GayYA Recommends Interview + Giveaway: Georgia Peaches and Other Forbidden Fruit by Jaye Robin Brown
Our newest GayYA Recommends title is Georgia Peaches and Other Forbidden Fruit by Jaye Robin Brown. (That means it’s our next #GayYABookClub read, too!) Georgia Peaches hits shelves tomorrow (8/30) but we still have an ARC & some awesome swag! So we’re doing a flash giveaway. How to enter: Share one reason you’re excited about Georgia Peaches via the #GayYABookClub hashtag. Multiple reasons mean multiple entries, so tweet as many times as you like! A winner will be randomly selected tonight (8/29) at 10pm CST.
If you don’t win a copy, buy yours at a local store tomorrow, or request it from your local library (if they don’t have it, you should be able to suggest the title for them to buy!). Share your reactions as you read on the #GayYABookClub hashtag, and join us for a Twit Chat on 9/14 at 6pm EST.
And now to the interview…! While I was at ALA I got the wonderful opportunity to sit down with Jaye Robin Brown, author of Georgia Peaches and Other Forbidden Fruit. I ended up late to meeting her, as I ended up heading the wrong way in the Orlando heat for several minutes before I finally realized this was NOT the direction I wanted to be going in. Thankfully, we were still able to squeeze in this interview. 🙂
Vee: So, tell us a bit about your book.
Jaye Robin Brown: It’s a YA contemporary and it’s about a girl, Joanna, who has been living in Atlanta with her evangelical radio pastor father since she came out, as a pre-teen. He is getting married for the third time and moves them to a smaller town in North Georgia and has conservative inlaws. And he asks her to kinda lower her freak flag a bit to help him settle into his new marriage. They are very close and she wants to do what she can for her dad, she really loves him. But she also gets the carrot, a promise of a radio show, her own program on his radio station – which is her way… in her mind, she kinda wants to infiltrate and spread her own message. So the carrot is big enough for her to agree, but she does not anticipate meeting Mary Carlson… and finding love. So there’s this conundrum of breaking her promise to her father or going for the girl that has her heart.
Vee: What was the original impetus for this book?
Jaye: I heard a thing on NPR about the insane wealth of radio ministers and I just thought to myself: “What if one of those guys had a gay daughter?” And, well, it ended up not being about the wealth part at all, but that started the idea.
Vee: One of the things that’s really cool about Georgia Peaches is that it takes place in the South There’s not a lot of Queer YA novels like that, especially ones that have characters who like being in the South, or at least like certain parts of it. Can you talk a bit about the decision to include that?
Jaye: Well sure. I’ve lived in South Alabama and I’ve lived in Georgia and North Carolina and I’m queer and I teach high school and I have queer kids at my high school. And faith is a big part of living in the South – wether it’s something you like or not like, it’s there. And as a queer teen coming into your own with your sexuality, it can be really hard. There are progressive churches but there also are a lot of really conservative churches that make you feel less than. In fact, there’s a line in the book that’s like, “Oh, Jesus loves you…wait nope, not you!” And that’s kind of a really mixed message and I wanted to– I didn’t really set out to address that, but obviously it was something I needed to talk about.
Vee: So one of the other cool thing about your book is that Joanna is already out at the beginning. Which like, when I started reading it I posted on Twitter, like “omg!” And then I read the back cover and was like “okay, it clearly says she’s already out,” but…
Jaye: Right. Well, she was living in Atlanta, and she was at a small private school with a supportive GSA so she was in an environment that was safe for her and she also had this best friend who’s sort of ballsy and brash and kind of paved the way for them. So I think it made sense. I had somebody question why I made the choice for her to have to kinda lie low when she moved to Georgia – and you know, I think that’s a natural thing that would happen. Because that’s a much less safer an environment and it takes a really strong teenager to be able to put themselves out there like that and take those risks, especially in a new place.
Vee: So were there other Queer YA books that you’ve read?
Jaye: Ummm, well I’m old enough that I really loved Annie on my Mind and um, then there’s that horrible one by Radcliffe somebody? I forget the name, and it’s an adult book, but it’s tragic really horribly tragic. [laughs] But really, it seems like recently there’s been an explosion of LGBTQIA* books in YA and I’m trying to read as much as I can. But I didn’t read specifically into that. I mean, I have life experience, so it was very natural for me to write a book about two girls falling in love. And the rest is just, you know, writing is writing.
