Queer Coded Covers

It’s the 1950s and you walk into a gas station or pharmacy and nose through their paperbacks, and you are looking for something in particular. You are looking for those scantily clad ladies in erotic positions on covers. You are looking for queer coded covers.

I remember the first queer coded covers I read in text: Ann Bannon’s 1950s Odd Girl Out and I Am a Woman from the Beebo Brinker Chronicles. I was a college student in Florida and a professor recommended them to me as pulp classics. In my life growing up, I had not really had access to queer literature nor a wealth of knowledge about it. These texts delivered a complicated and nuanced picture of queer identities and relationships.

To think that we might go back to the 1950s under Project 2025 and have to code queer texts by their covers—worse, that in states like Florida they are already being likened to pornography and banned and removed from libraries. Could it really be possible that educators and librarians who practice inclusivity become registered as sex offenders? It sounds dystopic.

I think of my own books—one with its queer subtext, the other very clearly dealing with transition and identity—and reflect upon the very nature of seeking a publisher for the latter, even after receiving a mention in the John Rezmerski Memorial Manuscript Competition. Due to it being an election year and the over 1200 anti-trans bills introduced between 2023-2024 so far, I could not wait for a publisher to decide now was the time for my book Bodies in Transition. Now was the time for the fierce urgency of the now, as Dr. King once said.

I (still) struggled with publishing through Amazon KDP due to the hierarchies in academia but reminded myself that self-publishing has often been the outlet for the marginalized—a place to foster more radical work.