There’s Nothing Fake About Tegan and Sara

The day before I turned 25, I packed up my Subaru and drove over the Canadian border to watch Tegan and Sara perform on their If It Was You Tour. A close friend texted me with concern asking if I really intended to drive six to attend a concert alone. For me, there couldn’t have been a better way to close out a year laced with different kinds of heartbreak. It was a time where I needed art to survive the realities of my day-to-day life. Tegan and Sara were part of the tapestry of queer artists and changemakers who helped ensure that survival. Like many queer people before me, I found a space in their music when I didn’t feel like the world had space for me.

Tegan and Sara’s career trajectory and wide ranging discography has allowed them to create music which finds people during the different stages of their lives. I recently had a chance to speak with Tegan Quin about the band, the Tegan and Sara Foundation, the pair’s graphic novel Crush, and their new documentary Fanatical. Reflecting back on the many eras and extensive soundscape of their band, Tegan shares “I kind of look at the trajectory of our career, all of the albums, all of the different choices as akin to haircuts or style changes. Our first album sounds like when you’re 17 and you’re just figuring it out. You haven’t figured out your face yet or what haircut looks good. You haven’t come to terms with your sexuality yet. Each of our records represents a kind of basic bitch moment in the life cycle of humanness. The luxury and sheer luck of Sara and I having the opportunity to make records right from the beginning moment of our creative journey is that we’ve been able to create a photo album of where we were and who we’ve been.”

The two went on to more fully establish their sound in 2001 with the release of their record If It Was You followed by one of their most famous records So Jealous. “The real Tegan and Sara starts to show through with If It Was You and So Jealous which makes sense because we were 24, 25 when So Jealous came out,” Tegan says. “We’d had more time to establish our voices and figure out who we wanted to be in the world. When I hold up those early high school songs next to So Jealous, I can tell we’ve alway had a way of putting together songs and a good sense for music. We have the ability to draw out the emotions of the listener by unraveling aspects of our own personal experiences.”

The release of their fourth record So Jealous brought on a higher level of attention from the music industry. The White Stripes covered their hit song “Walking with A Ghost” and Rolling Stone went on to list So Jealous as one of the top fifty records of the year. Once they got approval from men like Jack White and major magazines, mainstream audiences started to understand what queer audiences had known all along: Tegan and Sara were undeniable musicians, and they were here to stay.

They had to be great to even have a chance at making it as an openly queer band in the early 2000s. They were never going to get the same level of attention and resources from the industry as their gloried straight male indie rock counterparts. Going back through early reviews and coverage of their band for this piece, I kept seeing the same misogynistic and homophobic patterns repeated over and over again. Perhaps the best encapsulation of how the music industry treated them comes from a Spin review of So Jealous which began, “Lesbians, sisters, and proud Canucks this duo was once Wicca-folk nightmare….” But none of the bullshit stopped them. They continued to break records and attract larger audiences. They refused to be limited to a set genre, putting out records ranging from indie rock to pop with The Con, Sainthood (justice for Sainthood), and Heartthrob.

Even as Tegan and Sara continued to grow, their shows remained a place for queer people to gather and enjoy music together. It was an opportunity for us to come together at a sold-out show to see an openly queer band singing about queer love and queer life. That wasn’t always easy to come by, especially during the years before we had cultivated internet spaces to share art and build community. “We’ve always been interested in community and listening and connection,” Tegan says. “I feel really proud looking back on it now hearing about all of these people who met or got married or found community through our band.”

“It’s interesting because our own fandom era happened pre-internet so we all had to act like crazy, obsessive fans in our bedrooms,” she continues. “You could walk into my room and clearly tell I was into Kurt Cobain because every inch of my room was covered in posters of him. I bought a t-shirt with his face on it and wore it around my high school to figure out who else liked him. Then we ended up being on the other side of fandom and were almost annoyingly disconnected from our power and our privilege. We struggled at times to understand what people saw in us because we’re complicated insecure artists who can so easily get stuck in the cycle of thinking nobody cares about us because Pitchfork gave us a bad review. Those negatives can become all you see. It’s funny because during those key growing years where community building was happening and social media was developing was when we felt the worst about ourselves. But now looking back on it now I can see it was so important and so integral to how people figured out who they were and came out and found our band.”

Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara

Tegan and Sara have also coupled their artistry with activism. In 2016, they formed  The Tegan and Sara Foundation. The mission of the foundation is to support queer women and people of marginalized genders by working with grassroots, community-led organizations all over the U.S. and Canada. The organization has three main branches: supporting LGBTQ+ summer camps, providing queer health support, and funding community grants. This year, they were awarded The Humanitarian Award at the Juno awards ceremony presented by Elliot Page, who is a current board member of The Tegan and Sara Foundation.

“The Tegan and Sara Foundation mission is ever evolving but it’s always been our mission,” Tegan says. “It’s about so many things; building confidence, building self-esteem, building opportunities for economic justice. It’s about taking care of our community and giving us an official streamlined place to put our action, our energy, and in some cases our money.”

Tegan explains that some things in the foundation have remained consistent over the years, including one of its biggest programs, which is investing in LGBTQ summer camps: The foundation gives money to every single LGBTQ-focused summer camp in North America. “We saw that as a pillar because it’s where you breed confidence and connection,” Tegan says. “That’s the foundation to conquering the world. We see young people as incredibly important and they’re unestimated in so much of their young lives. Summer camps are a great place not only for them to see people like them, but to see older people like them. When you’re young you see your parents, you see your teachers. At camp you see volunteers and camp counselors who can serve as the cool, older LBGTQ people in their lives. It helps them see their future.”

While their organization has set programs, it’s also designed to adapt to the different systemic challenges queer people face.“As we see anti-trans restrictions, bills, and religious freedom acts hitting the floor both in the US and Canada, we’ve put a lot of our focus into getting grassroots organizations money very quickly,” Tegan says. “When COVID happened we wanted to make sure community spaces like GSAs and summer camps were able to move into a virtual space so these kids could still be together. Our big goal is funding initiatives like that which can get easily overlooked. The big funders aren’t often really directly invested in small communities. We’re really invested in the smaller communities, the smaller organizations. We’re taking the money that people so generously donate and getting it out the door into the hands of those communities right away.”

In addition to their music, community building, activism work, Tegan and Sara have made a commitment to self-archiving and making sure their story is shared. This began with putting out their memoir High School, which went on to become a TV show. They then went on to adapt their story for a younger audience putting out the graphic novel Junior High followed by its sequel Crush, which tells the story of a fictional junior high-aged Tegan and Sara navigating life as young queer musicians coming of age in today’s world. “Junior High and Crush as a duology hits on the major milestones every kid experiences from bullying to crushes to getting your period,” Tegan says. “There’s also a lot in there about how kids see themselves against the backdrop and fabric of the world today. With social media we’re all contrasting and comparing all the time. Our generation didn’t have to do that. We didn’t have to see what everyone everywhere was doing all the time. Part of the reason we loved modernizing the story was that we got to examine those questions.”

One of the many things I love about following the story of young Tegan and Sara is that it speaks to the emotional landscape of what it means to come of age as both a queer girl and as a musician. In Tegan’s words: “I don’t really want to sit down to talk about the process and show you how I play a song. I want to tell you what happened to me and I want to hear what happened to you. Our experience with music is through emotions.”

In Crush, the young versions of Tegan and Sara get big opportunities all at once, like landing a manager and making a music video. “They get opportunities before they’re ready,” Tegan explains. “Instead of going along with it and giving into the pressure they feel, they draw a boundary. They choose to connect back to what matters most; being a kid, enjoying their friends, living their lives. It was great to live that out because that’s the opposite of what we did.”

Writing that alternative history was cathartic for the duo, who worked with queer illustrator Tillie Walden — author of Spinning and Are You Listening? — for the graphic novels. Tegan sums up one of the book’s takeaways as “if you have the talent and ability, you don’t have to do it today. It will be there when you’re ready.”

Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara

Tegan and Sara are continuing to work to change the culture around what it means to be a musician in their upcoming Hulu documentary Fanatical, which premiered at TIFF this year and hits Hulu on Friday. The documentary tells the story of how someone (or maybe multiple someones) stole Tegan’s identity and used it to build false relationships with fans. Throughout the documentary, we see the hurt caused not only by fake Tegan, but by celebrity culture overall. “For the victims of Fake Tegan, they don’t care about who this person is,” Tegan says. “They don’t want to unmask the person. For them this story isn’t about glorifying what this person did; it’s about taking back their power. It’s about telling their story.”

In conversations with the victims of Fake Tegan, the duo heard the same things repeated over and over. Fans felt stupid and manipulated and like it was so ridiculous they had to keep it a secret. “Which is how I felt,” Tegan says. “Like this was somehow my fault or that I did this.”

The film, she explains, became about forgiveness. “All of us have done things we regret. On both sides,” Tegan says. “Maybe you put something shitty online and now you’re mature enough to understand that was wrong. On the other side, people have been taken advantage of and hurt. Not all of us have been Fake Tegan, but certainly all of us have put on a mask. Many of us have pretended to be something we’re not. Many of us have hurt people and maybe not even understood why.”

In asking those questions of who we are and who we can become, the film shows the full dangers of how we as a society allow fan culture to operate. “At some point, you get somebody or many somebodies crossing your lines,” Tegan says. “We started receiving sexual content, dick pics, and takedowns of our bodies when we were 17. You learn to put up with it. You learn, at least our generation learned, to put up with it. You learn to let it go. You learn to protect yourself. You make yourself less and less available.”

“It’s amazing to see so many of these young artists like Mitski and Boygenius and Chappell Roan engaging in a cultural change that needs to happen,” Tegan says. Indeed, these artists have all spoken out about toxic fan culture in some way, Chappell Roan recently taking to social media to explain the ways her boundaries have been violated and the toll it has taken on her mental health.

“Ten years ago, we went on tour with Katy Perry during a time she was hunted,” Tegan says. “People forget this, but she went through a whole period of time where she just wore one Adidas tracksuit everywhere because it devalued her photos. And we’re fine with it as a society because if we weren’t we would change it.”

Tegan compares this societal complacency about the issue to the fact that people have normalized not paying for music. “The second an option for free or very very cheap came out, people took it, even though we knew artists would no longer be able to be paid or pay back their debt to the label,” she says. “As a society, we have to take that in and ask ourselves the hard questions about how that feels. When you go to a concert there are security and barricades. Ask yourself why. For me, the film became so much more powerful the second we started asking those questions, not just who did what.”

I’m forever grateful to Tegan and Sara for everything they’ve done for me and for our community. They’ve given us space and stories and art that reflects us. Queer people are far too aware of what it’s like to go through life without those things. It’s why we love so fiercely. It’s why I was willing to drive six hours to see them perform. But our love for art cannot spiral into something so big it overtakes the humanity of the artist. That’s something we as a society need to change and unlearn. I hope this film is part of the larger shift that helps us do that.

Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara streams on Hulu this Friday, October 18.

Zolita Transforms Heteronormative Spaces Into Queer Ones

Nothing brings me more joy than blasting pop music by queer artists, and recently I got the opportunity to speak with one of my favorites. Zolita is a queer singer, songwriter, and filmmaker who first went viral in 2015 with her music video for “Explosion.” Since then, she’s continued to create visually-driven queer pop content from her “Somebody I Fucked Once” Trilogy to her latest EP titled Falling Out / Falling In. Most recently, Zolita premiered her tracks “All Girls Go to Heaven,” “Bloodstream,” “Small Town Scandal,” and “Grown Up” alongside accompanying short-film style music videos. They are all a part of her sophomore album, Queen of Hearts, which came out May 31.

Author’s Note: This interview has been edited, and some conversational threads have been re-organized for clarity.

Gen: I first encountered your work through your music videos and was immediately struck by your ability to squeeze what felt like full-feature films into the tight space of a music video. Can you talk a bit about your background in film and what visual storytelling means for you as a musician?

Zolita: Music was always something I loved, but it wasn’t something I thought was going to be my career. Film and visuals were my first love. I studied film at NYU and thought feature filmmaking was going to be my career. But it was frustrating because I’m the type of person who wants to do things in the now and go for them immediately. I want the fruits of my labor to be out there and accessible to people, so the idea of waiting around and trying to get the money to make a feature film felt like an infuriatingly long process. And at the time, I was really experimental and didn’t want to commit to narrative. I just wanted to put cool images together. That’s how I got into music videos. It’s funny because now my work is so narrative. It ended up circling back around. I still love the format of a music video because it is so accessible. You don’t have to go through such a long process, put it into festivals, and wait years for people to see it. Now, I’ve come to a place where I love the challenge of trying to tell a full story in such a short amount of time.

Gen: I feel music videos are such a powerful art form to put out there, especially from a queer standpoint. Even though we’ve come further in representation, there’s still such a struggle, especially for really young people, to find fully queer-centered stories made by queer people. Growing up I remember being so stressed about getting access to the limited queer content I knew was out there like The L Word and Pretty Little Liars. So I’d just go onto YouTube and quickly watch Hayley Kiyoko, then later, you.

Zolita: Totally.

Gen: So, in addition to being an accessible art form, music videos are also a collaborative one. How do you go about assembling a team?

Zolita: My core crew has remained the same throughout the last several years and it’s all queer, mostly just my friends. It’s been so nice having that established trust and always knowing by the time we are on set the vision is going to be carried out exactly as I imagined it, with the addition of what everyone else is bringing in creatively. It’s been such a gift to use my friends and work to create an environment where people can leave my set feeling like they were part of a big family.  Casting has become my favorite of the process. Diversity is really important to me, and I’m working to represent all different kinds of queer people. Because I produce all my work I’m very involved in all of the pre-production and every element of the video. There are so many happy accidents that have happened like getting Tatchi Ringsby to co-star in the “Somebody I Fucked Once” music video trilogy. She replaced somebody else who was supposed to be in it a few days before we shot. Tatchi is actually the reason it became a trilogy.

Gen: I want to circle back to what you said about producing. So you sing, act, produce, and direct all of your projects. How do you balance those roles and what’s it been like working on these videos with your roommate Shannon Beveridge?

Zolita: It’s a lot. I do so much prep work before the video shoot so that when I direct it, I can focus on being in front of the camera. At a certain point, I have to let go of the reins of the producing part. I have so many conversations with my team beforehand, and I live with Shannon, who creative directs, so she’s basically in my brain. She’ll hear about the project when it’s just a little spark, not a full idea. So she can watch the monitor and know if I’m getting what I want because she knows the vision so well. It’s so nice with editing to be at home and able to say, “Hey can you come in here real quick and look at this?”

Gen: Speaking of visions, your new music video series follows two queer pageant queens, which seems to be in line with a trend in your work overall. You often take what are thought of as hyper-feminized, hetero spaces like prom or cheerleading and queer them in a really fun way. What inspired you to use a pageant as a setting for one of your music videos?

Zolita: You hit the nail on the head; I love taking spaces and worlds that seem so heteronormative and set in the male gaze on the surface, then making them queer. It’s such a right of passage for a pop artist to do a pageant video or explore pageant imagery. When I read the story of Miss Puerto Rico and Miss Argentina falling in love at the Miss Universe pageant and getting married, I knew that was a story I wanted to tell. I also wanted to reference all of my favorite pieces of media like Miss Congeniality and Drop Dead Gorgeous and combine them into this real-life story.

Gen: That pageant theme is being carried into your upcoming fall tour. What do you imagine a pageant-themed tour to look like?

Zolita: I’m so excited. Each act of the show is going to be a different category of pageant. The whole thing will be very theatrical with lots of audience involvement. I’m also going to have dancers and my best friend Sierra has choreographed everything.

