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What If Things Were Different? — Five Works of Queer and Trans Futurity
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What If Things Were Different? — Five Works of Queer and Trans Futurity
Celebrating queer SFF stories about making communities, surviving together, and maybe even flourishing
By Lee Mandelo
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Published on June 24, 2025
Art by Dan Rossi
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Art by Dan Rossi
Even in the earliest stages of editing the anthology Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, I knew the book would open with an epigraph from the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia—where he argues that “the future is queerness’s domain.” Or, put another way: something about queerness is always “not yet here.” We’re always thinking, writing, and living our way toward it. I’ve got a tattoo of this phrase, not yet here, under my left collarbone; it’s a reminder that there are future possibilities out there somewhere, no matter how rough things get in the present.
Speculative fiction, too, is grounded in thinking about what has been, what is not, and what could be. In sf, we imagine our way into other worlds and other futures! Given that, I think there’s a natural connection between queer/trans life and culture and speculative fiction itself—it’s in those horizons of possibility. It’s in futurity: how we think about where we’re at right now and where we might be able to get from here, for better or for worse—and also how we imagine making communities, surviving together, and maybe even flourishing (despite all the forces working to the contrary).
This sense of “queer futurity” was the guiding theme for Amplitudes, and it was on my mind constantly as I selected and edited the stories gathered within it. However, “queer futurity” is also a theme that runs through many, many other queer speculative stories—including these five books and films I loved, each of which deals with queer pasts/presents/futures while offering imaginative possibilities for continuing queer and/or trans existence.
Metal From Heaven by august clarke
But isn’t this a second-world fantasy novel, you may be asking? Yeah, it is, and that’s why I think it’s required reading for thinking about “queer futurity”—and also for seeing what stories can really do when we’re elbow-deep in imagining other possible worlds than these. To put it bluntly: Metal From Heaven absolutely fucking rules. I rarely get as excited as I did while I was reading clarke’s deeply-grounded yet expansive constructions of queerness, gender, anarchism, and revolutionary resistance. This book is toothsome, horny, hallucinatory, sometimes-nasty, and what I like to call ‘compassionately unforgiving’ in its visions of what surviving the world together as queer and trans people can require.
What was it that hooked me first, though? There’s a scene, early on, where a young Marney receives the recently-deceased Tita’s black suede jacket—smelling of cigars and lilac perfume—and climbs onto a lurcher (picture a motorcycle) behind a big, thick, strong woman who inspires immediate, passionate admiration. Marney then rides away with her and her people, becoming part of a new world: an underground world, a resistant world, an utterly queer world. If you know, then you know, and it only gets better from there.
Blackouts by Justin Torres
At a place known only as the Palace, isolated in the desert, the narrator tends to an elderly queer man named Juan Gay as his death approaches. Juan has a project he’s passing on to the narrator, alongside his own life-stories: reclaiming the queer histories contained within the sexological publication Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. He also wants to hear the narrator’s life-stories too: how he came to be at the Palace, what happened around the time when they originally met while institutionalized, and more.
Storytelling and strange queer temporalities form the core of Blackouts, particularly in the dreamlike and unmoored weirdness of the Palace. Sometimes the novel explores the queer past as another country, another world, which we must at turns imagine and invent and uncover from where it’s been so thoroughly redacted/destroyed/obscured. Sometimes it’s about the awkward and painful present of living your life post-dislocating-disaster, arriving in the form of a breakup or a relapse or a recurrent trauma—and sometimes it’s about the potential queer futures we find in stories, or in our relationships to one another, especially cross-generational ones that show us where we’ve been… and where we might still go.
I haven’t even gotten into what Torres is doing with the physical object of the novel, either, what it’s like to hold in your hands. The inclusion of archival photos, the pages from Jan Gay’s Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns with the thieving homo/transphobic doctors’ notes all blacked out, the choice to print with brown ink instead of black… it was electrifying to experience as an artist. But I’m going to cheat and borrow from the blurb as my closing pitch, because they’ve said it best:
“The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures? […] A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light.”
Uranians by Theodore McCombs
If it’s more short fiction you’re after, McCombs’s Uranians was one of my favorite sf collections of the last few years. Whether we’re talking about the titular novella “Uranians” or the other stories in the collection, like “Laguna Heights” and “Toward a Theory of Alternative Lifestyles,” the quick-witted prose and cleverly speculative conceits of each piece are a delight. Sometimes an upsetting delight, when the push and pull of a well-crafted queer story that tangles with trauma and desire leaves you feeling wrung out after—but still, a delight nonetheless.