Vee: When you were writing it, did you have any worries about whether this could be published or not? Were you concerned about that?
Jaye: Well, my first book is not LGBTQIA+. It does have a side character that is gay, but … And I was actually writing a different book, and I got about 20,000 words into it and I just… it was like pulling teeth. And I had this idea of these two girls and I came home from this retreat and I ditched the other story, which was straight, and I started this story and I wrote 10,000 words in a weekend. So I thought I’m gonna write the book, and we’ll see what happens, and I hesitantly asked my editor if she would be open to something like this and she wholeheartedly said yes, and then she left and I had a new editor and he loved it! I have not had any resistance.
Vee: Yay, that’s always good to hear. Okay, well, I think those are all the questions that I have. Is there anything else you would like to talk about?
Jaye: Oh gosh, I don’t know. [laughs]
Vee: I know, I keep asking people that and they’re like “what?!” [both laugh]
Jaye: Well just to say that even though this is a Christian-faith based, it’s not a faith book. It’s more about just that question: Can you have faith – any faith – and be queer? And there are multiple answers within the book, with people that Jo encounters. People might read the description and think, “Oh, a message book!”, but it’s not like that. It’s a romance, primarily.
Vee: That’s really interesting about the faith. At the Stonewall Book awards, Bill Konigsberg talked a lot of about like… that was one of the things he was trying to talk about in the Porqupine of Truth, to be like, queer teens should be able to have access to faith and to God and be able to…
Jaye: Absolutely. I mean if that’s where they want to be!
Vee: Exactly, exactly.
Jaye: And, you know, not all teens may want to be there, but if that’s where you feel comfortable, if that’s where your family values lie… well, that’s sort of become a dirty word, but [both laugh] the right family values.
Vee: Actual family values [laughs] um. Well, that’s really cool. I think it’s really important to tie that in even if it’s not necessarily about that.
Interview: Liz Kessler, author of Read Me Like a Book
I got the chance to interview Liz Kessler, author of the YA novel Read Me Like A Book, and the two middle-grade series Emily Windsnap and, Phillipa’s Fairy Godsister. Read Me Like A Book is, in Liz’s words, about “a girl going from her last boyfriend to her first girlfriend via a major crush on her English teacher.” We’re so excited this book is being published in the US!
Thank you so much to Holly for transcribing this video! Check out Holly’s fantastic blog here, and follow her on Twitter @CatchTheseWords.
Vee: What was the original impetus for this book?
Liz: Well so you’ve probably read that it was the first book that I wrote and it took about 15 years to come to publication. I had an English teacher who influenced me incredibly. And what happens with Ash goes a lot further than what I had with my English teacher. But it was a situation where she changed my life quite dramatically really. ’cause she was kind of the first teacher who’d ever really believed in me and seen something more than just a naughty child who got into trouble. And um, and she was massively influential in my life and so there’s a little bit of it that’s kind of paying homage to her . A little bit of my experiences of coming out, and then just a story that I wanted to tell really. I wanted to get kind of, that story out there.
Vee: Right.
Liz: When I wrote it there wasn’t really anything like it at the time. When it finally came out, well, you know there’s hundreds of them really. There’s a lot. There’s a lot out there now. Which is brilliant.
Vee: Yeah, no that’s awesome. So, like you said you first wrote it like 15 years ago and I was wondering… I read a couple interviews where you talk about some of the changes you had to make, since publishing it now, in terms of like the technology and some of the lingo that’s used. But I was wondering if there’s anything in regards to like the queer content that you had to change? Or like, I don’t know, if there’s any any adjustments to that that you had to make.
Liz: Sorry what did you say?
Vee: The queer content and like…
Liz: Oh, I’ve got an issue with “queer” but–
Vee: Oh do you? Ok.
Liz: We’ll come back to that another time. Um, not really no. The content itself didn’t really change much. To be honest with you there was, when I very first wrote it, there was um the lines were a bit more blurry with the teacher. And part of what I decided working with my editor and my publisher was that I didn’t really want to go there. When I’d first written it, it felt important to me that there was, not exactly a full on relationship, but the teacher did cross the boundaries a bit more than she should have. But in the end I thought actually that’s not what the book’s about, it’s about Ashley’s self discovery and development. And to go there could almost make it something that people focus on to the detriment of what I feel it really is about. So that changed. But it changed for the benefit of the story, of the character, not to do with anything beyond that.
