Since the dawn of literature, queer people have turned to writing to document their existence: to share great triumphs and deep despairs; to praise the virtues of their lover, share their loneliness and proclaim their lust; to tell of their peculiarities and mundanities. For almost as long, they have been censored and bowdlerised, persecuted and relegated to the margins. No longer.

In these pages, readers will hear Homer's Achilles beat his chest in grief over the loss of his lover Patroclus and Paul Verlaine extol his lover's most intimate erogenous zones. They will see Alison Bechdel tiptoe, then leap out of the closet and Juno Dawson come out again, but differently. They will bite and lick and groan in sweet surprise with Roz Kaveney, and fall in and out of love with Qiu Miaojin in Paris and Taiwan. They will recognise Queer saints and icons – Audre Lorde, Larry Kramer, Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde – and meet the new figures carrying forward their legacy, including Keith Jarrett, Zhang Yueran, Imogen Binnie, Cat Fitzpatrick and Niviaq Korneliussen, among others.

In Queer, Frank Wynne allows LGBTQ+ voices to ring out, unashamed and unabashed, in eighty pieces that straddle the spectrum of queer existence: short stories, poems, essays, extracts and scenes from 36 countries the world over, from ancient times until yesterday.