The novella that anchors the collection is also, perhaps, the piece that resonates most with the idea of “queer futurity.” Sure, it’s a science fiction piece set on a generation ship. But more to the point, it’s shot through with ideas on the strange nature of queer temporality (plus so many intertextual references)—which is made even stranger by the closed world of the ship. Furthermore, the protagonist’s entanglement with arts like opera and poetry drives the story just as much as the dramatic conflicts with self and other that unfold throughout, so it’s got layers. (And I would be remiss not to mention that I also appreciated, very much, how McCombs handles queer eroticism and desire in this collection.)
We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, series editor Charles Payseur
Want even more short stories? Then I’d recommend picking up the Neon Hemlock anthology series We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction. Series editor Charles Payseur works with a guest editor for each volume—including Ryka Aoki (forthcoming), Darcie Little Badger, Naomi Kanakia, CL Clark, and L.D. Lewis—to put together a collection of (as it says right there in the title) the best queer and trans speculative short fiction from previous year.
One thing I really appreciate about this series is that the stories always come from a variety of publications. I’ve usually only read a handful of them before picking up the new volume. In the 2023 collection Darcie Little Badger edited with Payseur, there are stories from well-known magazines like Fiyah and Lightspeed… but also stories from original anthologies published by both big and small presses, like Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology and Worlds of Possibility. The editors have provided a much-needed service by drawing queer and trans sf from venues where it might’ve otherwise slipped readers by during the previous year—and then presenting it to us anew, like a gift.
I Saw the TV Glow dir. Jane Schoenbrun
I can’t ignore how much of my time has been occupied by excellent queer/trans film and television recently, so I’ve got to include Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow too. Our leads, Justice Smith and Jack Haven, deliver an intimate, agonizing portrait of coming-of-age shaped by trans longing and suffering alike. Schoenbrun draws techniques from experimental film and horror movies, combines them with the emotional resonances of ‘90s queer-kid fandom for shows like Buffy, and weaves from those threads an affect-driven narrative about what it fucking feels like to be trans in a world designed to crush it out of you. I saw this one in theaters—twice, despite and because of the fact that it wrenched me into my constituent atoms each time—but watching it in a dark living room with your phone tucked away somewhere else and no distractions will work too.
I Saw the TV Glow crosses between fantastical sequences and the characters’ lived realities, often oriented around their shared attachment to the YA fantasy tv series The Pink Opaque (a theme which appealed deeply to me as a lifelong sf/f nerd). Owen’s young adulthood, which is the centerpiece of the film, will strike a painfully relatable chord for many trans audiences. And maybe it hits most intensely for those of us who also grew up in the ‘90s, but I hear tell it lands just as hard for younger and older folks. While I left the theater afterwards feeling skinned, just raw to the air, I also felt more whole—more hopeful, even. The film constantly gestures toward more survivable possible futures for its leads. Maddy, for example, offers a glimpse of how some young trans people do get away: they run from their families, they bury themselves in the earth and experience a kind of death, the “freefall of utter precarity” that transition can feel like… and then come back new, reborn, ready to try and help an old friend onto the same path toward possibility.
But ultimately it was the street chalk-drawing that opens the smothering final section of the film, reading “there is still time,” that really got me. What a powerful message of queer resilience and futurity—that it’s never too late: for transition, for queer becoming, for a life that doesn’t suffocate you into nothingness. Honestly, those are some of the most hopeful words I can imagine. Even within the uncertain space where the film leaves us, Owen still has time, and the Pink Opaque is always out there, waiting on the horizon.
Though all five of these stories are pretty different from one another—and from the ones in Amplitudes, too—they all share that resonating belief in queer and trans futurity, queer and trans potentiality.
Always, so long as you’re alive: there is still time.[end-mark]
Buy the Book
Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity
edited by Lee Mandelo
Twenty-two speculative stories that explore the vast potentialities of our queer and trans futures.
Buy Book
Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity
edited by Lee Mandelo
Twenty-two speculative stories that explore the vast potentialities of our queer and trans futures.
Twenty-two speculative stories that explore the vast potentialities of our queer and trans futures.
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The post What If Things Were Different? — Five Works of Queer and Trans Futurity appeared first on Reactor.
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