Time was I could have covered every queer romance novel put out by mainstream publishers and still have had room to spare in this column. Small and independent presses have been nurturing L.G.B.T.Q. romance authors forever, and digital self-publishing opened up still more doors, but up until very recently, the big traditional houses had far more queer villains than queer romance leads.

And then, for a great many reasons, and because of the work and passion of a great many people — something shifted.

It’s impossible to spot a sea change while you’re swimming in it. All I can tell you is looking for multiple queer romance pairings used to feel like fighting against the tide, and now it feels more like a perfect summer wave rolling in and rushing around you.

We’ve still got the gay and lesbian presses, and the independent authors on the genre’s innovative edge — but we also have the quirky princess contemporary with two Black women leads, and the Harlequin category romance where the alpha millionaire hero is gay and Asian, and a bisexual Jewish sex educator falling for a Reform rabbi, and a 17th-century dandy in sky-blue silk stealing the heart of a highwayman, and the young-but-cynical waitress desperately crushing on the hot girl on the subway who may actually have been trapped there since the 1970s — and that’s just in this column! There are two — two! — trans romances coming out later this year, and more gay and lesbian and bisexual characters in fall and winter, and I would call it an embarrassment of riches but what it really is, of course, is pride.

Below you’ll find six of this summer’s queer romances (and one straight one). They offer everything on the romance spectrum from sweet and sexy, to rebellious, revolutionary and angsty.

Casey McQuiston’s first book, “Red, White and Royal Blue,” hit it big with the romance between the grandson of a British monarch and the son of an American president. Her latest trades British princes for Brooklyn drag queens — the superior royalty, no question. ONE LAST STOP (St. Martin’s Griffin, 400 pp., $16) is about meeting someone attractive and mysterious on your daily subway commute — a girl, it turns out, who has been riding the train since the 1970s, thanks to a magical timeslip. But it’s also about loneliness, and being unmoored from normal time, and missing people you’ve lost, and dealing with generational trauma and fearing an unknowable future. It is an absolutely brilliant pandemic romance that never once mentions the pandemic.

This kiss is an un-obliteration. It brings back what has been stolen.

The story throws knockout punches at the silences surrounding queer history and community. (Can it be a coincidence that the time gap between our girls spans the most devastating years of the AIDS crisis?) There are still too many L.G.B.T.Q. kids who grow up thinking they’re alone, isolated, too broken to be loved as they deserve.

McQuiston fights that on every page, layering the struggles of the early movement with those of this moment. She takes a familiar romance trope, the first kiss that obliterates everything that came before, and turns it on its head to make something revolutionary and breathtaking. When Jane Su kisses August Landry, old memories come rushing back: girls she kissed in the rain, girls she fought cops with in other cities, in other decades.

This kiss is an un-obliteration. It brings back what has been stolen.

I can’t imagine anything swoonier than that.

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And speaking of monarchies, both Alyssa Cole’s original Reluctant Royals series and its spinoff, Runaway Royals, explore hereditary rule and social responsibility: We see kings and queens of Black African kingdoms with unique religious and political traditions, as well as British dukes and European princes. Throughout the books, we catch glimpses of a shadowy organization called the World Federation of Monarchists — and in the latest installment, the institution’s junior investigator, Beznaria Chetchevalier, takes center stage as she hunts for a lost heir to the matrilineal Mediterranean island kingdom of Ibarania.

Only problem is, the heir in question — Makeda Hicks — would prefer to stay lost.

The other Royals books have actual rulers (and spouses of rulers) coping with problems of power — but in HOW TO FIND A PRINCESS (Avon, 388 pp., paper, $7.99), there is no power for our princess to claim. The whole heir search is a publicity stunt to boost tourism to Ibarania’s flagging economy; any acknowledged heir will have ceremonial duties but no ability to shape policy. Which makes sense, since this book is an Anastasia retelling, and the Romanov throne has been an empty one since the dawn of the last century.