The only other thing that changed really I suppose to do with it was there’s a scene when Ashley’s just come out to her best friend. They’re walking down the road and they get into this kerfuffle with these guys at the bus stop. When I first wrote it this scene was very threatening and quite aggressive and really frightening for Ash. And my editor said that when it came to it, it just didn’t feel that realistic anymore, it felt quite old fashioned. It felt like this was much more likely to be how it was, they were more like “I’ll sort you out” but in a jokey kind of way. So that changed. But you know since the book coming out things have changed again. This book came out in England a year ago. And, I don’t know, I feel like Orlando has changed everything since then. And there’s lots of other things that have changed things and made me think the world hasn’t moved on as much as…I don’t think it has. And, I think, it makes me think that the book is still needed. I hope it is still needed.
Vee: Absolutely.
Liz: But I’d like to think it would be irrelevant in another 30 years.
Vee:
Liz: It’s a funny thing to say about your own book.
Vee: No, absolutely, I get it. So, speaking of Orlando. I saw that you’d chosen to come out on your Facebook author page after the Orlando shooting. And I was wondering about like what the response was like to that. And why you felt that was important to do in the wake of that.
Liz: Well, when I first got the deal for Read Me Like A Book in the UK, so this is about two years ago now, I did come out, in most places. I mean I’ve always been open with my friends, and there’s no issue. But I’d never been open on Twitter, or in public. And I, before the book came out I didn’t want there to be a focus on…”is this your story?” I didn’t want that, so I wrote a blog a couple of years ago coming out. I married my partner and I just felt like I wanted to be out there. But the one place where I’d never done this was on my author page on Facebook because the readership of that page I see as 8-year-old American girls and their mums. And I just think that, it didn’t quite, it didn’t feel right. And then I don’t know, it was just this feeling after the Orlando shootings that… there’s a responsibility almost for people to, who are in any way the public eye– which I am in a tiny tiny way– but to just, kind of use our position if you like to do whatever good we can do, I suppose is the way of putting it. I felt like this should never have happened. This, this should not be happening in this day and age and I just, I felt very emotional. I’m sure lots of people did, I’m sure you did, many people did.
Vee: Sure, of course.
Liz: And I just felt like I want people to know why I write the books I write and I don’t want to hide away. I want to stand up for who I am, I want to stand up for the people who died that night, I want to stand up for people who are struggling, I don’t want to hide who I am. And you know, what is there to fear? So do it.
Vee: Yeah.
Liz: And the response was lovely, the response was absolutely, you know I’ve not had any, at this moment I’ve not had any negative feedback from doing that.
Vee: That’s awesome.
Liz: Touch wood…ok, just finding some wood to touch.
Vee: [laughs] So you also wrote the Emily Windsnap and the Philippa’s Fairy Godsister series, and… when I realized you wrote the Emily Windsnap books I was like what! ‘Cause I read that when I was like 10.
Liz: Aww.
Vee: And I loved it. So do you I don’ t know like, I don’t know a whole lot of authors who write middle-grade and gay YA books I guess. So I was just wondering like do you see your younger readers growing up to read your young adult books?
Liz: I tell you what, I’ve had a few emails from like 15-year-old girls who’ve said “I’ve just read Read Me Like a Book and I used to read Emily Windsnap, and I’m so glad that you’re doing this now and that you’re still writing for my age group.” And that’s one of the things that’s made me the happiest because I know that you wouldn’t necessarily think that there’s a link, but to me there is a link. I mean I don’t know if you have ever thought this when you look back at the Emily Windsnap books but, and I never thought it at the time, I just write the stories. To me Emily’s a mermaid, she’s a bit of a tomboy mermaid, she goes out on adventures, she gets herself into trouble, you know, she’s great, I love hanging out with Emily Windsnap. I have fun writing the books. But actually underneath all that the books are about coming to terms with who you are and they’re about bringing together different communities and you know, there’s even… there’s this line. I saw someone who had quoted this line on tumblr from Emily Windsnap where she stands up in Neptune’s court and she says “you can’t pass a law telling people who they can love.” It’s something like that. You can’t stop people from loving who they love just because a law says it’s wrong. I was like oh my god that was Emily Windsnap saying that! It’s, there’s a through line I think with the books. So yeah, I really really hope that the Emily fans will grow up to read the YA books. I’ve got a second one that’s coming out in October in the UK called Hold Me, it doesn’t have any LGBT content in it but it is an unconventional romance in a different kind of way. She’s alive, he’s dead.
