It’s summer, Pride parades are happening across the country, and there’s a blockbuster list of queer reads to keep you busy on the beach. However, there’s a distinct difference in tone between many big queer releases and the tone which Pride carries. “These books honour the journeys of LGBTQ+ individuals and the movement for love, acceptance and equality for all,” reads Penguin Random House’s Pride Book List; “we’ve compiled a fabulous selection of fiction celebrating a diverse range of LGBTQ+ experiences,” gushes the Booker Library’s 2023 Pride summer feature. Yet when I look at my favourite queer books of the year, they tend to be about gays being miserable, messy or murderous, from violent, paranoid Dolly in Eliza Clark’s Penance to disturbed, parasite-obsessed Vanya in Alison Rumfitt’s upcoming Brainwyrms. Love? Acceptance? Equality? These characters want nothing so magnanimous; Dolly literally wants to recreate hell on earth.

Bright and life-affirming gay books are necessary, for sure – particularly for younger queers – but we are also in a golden era of bad gays, encapsulated by Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey’s podcast and book of the same name, where they profile “evil and complicated queers in history” from Cressida Dick to Jeffrey Dahmer. “Gay life has broken through into mainstream culture, but largely for a sympathetic straight audience, and discussions tend to be oriented outwards,” notes Huw Lemmey in an interview for The Nation; “when we started Bad Gays, other gays were our audience.” The presence of messy gays, awful gays, abusive gays, even fascist or killer gays, in a book usually means that said book is by us and for us; it isn’t prostrating itself before a straight reader, asking to be loved. Sympathy, like a cloying dessert, is best had in small doses.

So, what’s so important about gays behaving badly? There are various things that bad gays in fiction can accomplish: one is a certain revolutionary queer spirit. In Samantha Allen’s Patricia Wants to Cuddle, recently released in paperback, the cast and crew of a Bachelor-esque show called The Catch are asked to engage in strange forms of queer intimacy, at complete odds with the ruthless heterosexual calculations of the show. Those who refuse – and most do – meet a… dramatic fate, and one that deliberately feels a little unfair; the straight characters are all drawn sympathetically, even at their worst. But that unfairness is proportionate: like in most horror, the Catch team have come to a place that they do not understand and where they are not welcome, and expect it to obey their own laws. If it is to have any character or political import at all, queerness must, at times, be hostile territory. (Hence the substantial opposition to Pride parades that are proudly ‘inclusive’ towards cops and oil companies.) Desire has always been violently, one-sidedly policed; the pissed-off gay landscape of Patricia Wants to Cuddle sidesteps morality in favour of wild catharsis, meeting vast structural violence with physical violence.

It’s relatively easy to see Patricia Wants to Cuddle’s bad-gay spirit as part of an important queer project, even if (especially if) it might scare some suburban parents. But what about books like Penance? What’s important about having bisexual murderers in the canon – and not sexy, enticing bisexual murderers, but characters who are genuinely frightening and disturbed?

In Penance, an unscrupulous true-crime journalist is profiling the horrific murder of a 16-year-old girl, Joni, by three other teenage girls in a sleepy seaside town. Joni is queer, as is the ringleader of the three murderers; this plays into the reasons for Joni’s murder, and plays into how the characters interact with and conflict with each other, but ultimately it is also an engine of the book’s horror – two of the few queers in a small town should supposedly make friends, and yet one tortures the other. Is it sexual jealousy? Does Dolly target Joni because she seems, in some ways, like a mirror of herself – someone close enough to evoke the hell she’s already in? Does Joni go with Dolly because she vaguely trusts that their joint queerness makes them allies?

“For characters to have real interiority, they sometimes have to be shitty, selfish people”

The straight journalist in Penance is relatively oblivious to these questions, but Clark and her readers aren’t, and seeing gays harm each other evokes uncomfortable, rich questions about identity, attachment, and community: the extent to which being queer cannot reliably make us love or protect each other, and how queer attachments in a homophobic world are not always a haven, but can turn abusive and terrifying. It might seem like this isn’t a priority to talk about, given the current virulent right-wing backlash against queer and trans people, but when all you have is your community, abuse and isolation from other people within your community becomes even scarier and harder to see, because those people are all you have. Intra-gay horror is less scary and less important when we’re in bright, gay-accepting times – if those times have ever really existed.

For characters to have real interiority, they sometimes have to be shitty, selfish people: take the richly imagined gay couples in Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans, who are so often terrible boyfriends to each other because of trauma, pressure or flailing self-protective impulses, inflicting casual cruelty as they try to keep themselves whole. Or take the central couple of Nicola Dinan’s Bellies, both of whom love each other and are trying their best, and both of whom seriously hurt each other. The warmth and intimacy of these books are built on their characters’ soft-bellied vulnerability and desire, which is shielded by a vast array of emotional attacks and defenses. Just as queer cattiness codes its own in-group intimacy, depicting bad gay boyfriends and selfish trans girlfriends allows its own kinds of fictional intimacy: we get the gift of real, full, hurt people, scrabbling for the things they want, paralysed by the desires they can hardly sate.

As we move through the remaining Pride celebrations of the summer, let us celebrate 2023’s vicious gay fiction. It might even lead us to a better, more sharp-eyed queer optimism.