A Rainbow Will Literally Save

by NoNieqa Ramos 

If one were to place the reviews of the DISTURBED GIRL’S DICTIONARY into a word cloud generator, one would see words like brutal, raw, gritty, unflinching … and one of my personal favorites “move over dead white guys.” What you won’t find is joy, and certainly not queer joy.

Yet to me, first and foremost, TDGD, was a love story and Macy’s indefatigable devotion for Alma accelerates like George’s motorcycle past the explosive ending into hope and possibility.

THE TRUTH IS is a different creature entirely. In that word cloud you’d find, identity, self-discovery, fierce, stream-of-consciousness, PTSD… hope! But not joy.

My characters’s families reject them because of their LGBTQIA+ identities and they suffer homelessness because of this child abuse. (Yup. CHILD ABUSE.)  These characters and the very real queer kids abused by their families deserve their stories to be told. But- I also have a responsibility to write the joyful world that I want to exist for my queer readers even if that hasn’t been my own experience.

I’m writing my first dystopian novel and no matter what bombs systemic racism throws at my characters, it is their very Latinx queer identities that will save them. There will be joy damn it. Latinx joy. Latinx queer joy. A rainbow will literally save.

Queer bookish joy for me is the privilege and the gift to write picture books. I just had a conversation with my lovely editor in which we talked about the sanitized depiction of the friendship between the moms. I had to explicitly say, they are not just friends. That it was important for kids to see the moms lean against each other or hold hands even if it’s not central to the plot line. Because a book doesn’t have to be the gay ABCS for it to be queer. (Yes, we need the gay ABCs, por supuesto. )

Queer joy is the community we find in each other. In the artist’s collective Las Musas, founded by writers and pioneers like Aida Salazar, I found that community, that sacred space, that school of learning and unlearning, that citadel. Queer joy is the community we give to children in the books we write and the books we place in their hands. Children cannot wait until we are comfortable to allow them queer community. Found family is beautiful, but queer children should not have to go on a quest to find the love they deserve at birth.

Queer joy is placing Awaeke Emezi’s PET into my child’s hands. Planning a moon ceremony because of Aida Salazar’s THE MOON WITHIN. Thinking of educators planning a mermaid parade because of JULIAN IS A MERMAID. Knowing the works of Anna-Marie Mclemore, Zoraida Córdova, Mia García,  Kacen Callender, Alex Villasante, Mark Oshiro and so many more await me, my children, queer children, and all children is a promise that one day queer joy wil be the dominant narrative.

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