The book is a bitingly funny, scathing rebuke to the emptiness of royal pageantry, and Cole makes virtuoso use of the familiar rhythms of a romance arc. When Makeda decides she’ll make the trip to Ibarania hoping to prove she’s not actually their princess, I began watching for clues as to how she was going to change her mind about her destiny. Romance novels delight in thwarting their lead characters’ most determined plans: People swear they’ll never fall in love, that they’ll only have one memorable night’s fling, that they’ll never trust anyone ever again. But that means anyone can be transformed before a reader’s eyes. Darcy is an ass at the start of the book, but he doesn’t stay that way.

And here, a princess who dreads being recognized as a princess has something else happen instead. I won’t spoil the reveal, but it’s shocking and joyful and absolutely perfect.

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Everything is vintage garters being unsnapped and forearms being revealed and silk blouses falling to the floor.

Equally seductive is EE Ottoman’s trans historical, THE COMPANION (EE Ottoman, 420 pp., paper, $11.99), where the sweet and sensitive main character, Madeline, abandons the social gantlet of literary circles in 1948 New York City to stay in the country with Victor, a friend of a friend and a fellow writer. Victor has a past with the gorgeous piece of trouble next door named Audrey, and Madeline finds herself intensely drawn to both of them.

Some books would make Madeline choose, but not this one. This is a caring and comforting trans poly triad, where scenes of harvest work, scrumptious midcentury meals and long walks in the woods alternate with some of the sexiest scenes I’ve seen in a while. There are books that are hot, with dark and dangerous edges, or with juicy frolics full of giggles and dirty talk — but this book is sexy: Everything is vintage garters being unsnapped and forearms being revealed and silk blouses falling to the floor and everyone being commendably generous with the orgasms. Ottoman’s prose is crisp and clear as water, but the reader is left gasping with thirst. (And other appetites — if you bundled this with a cookbook of Madeline’s recipes you would make a mint.)

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The book is a bad-decisions buffet.

For those who want precisely the opposite of comfort for their romance leads, try Hudson Lin’s HARD SELL (Carina Adores, 273 pp., paper, $14.99), which is from Harlequin’s new tropetastic L.G.B.T.Q.-specific line, one that bears a strong resemblance to classic category imprints like Presents and Desire. Which is to say: splashy and dazzling and high-intensity.

We have here a May-December romance between an alternative data millionaire and his best friend’s younger brother: There are work deadlines, family confrontations, illness, accidents and the absolute maximum angst at every moment. The book is a bad decisions buffet — which is precisely what a high-stakes category ought to be.

Along with the age gap, we have a grumpy-sunshine opposites attract setup, which is normally one of my favorite things, but which ended up reinforcing my sense of the younger character’s youth and adding a slight unease. So for me, the archetypes canceled one another out, but for readers who love the age gap as a central engine of tension — and I know you’re out there — I suspect the layered tropes might reinforce one another and double the emotional payoff. It’s always a little odd to be reading a book and thinking, “This is a perfect story for someone who is not me,” but variety of tone is the sign of a robust genre, and I’m looking forward to seeing where this series goes.

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In terms of opposites attracting, Rosie Danan is becoming a go-to author. Her second book, THE INTIMACY EXPERIMENT (Berkley, 336 pp., paper, $16), dives deeper than her first. The story is built around people who are trying to put themselves back together after trauma, and building a community based on love and empathy and deeper truths. If this sounds like philosophy or theology, that’s one of the pleasures of a romance that so richly uses Reform Judaism as a lens into its characters’ inward journeys.

I’m always interested in romances involving religion that do not fall under the Christian euphemism “inspirational romance” — and Danan’s book is at its very best when it’s connecting faith, trust, strength and desire in complex ways.

Sometimes a romance separates sex from intimacy to explore the space between. In Cecilia Grant’s “A Lady Awakened,” for instance, the initial plan is for the heroine to get pregnant: The sex starts early and the romantic feelings follow later. “The Intimacy Experiment” flips this script: The blunt bisexual sex educator, Naomi, and a hot thoughtful rabbi named Ethan hold off from touching for a good, long, aching while, even though both are experienced and Naomi in particular has always found sex to be simple and easy. There’s a lovely scene where she realizes she doesn’t want sex yet, and doesn’t know why, and she and Ethan work out what that means in a way that makes them both feel more emotionally invested even though the physical stuff is on pause.

