Where are the queer divorce stories?

This summer marks the twentieth anniversary of the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada—and the tenth anniversary of my divorce. When my marriage ended, I felt like an outlier. I only knew one other queer divorced person, and my experiences were absent from popular culture. Macklemore’s ode to same-sex marriage had recently gone platinum, but divorce seemed like something only straight people did. A decade later, I’m surprised by how little has changed.

Divorce is having a cultural moment, largely driven by women utterly fed up with being married to men. Divorce memoirs by authors like Leslie Jamison, Scaachi Koul, Lyz Lenz and Maggie Smith are national bestsellers. One far-right commentator recently referred to Lenz’s book This American Ex-Wife and Miranda July’s novel All Fours as “divorce porn.” Of these recent bestsellers, only July’s novel includes queer characters and plotlines. It’s a reflection of wider gaps in the divorce-writing landscape, where the majority of books are written by straight women about divorcing men. Where’s the divorce porn for the rest of us?

Like me, Pittsburgh-based writer (and fellow queer divorced person) Nico K Hall was struck by the absence of queer and trans divorce stories. It’s what prompted them to co-edit Autostraddle’s Divorce Week series with writer Carmen Phillips in 2024. The 16 articles, launched just in time for Valentine’s Day, covered everything from how to banish your ex with witchcraft to advice on throwing a divorce party for your bestie. It also featured personal stories from Hall and other divorced queer writers, a roundup of readers’ divorce horror stories and an interview with a queer divorce doula.

“Readers found it extremely validating to have their experiences reflected back at them,” Hall tells me. “People were itching to tell their story and to be seen.” They also received feedback from a few readers asking why the series focused on divorce instead of looking more broadly at queer and trans breakups. “What’s so different about divorce?,” the comments seemed to ask. Having been through a divorce, Hall is acutely aware of how difficult it can be to disentangle yourself from the legally binding status of marriage, as well as from its social and symbolic meanings. Hall and Phillips wanted to dig into what it’s like for queer and trans people who have to interact with an oppressive legal system to exit a relationship.

When I got married in my early thirties, I approached it from a queer feminist lens, naively assuming I could choose only the aspects of matrimony I decided were applicable to me. I wasn’t so hot on monogamy, but I liked the idea of me and my spouse-to-be pledging our love and commitment in front of our family and friends. I didn’t want my partner barred from visiting me in the hospital or blocked from acting as my decision-maker in a health crisis. Marriage seemed like insurance against the whims of homophobic authority figures.

All of this might have been true, but it’s also true that I didn’t fully understand marriage as a legal institution until I had to disentangle myself from one. As Karl Dunn, an author and divorced gay man, said in a 2024 interview on the Mental Health Much? podcast, “The thing people don’t tell you about marriage is, it’s a contract. You’ve signed away ownership of your relationship to the government.”

My previous breakups were hard, but at least my exes and I had control over how we did it. When I left my marriage, my spouse and I had to follow rules set by the government for more than a year before we were even allowed to apply for a divorce. The process involved lawyers, a judge and an astonishing amount of paperwork. It was exhausting, expensive and emotionally draining. It was also isolating. I had supportive friends, but I didn’t have a community of peers to commiserate with who were going through the same thing.

Los Angeles-based psychotherapist and writer Morty Diamond hosts To the End, a free weekly virtual salon for trans, queer, intersex and non-binary people going through divorce and romantic breakups. He created the peer support space after his own divorce in 2020. “It was a breakthrough for me to listen to stories from queer and trans folks that were so similar to mine,” Diamond says. Participants come to the salon wanting to be witnessed and to feel less alone, he says. “They need to know that there are other people going through this too.”

Participants have shared heartbreaking stories about navigating child custody battles, intimate partner violence and relationships with transphobic ex-spouses. The weekly Zoom gathering gives them access to a supportive community where they can express feelings of grief, rage, guilt and shame and talk with others going through similar experiences. It’s a safe space to talk about failure, which Diamond says is a theme that comes up a lot.

Some participants fear divorce will confirm every homophobic assumption their families of origin hold about why their relationships aren’t real or built to last. Others feel like they are failing their communities by divorcing, and fear it will sever their access to vital friendships and LGBTQ2S+ community spaces. In the current political climate, many people also fear their divorces will be weaponized as part of far-right attacks on marriage equality.

“People don’t look at straight relationships when they fail and say, ‘See …!’” Aaron Hoy, an associate professor who studies close relationships at Minnesota State University, Mankato, says. “Yet as queer people, our relationships are so often read as speaking for others beyond us.” Hoy, a queer sociologist who has researched same-sex divorce, describes marriage as a symbolically meaningful institution that holds significant cultural power, especially for communities whose relationships have been stigmatized as wrong, sinful or incommensurate with so-called family values.

