by L.C. Rosen
Queer Bookish Joy. That’s quite a thing to ask for these days. The whole point of these posts is to lift people up and make them cheerful so I don’t want to get into how I’ve been, but I will say this – most moments of queer joy, in my opinion, come about because of queer rage. Our power comes from anger. My story of queer bookish joy came about because of some rage.
The rage I felt was about how I felt queer boys were being portrayed in the most popular YA titles. How we were always sweet, always nice and shy and looking for love. How that was all we were allowed to be seen as. And how nearly all those books – the successful, popular ones with queer male leads – were written by women. I know they wrote us as cute and sweet because that’s how they wanted to see us. They wanted to tell us we deserved love – which is a nice thing to say – but what they didn’t realize is that by crafting variations of the same narrative in which love was the only thing we wanted (and usually a chaste, adorable sort of love, not a hot lip-biting kind of love), they limited our stories to ones of seeking out love. They saw teen queer boys as pitiable. They felt sorry for them – poor loveless boys, so shy, so introverted and hiding their queer magic. So they wrote us nice little love stories to give us what they thought we needed. But in those stories, we were never allowed to be messy, or wild, or gods forbid, want something that wasn’t romance. Want just to get laid. That would be a bad gay. Not a model minority like they always wanted us to be. Sweet, shy, chaste, romantic. That’s who we were becoming in popular culture. And I HATED that. Because the message I was seeing was that gay teens were only worthy of love if they were a certain *type* of gay teen.
(That’s not to say that those stories aren’t important – of course they are. Any story that tells a queer teen they are seen and deserve love is important. But when you only show a minority as one type of person over and over, it limits those kids trying to find themselves in that literature. It means they’re told they only have one option of who they can be. It means they think they only get love if they conform to what people think a good gay person is.)
So, in my hate, I created Jack. Jack, who didn’t want love. Jack who was unapologetically slutty. Jack who was going to write a sex column and include an anal how-to within the first 100 pages of the book. I LOVED writing Jack. Jack was a scream – Jack was me telling the world that gay teens can be anything they want – messy, slutty, mean, not a great student, unapologetically femme, drunk, do drugs, whatever – and still deserve to be loved. Jack was everything I thought the gay teens in the popular books would hate. Or fear. But I loved him. And I also knew he was a terrible idea.
I wrote 99 pages of Jack of Hearts (and other parts) in just a few weeks. And then I stopped. I have a rule – if I write more than 99 pages of a project, I am required to finish it. It becomes the priority. And I had other, safer things I could be working on. Adult stuff, other YAs even. Nothing like this. This was clearly a bad idea. The 100th WORD of the book was “fourgy.” There was no way this was getting published.
Still – I’d written it. And writing it had filled me with that queer bookish joy I’m supposed to be writing about here – so I thought ‘let’s get another opinion.’ I’m lucky that the editor of one of my middlegrades, Alvina, had become a good friend. So I reached out to her without my agent, just as a friend, and said “look, I wrote this thing. 99 pages worth, and if I go over that I have to finish it. I’m not asking you to buy it or even consider buying it – I just want to know if you think this is a terrible idea and I should put it away, or if it’s worth it to keep going.” Alvina very generously said she’d give it a look. I didn’t hear from her about it for a while, and I focused on other projects. But she did check in at one point, saying she was halfway done with the pages, and liking it, and she knew at least one editor who it might be worth sending it to, but to let her finish. I said thanks, made a note of the editor, and went back to the other projects. A week or so later, she wrote me again “have your agent officially submit this to me – I want to buy it.”
So that was my moment of queer bookish joy. That this character, who I loved so much for being messy and angry and slutty and everything I felt like books were telling queer teens they couldn’t be – was loved by someone who wasn’t me. A straight person, no less. And with any luck, he was going to be released into the wilds to show the rest of the world that he was just as deserving of love as those nice, good gay boys. Writing the rest of Jack’s story – having him sold in the UK to a team who loved him – all of that was a lot of joy. The reactions to him out in the world have been joy, too: I love the people who love him, but I also have a place in my heart for the people who go “look, I would never be friends with this guy in real life, he’s a bad kid, but he’s also worthy of love.” That was the point. And the teens who read Jack and feel that great sigh of relief – that’s a moment of joy for me, too. Those kids who go ‘oh, it’s okay to just want to sleep around for now. It’s okay to have desires.’ And especially all the kids – gay and straight – who go ‘oh, so that’s what they didn’t teach me in sex-ed: well that explains a lot.’ Knowing all those folks are out there (and the adults, too, who email me, asking me for follow up on some of Jack’s sex advice) – they bring me joy. And Jack brought them joy.
And of course, there are so many more types of queer boys out there in YA now. There were plenty before Jack. But we should still look to who is popular, and why, and what you tell queer kids when you hone in on one type of gay boy, one type of gay book. We have more than one story. We DESERVE more than one story being told. And readers – straight, queer, male, female – deserve to see queer kids as more than one type of kid. I tried to do that too in my new book, Camp, where by setting it at an LGBTQIA+ summer camp, I got to explore a wide variety of queer identities, and show how they’re all worthy of love. I admit, making it a rom-com almost felt like giving in – was I now creating a book that I’d raged against? But by making sure my protagonist in that – Randy – was just as messy and human as Jack, I think I carried on my happiness: I showed another type of queer kid who is worthy of love. And not just Randy, but all the other characters in Camp, too. Every book I get to write brings that joy – that moment of knowing that I’m showing people there’s more than one queer story.
So read widely: read the stories of queer kids you might not think you’d like. I think you’ll find that those stories, those kids, are just as important and worthy of love as any other. And that might bring you some queer bookish joy of your own.
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Lev Rosen is the author of books for all ages. Two for adults: All Men of Genius (Amazon Best of the Month, Audie Award Finalist) and Depth (Amazon Best of the Year, Shamus Award Finalist, Kirkus Best Science Fiction for April). Two middle-grade books: Woundabout (illustrated by his brother, Ellis Rosen), and The Memory Wall. And two young adult novels: Jack of Hearts (and other parts) (American Library Association Rainbow List Top 10 of 2018) and Camp. His books have been sold around the world and translated into different languages as well as being featured on many best of the year lists, and nominated for awards.
Lev is originally from lower Manhattan and now lives in even lower Manhattan, right at the edge, with his husband and very small cat. You can find him online at LevACRosen.com and @LevACRosen
Lev is represented by Joy Tutela of the David Black Agency.