Gen: It sounds like a night that’s going to have lots of different facets, and I think the same can be said for your album. How would you describe Queen of Hearts both as its own project and in comparison to your other works?

Zolita: I feel like Evil Angel is the only project I’ve done that felt like a set concept from front to back. With my last project Falling Out / Falling In there are so many opposite themes and very different sonic landscapes. My taste as a person is so eclectic, and the themes I want to explore are all over the place to the point where the only thing that makes it cohesive is my voice and my queer perspective. The album has celebratory queer music like “All Girls Go to Heaven” and “Small Town Scandal.” It also has songs involving things I’ve never dealt with or explored in my music.

When I was writing this album, I was in a pretty healthy relationship and didn’t know what to write about because I was just happy. Eventually, the relationship became not good and there are a few songs about that. But in the moment there wasn’t anything in my love life I was inspired to write about so I ended up looking inwards and writing songs about things I was really scared to write about. That got me to a place to write songs like “Grown Up” and “No One Tells No When You’re Beautiful” which is about addiction and families. It ended up being a very cathartic and rewarding experience. I’m definitely the most proud of “Grown Up.”

Gen: I was struck by “Small Town Scandal” in particular. Before I listened to it, I hadn’t spent a lot of time actively thinking about line dancing and the gap of queer music in that genre. Why did you decide to put a line dancing song on this album and what’s it been like reclaiming line dancing as a queer space?

Zolita: So I started going to Stud Country, which is a queer line dancing night that started in LA and has now expanded to New York, San Francisco, and Palm Springs. The minute I walked in there, I started crying. It was such a special thing to see queer people get to take part in something so ingrained in American culture that we’re usually excluded from. I started going all the time and dancing to all kinds of music. It made me realize I wanted to do a line dance to a really gay country song combining artists I loved like Shania Twain with more classical country tongue-in-cheek references. I grew up a horse girl playing flatpick guitar, like bluegrass. The song ended up reflecting my personal music taste and that part of my life while still having a pop, gay, cheeky feel.

Gen: Because you’re a part of the queerleading cinematic universe, I have one last question I have to ask you for the sake of journalism. As a queerleader what do you think is the gayest thing about cheerleading?

Zolita: All of the touching and lifting they have to do for it! I just think of But I’m A Cheerleader and all of the iconic slow-mo of the skirts and the lifts. So much physical contact between a bunch of women. Very gay.

Lamya H on Queer Muslim Community and Leslie Feinberg’s Influence on Their Memoir

feature image photo of Lamya H by Lia Clay

I was lucky enough to get a chance to speak with Lamya H, author of one of my all-time favorite memoirs Hijab Butch Blues and fellow supporter of ice cream dates. Her memoir is constructed from a series of breathtaking essays and close readings of the Quran, which guide readers through their journey attending an international school in an unnamed Muslim country, moving to the United States to begin college, and making a life for themselves in New York. On that journey, they continuously face the assumptions and bigotry put upon them as a queer Muslim immigrant from navigating a near impossible visa system to confronting white projections of what counts as “authentically queer.” Alongside those experiences, they discover the ways in which fighting for the world they want to live in goes hand-in-hand with the beautiful things in their life: community, care, solidarity. You can read more about Hijab Butch Blues in Stef Rubino’s book review for Autostraddle.

Lamya’s writing can also be found in publications like Vox, Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vice, Black Girl Dangerous, and right here at Autostraddle. She’s received fellowships from Lambda Literary, Aspen Words, and Queer|Arts. Their work as an organizer centers around creating spaces for LGBTQ+ Muslims, fighting Islamophobia, and prison abolition. Hijab Butch Blues comes out in paperback today.

Author’s Note: This interview has been edited, and some conversational threads have been re-organized for clarity. 

Gen: I wanted to start by asking you about your title. Any book calling back to Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues immediately has my attention. What made you choose to title your book in the footsteps of Stone Butch Blues and how do you see your work in conversation with or perhaps built on the legacy of Feinberg’s?

Lamya: Fun fact, the book was originally not going to be titled Hijab Butch Blues. It was going to be titled Maryam is a Dyke. That’s a line from the first chapter where I write about being 14 and having this realization about Maryam, also known as the Virgin Mary. I had this moment of kinship with her and found myself wondering if she was like me. I still have a lot of love for that title in its unapologetic queerness. But I had a few reasons why I decided not to go with it. The big one was that I didn’t want people to come to the book feeling defensive or aggravated at the concept without having read what that meant to me at 14. I also thought about older lesbians and the way dyke was used in violent ways and was a slur for a lot of folks. And I didn’t want people with a more traditional Muslim upbringing to automatically feel wary of the book.

Then, when I was thinking through other titles, I found myself thinking back to our queer writing ancestors and what I wanted this book to do. That took me back to Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. I read it in my twenties, and I remember being so blown away, especially by the way it blends a big political story with all of the personal stories of this person. Even though it’s fiction, it is a reflection of a person living in the 60s and 70s coming into their queerness and really thinking about things like race, class, gender, and labor movements. That’s where I learned you can tell a larger political story as you’re telling the story of a person on a more day-to-day level. And that’s what I wanted to do in my memoir. I wanted to tell these stories of me growing up and coming into my queerness while also talking about issues on a bigger level. That’s part of why Leslie Feinberg is a personal literary hero of mine and why I decided to pay homage to Stone Butch Blues in my title.

Gen: I can definitely see the correlations and conversations happening between your two works. Both of you as writers are very aware that individuals can’t tell their stories in a vacuum away from oppressive systems when it comes to class, gender, labor, and sexuality. I’ve been recommending Stone Butch Blues and Hijab Butch Blues as a duo and had some great conversations with people who read them back-to-back.

Lamya: That’s so cool you think of them together. Thank you.

Gen: Going back to Maryam; I loved the way you told her story parallel to yours and how you intersplice your memoir with close readings of various prophets and figures of the Quran. Did you know that would be the structure of your book when you started?

Lamya: I actually started writing this memoir as a series of essays, which is why the chapters are so self-contained. The first essay I wrote was one that actually comes towards the end of the book where I share the story of my partner pretending to be my friend while we were visiting family I wasn’t out to. It was during Eid, so the story of Hajar and Ibrahim and Ismael was all around us. Ibrahim was asked to sacrifice his son, and that’s why we sacrifice a goat on Eid and distribute the meat to friends and charity. During that time, I found myself having all these feelings about my partner coming to visit as my friend. On one hand, it was incredibly lovely and I found myself thinking a lot about her sacrifice in doing that for me. I was thinking about my sacrifices and my silence while also thinking about friends who hadn’t been able to have the kind of visit I was having because they had come out to their family or because their families weren’t great. That all tied back to Hajar within the story of Ibrahim and Ishmael and how she’s not being talked about in the same ways, even though she’s an incredibly important figure in the story. It had me thinking about parallels when it came to me and I found myself writing this essay. It felt really good to have written it because it felt like a way to clarify what was happening for me.

For me, writing is a way of disentangling threads and figuring out why I’m feeling some of the things that I’m feeling. It felt good to write that essay, and when I was done writing it I realized there were all of these parallels I had been thinking about my whole life, and they weren’t necessarily ones that I had written down or had thought about in more formal linear ways. Once I started writing more of those essays, I realized they were part of a bigger, more coherent story. So I found myself writing a memoir. It feels weird to say I found myself writing a memoir, but that is how it happened. I’m not trained as a writer. I didn’t grow up doing a lot of writing or taking creative writing classes. But I’ve always journaled and read a lot. Writing essays felt much more manageable than thinking about writing a whole book.

Gen: Throughout your memoir, you talk about these set projections, particularly white projections, of what makes an “authentically queer experience.” You then go on to talk about your journey finding communities where you feel and experience belonging. How did your understanding and defining of queer experiences change once you found those communities?

