Interview With Laura Lam
Sooo only like a month late, here is our interview with Laura Lam, author of our October and November Book Club books, Pantomime and Shadowplay! We had a lot of fun with this one, since Kathleen and I were also joined by Sarah and Laya, two of the awesome people behind lauralamfans.tumblr.com! Our transcript for it should be up soon. In the meantime, we’re right in the middle of our Shadowplay book club! So grab a copy, join us on #GayYA Book Club on Tumblr, and let’s discuss this wonderful book! (also check out the same tag on our blog, because some of our posts aren’t showing up in the tag)
Hope you enjoy– and as always, feel free to email Vee at victoria@gayya.org with any suggestions or comments you may have!
Welcome to the Mainstream
by Karina Rose
Twenty three million worldwide downloads.
Hundreds of sold out shows.
One hovering glow cloud that watches us all as we point and scream at it in praise.
Welcome to Night Vale.
It’s hard to even find a place to begin when talking about the cult hit podcast Welcome To Night Vale, as even from the beginning its listeners have been shocked, terrified, and confused, but above all else in love instantly.
I can’t even describe Night Vale, and I talk about it literally every day. The only way I could imagine it would make sense to someone outside of it is to have them imagine an NPR broadcaster on opium describing the apocalypse with the amount of zeal and normalcy they would describe their annual winter squash festival. And you know what, that sounds an awful lot like something that would happen in Night Vale.
There is always something to talk about in Night Vale, as well as something you can get arrested or sent to mandatory re-education for talking about; Such as mountains, angels, and the dog park. But there is one thing that community radio host Cecil Palmer has talked about openly from episode one, with no repercussions: His love and eventual relationship, with Carlos The Scientist.
In a world where the government schedules the earth quakes, writing utensils are illegal, the president of the community college is a smooth fist sized river rock, and you can be arrested for consuming wheat and/or its by-products, it is refreshing that a relationship—that happens to be homosexual and interracial—between a community icon and a well respected scientist is seen as not strange at all.
The relationship between Cecil and Carlos begins as a crush from afar and is never questioned by Cecil. It’s never a concern of his, nor a shame to him, as he publicly makes his declarations of admiration, live on public radio for all to hear. This is in the same town where people make homemade tinfoil hats to protect themselves from daily thought scans. Yet Cecil’s infatuation knows no bounds and is never met by regret. Night Vale is a small desert community where you can be ostracized for not praising a glow cloud, but being gay is not something a citizen would even bat their one of possibly three eyes to.
“We’ve had a really amazing response from the LGBTQ community,” Says Cecil Baldwin (Voice of Cecil Palmer in WTNV) to Pop Mythology, “…It’s really awesome to see gay and lesbian couples come together to watch the show… The sort of more mainstream gay media hasn’t quite picked up on us yet.” He comments on the very “underground” nature of the show, saying they are not completely geeky, yet not gay enough, and in that occupy a niche space of their own.
But this may change as we welcome Welcome To Night Vale to the YAlit world.
The Night Vale team is no stranger to the literary world, having established independent publisher Commonplace Books and released their novels on the unused story ideas of H.P. Lovecraft and “What It Means To Be A Grownup” before the phenomenon of Night Vale. But this will be their first novel released that is based on one of their own already wildly popular creations.
And of course their agent Jodi Reamer is no stranger to the literary world herself at all. Having racked up names on her list of represented clients like John Green and Stephanie Meyer, Jodi has been behind some of our YA world’s most game changing novels and authors. And she is now behind the beast that is Night Vale, and guiding it to publishers Harper Perennial/Orbit.
The nerd niche project is expecting to hit the media hard, setting a new standard for representation in all forms: Gender equality, racial diversity, and LGBTQIA+ representation. With such a strong fanbase behind it, WTNV is sure to turn heads to where big media heads need to be looking: At the future of representation in young adult literature, to young adult films and television.
Obviously representation is important, but for some reason, it’s still a “risky” prospect for huge mainstream YA hits. WTNV has huge potential to be a mainstream phenomenon, and with the force of its huge fans behind it, it doesn’t seem “risky” for the media to hail it as such. But when you add the subject matter of WTNV, this is where things like “going mainstream” get complicated. Because there are a going to be lot of weird things in this new novel that you don’t see in much YA.
