Yes, one of the things that really redeems a multitude of literary... well, maybe not sins, but pecadilloes, is the fact that she has written queer characters into her books, with great understanding and generosity, from the very beginning - you may remember there is a sympathetic lesbian couple (Ylsa and Keren) in the very first book, Arrows of the Queen (and while one of them dies, which happens to far too many queer characters, the survivor goes on with her life and finds a new lover, which doesn't often happen in "mainstream" writing about queer characters, and certainly not back when the first Valdemar books were written). What I also appreciate about much of her writing - even though I make fun of the "child with everything against him/her but a Glorious Destiny waiting" set-up that she uses so often - is her use of her novels to advocate for the rights of abused children. It is perhaps done best in her "NASCAR Elves" books, because the protagonists are not the abused children but the elves who are compelled by their innate love of children to help them escape.

Kushner, Walton and Rawn are all, in their ways, good reads - I hope you get time to read and enjoy them.

The L'Engle books, I think, take a certain switch of attitude to really get into - partly because they are children's books, and partly because they are of another generation - even though it's true that L'Engle has kept on writing, certainly well into the 1990s. Her voice remains that of a woman of her time, even though her perspective is quite modern in many ways, including the intellectual and professional capabilities of a goodly number of the women in the three books I've read so far.