Queer Representation in Literature

The power that can come from seeing your own experiences reflected in stories cannot be understated. This week In the Den, Jen chats with New York Times bestselling author Mackenzi Lee about the importance of representation, and queer representation in particular, in literature. Representation matters because what we see in the media doesn't just reflect reality. It has the potential to shape it. Books that depict and normalize queer relationships, queer identities, and queer stories in books help increase understanding in general, and give LGBTQ young people a vision of what their future could be.  

Special Guest: Mackenzi Lee

Mackenzi Lee holds a BA in history and an MFA from Simmons College in writing for children and young adults. She is the author of ten books, including The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, which was a New York Times bestseller, received a 2018 Stonewall Book Award Honor, and won the New England Book Award; and a series of novels for Marvel which tell the origin story of your favorite MCU antiheroes. Her adult debut, LADY LIKE, is forthcoming from Dial Press. In 2020, Forbes Magazine included her on their list of 30 Under 30 in media. She currently lives in Los Angeles with a fridge full of Diet Coke and a dog that weighs more than she does. 

Links from the Show: 

• Mackenzi’s website: https://www.mackenzilee.com/ 
• Mackenzi on IG: https://www.instagram.com/themackenzilee/?hl=en 
• Join Mama Dragons today: www.mamadragons.com 

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Transcript

JEN: Hello and welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons. I’m your host, Jen. This podcast was created to walk and talk with you through the journey of raising happy, healthy, and productive LGBTQ humans. Thanks for listening. We’re glad you’re here.

We have talked often on our podcast about the importance of representation. What we see in the media doesn’t just present reality, it also helps to shape reality and our views about it. It helps us imagine all the places in the world where we might fit and explore and excel. Representation for children and teens helps them create dreams for their future. Today we have a special guest to expand on and explore all these ideas with me, particularly when it comes to literature. 

Mackenzi Lee holds a BA in History and an MFA in Creative Writing from Simmons College. Her book, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue, is a New York Times bestseller, an ABA bestseller, a Stonewall Honor Book, a New England Book Award winner, and has been optioned for film by HBO. She is currently finishing a series with Marvel detailing the origin stories of fan-favorite antiheroes from the MCU, including Loki, Nebula, and Gamora. In 2020, Mackenzi was included on the Forbes 30 under 30 media list. Her short fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the Boston Globe, Atlas Obscura, Teen Vogue, and Bust magazine, among others. A link to Mackenzi’s Amazon page and website will be included in the show notes. Welcome, Mackenzi Lee, to In the Den! 

MACKENZI: Hi. I’m so happy to be here with you.

JEN: Can we start off by having you share with us the brief story of You? We’d like to get to know you as a person.

MACKENZI: I mean, I feel like you covered it in the bio. You hit all the highlights. Okay, so a brief story of me. I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was raised in a half-Mormon, half-not household. My mom still is a member of the Mormon church and my dad was not. So, as a kid, I really liked to read. But in hindsight I don’t think I was a very good reader. I read a lot of books over and over and over again. I listened to a lot of audio books. My sister and I were both given cassette players because that’s the age I came from. And we would walk around the house with our little boom boxes, essentially, listening to our respective books on tape constantly. As a result I still call audiobooks, “Books on Tape” half the time. So I really like doing books on tape while I sit and draw or do something else with my hands. I was a little fidgety. I like to read, but didn’t want hard books. I really loved to read Star Wars novelizations. I was a big Star Wars kid before it was cool to be – it's so mainstream to be a Star Wars fan now. And I’m like, “You all have no idea what I went through as a nerd girl.” I was so deeply uncool because of that and now it’s like everybody loves Star Wars. Anyways that’s a tangent, my bitterness aside. But I really liked to read, I liked to write as a kid. And then sort of put that aside as this is a thing that I couldn’t actually do as a professional career. I never occurred to me that a writer was something that you could do as a professional career. And also, I hit a point in school in junior high and high school where I didn’t have time to read for fun anymore. And I sort of forgot how. And everything I was reading was assigned to me in school. And it was all so challenging to me and I found most of it so deeply unpleasant that I just thought, “Well, reading’s not something I like to do. Reading’s not fun. It was fun when I was a kid, but now as a teenager it’s not anymore.” And so I sort of put aside reading, something I really, really loved to do as a kid, I stopped doing when I was in high school. And then got to college and decided I was going to be a historian. I really loved history and had worked at a living history park when I was in my teenage years. So my first job was a 19th century blacksmith which I think really shaped everything about me. It’s one of those talks where you’re like “That’s very on-brand.”

