This article explores entanglements of waiting and queerness in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998). It asks if waiting, a universal human activity and an unavoidable aspect of life, can be understood as a queer cultural phenomenon. In answering that question, the article proposes and conceptualizes a new concept in queer theory called “queer waiting.” Although the phenomenon of waiting connotes queerness in the sense that experiences of waiting tend to be perceived as strange, drawn-out, awkward, and tedious sort of “temporal breaks” in which time is somehow suspended, queer waiting is waiting experienced by queer people. More specifically, queer waiting is a form of waiting that is entwined with what makes people queer, like gender nonconformity, norm-challenging sexualities, and forms of kinship that challenge heteronormative relationality. Through close textual analysis, the article investigates if – and if so how – depictions of waiting structure experiences for The Hours’ queer characters, who are waiting in various ways. They wait, for example, to escape heteronormativity, to die from AIDS-related complications, or to relive a “queer utopia” that only exists in the past. Theoretically, a combination of José Esteban Muñoz’s theories about “utopian queer futurity” (an incentive for queers when dealing with the imperfect present) and Martin Heidegger’s Gelassenheit (releasement, which can be understood as a sort of “letting-it-be attitude”) are drawn on. By interpreting The Hours, the article suggests that while waiting, to all, can make the present seem static, boring, or unbearable, queers experience it, and handle it, in unique ways. Cunningham’s novel illustrates that releasement can be a temporary strategy for queers to deal with challenges while they, in Muñoz’s conception, envision (and await) a better future. But it also includes examples of queer characters forcefully resisting releasement as a solution, thereby refusing to let things be as they are.