“We got to marriage equality by trumpeting the values of monogamy and lifelong commitment,” Hoy says. Even after winning the right to marriage, “there’s so much anxious, conscious worry about how others will see our relationships.” This can put pressure on LGBTQ2S+ people to act like our relationships are proof of something larger than two people figuring out if they can stay together. I remember feeling ashamed when my own marriage ended just three years after making such a public declaration of our love and commitment. We were supposed to be the happily-ever-after at the end of the story, not its sad epilogue.

Hoy started researching same-sex divorce in 2016, soon after the U.S. legalized marriage equality. He wanted to understand what was distinct about our divorce experiences. It was a countercultural instinct at a time when same-sex marriage supporters were rallying under the banner of “Love is love!” Many of the LGBTQ2S+ organizations he reached out to for help in promoting his study refused to share the call for participants, with some even calling his research anti-gay. Yet to Hoy, sharing our divorce stories—the ones some community members were inclined to hide—seems like a very queer thing to do.

Nico K Hall’s experiences have shown them that some queer and trans people are hungry to put down the facade. “We’re often our least favourite selves when going through a divorce,” Hall tells me. “It’s lonely to not see this reflected in the narratives around us.” There is a lot of great, messy, vulnerable writing by queer and trans people out there, Hall says, but we don’t tend to foreground these qualities in our divorce writing, if we write about them at all. Queer divorce stories often seem to follow a healing arc: how I got over the pain, how I transformed in the process, what I learned, who I am now. Perhaps we feel so much pressure to perform resilience that it doesn’t feel safe to reveal the scars we sustained, or inflicted on others, along the way.

Hall attributes this gap to queer and trans people’s reluctance to share our messiest and most painful divorce stories. There are lots of things that can get in the way of this, like navigating the ethical complexities and emotional fallout of writing about an ex, or needing to stay silent to protect yourself or your kids from someone you might still be legally and financially entangled with. There’s also the fact of not wanting to put our worst selves on display for an audience that could include friends, family, former in-laws, coworkers and random haters. This is the first time in 10 years I’ve written publicly about my divorce and I’m still hesitant to talk about the hardest parts. Maybe we’d all feel braver if we thought of breaking our silence around divorce as an act of care. “Sharing our stories allows us to have grace for ourselves if we’ve gone through a divorce or are going through it,” Hall says. “It might help you understand where your ex-partner is coming from,” they say, and mitigate against the urge to cast villains and victims in every breakup story.

“We need to be talking about divorce more,” Diamond says. “There’s so much at stake.” He wishes soon-to-be-wed LGBTQ2S+ people could attend the divorce salon just once to get a taste of what is possible if their marriages don’t work out. “If anything, queering marriage would be learning about divorce and knowing how to prepare yourself should your relationship end.” The more we share our divorce stories, the better equipped we and our communities are to support each other through it. I knew nothing about the legal and financial complexities of divorce, or its social and emotional intricacies, before I got married. The end of my relationship was a crash course in Divorce 101. Finding my way through the bureaucratic parts was less daunting than feeling like I’d failed not just myself, but every person who’d been rooting for our love. 

I’ll never stop being grateful for how my community showed up for me after my divorce, and I still wish I could’ve found the kind of divorce stories I needed to feel less alone—writing that comforts by saying, “Hey, I’ve been there too.” Ten years later, part of me is still searching for them. It’s why I’ve looked for traces of myself in every one of those bestselling divorce memoirs. It’s what prompted me to finally start telling my own story in the hope that it might help others feel seen. Diamond’s motivations eventually led him to editing a forthcoming anthology of LGBTQ2S+ divorce stories.

While participants often come to the divorce salon to have others bear witness to their most difficult divorce stories, they also share in one another’s joys. Diamond said divorce can be a life-affirming way of learning new things about ourselves, our identities and what brings us pleasure. Hall, who described their divorce as freeing, says the more we divest from the romantic narratives we’ve been fed, the more capable we become of telling our own stories, which gives us “new narratives to work through and feed into ourselves.” Despite what The Ultimatum: Queer Love keeps trying to tell us, marrying The One doesn’t have to be the happy ending we strive for. For some of us, our most enduring romance might be with our friends, our communities or ourselves. We can find love and relationships in all shapes and sizes—after my divorce, I became part of a four-parent queer family that feels happier and more secure than my marriage ever did.

If there’s one thing my divorce taught me, it’s that divorce is simultaneously an ending and a beginning. When I said “I do,” I was making a promise to try. My ex-spouse and I tried and failed at marriage, and that’s okay. The end of our relationship freed me from the pain of trying to force the happily-ever-after I had been conditioned to strive for. I’m happier now than I was when I was married, and I hope my ex is too. I wouldn’t know—we haven’t talked in seven years. Even this feels like a deviation from the expected queer narrative, where we might sometimes feel pressure to become best friends with our exes. It’s another reminder of why I want queer divorce stories that broaden our imagination for who we can be to each other, what truths we are brave enough to reveal, and what kind of beginnings become possible after the end.