Poems about LGBTQ celebrate the diversity and resilience of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities. These verses embrace themes of love, acceptance, and the fight for equality and human rights.
Through powerful language, both non-queer and queer poets advocate for LGBTQIA rights and challenge gender and identity-based prejudice and discrimination. These poems may also explore the struggles and triumphs of LGBTQ people and activists. They highlight the fight for social justice and the ongoing journey towards a more inclusive and accepting world.
The ‘Hymn to Aphrodite’ by Sappho is an ancient lyric in which Sappho begs for Aphrodite’s help in managing her turbulent love life.
Sappho is the hero of LGBTQ poetry, and she is proof that lesbian poetry was already sort of a genre in 700 BCE. This is even more interesting in this poem, as literary critics and manuscript specialists, possibly unintentionally, edited out the fact that Sappho was talking about winning the affections of a woman, not a man.
‘Lullaby’ by W.H. Auden describes the love that one speaker has for his imperfect “beloved” and how that love will be enough to content them both.
W. H. Auden was a 20th-century Anglo-American poet who lived as an openly gay man after moving to America in 1939. His poem (sometimes known by its first line: “Lay your sleeping head, my love”) is a tender nocturne addressed to a lover. The poem, written in 1937, celebrates an intimate moment of peace between two people in love, removed from the judgments of the outside world.
In Olga Broumas’s ‘Calypso,’ the speaker conjures up a dreamy world, imagining sensual women to fulfill her sexual desires.
LGBTQ identity is central in the poem, affirming the speaker's lesbian identity as natural and inherent. The poem portrays lesbian identity as a distinct and valid expression of human sexuality. Through the speaker's assertion of her desires and experiences, the poem establishes LGBTQ identity within a supportive and inclusive framework. The closing lines emphasize that the women are together not due to external factors like trauma but because of their inherent sexuality and desire for companionship. The explicit and unapologetic portrayal of lesbian desire makes lesbianism visible while defying orthodox societal norms.
In ‘The Aureole,’ Finney crafts a poetic tapestry, exploring self-discovery, resilience, and desire with vivid imagery and profound introspection.
This piece is a celebration of LGBTQ love. It is a love poem that beautifully describes the passion of an intimate moment. It explores a lover’s gaze and presence. The poem also suggests their connection is the first time the speaker has ever felt “endless.” The piece explores the nature of identity, self-discovery, and transformation.
I stop my hand midair.
If I touch her there everything about me will be true.
The New World discovered without pick or ax.
I will be what Brenda Jones was stoned for in 1969.
‘Who Said It Was Simple’ by Audre Lorde is a powerful poem about the inequalities in various civil rights movements during the poet’s lifetime.
This moving poem was published in From A Land Where Other People Live in 1973. It touches on Lorde’s identity and her role within the Black and LGBTQ communities. She expresses a concern for “which me will survive / all these liberations” as she navigates a world in which she is bound “by [her] mirror / as well as [her] bed.” Lorde was also attempting to address those who identify with one group but continue to oppress another.
‘Because I Liked You Better’ by A. E. Housman is a love poem that taps on the theme of unrequited love. Like his “A Shropshire Lad” poems, it also touches on the theme of death.
A. E. Housman was an English poet and scholar who lived a largely closeted life in Victorian and Edwardian times. This piece was published posthumously in 1936, as Housman did not dare print it during his lifetime. The poem reads as a bittersweet confession to a male friend he loved deeply – widely understood to be Moses Jackson, who could not return his affection. With restrained emotion, Housman’s speaker agrees to give up chasing the one we love because we know they can never return our love.
‘One Girl’ by Sappho is a beautiful and moving poem. In the two short stanzas, readers can explore imagery Sappho relates to marriage and the loss of freedom for a young woman.
Sappho, the famed lesbian poet from the island of Lesbos, Greece, lived from 630–570 BCE. This is one of several poems she wrote dedicated to a female love interest. Sappho’s language and imagery skills are on display in this piece, as she paints a detailed picture of the negative change resulting from a woman's willing or unwilling union with someone in marriage.
Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough,
A-top on the topmost twig, which the pluckers forgot, somehow,—
Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.
