I recently joined the RWA despite knowing full well it wouldn’t necessarily be a place I’d be welcome. I’m a queer writer of queer stories—including romance—and seeing some forward motion in the organization made me think perhaps it was time.

Or at the very least, it was time enough to try and get involved, rather than just watch warily.

It’s hard to put into words what it’s like to watch people debate your humanity. To see spirited discussion from “both sides” of an argument where one “side” espouses that the way you love doesn’t qualify as a happy-ever-after, or reading suggestions that judges should be able to opt-out of stories about people like you because they just can’t “connect” with them? Or—this was only the other day—doing a search for “queer writers” in a forum and finding the only use of the term coming from someone who catfished everyone into