Like the character Megan. She’s a rare character, not simply due to the fact she is a little girl born in the form of an adult man’s hand. But she’s rare for what she represents as a subject in our culture; Transgender awareness.
WTNV may not be considered odd due to the unspeakable acts of street cleaning day, or multiple deaths of station interns. It may be off putting because of the nonbinary warrior of The Nomadic Masked Army.
Will it be the fact that librarians in Night Vale are foul beasts that prey on the young victims of The Summer Reading Program, or the fact that the well-read hero who rises above all else to defeat the librarians is a young black girl, that will make WTNV different from all the other YA novels?
Or maybe what makes Night Vale so different from our reality isn’t the fact that their mayoral candidates were a Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home and, literally, a five headed dragon. Perhaps it’s the fact that the winner of the mayoral election was Dana The Intern, voiced by a queer woman of color, Jasika Nicole.
There’s a lot of weird things going on in Night Vale, from The Whispering Forest to the radical diversity. And in Autumn of 2015, the question is going to have to be asked: What’s so weird about Night Vale? The hooded figures or the unprecedented representation?
Representation matters, and yet it’s hard to get into the mainstream media. I hope we can sneak it in, riding on the back of the five headed dragon of Welcome To Night Vale, where new realities arise from the ashes of the strange and unspoken. Mainstream diversification as well done and front and center as seen in Night Vale may seem like fantasy now, but if Welcome To Night Vale teaches us one thing, it’s that anything is possible.
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Karina Rose and her ya/gay/nerdpunk novels are currently trying their luck in the publishing world. In the meantime, she hopes she is funny on twitter as @karinarosewhite, creepy on Tumblr as TheNightValePost, and as cool as she thinks in real life (Where, let’s be honest, she’s really not and probably just writing some more). She’s from a small beach town in Orange County, California which is why she’s so liberal and so broke.
How David Levithan Stole My Heart
We’re thrilled to welcome one of our new regular contributors, Chiara Sullivan! Chiara will be blogging about all things LGBTQIA+ YA, with a focus on the fun side of it all. Look for more great posts from her in the coming months!
by Chiara
Just in case the title wasn’t completely obvious in the fact that David Levithan indeed owns my heart, I reiterate: he does.
How did this come to be? Well, sit back and I shall tell you the story of how my heart came to be David Levithan’s and not mine, after all.
David Levithan
1. He introduced me to LGBT+ fiction.
I read Marly’s Ghost in my early teens, and it was the first book that I had read that featured a gay couple. And you know what? I fell in love. I fell in love with the story of Marly’s Ghost, Levithan’s writing style, and the relationship between Tiny and Tim.
And such, my love for LGBT+ fiction was born. I wanted to read more of these diverse characters and I wanted to read them now.
2. He’s a freaking fantabulous writer.
Every time I sit down and open a Levithan book, I know the words within the pages are going to completely captivate me from the get go. I don’t have to settle into his writing. I don’t have to wait to become attached to the characters. All of it is just there and I love it. I cannot get enough of anything with his name attached to it.
3. And also a unique one.
I mean, he writes novels that consist of streams of consciousness, song lyrics, wild imaginings, and definitions of words. He writes books that I never thought were possible, that I never thought would work. And yet here they are – and they’re beautiful, and amazing, and completely fascinating in their uniqueness.
4. He writes diverse books.
I guess this is kind of linked to number one, in which Levithan writes about sexual diversity. He’s written about almost every sexuality on the LGBT+ spectrum and I just want to throw confetti in his face (with love and adoration, of course) to thank him. To thank him for being a voice, and unafraid to write the stories that need to be written. He’s a role model if I’ve ever seen one.
5. His Twitter.
I am completely serious. Have you read his tweets? I kindly link you to them here. Every time I see one on my Twitter timeline my heart either fills with some kind of hot fluffy air or it completely caves in on itself with sadness. He just captures the feelings of being in love so truthfully and I love it.
6. He changed my life.
David Levithan changed my life. Not only by #1 and introducing me to the wonderful world that is LGBT+ fiction, but because he has written books and stories that will stay with me forever. I often find myself thinking of Two Boys Kissing (can I please get some trumpet tooting for this piece of preciousness), and The Realm of Possibility (I just cannot even with this book AT ALL), and pretty much every other one of his books that I have read. And I can’t thank him enough for creating these characters and stories which burrowed deep into my not-so-pliable heart. They did an amazing job of capturing me so wholeheartedly (I totally stepped into that, I accept my fate).