Lorde’s ‘A Litany for Survival’ navigates the survival of the marginalized, emphasizing the crucial power of speaking out.
This piece portrays the trials of those who live under the shadows of a society that does not want to acknowledge them. It speaks on their fears and tells them not to be afraid of speaking up, for stating their minds will lead to positive change. The population acknowledged in the poem are marginalized groups.
Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market,’ narrates the fantastical tale of Laura and Lizzie, delving into sin, redemption, and sisterhood.
Though the poem does not explore same-sex relationships directly, it subtly alludes to homosexuality, particularly in the climax scene when Lizzie offers her body to Laura to save her life. Interestingly, the sisters' encounter with the goblins also has sexual undertones and leads to a curse and assault, while the union between Laura and Lizzie, carrying homoerotic undertones, is passionate, loving, and emotional, offering an antidote to that curse; thus, while working within the bounds of strict Victorian moral constraints, the poem subtly provides a space for alternate interpretations including lesbian sexuality over heterosexual relationship.
‘My Mother Would Be a Falconress’ by Robert Duncan explores a son and mother’s relationship through the lens of a falcon breaking free from his handler.
While this piece is not explicitly a LGBTQ+ poem, it does contain a subtext of queerness. Duncan was one of the earliest prominent poets to speak about and publish writing about being a gay man in America, and many of his personal experiences leak into his lyric poetry.
My mother would be a falconress,
And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist,
would fly to bring back
from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize,
Duffy’s ‘Warming Her Pearls’ explores the restrained lesbian desire of a maid for her mistress through the pearls of the mistress’s necklace.
Carol Ann Duffy is the most celebrated contemporary poet of the UK and was the first openly lesbian poet laureate, bringing LGBTQ concerns, perspective, voice, and visibility to the mainstream. This piece is among Duffy's earliest poems, wherein she explores queer desire, giving voice to the silenced undercurrents like a possibility of homosexual desire amid women in the class-conscious Victorian era. Nevertheless, openly being lesbian and exploring queer desire and perspective, Duffy represents and creates a space for marginalized LGBTQ identities.
Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress
bids me wear them, warm them, until evening
when I'll brush her hair. At six, I place them
round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,
‘I Sing the Body Electric’ by Walt Whitman is one of the poet’s well-known and celebrated early poems. It was published in 1855, in the first edition of Leaves of Grass.
This piece by Walt Whitman is one of the poet’s well-known and celebrated early poems. It was published in 1855 in the first edition of Leaves of Grass. In this poem, Whitman explores the body as a whole and celebrates the glories of existence and the interconnectedness of the body, soul, and people, irrespective of differences.
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Belle, as Mrs Beast, corrects the narrative of her story as well as other women’s stories in this masterful poem by Carol Ann Duffy.
As a lesbian woman herself, Carol Ann Duffy demonstrates the power women possess, particularly when they are unburdened by men. While most of the characters featured in this poem are heterosexual, as determined by their pre-existing stories, Duffy features a lesbian woman as having the most power. This is demonstrated as she wins a high-stakes poker game with a Queen of Spades and an Ace of Spades, which Duffy highlights as yonic symbols. She wins through inherent female power and sexuality.
These myths going round, these legends, fairytales,
‘The Lyric in a Time of War’ by Eloise Klein Healy is a poem about war, writing, and artistic cconnection throughout time. The poem is dedicated to how writing can create a connection between two people over time and space.
This poem is dedicated to Sappho, the Greek poet from the island of Lesbos considered to be the first lesbian poet. The speaker uses repetition to ask that she be “found loving” and that her music be “found wanting.” Her poetry, she knows, is “wanting / in comparison” to Sappho’s, but she hopes she will be as loving and feel a connection between the two across time.
‘The Anactoria Poem’ is a widely read love poem in which Sappho uses the story of Helen of Troy to speak on the nature of beauty.
While there is nothing sexually explicit or even definitively romantic about the relationship between the speaker and Anactoria in this poem, countless readers have used it as evidence for Sappho's queerness. It is certainly true that the depth of feeling expressed for Anactoria is similar to that expressed for romantic partners in other works of literature.
Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers,
others call a fleet the most beautiful of
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it's what-
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