JEN: Wait, so you like dressed up in the costumes and pretended and they would ask you questions and you would stay in character?

MACKENZI: It was not pretending. I trained as a blacksmith and I made things out of iron. And yes, was in the outfit. But I worked in a shop and there was a master blacksmith and there were two of us apprentices. And we would make things and we would talk to guests.

JEN: Like making oldy-time things, like you were making horseshoes?

MACKENZI: Oh, yes. We made oldy-world things. We made things that they used in the village that I worked in. We would make door hinges and spoons and they would populate the village and houses with them. Then we sold some of them too.

JEN: That’s fascinating.

MACKENZI: It’s the sort of thing I tell people about and they’re like, “You’re the only person I know that that is a fact that that makes sense.” Where as most people that would be very, very off brand.

JEN: And you got paid for it. It was like a job?

MACKENZI: Yes. It was. Shockingly, they were paying me for it. It was a job, job. I love how baffled you are by this.

JEN: I didn’t know this existed.

MACKENZI: It does. It was in Salt Lake City. It was sort of like Mormon Williamsburg. There’s a place called, This is the Place Heritage Park. It’s not church owned, but it’s – I think – it’s a state park. And because of that, it’s so intrinsically linked to Mormon history the way everything in Utah is. So it’s not an official church thing, but it is a Mormon pioneer related thing where they teach you about early life in Utah. And I had such a fun time there for three years. Essentially, I worked there for three summers, essentially cosplaying the past. And really enjoyed all the adventures.

JEN: I love that.

MACKENZI: It was very formative. It was one of those things where I look back and, yeah, where I am now makes a lot of sense. So I had done that as a teenage job. And that had led me to pursue a history degree. I thought I would become a professor because it’s the only thing you really do with a history degree. Either that or become a blacksmith at a state historical park. So I decided I was going to get a PhD. I was going to become a professor. And I wanted to study the Wars of the Roses. The 1400s in England essentially, this very civil war in fighting noble conflict over which house had the claim to the English throne. I was really interested in this because in high school I did theater and we had done Henry the VI and Shakespeare’s versions of the Wars of the Roses are quite fanciful. But still, I was very interested in this very niche conflict. So I went over and lived in the UK for a year to go to school there and wanted to study with this historian at the school who specialized in women during the Wars of the Roses which was super interesting to me. And, again, another very formative experience because at their face, the Wars of the Roses are so masculine. Of course, all war is very masculine first of all. But when you read the accounts, there’s no women present. It’s all just a sausage-fest. And this professor I worked with was very formative in teaching me how to find women’s narratives when they don’t seem to be present in history and just made me realize that everywhere there were men doing things, there were also women doing that same thing. And that’s women and queer people and disabled people and nonwhite people. You just have to sort of look in different places or sort of look just under the surface. And so she ended up being very formative in the way that I approached studying history. But she graded me really poorly on all my papers and I was very upset. And she finally told me that, “You can’t write history papers like novels.” She’s like, “You cannot write dialogue for Richard the III.” She kept marking things where she’d be, “You’re editorializing here,” because I would write things like, “Henry the V paced the battlefield of Agincourt.” She’s like, “You can’t do that. We don’t know he did that.” He probably paced the battlefield. And she’s like, “I know. But we can’t.” I wanted to write historical fiction and she sort of gently redirected me and was like, “You’re either going to need to change how your writing or what you’re writing. And it seems like you really want to be writing historical fiction.” So I came back to the United States and finished my history degree feeling very glum and like I had just wasted four years doing a degree I was never going to use. And about that time, when I was in England, I was also traveling a lot because I was over in Europe and you can get the super cheap flights. And I was traveling in the way you really only can when you’re 19 and have no sense of your own fragility. So I was doing a lot of red-eye flights that cost $15 and they essentially strap you to the top of the plane. And staying in hostels with 40 strangers and you have to sleep on your passport so nobody steals it. It was terrible. I loved it. I loved it so much. And I was spending all this time in bus stations and airports and train stations. And I was like, “What do people do for fun in those places.” Because this was before smartphones. I didn’t even have a cell phone. And so I was like, “What do you do on a train or in a bus or in a plane?” And there seemed to be these things called book stores in every airport, bus station, train station. Let’s give that a shot.

