If you’d told me last year that my obsession this year would be a gay hockey romance, I’d have thought you were crazy. Yet, like the rest of the planet, I went a bit gaga for the streaming series Heated Rivalry—binge-watching the show on HBO Max, obsessively texting friends about it, following the ubiquitous social media posts of its stars, Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams. I’ve yet to read the novels by Rachel Reid that inspired the show, but what better project to occupy me during the waning days of summer?

The teenage me would have been even more surprised by the mainstream success of a steamy LGBTQ+ romance. When I was growing up in the 1980s, queer narratives were ghettoized. Queer characters in those days of AIDS hysteria and rampant homophobia were rarely afforded happily-ever-afters—or even the happy-for-now enjoyed by Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander at the end of Heated Rivalry’s Season 1.

Novelist Cat Sebastian, who appears on the cover of this special Romance Issue, was a romance reader before she became a romance writer, but she encountered only straight characters in the historicals she devoured when her kids were small. “In most of those books there wasn’t even the faintest suspicion of queerness,” she tells contributor Kerry Winfrey in the cover story. Then she discovered the work of KJ Charles, who put same-sex desire on the front burner in her period novels; why couldn’t Sebastian, who identifies as queer, write books that did the same? She made her name with a string of acclaimed historical romances before she wrote Star Shipped—a contemporary romance between the male co-stars of a science fiction TV show—published by Avon/HarperCollins in March.

Thanks to writers like Reid, Charles, and Sebastian, the subgenre of LGBTQ+ romance is blossoming. Here are a few that have caught my eye in recent months:

How To Fake It in Society by KJ Charles (Bramble Books, April 28): “Charles has been a consistently excellent writer of queer historical romance for years,” notes our reviewer, “and this one more than meets her own high standards.” An English painter who has come into an inheritance falls for a con man posing as a French count in this “suspenseful and colorful gay Regency romance,” which received a Kirkus star. 

Dearly Departed by Chip Pons (Putnam, June 16): If the fops of Regency England aren’t your cup of tea, how about a queer paranormal romance? Here a mortal florist gets romantically involved with Hades, King of the Underworld, now retired and working as a funeral home director under the name Hayden Harlow. Our starred review calls it “tender and sexy.”

You x Me: A Series of Modern Entanglements by Ayla Vejdani (Generous Press, May 26): This collection of “six braided Sapphic love stories” is “ideal for fans of The L Word: Generation Q and the latest iteration of Queer as Folk,” says our reviewer. An unorthodox book from a new indie press that highlights BIPOC, queer, and disabled voices, it shows just how malleable—and robust—the romance genre is. Love stories for all!

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.