Vee [laughs]
Liz: But yeah I really hope, it’s all me it’s all my writing I think there’s a through line between the books, do you?
Vee: Yeah I absolutely do. I can definitely see it.
Liz: Tell folk out there because I think so too.
Vee: Do you have a favorite scene in Read Me Like a Book?
Liz: Do I have a favorite scene? I haven’t been asked that yet so I haven’t got an answer prepared. Hmm. I don’t know. I have little moments that I really like. I mean, I love the coming out scene at the end. It’s not just all simple joy. It’s also awkward and difficult. And I think that that’s real. I don’t think that when you come out everybody always goes “oh that’s wonderful!” I mean I have been criticised by a few people because there’s about three different people in the book who say “oh yes I knew it all along, even before you.” And they’re like did everybody know she was gay? How did they know? But I think that does quite often happen that you’ve kind of, you’ve been giving off these vibes before you finally realise it yourself. But… her dad finds it really difficult and so it’s not just plain sailing. So yeah, I quite, I like that scene because it’s celebratory but at the same time it’s also realistic.
I don’t know why but I like the scene where they’re mucking about with the lads, with these guys at the bus stop. Because again it’s a really pivotal moment for her, and I remember things like that happen to me. There’s a line in that scene I remember thinking when I was at University. When a friend of mine had a housemate who poured beer in my face because he said I’d corrupted his friend because she was my girlfriend. And he blamed me, he was very homophobic. And I remember thinking this line that’s in the book which is “it’s all very well going round with two fingers stuck up at the world but when the world turns round and sticks it back up at you, you realize the world’s much bigger than you are.”
And then I love all the intense moments when she’s staring at Ms. Murrin she’s like oh my god what am I thinking? There’s just little favourite bits I don’t know. Do you have a favorite scene?
Vee: I’m not sure if I do… I do like that… like, what you’re saying about the coming out bit because I don’t know, it’s definitely like a big moment for her but I do like that it does have the awkwardness. And it’s not just like this one big triumphant thing.
Liz: Yeah, exactly.
Vee: So I appreciated that because I think some books can simplify that. And not to say that…I do think the feeling of triumph is an experience that people can have but there are other ones. So, yeah, I liked that. I’m not sure if I have any more questions, we’ve kind of covered everything I have. But, do you have anything else?
Liz: Just… I think something that I’ve been aware of since the book came out is it seems to have gone from you know, before it was published, no one wanted it. It was quite, a bit of a risky subject 15 years ago. And now it almost feels like that we’ve gone so far the other way that some people have said that, you know you shouldn’t be making an issue of coming out. It shouldn’t be the main focus of the book. You should just have… queer, I’ll say queer for you, I have issues with queer only because I… to me it still has negative conotations and I find it kind of hard to reclaim it in a very positive way.
Vee: Absolutely.
Liz: But there are the people who say we should just have queer characters in the background, just being there not making an issue of it. And I suppose what I would want to say is that I think we’re still…that would be the aim eventually but I don’t think we’re there yet. And I think that at the moment when it still is an issue, when it’s still illegal in many countries, when people can go into a gay club and shoot dead 49 people simply because it’s a gay club etc etc., I think that it still is an issue and we do need some books that do prioritize it as an issue. But at the same time I think we need the other ones, too, where the characters are just going along being who they are in the background without making an issue of it. So I think, I feel like it’s very very interesting times in terms of the whole LGBT world.
Vee: Yeah. I definitely think like both sides are very important and I think there’s a lot more diversity within those experiences that need more room to be explored. It’s like everything is important, everything has its place.
Liz: I agree and I think you know, there’s so many, there’s opportunities to have so many books out there, lots of people that need to read them and lets just get them all out there.