Lamya: Maybe this is less of the case now, but in my twenties as I was coming into my queerness, it felt like there were very heteronormative ways to be queer; what you’re calling projections. These “ways” tended to be super white and very rigid. You come out to yourself, then to your family, then you live in this particular way. You have a homebase gay bar. You party at Pride. And all of those things were just not things that worked for me. It took me a long time to have the confidence in myself to know they didn’t work for me and to understand I could live in ways that were different.

A big way I came to those things was through finding community, specifically queer Muslim community. I was able to see people who were already living lives that felt more authentic to who they were. Everyone in that community was living their queerness and Muslimness in different ways. People identified with those words to different extents. Some people identified as Muslim-ish, or culturally Muslim. There were people using different words for their sexualities. Watching all these people live lives that were different from each other, but also different from this normative way of being queer, opened something in me. This was also around the time when there were a lot of debates and legislation happening around gay marriage. It felt a little bit like the heteronormative way of being queer was positioned in a way to make itself more understandable to straight people. This mentality of straight people get married, therefore queer people should also get married so we make sense. That narrative really didn’t resonate with me either. It was only through seeing these other queer people live their lives that I was able to figure out what I wanted my life to look like.

A big struggle with being queer is that we don’t grow up with models. We don’t see alternate ways to live. When there’s one model, it can feel so easy to latch onto that, but what I love most about finding my community is that I found myself surrounded by other models of how to live. One of the characters I write about is my queer life mentor who is older than me. They showed me how to be a person who is kind both to themselves and to others while fashioning a life for themselves.

Gen: On that thread of self-love and understanding, your book introduced a new term: queer indispensability. Do you mind defining that term and talking a bit about what it looks like in your life?

Lamya: The first time I heard that term was during a play. I just remember sitting in the theater and weeping because I felt so seen in that moment. The idea of queer indispensability is that queer people live with this sense of loss and/or potential loss in coming out to family and experiencing abandonment. Queer people go on to counter that loss by making themselves indispensable so that we can’t be abandoned. It was vulnerable to write about, and it’s also vulnerable to talk about. But it’s something I noticed in myself a lot and it’s something I still haven’t figured out how not to do. I’m working on it though. I want to be able to let people in and to be there for me. I don’t want to just be this person who’s constantly being there for others while suppressing my own needs, desire for connection, and ability to ask for help. I have to practice being vulnerable with people and trusting they won’t leave me. It’s definitely something that I’m working on, and I’m not quite there yet. But I think about it a lot. Having a name for it helps because then I can notice myself not letting people be there for me.

One of the things that’s really helped in that regard is having a baby. I have a one-and-a-half-year old, and that really brings out interdependence in my life. It’s impossible to parent in a two-person model where people are working full time without relying on community. Leaning into that sense of interdependence and doing things like letting people cook for me or even just come over to watch my baby so I can go for a run has been such an incredible shift in my life.

Gen: I really relate to the experience you’re describing of hearing queer indispensability described and just crying. That was what I went through reading that section of your book. I just had this moment of wow, I think that’s what I’ve been doing most of my life. Just feeling like I was on the brink of losing everything and everyone so trying to just take care of everything myself and do the most for other people so they need me. Then feeling immense guilt asking for what I need.

Lamya: Exactly! What are some things you do to counter that?

Gen: Mostly I think about how I would feel if a loved one was dealing with that and mirroring it back on myself. I don’t want the people in my life to feel like they can’t ask for anything. Love, friendship, and relationships operate on a two-way street. It’s an act of love to let people take care of you and know you are ready to take care of them. I’m getting better at it, but it’s something I’m still working on. It also helps to think through all of the people who love me fully in my queerness.

Lamya: Absolutely. It’s an immense amount of trust that you’re putting in another person to be vulnerable to let them take care of you, which is the foundation of relationships of all kinds.

Gen: On the topic of evolving mindsets, towards the end of your book you share this realization about the importance of balancing your physical and emotional safety alongside your fight towards the world you want to live in. Can you talk a bit about what that balance and fight looks like during this particular moment?

Lamya: With the ongoing genocide and the carpet bombing of Gaza, it’s hard to have any sense of balance. Having balance at other times lends itself to experiencing times of intensity, and now is a time for everyone to be organizing, protesting, calling your representatives, talking to the people around you. I understand those aren’t things everyone can do, and everyone’s fight looks different, but we all have to be doing something in this time of crisis.

I will say balance is something I’ve had to actively learn how to do. I don’t know if that’s because I’m a Capricorn, but all my queer friends tell me that’s why. I had to learn how to pick battles and recognize that sometimes people were fighting about something, not because they deeply believed it, but because they were trying to bait or troll me. Through my twenties and thirties, I learned to recognize those things and see when I was able to actually move someone so I could fight more effectively. I needed to spot the channels where I was going to make a difference, not exhaust myself. I also had to learn how to really rest.

I think that’s something that isn’t talked about enough. It’s so important to take care of yourself and to rest and to build up energy. I’ve learned to do that through organizing, community, and watching people over the years. I’ve seen people respect their burnout as a signal to rest and recharge. All of that has led me to this moment where I feel I have a better grip on things. Obviously I don’t handle things perfectly and I still have a ways to go, but I’ve learned how to channel my energy into fights where I can make a difference. Palestine is very much on my mind right now, and I know there are many, many ways to fight. I think it’s important to recognize that not everyone can do everything and that people are able to fight in the ways that they can.

Gen: Yes, absolutely. We all need to be making as much noise as possible and queer people have a big role to play in that fight. Do you have particular resource recommendations when it comes to education and resistance in support of Palestine?

Lamya: I’ve been thinking a lot about Israel’s use of pinkwashing — where it positions itself as a “gay haven” in the Middle East and paints everyone else with racist tropes such as being backwards, and uses that to justify its occupation of Palestine. My big ask of queer people right now is to resist that characterization and support queer and trans Palestinians who are resisting apartheid: by learning more about pinkwashing, calling on mainstream LGBTQ+ organizations to publicly support Palestine, and following/boosting Palestinians who are documenting the genocide.

How Bluestockings Bookstore Is Fighting To Keep Serving Queer, Trans, and Houseless Communities

all photos courtesy of Bluestockings Cooperative

To have a bookstore is to have the opportunity to create magic. It’s the opportunity to give people the words and stories they need. At their best, bookstores are built around the values of listening, being listening to, care, being cared for, and community. Because to write, read, and share stories is to reach towards others, to reach something beyond yourself. To me, that’s about as close to magic as you can get.

When I think of bookstores which best embody that magic, NYC’s Bluestockings Cooperative comes to mind. The space is queer, trans, and worker-owned, meaning they work from a cooperative model, following the guiding principles and wisdom of Black communist and leftist organizing in Harlem as well as the Borinquen organizations of Loisaida. Instead of having bosses or managers, each employee is a worker as well as a partial owner within the cooperative.

Together, these worker-owners are continuing Bluestockings’ longstanding mission grounded in the principles of abolition feminism, solidarity, and transformative justice practices. Their mission operates in three parts: 1. distributing literature and resources about oppression, intersectionality, community organizing, and activism by sharing the stories of marginalized people, 2. maintaining a space in New York City for dialogue, education, and reflection where all people are respected, and 3. building connections, knowledge, and skills in their communities.

You’ll see this mission reflected directly in the space and its practices. Masks are required and available for those who didn’t bring their own. As long as people are wearing a mask and abiding by Bluestockings Safer Space Policy, they can spend as much time as they want in Bluestockings sitting, browsing, and using the wifi without having to make any kind of purchase. One of the many toxic byproducts of late-stage capitalism is that warm, safe, free, indoor spaces where people simply exist with access to wifi and restrooms are becoming more and more difficult to find. This is especially true in New York City, as Mayor Eric Adams recently cut millions from New York City’s library budget forcing them to close on Sundays.