JEN: They all have one of those.

MACKENZI: They do. Yeah. I saw a lot of them. There must be something to this reading thing. So I started reading again when I was traveling. And I was reading a bunch of – for a while I was reading whatever the school library had. So it was a lot of assigned books. It was similar to what I had been reading in high school, but I could choose. So I liked that better. And then I rediscovered some of the books that I had read as a kid and as a young person and loved. And I was sort of recaptured by the magic of reading. I started to love reading again, primarily because of these books that I’d loved as a kid. And it was 2010 would’ve been the year. So YA was sort of in its hay-day as a genre. The Twilight boom was on its way out, but the Hunger Games boom was coming in. and there was so much great young adult literature. And I found that there was a lot of stuff happening in young adult that was counteracting the sort of stuff in adult fiction that I didn’t like. There was no long slow exposition. There was no 40-year-old men having affairs with teenagers. All of these things I really didn’t like about adult fiction, were not happening in YA. And instead, you were having these really interesting conversations about coming of age and about discovering your identity, the sort of “We need diverse books” movement wasn’t really in full swing yet. But it was catching on. And YA, these were the kind of stories I wanted to be telling. And I think I was also 22 or 23 and so also I felt very close to the YA age. And I think we also – none of us ever feel like we stop coming of age which is why Young Adult continues to be a genre read by people of all ages. But I was very attracted to children’s books and young adult books and decided I wanted to do an MFA much like my history professor had recommended.

JEN: It just took you a little bit to believe her.

