What Queer Love Looks Like in the Shadow of Illness

When we think about YA romance, certain images come to mind: meet-cutes in the hallway, first kisses under the stars, dramatic confessions that end with happily-ever-after music swelling in the background. But love—especially queer love—doesn’t always look like that. And when illness enters the story, it almost never does.

Too often, young adult fiction sanitizes both queer love and illness narratives. Queer love is made palatable, stripped of messiness, intimacy, and fear, while illness is presented as either tragedy or triumph. What gets lost is the truth: love and illness are often intertwined in complicated, unglamorous ways. They’re found in whispered reassurances in hospital rooms, in the small tenderness of shared care, in the quiet courage it takes to show up when you’re scared.

That’s the heart of my YA short story, Love Isn’t Sterile. It follows two teens navigating queer love against the backdrop of illness and caregiving. One of them is tethered to a medical routine, where gloves, masks, and sterile procedures create both physical and emotional barriers. The other is learning what it means to love someone whose life can’t be neatly separated from fear and fragility.

But here’s the truth: love is never sterile. It’s messy. It’s raw. It exists in the shadow of fear, not in spite of it. When we look beyond the sanitized versions of YA romance, we see that resilience and tenderness can exist side by side—that queer love can be beautiful precisely because it’s complicated.

By telling stories like Love Isn’t Sterile, I want to expand the YA conversation. Teens deserve to see love that isn’t scrubbed clean for comfort, but that reflects the truth of living with illness, of loving through fear, and of finding connection in the places where others might look away.

Because in the end, love doesn’t wait for perfect conditions. Love doesn’t stop at the hospital door. And love, even in the shadow of illness, is still love—messy, brave, and deeply human.