Why queer characters feel at home in fantasy like The Red Winter

Cameron Sullivan explores why queer characters have always belonged in fantasy, and how that shaped his own epic novel, The Red Winter.

By Tacye On Mar 4, 2026

From ancient myths and folklore to modern fantasy epics, queer characters have always belonged in stories of magic, monsters, and heroism. In The Red Winter, Cameron Sullivan continues that tradition with Sebastian Grave, a queer hero at the heart of a dark, blood-soaked adventure. Here, Sullivan explores why fantasy has long been a natural home for queer stories and how those worlds of wonder offered him his first sense of possibility, freedom, and belonging.

**Guest post written by Cameron Sullivan, author of The Red Winter.**

The first fantasy stories I ever read were myths and folk stories. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these were also the first queer stories I ever encountered.

Greco-Roman myths are probably the most famous examples of same-sex love (and lust) in folklore – pairings like Artemis and Callisto, Apollo and Adonis, or Achilles and Patroclus. The ancient Norse storytellers were proud freaks as well (check out the parentage of Odin’s horse, Sleipnir, for example), and there’s something especially magical about the Egyptian myth of Set and Horus settling their differences by attempting to impregnate each other.

For the people telling these ancient stories, queer love sat very naturally alongside heroic deeds and creation myths. Just like heterosexual love, it was messy and beautiful and destructive and world-changing – and absolutely worth immortalising in an epic. Heroes and gods were into it, and often into each other.

Unsurprisingly, my next great love was fantasy fiction, which often draws so heavily on myth and folklore. Authors like Mercedes Lackey and Anne Rice wrote engrossing stories in which complex, interesting queer characters had the space to perform acts of grand heroism or low villainy. These characters were powerful and complex, and their sexuality was never deployed as a punchline or a marker of moral depravity. It was openly discussed and explored, but at the same time it was passionately, beautifully unremarkable in the world of the story. These were stories not just about queer characters, but about worlds in which queer characters were able to live and love as they pleased. For a young gay man, that was a magical place to inhabit – my first ‘safe space’.

And I think that’s also part of why fantasy and queer characters go so well together. LGBTQIA+ characters exist in all kinds of literature, but only speculative fiction offers the freedom to meaningfully reshape the world they inhabit, whether it’s another planet, another dimension or simply another historical period. In doing so, it frees queer characters from many of the tropes that often define them in the world we know – shame, secrecy, rejection, unrequited love. It allows an exploration of identity without the limitations of real-world discrimination. Or, to put it another way, their stories aren’t shaped by how they respond to prejudice. For my younger self, that was maybe the most compelling fantasy of all.

It’s still very meaningful to me that queer characters and fantasy have been part of storytelling for as long as people have been telling stories. In writing Sebastian Grave, the queer protagonist in The Red Winter, I wanted to recreate that feeling I had when I first read those myths and folk stories. I wanted to create a powerful queer character leading an epic, blood-soaked adventure on his own terms, like my early fantasy-fiction heroes. Mostly I wanted to recreate that place full of magic and danger in which a queer character could shake the world and live magnificently with his own moments of triumph, loss, sacrifice and redemption. And maybe even a love story.

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