MACKENZI: Yeah. It took me a little bit to figure it out. But, at the end of the day, I was like, everything makes perfect sense that I did a history degree and then I went and did an MFA in writing for children and young adults and now I write historical books for children and young adults. I’m like, my degrees worked really well together. So I ended up moving to Boston after school. I went to Simmons College which has one of the country's few MFA programs where you can specialize in children’s and young adult literature which I really wanted to do because I have heard the reputation of fiction MFA programs of not taking those kinds of books seriously. And I was like I didn’t want to waste two years just fighting to get my professors to take my writing and what I want to be writing seriously. So I went to Simmons. I had a wonderful time. While I was there I started working in a bookstore, which I thought would end up being just the crummy retail job you work while you’re in grad school. And then, ten years later, I am still working in bookstores. I’ve now worked in five different independent bookstores in three different states. I’m so addicted to bookselling and part of it is because I get really passionate about the books that I love. And so I love forcing them upon other people. That has become my passion in life. So I’m still a bookseller which I started doing in Boston. And I was writing fiction when I was back there. My first novel got published when I was 24, which is extraordinarily young. I would say now, too young. I wish I had waited a little bit, let a couple of those ideas simmer. But it’s fine because where I ended up being is exactly where I want to be. So I published a first novel that was based sort of around Frankenstein. It’s a reimagining of Frankenstein, but also the story of Mary Shelly writing Frankenstein which I got very, very obsessed with for a while. And it was sort of wildly unread. Nobody bought it. It sold very, very poorly. And the only reason I got to write another book is because Harper Collins, who was my publisher, had foolishly signed me up for two books. So the first book is this monstrous thing plus second untitled book. And I think they were doing that at the time because lots of dystopians were popping off, and so, “If this really takes off, we want to have you under contract for the next one.” And instead, it was sort of like, “Well, do whatever you want because you don’t have any sort of audience or following or precedent.” I was trying to write a book about Chicago steel mills in the 1890s and it was really sad. And I was really sad at the time. And I was trying to figure out how to be a professional writer and how to commodify your art. And how to sort of reconcile the weirdness of writing something and putting something out there and having this huge, tremendous accomplishment of publishing a book and it just felt like nobody cared or nobody noticed. The industry felt so indifferent to me as a whole. And so I was very sad and I was writing this sad book. And everybody in the book had cholera and was missing limbs. And it was very sad. And I just prying it out of me in three word increments and it just was not working. And so I thought, “The thing I’m going to do, to make writing fun for me again, is I’m going to write, just for me, the silliest, campiest, dumbest adventure novel that I can think of. And it’s going to have every silly trope in it that I love. It’s just going to be goofy and wacky and I’m just going to go for it. Nothing is off limits.” And so I would reward myself for writing three words of the Chicago steel mIll book by getting to then write thousands of words of this trope-y adventure, silly book that was just for me. And, at a certain point, I realized then that I should probably be writing the silly trope-y adventure novel as the next thing I was going to publish instead of the sad Chicago steel mill book. And that book was the book that ended up being Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue which is a campy, silly, trope-y, adventure novel set in the 1700s in Europe about two boys on their grand tour of Europe.

JEN: I want to go backwards to when you were very first thinking about how you wanted to do these books. I want to hear how much thought went in. Were you decided, had you noticed in your life there was a lack of representation? Was there stuff missing for you? Where you trying to fill a hole? Or were you just writing about what you loved?

MACKENZI: My first book came out in 2015. The same year that a book called Love, Simon came out (it’s now called Love, Simon. At the time it was called Simon Versus the Homo Sapiens Agenda), which was a groundbreaking book in young adults in terms of queer representation. It’s a rom-com about a gay teenager. And it broke the world in that it was so popular. Everybody was reading this book. For people who don’t work in the book industry, it’s very rare that a book is a surprise hit. Usually, when things hit it’s because there’s been a carefully orchestrated campaign of marketing and publicity behind them. And the publishers know what’s going to succeed based just on how much marketing they’re giving a book. That’s the reality of the world. But Simon was a book that sort of crept up on everybody. And it kept gaining momentum. And it just kept getting read and read and passed around and read, especially by teenagers. And part of that was because it was about queer characters. And it set off this sort of revolution in Young Adult. And there had been queer authors before. David Levithan was super instrumental in his role in queer literature. He wrote some of the first. There’s queer YA that goes back to the ‘60s but it was very sort of moralistic. It was all really centered around queerness and punishment for queerness. And lots of them don’t have happy endings. And then here you had Simon come along which was just this joyful rom-com about two boys. And people responded so strongly to it. And so I think I felt a little bit buoyed by the success of Simon and also just that I was; I can’t remember what age I was when I came out. I officially call myself bisexual. But at that time, I was thinking more about my own identity and wanting to see more of that identity. I was becoming less afraid of it and, as a result, was seeking out more queer literature. And I remember looking for specifically queer historical fiction because I love historical fiction, that’s what I wanted to read. And I was reading YA. And I could only find about five books that were queer YA. And they were all sort of very tentatively queer. Or they were not super fun. That was the other thing, they were sad. Everything is always so sad in historical fiction. It's like you can be lesbians, but you have to end up parting ways and marrying husbands but you just pine for each other and know that you have this soulmate. I don’t want that. I don’t want them to die. I don’t want them to be apart. I want like a no-holds-barred happy queer romance. And I think we fall into the trap of thinking that history, in order to be accurate, it has to be a sad ending, right? It has to be “We loved each other but we can’t possibly find a way to make it work.” And we think of history as being a constant – “Everything constantly gets better. It’s always incrementally getting better for queer people,” when really when we talk about the queer experience in America today, we know that it’s so dependent on your race and your sexuality and your gender identity and your socioeconomic station and all of these different factors. And history is the same way, but we don’t tend to grant people that same individuality in history or realize that acceptance and equal rights and everything as we’re seeing now is a rollercoaster. It goes up and then in reaction it goes down. It gets better and it gets worse. It gets better and worse, and that’s sort of the cycle throughout history. And so I remember reading the statistic that there were more gay bars in London in the 1750s than there were in the 1950s, which blew my mind. And I was so obsessed with this idea. I think, too, as a Mormon, at the time I was still a practicing Mormon. I was curious about how people could make it work being a religious person when you just know your identity is always going to be at odds with your community. There’s never a “Hopefully someday this law will pass and everything will be fine.” It was just like this is never going to work. And so I was really drawn to historical fiction about queer people because I was drawn to stories of people who knew their community would never come around, right? And you have to make it work sort of in spite of that and you have to find your own security and identity. And you have to find your people and you make it work. And you sort of create your own world whether it's inside or outside of society. So all of that stuff was on my brain when I was writing Gentleman’s Guide. And one of the first things I knew about it was because I was doing this book, as I told myself, just for fun, no strings, no rules, etcetera, I was like, well, because I’m doing it just for fun, I can write a queer romance and I can write a happy queer romance because at the time, I felt like “That’s anachronistic. Nobody’s going to want a happy queer historical romance because that’s not really how history was.” And, as a result, I ended up writing sort of exactly the wish fulfillment queer romance that I would’ve wanted to read. And it turns out a lot of people also wanted to read it which was a great surprise.

