Writing Queer Love Stories That Feel Real

I get asked a version of this question a lot: how do you write queer love stories that feel real? Not performative. Not “issue of the week.” Not trauma porn dressed up as representation. But genuinely, recognisably, achingly real.

I don’t think there’s a formula. But I do think there are principles I come back to every time I sit down to write, and I want to share them — partly because I think they’re useful for other writers, and partly because I think readers deserve to know what goes into the stories they trust with their hearts.

Lead With the Love Story, Not the Identity

The single most important shift I made as a writer was deciding that my characters’ queerness would be a fact of their lives, not the plot of their lives. Their identity isn’t the conflict. It’s the context.

That doesn’t mean homophobia doesn’t exist in my books — it does, because pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. But it means the central question of the story is never “can two men love each other?” The answer to that is obviously yes. The question is: can these two men, with these specific fears and desires and histories, find their way to each other?

That specificity is what makes a love story feel real. Not the gender of the characters, but the particularity of their connection.

Write the Joy

I think there’s been a slow but important shift in queer fiction away from suffering as the price of admission. For a long time, queer stories were expected to earn their existence through pain — through coming out trauma, rejection, violence, tragic endings. And those stories matter. They’re real and they deserve to be told.

But so do the stories where queer people are happy. Where they fall in love and it’s complicated and messy and beautiful, and the complication isn’t because they’re queer. Where the happy ending isn’t a miracle — it’s just what happens when two people do the brave, terrifying work of choosing each other.

In the Stolen Romance series, I wanted joy to be present even in the hardest moments. The humour between characters. The delight of discovery. The specific giddy ridiculousness of being so attracted to someone that you temporarily lose the ability to form sentences. That’s real queer experience too, and it belongs on the page.

Earn the Intimacy

One of the things I feel strongly about in writing romance — queer or otherwise — is that intimate scenes should be an extension of character, not a departure from it. The way two people are together physically should tell you something about who they are and where they are in their relationship.

For MM romance specifically, I think it matters that these scenes feel considered rather than performative. They should reflect the actual tenderness, awkwardness, communication, and vulnerability of real intimacy between real people. Not choreography. Connection.

Listen More Than You Assume

Every queer person’s experience is different. Full stop. The worst thing a writer can do is assume that their own experience (or their research) represents the universal queer experience. It doesn’t exist.

What does exist is specificity. A particular character, in a particular time and place, navigating a particular version of love and identity. The more specific you are, the more universal the story feels — because readers connect to emotional truth, not demographic checkboxes.

Why It Matters

We’re living in a moment where LGBTQ+ stories are more visible than ever and simultaneously more contested than ever. Writing queer love stories that feel real isn’t just a craft goal — it’s an act of insistence. It says: these loves are as complicated, as beautiful, as worthy of a six-hundred-page saga as any other.

That’s why I write what I write. Not to represent a community (no single book can do that) but to tell the truest love story I can, and to trust that the truth of it will find the people who need it.

A. B. Jackson is an LGBTQ+ rockstar romance author. The Stolen Romance series is available in English and Spanish. Start with the free prequel novella, Stolen Nights, at abjackson.com.