Queer Love Poems
Love is love poetry, by and for LGBTQ+ folks.
BY The Editors
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.
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
- Jack Spicer
In Trust
Thom Gunn
Valentine
Donald Britton
Proportion Surviving
Renee Gladman
When I Heard at the Close of the Day
Walt Whitman
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
- Amy Lowell
Accidents of Birth
William Meredith
- Peter Pereira
American Wedding
Essex Hemphill
A Poem for the Old Man
John Wieners
Epithalamium
Phillip B. Williams
Voyages
Hart Crane
[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
- Jennifer Chang
- D. A. Powell
- Destiny O. Birdsong
You Love, You Wonder
Brenda Shaughnessy
Dreaming of Lesbos
Tatiana de la Tierra
Six Sonnets: Crossing the West
Janice Gould
- sam sax
A Poem of Love in Eleven Lines
Gerrit Lansing
- Tarfia Faizullah
The Aureole
Nikky Finney
- Miller Oberman
- Jericho Brown
The Dream
Aphra Behn
Wild nights - Wild nights! (269)
Emily Dickinson
Husky Boys' Dickies
Jill McDonough
- Richie Hofmann
- D. A. Powell
- Assotto Saint
Movement Song
Audre Lorde
- 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
- Frank O’Hara
Poem for Haruko
June Jordan
- Nomi Stone
- Luther Hughes
Love and Death
Lord Byron (George Gordon)
What to Say Upon Being Asked to Be Friends
Julian Talamantez Brolaski