JEN: I’m going to jump over to the bookstore a little bit now. Just because you hunted for the books and you found a handful. If someone asked me for recommendations, I would have none in that genre based on exactly what you’re saying. The idea that it’s anachronistic. There were no happy queer people in history. So, 20 years you’ve been working in bookstores? Is that about right?

MACKENZI: No. About 10 years.

JEN: Oh, 10. Way less than I thought.

MACKENZI: You over shot. I was going to say, 20 years! No, about 10 years.

JEN: Are you seeing an increase in people coming into the bookstore seeking out representation for a variety of different things?

MACKENZI: Absolutely.

JEN: Like I need to see someone with some intense anxiety who’s moving through the world and finds success anyway.

MACKENZI: Yeah. It’s interesting. I think you get a lot of parents coming in and looking to, especially kids in YA books, you find a lot of parents who are looking to do bibliotherapy with their kids and saying, “My kid just came out as nonbinary or my kid is getting bullied at school or my kid has really bad stage fright and is really shy. Do you have any books about that?”

JEN: We get that question a ton in our groups for just exactly how you’re phrasing it now.

MACKENZI: Yeah. It’s a term I picked up in grad school is bibliotherapy which is we want to read books about people like us and that’s sort of how we know we’re not alone in our experiences and in the world. And I’m always happy to provide those kind of books. But it’s also nice that I’m now living in Los Angeles which is a much more diverse community than where I was living in Salt Lake City in bookselling or even where I was living in Boston in bookselling. And it’s really spectacular to be able to, when non-white people come into the bookstore, to be able to just give them books that are not like, “Here’s a book about black people suffering.” It's like, “Here’s a book about a cute black kid slaying vampires.” Like, the fact that we now have such a range of stories about that sort of not white-straight-heterosexual-default that has been the case for so long, it’s really wonderful to just casually be able to give people those books. But then, at the same time, the flip side of that is I had a woman come into the store a couple of weeks ago and she was like, “I’m looking for lesbian romances.” And I was like, “Oh, my God. My favorite. Let me recommend all my lesbian romances to you.” We went over to the romance section and I pulled out the lesbian romances and she said, “Yeah. I’ve read all those.” Oh, “There is only about five here in this whole section.” So as much as I think we’ve made tremendous strides, which we absolutely have, we’re still so far to go from anything nearing enough, anything nearing equality. I think, too, because I operate and I work in this bubble of I talk to a lot of other queer authors. I read a lot of books by queer authors. And so I feel like there's just so many. And there are. But there's also still not enough and you kind of don't realize that until you go to the romance section and pull out the five books and someone goes, “Yeah. I’ve read all those. It’s only five books.”