Call for Submissions: Bisexual Awareness Week Series
During Bisexual Awareness Week, we want to use our space on GayYA to support bi, pan, and polysexual/romantic voices. Last year, we decided to host Awareness Week Series over the various LGBTQIA+ Awareness Weeks throughout the year. Though we hope to include everyone on the site at all times, we wanted to dedicate a concentrated space to people from a specific community to talk about how they’re represented in YA. The response from the community was phenomenal– we got to feature many fantastic and thought-provoking posts, and watched as the community fostered some nuanced discussions via our identity-centric Twit Chats. I personally remember feeling amazed as I read the posts that were sent in and scrolled through the Twit Chat hashtag. I realized I wasn’t alone in my feelings of discontent regarding the representation of my identities, or my hopes for what that representation could look like in the future. I got to meet and connect with so many smart and passionate people.
So of course, we had to do the Awareness Week Series again this year.
During the 2016 Bisexual Awareness Week, we’ll feature 3-5 posts from various bi/pan/poly contributors over the course of the week, and dedicate a space to talk about bi, pan, and poly representation in YA.
Interested in contributing? Here are the details:
Posts should be between 800-2500 words, and center around bi/pan/poly representation in YA. Your posts may go through light edits or a collaborative workshopping process.
Send your post as a Word doc to vee@gayya.org. Please include a 2-5 sentence bio about yourself including links to your blog, Twitter, website, or tumblr. Any links you’d like to use should be included as hyperlinks in the post. If you’d like to include a headshot or other images please attach them to the email– do not embed images in the document!
We do not offer monetary compensation of any sort, but are usually happy to help you out in other ways if we can. Just ask!
The deadline for submitting a post is September 12th. We’ll let you know by the 17th if we’ve selected your post for the series.
A Few Words of Advice:
We will consider any topic that is related to LGBTQIA+ YA, however please be aware that we try to avoid repeating similar takes on identical topics. The more specific you can be, the more likely we are to accept your submission. In particular, we are more likely to accept topics that weren’t featured in last year’s Bisexual Awareness Week Series: http://www.yapride.org/?p=3031 That said, if you’d like to build on a topic covered by a previous contributor, or offer a differing opinion on a similar issue, we will happily consider your post.
Email vee@gayya.org with any questions. We look forward to reading your submissions!
Review: A Harvest of Ripe Figs by Shira Glassman
by Jennifer Polish
Cover page for A Harvest of Ripe Figs, by Shira Glassman. A red parchment-esque background behind a violin, its bow, and several purple figs, one of which is sliced in half, its lush red insides facing the front.
Esther of the Singing Hands is Perach’s Sweetheart, a young and beautiful musician with a Girl Next Door image. When her violin is stolen after a concert in the capital city, she doesn’t expect the queen herself to show up, intent upon solving the mystery.
But Queen Shulamit–lesbian, intellectual, and mother of the six month old crown princess–loves to play detective. With the help of her legendary bodyguard Rivka and her dragon, and with the support of her partner Aviva the Chef, Shulamit turns her mind toward the solution–which she quickly begins to suspect involves the use of illegal magic that could threaten the safety of her citizens.
I don’t do mysteries. Not typically, not unless there are queers and solid politics that don’t glorify the criminal legal system or some futuristic/mythical allegory thereof.
I don’t do mysteries, but I fell helplessly in love with Shira Glassman’s A Harvest of Ripe Figs the way I fell helplessly in love with the older sister of the main character of my dear friend’s manuscript.
(Forgive the obnoxious string of relationships: they seem appropriate, somehow, for mystery settings in fantastical realms.)
Glassman’s tale is not your typical detective story. Centering on relationships rather than masculinized, racialized perversions of justice, and domestic fluff rather than gore, Glassman brings readers deeply into the land of Perach, where dragons and gluten-free challah coexist with full-bodied lesbians and a trans kid of color whose story has the opposite of a tragic ending.
The gloss above gives away about as much of the plot as I’m comfortable doing without interfering with the delight of the twists and turns of relationships and mystery throughout the tale. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t more to say about Glassman’s work, for which beautiful fanart can often be found on her tumblr page.
As one reviewer describes on goodreads, this is domestic LGBTQIA fluff. FLUFFY fluff. And it works beautifully.
