Collection

Queer Love Poems

Love is love poetry, by and for LGBTQ+ folks.

Illustration by Jia Sung.

Love, like identity, takes all shapes, forms, themes, and patterns. Perhaps for no other community is love more self-defining and confining than the queer community. However, like a term or a category, love is never one-size-fits-all: love can be a garden on the moon, a jar of peanut butter, the slug sublime, or just one happy night. Here is a selection of poems written from and about LGBTQ+ love, passion, sex, loss, and desire.

For more poems about love, explore our archive.

My Beloved

- A Glimpse
  Walt Whitman
- i love you to the moon &
  Chen Chen
- Poem for My Love
  June Jordan
- Domestic
  Carl Phillips
- The Hug
  Thom Gunn
- What Kind of Times Are These
  Adrienne Rich
- Winter
  Timothy Liu
- Asking About You
  Eloise Klein Healy
- Thaw
  TC Tolbert
- Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
  William Shakespeare
- A Second Train Song for Gary
  Jack Spicer
- In Trust
  Thom Gunn
- Valentine
  Donald Britton
- Proportion Surviving
  Renee Gladman
- When I Heard at the Close of the Day
  Walt Whitman

Wedding Poems

See our Love Poems collection and Wedding Poems sampler for more wedding poems.

- You, Therefore
  Reginald Shepherd
- Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds
  William Shakespeare
- The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
  Christopher Marlowe
- A Birthday
  Christina Rossetti
- Power in Silence
  Michael Field
- One Girl
  Sappho
- A Lady
  Amy Lowell
- Accidents of Birth
  William Meredith
- Turbidophilia
  Peter Pereira
- American Wedding
  Essex Hemphill
- A Poem for the Old Man
  John Wieners
- Epithalamium
  Phillip B. Williams
- Voyages
  Hart Crane

Passionate & Erotic

- [Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?]
  Marilyn Hacker
- Peanut Butter
  Eileen Myles
- Love Poem to a Butch Woman
  Deborah A. Miranda
- Recreation
  Audre Lorde
- Mayakovsky
  Frank O’Hara
- Conversation with Slugs and Sarah
  Jennifer Chang
- Pupil
  D. A. Powell
- what lesbian porn has done for me
  Destiny O. Birdsong
- You Love, You Wonder
  Brenda Shaughnessy
- Dreaming of Lesbos
  Tatiana de la Tierra
- Six Sonnets: Crossing the West
  Janice Gould
- James Dean with Pig
  sam sax
- A Poem of Love in Eleven Lines
  Gerrit Lansing
- Yr Not Exotic, but Once Ya Wanted to Be
  Tarfia Faizullah
- The Aureole
  Nikky Finney
- On Trans
  Miller Oberman
- Trojan
  Jericho Brown
- The Dream
  Aphra Behn
- Wild nights - Wild nights! (269)
  Emily Dickinson
- Husky Boys' Dickies
  Jill McDonough
- Breed Me
  Richie Hofmann
- The Fluffer Talks of Eternity
  D. A. Powell
- Words to be Broadcast over Eagle’s Nest Sound System –I
  Brad Gooch

Heartbreak & Longing

- The Language of Dust
  Assotto Saint
- Movement Song
  Audre Lorde
- A Little Closer to the Edge
  Ocean Vuong
- Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías
  Federico García Lorca
- Later
  Raymond Luczak
- One Art
  Elizabeth Bishop
- Sonnet 16
  Richard Barnfield
- Project for a Fainting
  Brenda Shaughnessy
- Oh God
  Michelle Tea
- Poem ("Instant coffee with...")
  Frank O’Hara
- Poem for Haruko
  June Jordan
- On World-Making
  Nomi Stone
- Tenor
  Luther Hughes
- Love and Death
  Lord Byron (George Gordon)
- What to Say Upon Being Asked to Be Friends
  Julian Talamantez Brolaski