Post-Pride Month Manifesto: Why I Write for Queer Kids

Here we are the day after Pride month. Corporate "allies" have changed their icons back to bland from the June rainbow. I haven't written a blog in a while. I haven't written much of anything this month, or most of last. It's been a long month, with ups and downs. I taught a teen writer class, which was scary and rewarding, the former fading as the later grew. I'm surviving submission, and still falling prey to second book slump, but trying really hard to gear up to drafting again.

This Pride month, I wanted to write a manifesto of queer authorship and what I hope to achieve during my hopefully long and productive career as an author. I thought it might be like a time capsule I could look back on after I debut, after I’ve been down a road I’m squinting at from a few blocks away. My original plan was to do this at the start of Pride, but, then I got called back into my day-job office after a year and a half of working from home, and I lost a lot of motivation. So here’s what I’ve got:

I write for queer kids. How many more people would feel comfortable with themselves today if they saw their potential as kids? I write to give kids that potential, so they find it instead of stumbling into it, or it stays hidden, missing.

So many people want to silence queer art, or queerbait, tease us and then say no at the last second, with the unconcealed scorn, or even disgust. How could you sully something like friendship? I'm sick of the accusations. So I want to write books (and someday other media) where they're DEFINITELY QUEER, YOU DON'T HAVE TO SQUINT!

I write selfishly. You should write selfishly, too! I get to write for me. The me, a decade or so ago, who would have been spared the awkward relationship with gender that stemmed from not understanding my place outside the binary. The me, teased and called a prude in high school, who didn't understand that being asexual was why sex talk was uncomfortable, but it didn't have to be. The me, always, who desperately wanted to be told they were someone special. And who always was, but might have seen it more easily if they had the books I write.

Living through the most high-volume month of queer books by all types of brilliant queer authors, I feel reinvigorated. I'm manifesting my place among those queer authors. I know my books, written and yet unwritten, will speak to others the way they speak to me, now and when I needed them most. They won’t be for everyone, but know, if you need them, they’re for you.