JEN: That’s it. I need more than five. Okay, that makes a ton of sense.

MACKENZI: I have a lot of parents that come into the bookstore, a lot of teenagers, when I can get them to talk to me about books, are the sort who will ask for – they won’t outright ask for like, “Do you have anything gay?” They’ll say things like, “I’m looking for something like Heartstopper.” And you’re like, “I got you. I know what that means.”

JEN: I’m talking to you in code.

MACKENZI: And it’s not even that they have bad parents – not bad parents, but not even that they have conservative parents or parents that don’t approve – it’s just sometimes we can’t even voice those things to ourselves especially when we’re teenagers. And books become a language that we can use to express ourselves and also to figure ourselves out like the things we love and respond to in books and in fiction it’s sort of a way to test drive your own life and to create sort of roadmaps for scenarios for identities that you don’t know if you belong to. And then you sort of test them out in fiction and see what sticks and what applies to your real life.

JEN: So, as an author and also a bookseller, even though you’re in LA – it’s probably a little bit insulated there – but you have to be well aware of the nationwide efforts from various small groups to ban some books from libraries.

MACKENZI: Yeah. I’ve heard quite a bit about this.

JEN: And pretty much everything you write about, I imagine, is kind of in that targeted space.

MACKENZI: Yeah.

JEN: Do you have thoughts about this book banning or even fears about your own books being targeted?

MACKENZI: I just think it’s really sad. I think it’s sad that we think that these books that are getting banned are harmful or dangerous or corrupting children, when really I think in so many cases they’re teaching kids to have empathy for people and experiences that are not theirs. And also are giving kids safe spaces to -- and I say kids meaning teenagers too – giving kids safe spaces to work things out and to deal with hard things and learn about hard things. I think about, as a teenager reading – I guess I would’ve been, yeah, kind of a young teenager because I wasn’t reading a ton in high school – but I remember reading books that were way above my comprehension, with content that was way above my comprehension. And one of two things happened which is I either skipped over it and just blocked it out of my brain, and then returned to those books as an adult and I’m like, “Oh, my Gosh. I had no idea this was in here.” Or you take it and you learn from it. Nothing I found in a book corrupted me. No book that had drug use present in it ever made me want to go try cocaine. That’s the other thing is I think people who are banning these books based on content often don’t understand the function of this content in literature. It’s almost always part of the bigger thematic experience. It’s part of a journey. It’s part of a character. It’s never – this is not corrupting your children. It's not teaching them how to do things that you consider bad. It’s also just so much of the content, it’s not content. It’s not content to have two girls falling in love. That’s just a romance. And there’s so much of like a frustrating double standard for that that when straight people do it, it’s fine. When queer people do it, it’s banned. It has driven home for me – In the last 10 or so years, as queer literature has expanded so much, there’s started to become these conversations about like, “Well, do we need those sort of coming out stories anymore? Do we really need these basic queer literature stories anymore?” I remember, actually, when the Love, Simon movie came out, there was a conversation on NPR I heard that made me want to set everything on fire. Where this critic on NPR, who’s like a guy in his 40s, a white guy. I think he’s a straight guy, was talking about seeing the Love, Simon movie. And this was like in 2017, 16. It was a while ago still. And he was like, “Yeah. I asked my daughter who’s in high school in Washington D.C. in a very wealthy, liberal area – he didn’t say all that, I implied all that, or inferred all that – he’s like, “I asked my daughter if she thought this kind of story was still relevant and she was like, not really because this would never happen in my school because everybody’s just cool if you’re gay. Nobody would ever blackmail you because you’re gay.” And I don’t think this movie’s really relevant any more. And I was like, if you would move 20 feet outside of your little liberal bubble in D.C. you would realize that it is not cool and okay and safe to be gay in every high school across America. And just because it’s better doesn’t mean it’s okay, doesn’t mean it’s “normal” doesn’t mean that everybody feels safe doing it. I think this idea that just because it’s gotten better, means it’s safe and okay.

