can be a good thing, and Juniper has to realize that not all love stories last forever.”
Similarly, author Jamar J. Perry found his way into the fake dating trope while hoping to explore another subgenre that often doesn’t highlight Black characters: royal stories. “I wanted my readers to see a Black boy being able to become rich and famous, and get to go around the world,” he said. “So often the images that we see of Black boys are just so limited, that we don’t really get to see Black men and Black boys thrive.”
In Perry’s YA debut, Finding Prince Charming (Bloomsbury, June), 18-year-old Tyriq Howell is desperate for another chance at an interview for his dream college after his late arrival gets his interview canceled, when Desmond, a student worker, offers Tyriq a deal he can’t afford to resist: Desmond can get Tyriq another interview if he attends a fundraiser as his plus one. All seems simple enough until Tyriq discovers that Desmond is actually the prince of the island of Catalina, drawing a massive wave of attention from the media, much to the disapproval of Desmon's family.
Even though Tyriq and Desmond’s public relationship is a classic fake-dating scenario, Perry wanted to play with a dynamic that “from the beginning is not so stable” because feelings are in play from the start.
“Tyriq thinks Desmond only wants him to get back at his family, instead of just liking him,” Perry said. “I wanted to show how Tyriq cannot get out of his own way but also how he knows what he wants out of life, and how he won’t live on anyone else’s terms, modeling that same behavior for Desmond.”
There are layers to Perry’s fake dating scheme: which is that Desmond isn’t keeping his sexuality a secret, rather his family is, a distinction that complicates matters for the boys even further. “I wanted to explore the ability to make decisions for yourself that are all about what you want out of life,” said Perry. “So many queer people, and especially queer Black men, have such a devotion to their families, that they continue to harm themselves just to have their family’s love.”
Ultimately, what Perry wanted to create was a story of abundance for two Black boys. “In a lot of romances, the [protagonists] love each other, and they get the happy ending, but someone always loses,” Perry said. “There’s this huge tension between Tyrique loving Desmond but also wanting his own life. He wants to live his life on his own terms, and he gets to have both.”
Love Always Wins
Romance can often be an overlooked genre in terms of its impact, but the writers we spoke with recognize how it can provide young readers with a space to feel seen and celebrated—and worthy of epic love.
For Burch, the genre offers an opportunity to showcase Black queer life beyond tragedy and instead wrapped up in joy and love. “Black queer folks can exist in the romance space, and while their stories might not be divorced from racism or classism or homophobia, those issues are not the crux of it,” Burch said. “The heart of Black queer romance is two doubly marginalized people front and center in their own stories getting the love they deserve.”
Lockington, who recently celebrated a decade with her wife, said she writes about queer love as an opportunity to reflect the love around her in real life. “I love our love story, and I love the love stories of queer friends of mine. And I just want to see the care and community and resilience and humor that I found in my own relationship, which I found as a member of the queer community, the Black queer community, on the page, especially during this time.”
In an era of rising book bans targeting both queer literature and BIPOC-focused stories, Tucker finds that the matter of portraying Black queer love stories is quite simple: “Nothing in my book is controversial,” she said. “It’s just two people falling in love.”