It’s a powerful, thoughtful moment in an ambitious and rewarding story.

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Of course a letter opener has a hidden rapier blade. Of course a respectable lady’s house in Mayfair is equipped with a flying spell and can sail to Bath to elude enemies.

Our next book: not as subtle. Romance readers often discuss historical romances as a kind of shared fantasy setting full of improbable dukes bristling with abs and feminism; India Holton’s nimble debut novel, THE WISTERIA SOCIETY OF LADY SCOUNDRELS (Berkley, 336 pp., paper, $16), takes aim at that idea and blasts it out of the sky with a barrage of bloodthirsty charm. It’s the kind of book for which the word “rollicking” was invented.

Do not be taken in by the sweetness of the cover: This story is so outrageously bonkers that it ends up creating its own surreal logic. Of course a letter opener has a hidden rapier blade. Of course a respectable lady’s house in Mayfair is equipped with a flying spell and can sail to Bath to elude enemies. Assassination contracts are as good as a letter of introduction, and stealing your target’s bracelet is merely an attempt at flirtation (especially if she simultaneously steals your fountain pen).

And then everyone is in the air firing artillery at everyone else, and lies and treachery abound, and several people get repeatedly and casually shot, stabbed, concussed, exploded and brained with an emerald crown.

This book has considered realism and punted it out the highest available window. Holton is having as much fun as the English language will permit — the prose shifts constantly from silly to sublime and back, sometimes in the course of a single sentence. And somehow in all the melodrama and jokes and hilariously mangled literary references, there are moments of emotion that cut to the quick — the way a profound traumatic experience can overcome you years later. The instant you know you’ve fallen in love with exactly the person you shouldn’t. The moment you realize the way you’ve always solved problems has become its own problem, and now you have to find a way to unlearn it for your very survival. That last one, admittedly, does involve cannons, but it was very incisive all the same.

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The book does not so much tear down class boundaries as dynamite the very idea of class itself.

Though set in alternate Victorian times — with an alternate Queen Victoria herself, no less — Holton’s book had me dreaming of the late 19th century on account of all the swashbuckling. With THE QUEER PRINCIPLES OF KIT WEBB (Avon, 335 pp., paper, $15.99), Cat Sebastian’s newest, we get the full Georgian-era experience: coffeehouses, lace cuffs, noblemen in pastel silks and ballad-worthy highwaymen whose thieving days are almost, almost behind them.

Like Holton’s, this book also features a chillingly villainous father, a life of crime and falling in love with someone you shouldn’t — but this is the realistic version, where pistol balls hurt, love can’t fix everything and the aristocracy is founded on and nourished by blood.

Highwayman, it turns out, is a pitch-perfect role for a queer historical hero. If you’re already risking your neck to steal purses and harry the gentry, you’ll think nothing of risking your neck for someone you love. Both Kit, our thief, and Percy, our silk-clad lord, have to make themselves vulnerable and learn how to trust. They are very good at doing this while pretending not to do it, which is great fun for the reader.

Romances have been equating goodness and nobility since forever, with characters discovering their true aristocratic origins to make sure no class boundaries were crossed in the making of a lineage (looking at you, Georgette Heyer). This story does the opposite: The noble lineage has been a fraud all along, and Percy has to come to grips with the idea of not being who he was raised to be — both in a financial and legal sense, as well as a moral one. The book does not so much tear down class boundaries as dynamite the very idea of class itself, which is becoming a satisfying theme in Sebastian’s work. Laws that exist only to hurt people are unjust; systems that depend on people’s misery should be subverted and dismantled at every chance.

The right to love and be loved as we are is a compass that always points toward justice.

Olivia Waite is the Book Review’s romance fiction columnist. She writes queer historical romance, fantasy and critical essays on the genre’s history and future.