The shelves are full of books centering queer voices, intersectional feminist voices, abolitionist voices, and voices calling for liberation from colonialism. Behind the main counter there’s a “free store” maintained through a donation system with shelf-stable food, hygiene products, and first aid supplies. Through a government program, Bluestockings is also able to provide Plan B. All anyone needs to do to access these resources is ask. According to worker-owner Al (they/them) who is responsible for building out their free store, “I’ve ordered and disturbed 2,496 Plan B doses to date. We take surveys on our free store and on average we service 75-100 community members who utilize the snacks and protein drinks as well as our sanitary products and hand warmers.”

In addition to its inventory choices and free store, Bluestockings practices care towards its community by providing free Narcan training and fentanyl test strips. Given that fentanyl (a powerful opioid up to 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin) cannot be detected by sight, taste, smell, or touch, fentanyl test strips can be life-saving. Naloxone (the brand name version of Narcan) is a medication that blocks opioids in the brain for 30-90 minutes and can reverse opioid overdoses. Bluestockings conducts free Narcan training sessions every Saturday afternoon. If people aren’t able to make it to those trainings, they can get a 15 minute individual training from any of the worker-owners (all of whom are certified) or schedule a larger group training. The Narcan kits and fentanyl test strips Bluestockings gives out come from an OOPP (Opioid Overdose Prevention Program) registered with the New York State Department of Health. Bluestockings has been able to give 1,050 Naloxone kits and at least 4,000 fentanyl test strips since November 2023.

I wish this were just a piece on how a longstanding queer bookstore and refuge is finding ways to continue practicing care and love for their community. Unfortunately, this is also a story of gentrification and white supremacist capitalism not caring about what’s right and medically safe.

Last winter, Bluestockings began receiving threats and complaints from neighbors about the unhoused people on the block, pressuring them to stop their community care programs (something they have absolutely no intention of doing). When asked to describe their interactions with the surrounding neighborhood, Al said, “The neighbors were violent toward us with slurs, hammers, and bb guns. We fought back with education, facts, and community support. What we do for our community is part of our mission statement. We show up. I didn’t know how invested I would be in the lives of our community or how they would impact me. That’s my Bluestockings highlight.”

Despite Bluestockings’ efforts to educate the surrounding neighborhood, they’ve mostly been met with shut doors, ignorance, and additional harassment when they stated their intentions of continuing their programming. Once neighbors realized they weren’t going to scare Bluestockings out of their values, they took it to the next level.

In May, a petition titled “Save Suffolk St.” began to circulate with the intention of getting City Council member Christopher Marte to assess Bluestockings’ ability to operate harm reduction programs. The petition reads: “While we support all that Bluestockings does for the LGBTQIA+ community, they are not equipped to service harm reduction and thus their unprofessional management has sadly brought illegal activity that has made our street unsafe.”

Not only is this petition feeding into the harmful belief that unhoused people are scary and unsafe to be around, it’s also just factually inaccurate to what Bluestockings does. Bluestockings is not operating as a facility providing comprehensive harm reduction services or a needle exchange program (though they do point people to local organizations who are able to offer those services). All they are doing is providing a safe place for people to sit down, access to kits, and information on additional resources.

The pressure from the neighborhood soon dominoed into action from their landlord, who this past October issued a 15-day notice to cure (the first step to a formal eviction process). Their violation was listed as, “unauthorized use of the premises as a medical facility” (again, untrue) and goes to state their practice of “permitting homeless individuals to use the basement restroom” and handing out food are creating a “hazardous condition” for residential tenants. These violation claims are not backed by any factual violations of the conduction of the OOPP Bluestockings is registered with. Nothing about these services is illegal or against the terms of their lease which allows Bluestockings to operate as a “bookstore/café/community center.”

Thankfully, Bluestockings was able to retain a pro bono lawyer who has assisted them in extending the window to cure during ongoing negotiations with their landlord’s lawyer. Ultimately, the goal of Bluestockings is to settle the situation outside of court and peacefully continue their community care programs. However, if they are not able to reach an agreement outside of court, they may pursue a Yellowstone injunction. This would put a pause on the eviction process while a judge evaluates the validity of the lease violations.

Until then, Bluestockings worker-owners continue to face verbal and physical harassment as they maintain their programs and policies. Worker-owners see the effect of their actions and their care reflected back to them every day. People come in and send messages letting Bluestockings know their programming helped them get through tough times, find housing, and/or get into recovery. When asked to share a bright Bluestockings moment, worker-owners told me about a local GSA who did a fundraiser at Bluestockings because they felt so welcomed and seen at the bookstore. Bluestockings’ programming with students gives those students a window into building queer community and living a full life as a queer professional. Sometimes, Bluestockings is the first place to provide them with that window. The value of this space where people can access necessary resources, experience safety and belonging, and exist in solidarity cannot be overstated.

The story of Bluestockings is not one which can be told in isolation from the racist, homophobic, transphobic book bans targeting schools and libraries all across the country. The worker-owners at Bluestockings are part of the larger tapestry of bookstore workers, librarians, and teachers continuing the fight to give everyone access to books and literary spaces. Ongoing community action and support is an essential part of making sure they aren’t fighting alone.

Some things you can do:

• Check out Daven McQueen’s piece which breaks down how you can fight back against book bans.
• Support and share information about those working to distribute books to people who need them, like the Queer Liberation Library, which has hundreds of free queer narratives for those who may not be able access those titles physically and Firestorm Books, who are raising money to redistribute the 22,500 books removed from the Duval County School Systems to the children and young people of Florida. If you have another organization you love, be sure to drop it in the comments section!
• Get a library card and request the titles you’d like to see there. Not only does this help support authors and libraries, it also ensures books will be there waiting for people who need them. Added bonus: It’s really hot to have a library card!
• If you’re looking to support Bluestockings specifically and you’re affiliated with an organization purchasing books, please consider placing your bulk orders from Bluestockings Cooperative and using them as your official book supplier. You can also check out their membership program, which helps them pay rent and keep the space public and open to all. If you’re in New York, be sure to stop by and get a free Narcan training.

Sex Scenes Belong in Novels: An Interview with Author Ruth Madievsky

feature image photo of Ruth Madievsky by Adam F. Phillips

I recently got the opportunity to talk with Ruth Madievsky, author of one of my favorite books of the year, All-Night Pharmacy. Described by Kristen Arnett as, “…rich and boldly dark, slick and queer in all the best ways,” All-Night Pharmacy is a show-stopping novel following a young unnamed narrator living in the shadow of her alluringly chaotic sister Debbie. The two spend their nights traipsing the streets of Los Angeles before ending up at Salvation, a bar full of fellow misfits, chasing highs through a cycle of alcohol, drugs, and risky decisions. One night after a particularly potent cocktail of hard liquor and unidentified pills, our narrator finds herself pushed to an act of violence after which Debbie disappears. Trying to figure out how to exist without her sister’s influence, she takes a job as an Emergency Room receptionist where she steals prescription medications to manage her opioid addiction. While she’s there, she meets her girlfriend Sasha, a self-identified psychic and Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who acts as her spiritual guide. In this relationship, our narrator must learn to navigate her existence alongside questions of sobriety, mysticism, and generational trauma.

Madievsky’s debut poetry collection, Emergency Brake (Tavern Books, 2016), was the winner of the Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series and spent five months on Small Press Distribution’s Poetry Bestsellers list. She’s a founding member of the The Cheburashka Collective, a community of women and nonbinary writers whose identity has been shaped by immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States.

Author’s Note: This interview has been edited, and some conversational threads have been re-organized for clarity. 

Gen: Hey Ruth, how are you?

Ruth: Hi Gen! I’m good — working on an op-ed related to HIV care today. How are you?

Gen: I’m good! Actually, you mentioning your op-ed gives me a nice segue into my first question. Do you mind sharing a bit about your work as a pharmacist and how that work informed All-Night Pharmacy?