+++
So, thank you David Levithan for 100%, utterly, completely, and ruthlessly stealing my heart. Because I am all the better for it.
—
Chiara Sullivan is an Australian self-proclaimed bibliophile with an incurable book buying addiction. She is constantly in the midst of writing LGBT+ YA novels and hopes that one day they’ll appear on shelves so that people can read (and hopefully fall in love) with the words inside. When she’s not reading or writing you can find her tweeting, blogging about books, or watching Merlin.
Review: Being Emily by Rachel Gold
Being Emily by Rachel Gold (Bella Books, 2013)
They say that whoever you are it’s okay, you were born that way. Those words don’t comfort Emily, because she was born Christopher and her insides know that her outsides are all wrong.
They say that it gets better, be who are you and it’ll be fine. For Emily, telling her parents who she really is means a therapist who insists Christopher is normal and Emily is sick. Telling her girlfriend means lectures about how God doesn’t make that kind of mistake.
Emily desperately wants high school in her small Minnesota town to get better. She wants to be the woman she knows is inside, but it’s not until a substitute therapist and a girl named Natalie come into her life that she believes she has a chance of actually Being Emily.
A story for anyone who has ever felt that the inside and outside don’t match and no one else will understand…
The first chapter of Being Emily is hard to get through. I picked it up several times through the months and just couldn’t get into it. It seems like you’re going to be in for an angst ridden ride through the idea of what a cis person thinks a trans person’s life is like.
But I stuck with it, and by the time Emily and Claire have their first meaningful interaction, I was already falling in love with both of them. The story moved past its original lull, and I buzzed through the rest of it in a matter of hours. I couldn’t put it down.
It’s not a sad or angst-ridden story at all. Instead it feels incredibly honest, and there are moments of joy, anger, and sorrow, laced together in a way that will make you cry and laugh along with the characters. It doesn’t shy away from the hardship but it also doesn’t make the claim that this hard stuff is all a trans person’s life is ever.
Being Emily switches between the characters and POV, Emily’s chapters in first and Claire’s in third. This is possibly one of my favorite things about Rachel’s writing: I love switching POVs, the amount of agency that this gives Emily I love even more. Though the narrative delves into Claire’s feelings and doubts on the matter of her supposed boyfriend actually being a girl, it jumps over the pitfall that Luna by Julie Anne Peters fell down, and makes it clear that Emily’s viewpoint is the most important. Claire gets to tell her experience, but Emily has the authority to tell her own. Some people would probably prefer to have it just from Emily’s perspective, but I think there’s room for having the cis voice as an addition to the trans one. It actually helped me understand their thought process.
What really cemented my love for this story was *SPOILERS* when Emily comes out to her therapist. *END SPOILERS* I was just about to do the same and it helped me so. Much. After that, I was invested 100%. It helped that at the time I was emailing with the author on a guest post for our site, and told her my experience. We talked a little, back and forth and although I’d told others before, it was the first time I was ever really allowed to talk candidly about it.
My one critique of this book is the slight biphobia, especially present in the beginning: “Claire breezily described herself as bisexual, and she was the weirdest person other than me that I knew, but at times I thought the bi thing was her attempt to be unique. She’d never had a relationship with a girl…” p. 6
I do think it gets better as the book goes, because Claire has to start questioning and exploring her feelings, but I would have preferred to just not have that in there at all.
All in all, I think this is an excellent book that captures an honest, painful, but ultimately hopeful and joyful story of a young trans teen. I highly recommend it to everyone— especially those looking for good trans lit. Frequently, when people are looking for trans girl lit, Being Emily falls by the wayside, and people default to Luna by Julie Anne Peters— and it’s honestly like getting stuck in a pot of boiling water every time I see that. Not only is Luna extremely problematic and damaging, but there’s way better stuff out there— like Being Emily by Rachel Gold.
