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Today’s blog post is actually the introduction to a short series of close readings. I’m going to be looking at stylistic choices made at the ends of queer love stories, asking how these concluding moments work to imagine the future for their protagonists. This topic comes about mostly because of connections I’ve been seeing across a bunch of books in my recent reading. Over the last few months of consuming new releases and re-reading some old favorites, I came across many queer love stories with particularly moving or innovative conclusions. They included epilogues and quick final paragraphs; imagined both lives with marriage and babies, and families complete without either; expressed everything from firm optimism to tenuous hope. A lot of these endings, in all their glorious variety, served as a coda to pasts that were reimagined to be more welcoming to queer expression and identities, allowing characters to envision futures that might otherwise have been hard to see from their particular vantage points in history.

All of these endings got me thinking about how reading any HEA is, fundamentally, an act of inferring the future from information about the past. In queer romance, though, doing so means imagining optimism from not-always-hospitable spaces. It has also sometimes meant thinking around certain concluding structures integral to the genre – cohabitation, marriage, procreation – that haven’t always been accessible to queer protagonists. So as I often do, I started wondering about the particular prose demands of writing re-imagined pasts and imagined futures. What kind of work is done by the last sentences of queer love stories, the words that place a completed narrative into the past while opening up towards imagined futures? There’s a kind of temporal collapse between past and future to these endings that has, I think, particular valences for queer love stories – even if they share a lot of terrain with the wider genre they belong in. Endings ask us to look closely at the spaces between the conclusion of the narrative and the epilogue, between the characters’ past and their future, between the past as the author has imagined it and the past as the reader knows it (or thinks they know it), between the future the reader lives in and the future they imagine the characters living. And as I’ve read, I’ve been struck by the variety – in both style and structure – with which authors approach these questions of temporality for their characters. 

While there are plenty of queer historical romances with traditional epilogues that would allow me to think through these questions, the books that appealed to me on the broader topic of queer futures included both narratives that aren’t aren’t historicals (though they’re interested in the political relationship between the past and the future) or that aren’t genre romances (though they include love stories that end on a note of optimism). So while I started off wanting to write specifically about histrom epilogues, this project quickly expanded to include different sorts of books. That expansion also had some consequences for format. Rather than one long blog post, I’m going to share four separate posts about four different books over the span of the next few weeks. One reason for doing so is that I want this discussion to be accessible to readers who prefer to avoid spoilers: expecting everyone to have read four different recent releases in order to engage with a single post was… well, even for someone accustomed to writing for a niche audience, that seemed comically limiting. This way, readers can pick and choose which pieces they want to read. I will do my best not give away too much about other books’ endings across posts, though I will try to draw broader connections here and there, finishing up with a quick conclusion after the final close reading. 

Another benefit of this format, for me, is that I simply had too much to say about every book, and no way to cope with all the various connections and differences between them, to confine myself to a single coherent piece. As different as they are, I think the books I’ll be looking at fit together in part because of how differently they approach central question of imagining queer futures, and the diverse kinds of queer identities the protagonists have. I think – I hope – the expansiveness of the project will ultimately be one of the takeaways.

On that note, I will also be trying to incorporate just a tiny bit of queer literary theory into each of my readings (I promise it won’t hurt!). While reading romance has turned out to be integral to exploring and understanding my relationship to my own queerness, I am all the more conscious of the ways in which my experiences as a cis white woman differ from the variety of identities represented in these books. My hope is that thinking with a range of scholars will help me more sensitively attune to the intersections at play in these texts, while still fully owning the limitations of my own perspective. I also want to acknowledge that in limiting myself to four books, I am also by necessity limiting the full range of intersectional identities that could be discussed from across queer romance: I will try, in my concluding post, to recommend more novels for further reading and draw some broader conclusions.

So, all that said, let’s talk books! I’ll be looking at the final passage of four novels, ordered chronologically by the era they’re set in. I’m going to start off discussing structural techniques for radically queering the traditional historical epilogue in Something Spectacular by Alexis Hall, a Regency-era romance. Then – in a departure from both genre romance and epilogues – we’ll talk about magic-inflected history and living with the ghosts of queer pasts in Even Though I Knew The End, set in C.L. Polk’s imagined 1930s Chicago. Then I’ll take on We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian, a 1950s-set romance that builds gentle bridges over the years of queer history that sit between the epilogue and the readers’ present. And finally I’ll look at a contemporary romance with a radical political vision for a future led by its young Latine protagonists: Ander and Santi Were Here by Jonny Garza Villa. 

I hope you’ll join me over the next two weeks, reading whatever speaks to you, and sharing any thoughts and recommendations if you’re so moved!