Ruth: I didn’t set out to write about anything pharmacy-related, but once it became clear that All-Night Pharmacy was going to be full of grifters and schemers, a scam involving pharmaceuticals felt like one I could speak on! As much as I love books that are clearly heavily researched — I remember being in awe of Rebecca Makkai reading every issue of a Chicago gay periodical on background for writing The Great Believers — I wasn’t interested in spending a thousand years in the archives to think of a scam I couldn’t wrap my head around on my own. And having spent some time in emergency rooms at various points in my training, as well as responding to cardiac and respiratory arrests when I was working as a hospital pharmacist, I was interested in the extremity of the ER. It felt like fertile ground for fiction, especially for the narrator of All-Night Pharmacy, who lives in such extremes.

Gen: I loved the setting of the ER for the narrator as a space where she observes those extremes and lives surrounded by prescriptions. She also got to live my dream of being approached by a hot woman at work who says she can guide her through life.

Ruth: (laughs) Yeah.

Gen: Sasha added a lot to this narrative for me in terms of how I read the narrator’s experience with addiction and obsession. Throughout the novel, readers are able to see her struggles with opioid and benzodiazepine dependence, addictive patterns of behavior, and the difficulties of looking for what lives underneath those patterns. What was your experience like writing into addiction and weaving the narrative threads around it together?

Ruth: It was important to me to not write about addiction as a moral failing, because it’s not. There’s so much stigma there already, and I didn’t want to throw another log in the pile. I was also interested in exploring the way historical traumas can affect those who are several generations removed. It felt to me that there was a connection between the narrator and Debbie putting themselves in peril and their family legacy of Soviet terror and the Holocaust. Not the kind of connection that can be summarized in a pithy thesis, but a connection nonetheless. I wanted to explore how being the descendant of survivors can fuck a person up.

I mean, one could write the math class scene in a way that’s just as erotic as a sex scene, but I digress.

Gen: I really appreciate the ways both your writing and work as a medical provider act in opposition to that stigma. We see this intense almost co-dependence when it comes to our narrator with her sister Debbie and also with her girlfriend Sasha. It had me thinking a lot about what it looks like to try to separate yourself from the people who understand the darkest parts of you and people who you share a history of generational trauma with. Was that a question you were thinking about as you were writing these characters?

Ruth: Totally. The narrator lashes out at Debbie for being such a dominating presence in her life, but really, she wants to be dominated. She’s consumed with unease over how to be a person and craves being told what to do. When Debbie disappears, Sasha becomes a less toxic version of that for our narrator. She helps her hone her own agency and act on her desires. But also, she’s another person telling our narrator what to do.

Gen: I can absolutely see that in her personal life and in her sex life. You have some really powerful sex scenes that exist at the intersection of desire, domination, and violence. Did you have a specific approach or mentality when it came to writing sex for this novel?

Ruth: I’ve always been interested in the interplay between tenderness/desire and violence. It’s so silly to see internet discourse about whether explicit sex scenes are “necessary.” I don’t know, Regina, are nectarines and cough drops and your brother “necessary”? I don’t think sex scenes have to “earn” their place in a book more than any other scene. But I also don’t buy that they don’t function differently on a craft level than other scenes. People pay more attention to them, I think, which means they function differently than a scene where someone is teaching a math class. I mean, one could write the math class scene in a way that’s just as erotic as a sex scene, but I digress. I think it’s easier for a sex scene to fail because we’re primed by our puritanical and sex-obsessed culture to take notice when we see sex on the page. I’m a poet, so I was already going to polish every sentence in the book like a fucking stone. With the sex scenes, I probably took a little extra care, knowing those might be more memorable.

Gen: Absolutely. I’m personally a big believer in including sex scenes when sex and sexuality are part of the narrative. Especially hot bathtub exorcisms.

Ruth: Especially those.

Gen: So important. You mentioned you’re poet which I could definitely feel in the way your sentences were crafted and the fluorescent visuality of the novel. Can you talk a bit about how your work as a poet affected this project?

Ruth: I wrote the novel the way I write poems — no outline, just me staring at a blank page, letting beauty and truth guide the way. I always feel so schmaltzy talking about Beauty and Truth like they’re essential oils in a Ponzi scheme. But it’s been my experience that the only way I can figure out what a piece of writing wants to be is by writing it. As with my poetry: image, voice, and chaotic metaphors were my favorite tools in the box. My obsession with constantly chiseling away at the line level also made it hard to tell sometimes whether a line, paragraph, or chapter etc were serving the book. Sometimes, that shit is a flex and doesn’t actually belong there.

Gen: Going back to essential oils, I’d love to hear a little bit about the setting of LA. Did you always know that was where you wanted this novel to take place?

Ruth: I’ve spent most of my life in LA, and it’s a city I love dearly. The occult is everywhere here. Growing up in a place where every other commercial block has a psychic shop — it felt inevitable that this would be the landscape of my novel, too. LA is so many different cities and is home to types of people you can’t even imagine. People writing screenplays with their gastroenterologist, water witches catching mistakes on your taxes. And also, you know, people living much more “normal” lives within the same margins. You can be anyone here, which means you can also be no one. That felt like the perfect backdrop for these characters.

Gen: It did feel like the perfect setting for this story. Also, if you know any water witches who can help me with my taxes, please send them my way. Can you share a bit about what you’ve been working on?

Ruth: I’ve been working on a new novel which is — you guessed it — about women behaving badly. Or, as my beloved Goodreads prudes will probably think of it: “disgusting women being disgusting.” Put it on my tombstone, bitches.

Author Mac Crane on the Eroticism of Basketball and Writing Queer and Trans Pleasure

feature image photo of Mac Crane by Jerrelle Wilson

There are so many brilliant queer authors putting out work today and I recently got the opportunity to chat with one of my favorites, Mac Crane (they/them). Their debut novel I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself takes place in a surveillance state where people convicted of wrongdoing by The Department of Balance are assigned an extra shadow and become “Shadesters.” These shadows serve a constant as a reminder of their shame as well as an invitation for societal discrimination and harassment. The novel opens with Shadester Kris as she’s handed her newborn daughter who has been assigned an extra shadow for “killing” her mother in childbirth. The story that unfolds is one grief but also of love and community in the face of institutional oppression. You can read more about I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself in Yashwina’s book review, and A+ members can check out the discord transcript from when Mac joined us back in March for Read A Fucking Book Club.

They recently a signed a two-book deal with Dial Press described by Publisher’s Marketplace as, “an untitled coming-of-age novel about obsession, ambition, and the intimate, erotic connection between two teammates, pitched as Call Me By Your Name meets Love & Basketball set at a Pennsylvania high school in the early 2000s; and a story collection centering queer and trans desire, performance, and the distance between who we are and what we want.”

Author’s Note: This interview has been edited, and some conversational threads have been re-organized for clarity. 

Gen: Hey Mac! How are you?

Mac: Hi! I’m good, how are you?

Gen: Oh dude, I’m good! Hyped to get a chance to talk with you.

Mac: I’m so excited to talk to you too. You are the best hype person I could dream of. Any excuse to talk gay and sports stuff.

Gen: Those are actually my two primary conversation genres.

Mac: Very much same.

Gen: Alright well, speaking of gay stuff, I’d love to start by asking you about your badass book I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself. I know this book started from your poem which reads, “If the shadows of everyone you’ve ever hurt followed you around, day in and day out, would you still be so reckless with people’s hearts?” What was the process like going from that poem to writing a full novel?

Mac: Oh man, unplanned. I mean the entire process. I never intended to write a novel about it. I wrote it when I was young and feeling very sad for myself and full of shame. I thought shaming myself into behaving better was a great idea. Like Scarlet Lettering myself. Then I promptly forgot about the poem. I had a lot of growing up to do and a lot of examining my shame and relationship to it. How the shame was what was preventing me from changing, not helping etc.

Gen: How did your mindset around shame evolve before and as you wrote this book?

Mac: I really had been living inside of it for so long. When I was young, I felt a lot of shame around being queer.

Gen: Been there.