Whereas a great deal of queer fiction takes an overall serious tone and surrounding itself with conflicts of epic proportions, this is literally a story about a mystery-solving lesbian queen, who is almost constantly accompanied by her best friends (queer family!), wife, and baby. While there are references to off-page, non-lethal transphobic violence and a strong current of awareness of misogynist violence (particularly in one scene where Shulamit, the MC, is alone with a man who has impersonated her guard), queer readers across the board are surely thirsty for the relative dearth of violence and grief that this text contains.
Featuring QPOC all across the board, including trans and gender nonconforming characters, the protagonist is a full-bodied cis lesbian who is neither concerned with her weight nor, primarily, with her sexuality (though it structures her life in a lovely, refreshing — need I say it again? FLUFFY — way).
The land the characters inhabit is also predominantly Jewish, something a lot of queer Jews I know (including the Jewish-Catholic homos like me!) passionately need. All of this comes off as incredibly real, as Glassman herself is queer and Jewish, and many subplots, characterizations, and side stories are based on her own life experiences.
This is an important point, because I always worry that calls for “diverse” representation, in the wrong hands, can fetishize “inclusivity” for its own, “marketable” sake. However, despite the wide swath of people that A Harvest of Ripe Figs represents, I don’t feel like it tokenizes or makes a laundry list out of characters, because no identity comes off as monolithic.
For example, there is a moment during which the MC, Shulamit, misgenders another character, Micah, based on her assumption that he is a gender nonconforming, male-passing woman, like her lover. Significantly, this moment does not become a revelatory, celebrated learning moment for the cis queen; instead, it becomes a moment of quiet humility during which she is called out by her friends; and the power is Micah’s to forgive her for her misreading of his gender. Shulamit gets no cookies for correcting herself and apologizing; that story arch remains about Micah, not about Shulamit, and it culminates with Micah’s happy, happy ending.
This. Is. Amazing.
A catch, however, follows: this review contains some important critiques of this happy, magical transition-style ending for Micah that I feel compelled to write to here. Though I’m a cis queer woman (significantly, like the MC and author of this text), I felt some hesitation about Micah’s happy ending (spoilers ahead!): his body transformed with a magical crystal that “ripened” him (such a great concept), which is cool and happy for him, but I worry (even as I hesitate to say because it’s not my place to make this judgment) that this could be seen as implying that trans characters need magical body-changing transformations, bestowed by benevolent cis characters, in order to access a happy ending. However, since it was also very clear that Micah was an individual, not a mindless representation of everyone who seems — on the surface — to be like him, I think it came off as fine because Micah as an individual clearly wanted this ripening crystal and the effects it had on his body.
So, magically or not, he gets what is, for him, a happy ending.
Something all too rare — and to be wary of at the same time — in a YA market in which white cis people (like myself) have more opportunities to publish “representations” of “the lives” of TPOC than are TPOC themselves.
While we’re on the subject of the politics of representation, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the hella feminism in this text, which is beautifully ever present and quite, quite explicit.
Some feminist readers might find a bunch of the dialogue and internal narration too straight-forward, perhaps: for example, Shulamit often thinks to herself and speaks to others very directly about feminism. This is great and refreshing, of course, except it also has the potential to feel none-too-subtle in terms of the narration.
However, the reason it struck me as jarring is not the directness (ohhh, the direct conversations that take place over dinner and netflix at our apartment!), but because the language she was using almost felt like it was jarring in the world Glassman had created. As a fellow writer of YA fantasy, one of my biggest struggles in my own work is to keep the language clean of contemporary U.S. expressions in an otherwise otherwordly, different-language-convention-using setting. But, Glassman’s strong efforts to weave this world into her own merits, in my eyes, an acceptance of these blunt narrative tools.
Overall, A Harvest of Ripe Figs is as refreshing as the title suggests it might be, providing readers with both an antidote to and an escape from the dystopian reality around us.
Glassman has created a world in which QPOC are not ensured a miserable ending simply because they exist. She has created a haven for imagining new worlds while refusing to ignore the broken realities of this one. And she has created a system of magic that grants trans characters who want their bodies to match their identities a much better form of health care than do insurance companies in this country.
All of this reminds us keenly that fantasy need not ignore this world’s systematic oppressions to offer an escape from, and dream an alternative to, the present.
