President Trump’s return to office has fueled the grassroots forces that have driven a spike in LGBTQ book bans in recent years, creating a notable chill in the market for queer stories, according to authors and others in the publishing industry.
The effect has been most keenly felt within children’s book publishing, where editors and authors describe lower sales numbers amid book bans, as well as the administration’s targeting of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and pre-occupation with “radical indoctrination” in K-12 schools.
“This is the first year in like a decade that I’ve had [rejection] responses from editors specifically citing that it’s difficult to place queer books in stores, and they’re being selective about acquiring queer stories,” said Rebecca Podos, a senior literary agent at Neighborhood Literary and young adult and adult novelist.
Industry professionals and authors fear that this atmosphere may continue throughout Trump’s presidency, resulting in less queer novels reaching readers in the coming years.
“[Publishers] are going to invest in books that are safely going to go on shelves, that are not going to get banned, that are not going to have this kind of controversy,” Dahlia Adler, a young adult novelist and the creator of the website LGBTQ Reads, which promotes queer literature for all age groups, said. “I just feel like they’re stepping back.”
Adler said she noticed fewer new queer novel announcements this year while conducting monthly round-ups of upcoming titles. She uses weekly lists of book deal announcements created by Publishers Weekly, a leading publishing industry paper, to track upcoming novels with queer characters or storylines.
While Adler noted that not all book deals are announced in these columns, the lists usually feature acquisitions from major publishers, such as Penguin Random House and HarperCollins.
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She said she has been having more and more difficulty finding LGBTQ+ novels while reviewing these weekly lists — a phenomenon that she has attributed to lower acquisitions of queer novels this year, as well as more “coded language.”
“I think it’s less explicit, particularly in YA [young adult], when a book is queer, in the announcements,” Adler said. “I think that language is kind of being more intentionally left out to keep it from being a target.”
Now, she often finds herself going to an author’s Instagram page or website to find out whether a novel has a queer main character or romance. She also checks advance review copy websites like Edelweiss to see whether they’ve categorized a book under their LGBTQ+ category.
“I think queerness in big books is very largely being buried by publishers, not necessarily by authors,” she said. “I feel like that’s kind of my biggest takeaway of this round of the Trump administration. [Publishers] are not necessarily not buying them, but they’re not necessarily being loud about the fact that they did buy them, and they’re letting people find out they’re queer in other ways.”
Literary agents like Podos have observed a similar effect across the publishing industry when it comes to acquiring new LGBTQ novels.
Jim McCarthy, vice president at the literary agency Dystel, Goderich & Bourret, said he received a rejection for a client’s queer novel similar to the one Podos received.
“I did have an editor pass on a project and specifically say that in the face of so many book bans and so much concern about decreasing school library sales of queer content that they were passing on a because they didn’t believe there would be enough of a market for them to have access,” McCarthy said.
“This really feels like it’s been the first backwards step in terms of publishing worrying that they can’t access enough readers because of sort of broad cultural concerns about queer content,” he added. “I can’t imagine that five or 10 years ago, I would have received a response like the one I received.”
Amy Bishop-Wysick, a literary agent at Trellis Literary Management, said she has not received any rejections in this vein.
“But I know other colleagues have had that experience for sure,” she said, noting that many industry professionals remain committed to bringing queer novels to shelves.
Queer novels for younger readers — including books across the picture book, middle grade and young adult categories — are the most vulnerable to industry caution, publishing industry professionals said.
According to Irene Vázquez, an associate editor at independent publisher Levine Querido, this is because a majority of sales for children’s and young adult books are through the “institutional market” — a term used in the publishing industry to refer to wholesalers that sell books to schools and libraries.
“These wholesalers that sell to schools and libraries [are] more hesitant of when they take those titles,” Vázquez said.
She chalked this up to political book bans that have overwhelmingly targeted LGBTQ+ novels and novels with people of color as main characters — a movement she said Trump has emboldened.
Book bans spiked across the country following Trump’s first term, with PEN America formally tracking them beginning in 2021.
The organization found that school districts had enacted at least 2,532 bans during the 2021-22 school year, and that an all-time high was reached in the 2023-24 school year with 10,046 book bans. This number decreased during the 2024-25 school year, during which PEN America tracked at least 6,870 book bans, affecting 3,752 unique titles across 87 school districts.
Children’s novels have been most affected by book bans amid the right-wing push to control what’s being taught or distributed in schools.
In 2025, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that allows parents to opt their children out of reading books with queer characters for religious reasons. Trump also issued an executive order within his first few weeks in office calling for the end of “radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling,” threatening to end federal funding to schools that teach about concepts related to LGBTQ+ identities or white supremacy.
“Imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children not only violates longstanding anti-discrimination civil rights law in many cases, but usurps basic parental authority,” the executive order states.
The Trump administration has also made several policy changes or issued executive orders targeting the LGBTQ+ community, particularly transgender individuals. In military bases, the Pentagon has ordered its military bases to review and remove books with DEI content, which likely includes queer novels.
Adib Khorram, the author of “Darius the Great is Not Okay,” an award-winning novel with a queer main character, credited book bans for a 70 percent drop in his twice-a-year royalties paycheck for the novel.
“Many queer authors have had to diversify their writing and income stream in order to make ends meet in the last few years,” he said. Khorram branched out into writing adult novels, partially because of the contentious environment for queer children’s novels.
Arthur Levine, the founder of Levine Querido, an independent publishing house, said this environment also created an existential threat for publishers focused on pushing out diverse titles.
“It threatens entire lists,” he said, referring to a publishing house’s book list. He said Levine Querido had founded a nonprofit to facilitate children’s access to queer titles to help alleviate some of the financial strain the publishing company is currently under.
Despite the political pressures facing the publishing industry, sales and interest in queer novels remain steady, said Ron Ward, a bookseller at Talking Leaves Bookstore in Buffalo, N.Y.
“People here are actually really excited to read banned books,” Ward said. He added that the most popular book club nights at their store often feature banned queer novels.
Publishers and authors are also organizing to maintain space for marginalized stories.
Khorram sits on the board of directors for Authors Against Book Bans, while McCarthy holds a similar position with Publishing Professionals Against Book Bans, an offshoot of the authors’ organization.
“All marginalized communities are being attacked by book bans, and so we need to be particularly forceful in our support of those voices,” McCarthy said.
“Most authors of books for young readers, especially authors of queer books for young readers, are in this because we care about young people and want them to have access to good literature,” Khorram said. “In particular, we want young people to have easier childhoods than we did and childhoods where they see themselves reflected in the pages of a book.”
He said he was determined to keep writing queer novels in the current political climate. “But it has certainly led to more anxiety about how I will pay my bills,” he said.