Mac: I also felt a lot of shame around hurting people, which only perpetuated the cycle of pain. It felt pretty inescapable for a while, like I was just stuck going round and round and piling the shame on. I felt shame around mental health too, having severe anxiety and depression, not knowing what to do with any of it. But I started to think of shame as the actual issue…not all the things I was ashamed about. Shame was the thing that had to go. And if I couldn’t get rid of it completely, I would at least acknowledge the ways it affected my life, my decisions, my mental health and relationships.

Gen: Your book really helped me shift the ways I related to my own shame. It’s a really hard mindset to change, especially when we live in a world so hyper focused on punitive actions.

Mac: What was your relationship to shame like?

Gen: I have some pretty severe issues related to depression and anxiety which got compounded for a while with shame I felt around queerness. I was not always the best at dealing with it and for a while I just used coping strategies which were ultimately harmful to me and the people who cared about me. I’m entering an era where I’m trying to be more honest about it because I feel like not talking about our problems only adds to that shame pile on.

Mac: Oh absolutely — and thank you for sharing that with me. It’s weird, but I like talking about shame. I guess because it tends to be a thing people shy away from talking about. Even as we start having open conversations about many things related to it. I feel like, at least in my experience, shame is something we often talk around without actually naming it.

Gen: Totally.

Mac: It just got so entwined with everything else that I couldn’t piece any of it apart.

Gen: I could see that. Because this book isn’t just about shame on a personal level; it’s also talking about how corrupt governments utilize shame to further enforce systems of surveillance, marginalization, and punishment.

Mac: Yeah, for sure.

Gen: Did you set out to use the emotional landscape of shame and the genre of dystopia to write an abolitionist text? Or did that come together later?

Mac: I did. I wanted it to be abolitionist in nature, to draw the parallels between and reveal the cruelty of different forms of punishment. Like there are no prisons in the world of my book but they’ve replaced them with another punitive measure that’s inhumane. And if a reader who maybe isn’t sold on abolishing the prison industrial complex reads my book and feels that this shadow system and surveillance society is unjust and horrifying, maybe they can take that next step and realize how horrifying incarceration is.

Gen: How did your views on prison abolition evolve as you wrote this book? Do you have particular resource recommendations?

Mac: I was still very new to it while I was drafting Exoskeletons so I was just immersing myself in everything I could. Reading Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, Andrea J. Ritchie, Derecka Purnell, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and beyond. I think probably in the beginning I was so stoked on the idea of abolition but was limited in my vision or imagination — I couldn’t picture it or see how it would work, but reading all these essential texts really helped me imagine a better future.

Gen: We definitely live in a world that tries to limit our imagination when it comes to the possibility of living free from corrupt institutions. I feel like that actually goes nicely into my next question. I know you’re a parent and you write about parenting really beautifully here. How has parenting gone on to impact your writing?

Mac: Man, I mean it’s impacted my writing in practical ways like I have way less predictable time to sit down and just write at my computer. Parenting has helped me embrace a flexibility that I never really had. I was so rigid, especially with my own schedule. Like, I will get up every day at 5 am and work on whatever and if I don’t then I’m a failure. Then there’s the shame again. Parenting has helped me view everything as writing — which feels corny to say but every time I say it, it feels truer and truer. I slow down and meditate on my writing, on big questions I want my work to interrogate and then you know, it maybe gives me more of that imagination for a better future we were talking about. I have this tiny person in my care who I want so much for.

Gen: I have no doubt you’re an amazing parent and the art you’re putting into the world is making it better. On the topic of art you’re putting into the world, congratulations on your two book deal! What can you share with us about the projects?

Mac: Thank you! So, it’s for a novel and a story collection. Right now, the novel is called A Sharp Endless Need.

Gen: Gay.

Mac: Gay. Very Gay. It’s about two high school queer basketball players in 2004 in bumble Pennsylvania.

Gen: My dreams have come true.

Mac: It’s something that is near and dear to my heart for a million reasons.

Gen: Can you give maybe one or two?

Mac: Well, it’s not autofiction, but it gets at the heart of my adolescence. Before I really realized I was queer, I had a lot of complicated and intense “friendships” with basketball teammates. I didn’t know what was happening, what it meant and it was confusing because it was in this gray area like we weren’t making out but we felt like we were in a relationship and the friendship would be really addictive in many ways and then end in heartbreak. Nowadays, I refer to some of these people as “pre-girlfriends”. Not to their faces, of course. It was a really hard space to navigate and all of that was complicated by playing with these people.

Gen: Wait, I needed this term for myself.

Mac: There were so many pre-girlfriends. Like, examining the connection and chemistry we had on the court, it only heightened the feelings I had off the court. I thought nothing else could compare to doing something I love more than anything with someone I love, but don’t realize I love.

Gen: I will say basketball is one of the hottest sports.

Mac: Basketball is extremely hot, and I wanted that to come through in the book. The eroticism of basketball. Like there’s the surface drama of who will win the game. But really it’s like wow, this is sex.

Gen: Everything I need in a novel! What can you tell us about your collection?

Mac: I can tell you it’s very gay and trans. Right now it’s called PERVERTS, shout out to Venita Blackburn at Sewanee for helping me name it.

Gen: That’s gonna be another preorder from me.

Mac: The stories are very strange, and I sort of hate being like hahaha I’m so bizarre! Because I’m not, but they take on a sort of absurd edge to reveal things about queer and trans desire, identity, and the performances we put on for people within our community and outside of it.

Gen: I feel like the best stories do go for that absurd edge.

Mac: It’s a lot about performance, I’d say and there are some queer and trans reimaginings in there as well. A queer Peter Pan reimagining. Those are very fun for me to write.
The stories, for me, feel like when I’m at my most playful, even as they take on very serious themes.

Gen: Do you mind sharing a bit about your experience putting out queer literature today? Anything from the beautiful to the challenging.

Mac: Oh gosh, you know. It’s such a complicated and beautiful experience. The best part is having queer readers reach out to me and share their experiences of reading it and tell me what’s meaningful to them. Or how it changed them. I mean, it’s literally UNREAL for me to believe that something I wrote changed someone. But it’s incredibly moving to hear nonetheless you know, and then all of this beauty intersecting with book bans and feeling afraid for queer and trans kids who might not be able to go into a library and find the book they need. Not specifically mine, but any queer or trans book that makes them feel seen.

Gen: The cruelty of taking away stories from children who need them is earth-shattering.

Mac: It is so fucking earth-shattering. There’s also an added complication, at least for me personally, to publishing a book that has a lot of queer sex scenes on the page. It’s the only way I know how to write — including queer and trans pleasure and sex and desire — because that’s my life? And I have to deal with people in my immediate world who I think try to shame me for putting so much queer sex on the page, like it’s not palatable. Or like queerness is only palatable if it’s PG-rated, single, close-mouthed kiss. But let’s bring this full circle baby because I refuse to feel ashamed for squirting!

Gen: I’m so grateful to authors and artists doing that work, because there is so much shame around queer sex and queer sexuality. We belong fully on the page and in media, not just the bits people see as “tolerable”.

Mac: For real. I hate the word tolerance. It’s the worst.

Gen: Well, I can honestly say that your work tells tolerance to fuck right off.

Where Are All the Scream Kings?

When I was in fourth grade, I got in trouble for discussing how fast my body would decompose if I was stabbed. It was far from the first time I’d discussed murder and rotting flesh with my classmates, and it definitely wasn’t the last. I wasn’t trying to scare them or get attention; I was genuinely interested in all things murderous and bloody. That was just who I was. Gore girl. While other kids watched Cartoon Network and the Disney channel, I consumed hours of horror and crime television, especially Bones. Even though I didn’t always understand what was happening in the movies and shows I watched, I found myself fascinated and strangely grounded by the fictional violences playing out on screen.

