How Reading Queer Smut Helps Me Feel Queer in My Straight-Passing Relationship

It’s not my no-show socks, criminally over-plucked brows, or enduring affinity for The Killers that's the most millennial thing about me. Bar none, that superlative belongs to the fact that Tumblr erotica was my queer awakening.If Tumblr’s notorious, oh-so-sanitizing adult content ban in December 2018 has left you unfamiliar with the sheer horniness of the platform in its heyday, know this: At one point in time, Tumblr was something of a queer smut mecca.What is queer smut, exactly? “It’s material that contains very explicit non-heterosexual sexual acts with the intent of arousing and exciting the reader,” Philadelphia-based ASSECT-certified sex therapist and clinical licensed social worker Melanie Greenberg, LCSW, CST, MEd, founder of Pulling Threads Therapy, tells Cosmopolitan. In the vein of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who famously said about porn, “I know it when I see it,” queer smut is arguably something you just know when you read it (or otherwise consume it).By that admittedly elusive definition, Tumblr was overflowing with the stuff. Erotic prose, very, well, vaginal poetry, Glee fanfiction, and lesbionic GIFs all lived alongside one another on dashboards like mine.But while the Tumblr of my youth may be gone, horny queer storytelling certainly isn't: United States print sales of romance novels doubled between 2021 and 2025, with LGBTQIA+ specific romance and fiction reaching an all-time high. Meanwhile, online Archive of Our Own (AO3), one of the internet’s biggest repositories for fanfiction, averages around 125 million page views per day. (When it is up and running!! Don’t get me started!!)And just as the queer smut of Tumblr helped me understand something about myself years ago, today's spicy stories can do the same. “Queer smut continues to offer a safe and contained way to explore your sexuality and gender, fight queer imposter syndrome, and feel more connected with the queer community,” Greenberg tells Cosmopolitan.The six readers I talked to have utilized queer smut to do all of that, and then some:“It Helped Me Understand Who I Am”Figuring out that you’re queer can be tricky when you don't know what queerness is, or don't see possibilities that resonate with you reflected anywhere around you. “Representation matters because it shows us what is possible,” says Greenberg. And when representation is limited—whether in mainstream media or your local community—the relationships and worlds within smut can expose queer and questioning readers to sexual possibilities they didn't previously know existed.That was the case for Sydney, 30, of Toronto, Canada: “I grew up in a pretty small town, where I was the only person I knew who was queer.” There were no out and proud gay people, and gayness wasn’t something she had ever heard anyone talk about, nor could she seek it out at local bookstores. “I couldn't walk into an Indigo or a Barnes and Noble and find a physical book that had any stories I could see myself in,” she says.But the smutty, queer fanfiction Sydney found online about Grey’s Anatomy and The Devil Wears Prada offered exactly that. In fact, that’s literally where she learned possible terms for her sexuality. “I initially began identifying as a lesbian because this was the language in the stories that I was reading at the time,” she tells Cosmopolitan. Nearly two decades after her initiation into queer smut, Sydney prefers other terms for her sexuality. Still, she says, “I literally see queer smut as a core pillar of my sexuality.”Megan Ixim, 35, of Los Angeles, California, similarly found queer smut before she had the language to describe her own sexuality. “I first found queer smut at a time when I didn’t know how to identify, but it offered me a place to explore and become comfortable with my bisexuality,” she tells Cosmopolitan.“It Connects Me to My Queerness”These days, more than two decades after her initial foray, queer smut continues to support Ixim’s sexual well-being, but differently: “As a bisexual woman in a heteronormative-looking, committed partnership, queer smut remains a special place for me,” she tells Cosmopolitan. “It allows me to really tap into that energy. Be a part of the conversation. Be a part of those worlds.”Rachel, 30, of California shares a similar sentiment: “As someone who has been in primarily straight-presenting, monogamous relationships, and who lives in a conservative part of California where there are limited queer events, reading queer smut is my way of exploring and validating that part of my sexuality.” In particular, Rachel seeks out characters who are bisexual and who, over the course of the story, have relationships with people of different genders. “I genuinely feel much more security and surety in my bisexuality after finishing a story like that,” she says.But you don't need to be in a relationship that reads as straight—or even a monogamous one—to find that queer smut offers access to something your sex life doesn't. Jess, 28, of Portland, Maine, is polyamorous and has two loving partners of different genders, and leans on Heated Rivalry and Law & Order fanfiction to enjoy sexual fantasies they’ve learned are best kept as fantasy fodder.“I always think that group sex with people of different genders is the Ultimate Bisexual Experience,” she says. The thing is, “ I don’t actually like threesomes or group sex in real life… it’s overstimulating.”Queer smut, then, allows her to explore the so-called bisexual splendor of a threesome—with Ilya, Shane, Rose no less—all without the sensory overload that makes it less enjoyable in practice than on the page. “It's hot and deeply affirming for me to get to explore them on the page,” she says.“Queer Smut Is a Playground for Gender, Too” Greenberg says that most smut readers fall into one of two camps: “There are readers who consume smut on the cuck chair, meaning they like to picture themselves outside of the scene watching the people within the pages,” she says. And then there are other readers who like to imagine themselves as one of the characters. The latter “can be a very safe and contained way to explore your gender, pronouns, or identity,” she says.Indeed, Carly S., 39, of New York City, tells Cosmopolitan that queer smut has given her room to experiment with her gender in ways that feel affirming, creative, and low-stakes. “I’m more non-binary, but I present very femme, and like that I present femme. I don’t have any real interest in changing the way I dress, going on hormones, having surgery, or really changing how I present in my everyday life,” she says. But queer smut lets her put herself into roles, bodies, and sexual situations she doesn't necessarily want to explore IRL but enjoys inhabiting in fantasy.“Through queer smut, I can imagine spending a night being more butch, or what it would be like to have a factory-installed penis for the night,” she says. “Even putting myself into stories as a very feminine trans woman who still has a penis has been really exciting because I get to keep the femininity that feels like me while exploring this completely different relationship with my body.”Meanwhile, Ray, 18, of North Carolina, who is gender-fluid, shares that reading smut by trans authors and about trans characters has helped them figure out which words feel good when referring to their own anatomy—and which decidedly don't. “It’s given me language,” they say. “I've learned, for instance, that I prefer to use ‘clit/dick’ interchangeably, and not ‘pussy’ to refer to my cunt/front hole.”All in all, queer smut can teach you quite a bit about yourself while revving your engine. So while Tumblr is no longer serving up the goods, luckily there are still plenty of places—and counting—to keep reading.