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Review written by Vee
Resilient Butterflies: On Rigoberto González’s The Mariposa Club
We are thrilled to introduce one of our new contributors, Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez! She will be writing mostly about Latina/o characters and representation in queer YA. We are so happy to have her on board!
by Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez
The Mariposa Club follows the “Fierce Foursome,” Maui, Trini, Lib, and Isaac, through their high school senior year and tells of their goal to start the school’s first GLBT club. In their attempt to leave a legacy at their school that will create a safe space for future queer students the Fierce Foursome is barraged with homophobia from their peer and their community. Throughout the novel they learn much about each other and about what it means to be Latino and gay. González’s critical choice to name the book and the club “the Mariposa Club” signals a history of gay Latino experiences and stories off of which the Fierce Foursome is able to build. Daniel Enrique Pérez[2] explains in his essay “Toward a Mariposa Consciousness: Reimagining Queer Chicano and Latino Identities” that mariposa is a term “[…] commonly used to describe Hispanic males who engage in non-heteronormative gender and sexual behavior, with an emphasis on attributes typically associated with femininity” (97). While the term in this context has frequently been used as a derogatory expression, Pérez explains how Chicano/Latino authors and artists have embraced the term to signify resilience, transformation, and empowerment.
There is a moment in the novel where Maui expresses concern for not knowing enough about being gay and Latino. Trini explains that gay Latino culture is all around them and it’s their responsibility to find it and learn it so they can then share it with others. Maui and Trini’s desire to find themselves in history, position themselves in the present, and secure their futurity is precisely what fuels their need for a school club. In other words, the Fierce Foursome’s decision to identify as mariposas and to name the club as such highlights their resilience despite the homophobia that threatens their lives.
Pérez further explains that “González’s mariposas are often Chicano males who have been persecuted for being effeminate, but they are also fierce warriors who do not fear the varied social locations they inhabit; they are deemed beautiful in their own skin, and they remain resilient” (105). While each of the Fierce Foursome definitely exhibit these qualities, it is the character Trini that best exemplifies a “fierce warrior.” Trinidad Ramos is transgender and proud of it. The reactions to her use of women’s clothing and make up reveal the patriarchal system present in her home, school, and community. Because she defies patriarchy she is often the victim of violent acts meant to subdue and erase her. She is beat by the school jocks, humiliated by the popular students, and physically abused by her father. Trini experiences a different level of violence than her other gay friends because her identity is made hypervisible through policing of non-gender conforming bodies. This visibility puts her in more danger but Trini use this to find empowerment and to survive.
Rigoberto González
Trini is a fictional example of the real violence that queer and trans youth experience. Gonzalez’s dedicates his book to queer youth because he understands the pain and the trauma often associated with being a young queer personal of color. His dedication reads: “For the young mariposas we all once were. For the young mariposas who are, and will be. For Lawrence King, our fiercest mariposa.” In February 2008 15-year-old Lawrence King was shot by a fellow classmate because of alleged unwarranted sexual advances. Various news reports indicate that King had been bullied for some time because of his use of women’s clothing and make up. King’s murderer was convicted of second degree murder. The hate crime charges were dropped.[3] It is significant that the González singles out King because it suggests that King’s death affects us all and that violence against queer and trans youth of color affects us all. The dedication is also hopeful; by identifying as mariposas González invokes the strength, empowerment, and resilience related to queer identity. Through The Mariposa Club González teaches past, present, and future mariposas to be resilient butterflies. By centering gay Latino youth he makes it clear that their experiences and lives matter.
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[1] Rigoberto González other works include Autobiography of My Hungers (2013), Black Blossoms (2011), Men without Bliss (2008), Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (Memoir 2006), Antonio’s Card/ La Tarjeta de Antonio (Children’s book 2005), Soledad Sigh-Sighs/ Soledad Suspiros (Children’s book 2003), Crossing Vines (Novel 2003), So Often the Pitcher Goes to the Water it Breaks (Poetry 1999).
[2] Daniel Enrique Pérez (2014). “Toward a Mariposa Consciousness: Reimagining Queer Chicano and Latino Identities.” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 39:2, 95-127.
[3] That same year, Angie Zapata was murdered for being transgender. Her murder was convicted of first degree murder and charged with a hate crime. Zapata’s case was the first in the country to charge someone for a hate crime against a transgender person. See Emily Dianne Cram (2012) “‘Angie was Our Sister:’ Witnessing the Trans-formation of Disgust in the Citizenry of Photography.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 98:4, 411-438.