Caleb Roehrig has written several YA novels starring queer characters, including mystery, heist, and vampire novels. Buy them from one of the author’s favorite indies, Literati Bookstore or The Book Cellar!

by Caleb Roehrig

In 2011, three and a half years before I wrote the manuscript that would become my debut novel, my husband and I put all of our belongings into storage and we moved to Helsinki, Finland. It was a world away from everything we knew, in an unfamiliar country where we didn’t speak the language, and where we had only two friends—a gay couple, maybe fifteen years older than us, who lived a couple hours outside the city.

On a weekend we spent at their home in the Lakes region, one of them handed us a copy of Tales of the City, by Armistead Maupin. He insisted that we had to read it—that every queer person should read it. His words were, “I didn’t know what it meant to be gay until I read this book.”

As statements go, it was pretty grand, and I dismissed it as hyperbole. Like most queer people, my self-discovery had been hard-fought and hard-won—truths sifted from the dross of cruel stereotypes and social stigma, using a decoder I’d had to build myself. I was an adult, an out gay man who’d just gotten married (in Vermont, because my then-home state of California had stripped that right from us in 2008, and the Obergefell decision was still years away.) What could I possibly learn about “being gay” from a book that was written in the seventies?

The answer, as it turned out, was: a lot. A lot.

Tales of the City isn’t a guidebook or a memoir, but something much better: a vibrant, subversive, and joyous Pride parade through San Francisco’s countercultural heyday. (Nota bene: it’s not meant for young readers, and won’t be suitable for everyone. There’s a lot of adult content, and the terminology and conceptualization of various sexual and gender modalities reflect the understanding of the era in which it was created.)

I knew what it meant to carve out an identity in a void of positive representation; I knew what it meant to declare myself a queer person as an act of defiance, and what it meant to slough off shame and self-loathing, to decide I was good enough to love. But something I never knew was how queerness itself could be a source of joy.

Growing up, we weren’t taught a single thing in school about queer people, their contribution to science and culture, their fight for justice. Stonewall, Marsha P. Johnson, Christine Jorgensen, Harvey Milk…they are bedrock elements of LGBTQ+ history, and I only first heard of them in my early twenties. (Well, Milk I had heard about in high school—but only as a footnote to a lesson on the “Twinkie defense” in a class on US law. I’m not sure my teacher even mentioned that he was gay.)

When Maupin first started writing Tales of the City, it was before Milk’s assassination, and before the advent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Originally published as a serial in the San Francisco Chronicle, it was a story about…well, it’s hard to boil down, because it subverted genres with gleeful abandon, but at its core? It was a saga about found family, as a motley crew of social castaways gradually fell in love—with the city, with themselves, and with each other.

At every turn, the story confronts what it means to be different, and what it means to find joy and beauty in being different. What if, the book asks, instead of letting a bunch of boring, cisgender heterosexuals tell you what society is supposed to be like, you made those decisions for yourself? The characters in Tales don’t just accept their queerness, or live it in defiance—they revel in it. Freed from the shackles of social norms, and unconstrained by self-conscious self-loathing, they live bold, quirky lives that suit them. Relationships are open, sexuality is fluid, gender isn’t fixed…and with every step taken into new territory, the characters are like Alice exploring Wonderland, awed and delighted by the endless possibilities, the endless beauty.

In refusing to acknowledge society’s speed limit, they achieve unimaginable velocity.

I had plenty of queer friends, of course, but never in my life had I seen queerness presented this way: like a glorious party, where it can be everybody’s birthday at the same time, if we just say so. Never had I seen the interconnectedness of queer culture expressed with such fondness, passion, and fitting irreverence. Never had I truly considered that pride didn’t have to be an act of defiance, a boxing match against the shadows, but simply an act of love.

Finally, I understood the meat of my friend’s statement, that he didn’t know what it meant to be gay until he read Tales of the City—because I felt it, too. I’d wasted so much time struggling to act like straight men, trying to prove how heteronormative I could be, in order to gain acceptance and approval. What if, I at last had to ask myself, I just decided to believe that “not fitting in” was the best thing that ever happened to me?

When I think of “queer, bookish joy,” I think about this friend of ours passing down his love of Armistead Maupin to us—and how significant it is for queer people to share art that matters to them, particularly across generational lines. So much of our history has been lost, because the people documenting the past have ignored us; so much of our joy has been redacted, omitted, or transmuted into pain for the sake of making our existence easier to understand in the context of a society that treats being different as automatically suspicious and not entirely acceptable.

As a writer of books for young readers, I’m in a position to share my knowledge and experience with a new generation; I have the opportunity to take all the lessons I’ve learned—the ones that were hard-fought, and the ones that were gifted to me—and pass them along to today’s queer youth. It is my immense privilege to pay it forward, to hand over the torch of love, respect, and celebration, so someone else can carry it.

I can’t think of a more meaningful legacy than that.

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Caleb Roehrig grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and after living in Chicago, Los Angeles, Helsinki, and Los Angeles (again,) he has returned to Chicago. In the name of earning a paycheck, he has: hung around a frozen cornfield in his underwear, partied with an actual rock-star, chatted with a scandal-plagued politician, and been menaced by a disgruntled ostrich.