Queer Joy Is Real, But Why Must We Always Prove It Through Pain?
The curtain always rises the same way. A queer child learns to hide their laughter. A queer lover pack memories in silence. A trans woman walks home slower than she speaks. The world applauds when we cry. The world listens when we bleed. But when we laugh, it asks why.
The world applauds when we cry. The world listens when we bleed. But when we laugh, it asks why.
This is nothing new. It’s not even hidden. The pain of queer people has always been more “marketable” than their joy. Suffering becomes the story that gets published. Pain is the ticket to attention. No one asks how you love unless they’ve first heard how you were broken.
There’s something unsettling about how queer stories are curated in literature, in cinema, and in media. Not because pain is dishonest, but because joy is treated as though it needs permission. As if it must first be purified by sorrow before it can be taken seriously. As if queer joy must crawl through fire before it can be called real.
We’re told to be honest. To “tell our truth.” But only if it ends in tragedy. Only if it follows the narrative arc the world already knows. The queer character must die. The queer couple must part. The queer child must be punished before they’re allowed to exist.
Think about the stories we call brave: Moonlight (2016). The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018). Blue is the Warmest Color (2013). They are stunning. And they ache. But they also echo the same rhythm—queer love, no matter how beautiful, is always temporary. Always doomed. Always proof of suffering rather than celebration.
The stories we don’t tell speak just as loudly. Where are the films where a queer woman grows old in her garden without becoming a ghost? The books where a trans man teaches his nephew to swim without it turning into a confession? The series where nonbinary characters flirt at a party without having to explain their pronouns?
Joy is not decorative. It’s not the reward after the struggle. It’s a core texture of queer life—just as central, just as urgent, as grief.
Also read: ‘All of Us Strangers’ Buys Into Tropes of Tragic Queer Lives–But There Is Still Hope In It
Joy as resistance, not reward
José Esteban Muñoz wrote in Cruising Utopia (2009) that queerness is a horizon—a forward glance, a dream in progress. He rejected the idea that queerness must always be reactive to oppression. He saw it as imaginative, alive, and joyful.
And yet the present still clings to its tragedies. Pain is legible, but joy is doubted. People believe your queerness more when you’re miserable. They trust it more when you’re sad. The laughter of queer people is seen as dangerous—as if happiness means forgetting the laws that threaten us, the families that silence us, the institutions that punish us for living outside the script.
But queer joy is not silence. It’s not erasure. It’s not the opposite of resistance. It’s the form resistance sometimes takes when fists are tired, when survival feels too small a word.
Queer joy can look like a dinner table. A couch with bad upholstery. A grocery list with your name on it. Two hands washing dishes in a sink untainted by shame. A group chat that always says good morning. Drag queens laughing backstage. Lovers building furniture while hungover.
Also read: From Normalising Queer Love to Queer Joy: Why Heartstopper is Gen Z’s Defining Publishing Phenomenon
All of it matters.
Sara Ahmed, in The Promise of Happiness (2010), writes about how happiness is often aligned with obedience. The “good life” is defined by conformity to norms. Deviate, and your happiness becomes suspect. Queer people are asked to prove their pain but apologize for their pleasure—to explain their identities through wounds but never through ease.
There’s no shortage of pain in queer life. Laws still criminalize desire. Workplaces still punish difference. Families still cut ties. But when stories dwell only on the violence, they create archives that flatten. They teach queer youth that joy must be earned, that you have to survive something terrible before you can want something soft.
This logic isn’t just cruel, it’s dangerous. It tells us happiness is indulgent. That stability is assimilation, and hat care is somehow less “real” than loss. It turns the ordinary into the impossible.
But queer joy is not exceptional. It’s everywhere and it’s not a fantasy. It’s a frequency—often quiet, often unfilmed, but deeply real.
Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) offers moments of that softness—not by avoiding pain, but by letting joy exist alongside it. James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) does the same. Even in longing, even in loss, these stories refuse the binary between grief and grace.
But we need more than longing and resilience. We need stories that start with love and stay there. Queer stories where nothing explodes. Where no one dies. Where the biggest conflict is which dog to adopt. Stories about being boring. About being late. About being adored.
Films like Rafiki (2018) offer glimpses of this—a tender, colorful queer love story from Kenya, banned in its own country not because of its sex, but because of its hope. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) dares to let women look at each other without flinching, without shame, without apologizing before touching.
These are not naive stories. They’re intentional. They’re deliberate refusals to let queer people exist only as metaphors for suffering. They allow us to be whole. They allow us to want more than survival.
And survival is not the same as living. Living means killing houseplants, sending memes at 2 a.m., baking cookies badly, forgetting to call back, and showing up anyway. Joy doesn’t have to be grand to be true. It only needs to be ours.
We can’t wait for permission to tell these stories. We can’t wait until the world is safe, until the laws change, until the cameras are kinder. The archive is being written now. The future is being shaped now. If we don’t make space for joy, others will define queer life for us—forever.
This is not a call to ignore pain. Pain will remain, but it should not be the only thing that makes us visible. It should not be the currency we use to buy recognition. We are not only what hurts us.
Also read: Why LGBTQ+ Audiences Love Eurovision
Audre Lorde said it best: Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation. And that is an act of political warfare. To care is to resist. To dance is to speak. To kiss is to build. To love is to refuse disappearance.
Let us refuse. Let’s write stories where queer teens fall asleep before the credits roll. Let’s film scenes where no one cries. Let’s publish poems about breakfast. Let’s build futures that begin with delight.
Queer joy is not a footnote. Not a gift. Not the “other side” of pain. It is a language of its own—one that must be spoken now.
And it doesn’t owe the world a single explanation.