Shira Glassman imagines a world that very much honors the fact that fiction does not need more dystopias; no, Perach is very intimately aware that this world — the non-fiction we navigate in our daily lives — is quite dystopian enough.
Instead, Perach provides us with a largely fluffy, domestic queer adventure that spotlights chosen family, happy and safe queers of color, full-figured folks whose sexiness is a given, and the power of interdependent love in the midst of an age of independent death.
—
Jennifer Polish is an adjunct English professor at CUNY LaGuardia College and PhD student in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. When she’s not working on her debut YA fantasy novel (so queer that she felt the need to include some token straight cis characters), she is likely to be reading or writing about YA literature for school, sweating an absurd amount at the gym or on the basketball court, or writing fan fiction in small, dark corners.
On the Queer Trans Experience: Because Sometimes Just One Letter Ain’t Enough
by Meredith Russo
One of the things most often praised about my book If I Was Your Girl isn’t the book itself, but the author’s note at the end (or the beginning, depending on if you’re reading the ARC or the final print) where I lay out my hope that cis people won’t take Amanda’s rather normative story as a set of rules trans people must follow and, more importantly for this post, where I admit that I had to make some concessions so the story would be more palatable for them. Let’s talk about those concessions, because they’re something I still think about a lot. Let’s talk about one in particular.
Making Amanda completely heterosexual was a pretty minor concession since it fit with her character anyway, but it was still kind of a Thing for me. I don’t know what to call myself moment to moment, but I’m sure as heck not straight, I’m more attracted to women than anything, and this was a HUGE problem for me when I was a teenager. My dysphoria wasn’t very bad when I was a little kid because masculinity wasn’t really imposed on me by my parents (I was still too scared to do anything overtly feminine where people could see) and, honestly, if I were cis I would have been a pretty big tomboy. Things got bad when I hit puberty though; I knew something was wrong, I knew I felt twisted and detached inside, and I knew I had to do something about it, but there was a problem.
Even if pop culture hadn’t convinced me from my earliest memory that a trans woman is one of the worst things a person can be (and that’s a big if), the fact that I was attracted to girls made my actually being trans impossible, because this was the early aughts and even after some pensive googling the best info I could find labeled me an “autogynephile” (google that if you feel like getting angry and depressed). So I came out as bi at thirteen, hoping that would relieve some of the pressure, and while it did it still wasn’t much. A few years after that I came out as gay, insisting that I only liked men because, for some reason (hyuck) I couldn’t handle how it felt to be with a girl as a boy, and the only time I ever really felt okay was when a boy made me feel desired and pretty in a way I now recognize, looking back, as how I imagined boys treated girls. Ask me about cognitive dissonance some time, because I am old hat.
So, obviously, that didn’t work. I eventually found a bunch of real, actual trans women online in my first few years of college, came to terms with the idea of being trans, and started processing that. But my attraction to girls was still a huge problem. I could never quite shake the idea that this made me that word, autogynephile, a freak who fetishized the idea of myself as a woman rather than a woman who happened to be attracted to other women. Other people didn’t really help, as the most common reaction from cis people I told was, “So, wait, if you’re into girls why transition at all?” As if loving a woman as a man and loving a woman as a woman are equivalent (believe you me, they’re not), as if straight trans women are just extremely gay men and gay trans women are… well, you get the idea.
I don’t think I really learned to feel completely okay about it until two years ago when I read A Safe Girl to Love by Casey Plett, which features more than a few short stories about trans women with cis women and, gasp, scandal, other trans women! I know, right? But it happens, and honestly it rules. I recommend it. Anyway, the relationships in the book aren’t all happy — many are dysfunctional or worse, but they’re still there, and the women in them understand themselves as queer, bi, or gay, and that isn’t questioned by the narrators, and that meant so much to me. Can you imagine if I had seen something like that in a movie, a TV show, or, more germane to the topic at hand, a YA novel when I was younger? Can you imagine how that might have changed my life? Because I can. I think about it a lot.
I’m sad that wasn’t something I could find a way to include in If I Was Your Girl. I intend to depict a more diverse trans experience in future books, but until then, hey, consider this an opportunity for you to do better. I promise I’ll be first in line to buy that book.
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