I began to more heavily rely on horror as a place of solace as I made the shift from elementary school to middle school to high school. With each passing day, I felt more and more like I didn’t belong in the world presented to me. It wasn’t just that puberty had brought with it a blanket of unwelcome hormones and clinical depression; it was that I was coming to understand the particular pains of being queer and being a teenage girl. I started to more fully contextualize the men who yelled at me from their cars and interrogated my friends and I on the sidewalk. The hardest part was that the danger wasn’t just coming from men I could disregard under the label of “stranger danger.” The boys I’d previously considered friends and casual acquaintances started to show me the cruelties they were capable of. In seventh grade, a girl a few lockers down from me told me she’d put duct tape around her pussy in case her boyfriend wouldn’t listen when she said no. The words gay, dyke, hoe, and slut served as staple insults. Girls were rated, and the ones with the lowest ratings were treated as inferior and annoying. None of these experiences are particularly unusual. I ignored my own growing anxieties and spent my days pretending to be a girl I wasn’t. At home, I obsessed over the show The Following and read all the Stephen King books I could get my hands on.  

As I got older, I found the language I needed to explain my constant buzz of anxiety, depressive dips, and the gendered fear the world normalizes. I got on medication and fell in love with horror franchises like Halloween where I could easily point to villains and say: That guy. That’s the problem. He’s the evil that needs to be defeated. When he’s gone we’ll all be safer.

One thing to defeat, not a world to change. It was a simple understanding of violence that couldn’t be applied to anything else in my life (though of course as Stef Rubino writes in their Horror Is So Gay essay “Elm Street Was a Nightmare Before Freddy Made It One”, even horror’s monsters do not exist in isolation from the horrors of society).Watching horror also gave me a way to have power over something that scared me. I can’t walk away from my mental illnesses or ever guarantee someone isn’t going to hurt me because they feel that’s their right. But when I watch something scary, I can always close my laptop, turn off the television, or walk out of a movie theater.

During my college orientation, new students gathered to listen to a presentation on how not to be raped. We watched a video about how we should think of sexual assault like a bear attack. Wouldn’t you take precautions if you lived on a campus full of wild bears? A girl left the auditorium in tears, and a sports bro in the row ahead muttered about his time being wasted while leveling up in Candy Crush.

The presentation confirmed what I already knew: You need to protect yourself and others because institutions aren’t going to. That night, I started looking into transfers and wondered if it’s possible to escape the apparently inescapable. I later celebrated finishing my transfer applications by watching The Purge alone because I hated leaving my room at night. I already knew about the fucking bears.

In the end, I graduated from a different college and started work at an outdoor education center in Vermont. The job came with housing, and living with cis men gave me an anxiety that was both warranted and unwarranted. We become close in the way people do when they are living and working together in rural Vermont. But I made a miscalculation about what that closeness meant. Because there were things they never understood. They never understood the piece of my life that made me hate when they stood in door frames. They nodded in sympathy and confusion as I shared my anger over the coverage of Amber Heard’s defamation trial and the Roe Supreme Court Draft Leak. They gave allowances to men known to be misogynists. When I found these men sitting in my house, I’d go on long runs and hide out in my room watching Black Swan on a loop.

I was relieved when I got funding and a teaching assistant to start my MFA at a university far away. My mental health had been on a decline again, and I just wanted space to write, run, and focus on better strategies for dealing with my mind. I dedicated myself to my novel and routine and being the best teacher I can be. I see my student’s keychain pepper sprays and pray they never have to use them.

On Thursday nights, I attend a reading series usually followed by drinks with my cohort at a local bar. On one of those Thursdays, a man I didn’t know stopped me and started asking me questions. Was I a college student? Did I have a boyfriend? Did I live alone? Hadn’t he seen me before leaving that apartment building? I did what I’ve trained myself to do in these circumstances. I walked away, gripped the whistle I carry harder in my pocket, and got ready to dial a friend. After he saw my whistle, he walked away too, allowing me to go back to my apartment to have my panic attack in peace. I was too rattled to sleep, so I decided to calm myself down by making my way through the Saw franchise. About halfway through, I started laughing to the point of tears. Maybe I’d be stalked, but there was no way that man was smart enough to put together a reverse bear trap.

After I finished my journey of death traps, I added to my notebook a list of men I’d seen scream in horror movies. Not men panicking or yelling, but men reacting with a gut-wrenching scream. It shouldn’t have been a hard list for a horror fan to make. Men aren’t free from the terrorizing events which take place in horror movies. They have their own dangerous encounters with murderers like Micheal Myers, Ghostface, Leatherface, and Jason Voorhees. They experience the same petrifying paranormal events which dominate the genre: ghosts, haunted dolls, and evil clowns. Where were the screaming men, and why was their absence bothering me so much?

The genre’s lack of Scream Kings was a problem I’d been discussing via text with a crush who I’d never met and who lived on a different continent (sometimes to be gay is to be unhinged and irrational). She was a horror fan too and seemed interested in the list, so I spent an unhealthy number of hours watching movies alone and going through online horror discussion boards. What I eventually came to realize is that men do actually scream in horror movies (rarely), but almost always under four set circumstances. The first is torture or extreme physical pain, which is why a good number of the movies on my short list ended up coming from the Saw franchise. The second is when a male character is queer or queer coded, as Jesse and Grady are in Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. The third is when they are screaming for a joke, over-the-top shrieks played for laughs (this second and third scream often occur at the same time). The last is when they are going through possession or body transformation, like Peter in Hereditary and Wallace in Tusk.

The message behind these specific gendered scream choices and the infrequency of screaming men in horror in general seems to be that screaming in terror is ultimately a feminine act which straight men simply aren’t capable of even in the most dire of circumstances. This message is as unbelievable as it is disappointing. The genre is designed to push our understanding of both human behavior and the human condition. That’s part of the reason I fell in love with horror in the first place. We’re willing to accept everything from sexually transmitted demons to armies of murderous doppelgängers, yet we are still unwilling to accept the very real possibility that a frightened man might scream when he’s scared. Why is that the boundary directors and screenwriters are so unwilling to push on?

Perhaps the answer lies in all the “nonviolent” men who have followed me and commented on my body with relative frequency since I was 11. I used to tell myself I had this problem because I usually walk alone, look young for my age, come and go from queer spaces, and socialize with other queer people in public spaces. These are definitely factors, but I know better than to see myself as the one at fault. If there’s one thing horror movies have taught me, it’s that looking for a reason doesn’t help you when the call is already coming from inside the house. I’m sure a good number of those men know they aren’t going to get anywhere with me and aren’t planning to do anything beyond verbal harassment (though I can never know that for sure). They just want to see my fear because they know that scaring someone is a way to demonstrate power over them. That’s why fear is one of the most powerful tools of patriarchy and why our screens are full of screaming women. Screaming being the ultimate encapsulation of fear and not something audiences expect from men.

To be clear, I’m not saying Scream Queens themselves are only a manifestation of patriarchy. It’s natural for terrified people to scream and for horror films to want to show that terror. Scream Queens go back almost as far as the big screen itself, beginning with Fay Wray’s show stopping scream in the original King Kong. She started the parade which would later go on to include horror icons such as Janet Leigh, Jamie Lee Curtis, Neve Campbell, Tanedra Howard, and countless others. I have deep respect for the work of every single one of them. Have you ever let out a full body scream? Have you seen Samara Weaving scream? Are you fucking kidding me? It’s an exhausting art form and one which shouldn’t only be practiced by women. The Scream Queens aren’t the problem. The problem is the relative silence of men.

There are certain things I never really see changing. I can never guarantee that people will react well when they read me as queer or when they find out I’m a lesbian, something I’m very open about at this point in my life. I don’t think I’ll ever feel comfortable running at night or getting rid of my pepper spray. I don’t think people will ever stop voting bigots into positions of power. Is expecting fear to be displayed equally in the face of deep fictional terror too much to ask? It might not change the world, but I do know more men screaming their heads off would bring at least one dyke a little bit of satisfaction.

Horror Is So Gay is an annual Autostraddle series of queer and trans reflections on horror.