For as long as anyone has used it, “cat lady” has been a way to make someone small: lonely, odd, a little too attached to an animal because no person would have her. Flip through Queer Icons and Their Cats, though, and the insult falls apart. The book is a gallery of some of the boldest people of the last century, each one photographed with a cat, and the effect is not sad at all. It is the opposite. The cat turns out to be the one who stayed.
That is the quiet argument running under all the glossy portraits, and it is what makes the book more than a coffee-table novelty. Authors Alison and PJ Nastasi gather LGBTQ+ figures across generations, from cartoonist Alison Bechdel, whose name gave us the Bechdel test, to 1960s pop legend Dusty Springfield, to novelist James Baldwin. The thread linking them is not a scene or a decade. It is a cat.
The stat that explains the whole book
The Nastasis fold in one number that reframes everything around it. A national survey from Harris Interactive and Witeck-Combs Communications found the gap plainly: 63 percent of queer pet owners share their homes with cats, against 52 percent of straight owners. The book connects that gap to something plainer than coincidence. When the wider world has been hostile, the animal at home who asks nothing and judges nothing becomes a genuine refuge, not a consolation prize.
Read that way, the “cat lady” trope stops being an accusation and starts looking like a claim. Plenty of queer people have taken the gendered baggage of cat ownership and simply kept the good part: the companionship and the daily comedy, minus the shame the stereotype was supposed to carry.
The cats behind the icons
The anecdotes are the fun of it. Freddie Mercury was so devoted to his cats that, according to a memoir by his longtime assistant Peter Freestone, he would phone home from tour so his cats could be held up to the receiver to hear his voice. He dedicated his 1985 solo album Mr. Bad Guy to them, and to cat lovers everywhere.
The book also catches people mid-conversion. Trans activist and performer Buck Angel, by his own telling in the book, spent years associating cats with the lesbians in his life before an outdoor cat named Obama let himself in and appointed Angel his person. The resistance never survives the cat. From Janis Joplin to fashion designer Jason Wu, the collection keeps landing on the same note: these were people who did not fit the mold, and the cat did not care.
Worth it
At around $17, Queer Icons and Their Cats is the rare gift book that rewards a slow read as much as a quick flip. It works as a Pride-season present, a housewarming for a new cat parent, or a shelf piece that starts conversations. You can find it directly from Chronicle Books or on Amazon.
What newer research adds
The book has stayed in print since its 2021 release and is now widely available in paperback, so it is easier to track down than it was at launch. The ownership gap it leans on has held up in later surveys too: pet-industry and advocacy groups continue to report that LGBTQ+ adults own pets at high rates and lean toward cats, and more recent work has focused on how much those pets function as everyday emotional support rather than simple companionship. The stereotype the book pushes back on, in other words, keeps getting less true the more anyone actually looks.
References
- Nastasi, Alison, and PJ Nastasi. Queer Icons and Their Cats. Chronicle Books, 2021.
- Freestone, Peter. Freddie Mercury: An Intimate Memoir by the Man Who Knew Him Best. Omnibus Press.
- Witeck-Combs Communications and Harris Interactive, national survey on LGBTQ+ pet ownership.