JEN: You should come visit us in rural Idaho.

MACKENZI: That’s exactly it. So what this is sort of driven home for me too is the need for – I utilized this skill more in Utah than I do now and thankfully less even now then I think I did when I first started bookselling – which is the idea of like “sneaky queer books.” I think we need books that don’t have it in the jacket copy. And it’s very trendy right now and amazing that we can do this on young adult books to have a picture of two boys kissing or literally to have a book called Two Boys Kissing. Which David Levithan does. It’s incredible to have those. But I think it’s also really important to have books that don’t mention anything about the character’s sexuality, don’t mention a love story between two boys or whatever. So these kids can kind of slide them past their parents. Or, alternately, kids who had never thought to pick up a book about a queer character will pick it up and read it and be like, ‘Oh. I loved this book. Didn’t realize they were gay.” And just like you move on with your day. Because I think the other thing too is that when we ban these books we tell kids there’s something salacious about queerness, about sex about any of this stuff that’s just a normal part of being a kid. And then, as a child if you’re being told these things are banned, you feel so weird about them. And they feel forbidden and taboo and then you end up developing these complexes about totally normal human relationships and intimacies. And I think that’s really damaging. And I think we also tend to only think about queer books only in terms of queer kids read queer books when really we need everybody to read queer books so that we normalize those relationships so that the straight people moving into the future are people in heterosexual relationship are taking queer people seriously and respecting them and respecting their relationships. And a lot of that empathy building can start in literature. That was such a long answer when really it all boils down to it just really bums me out that all these book bannings are happening. It’s so sad and it’s so discouraging and it’s really, really frustrating as an author but also just as a citizen of the world.

JEN: I love that you touched on the two different angles, too. It made me instantly think of two books that I’ve recently read. One was Mad Honey, that the audience can look into if they want. But it’s kind of this surprise, like, “Surprise, there’s a trans character in the story.” And that becomes kind of a theme because it’s a big deal in that situation. And I don’t know if you’ve read the Priory of the Orange Tree, but one of my favorite things about that book was that people just were queer and no one cared.

MACKENZI: The thing is, and when you’re publishing a hundred queer books, every queer book can be different and every queer book represents some different element of the queer experience. And that’s the importance of having lots of these stories is that nobody has to be everything. When you only have one story, when you only have one book, that book has to be everything to everybody and no book can realistically be that. So we talk about books like Love, Simon where it’s about a gay teen coming out and struggling and being bullied because of that. And like, yes, we need those books. But we also need books where kids are already out and they're fine and they’re happy. And we also need books where it’s fantasy and queerness is just totally normalized in the world. And we need all of these books to represent all of these different facets of the queer experience and so that everybody can find themselves in literature. It doesn’t help if we replace one kind of single story with another kind of single story.

JEN: So my absolute favorite genre – I just mentioned two books that aren’t in it – but my absolute favorite genre is historical fiction. So I was really happy to find out that that was where you’re at. And really intrigued by this idea of queer historical fiction because we do have this narrative, I think, in society of history being entirely heterosexual and cisgender.

MACKENZI: Right.

JEN: And this idea that queerness is new or fresh or recently invented. And it’s just not true. So you talked about your pathway to historical fiction. But I’m interested in how you made that connection of historical fiction and queerness, “This is going to be the mix that works for me.” Instead of being, “I’m going to write historical fiction. It’s going to be about Anne Boleyn.”

MACKENZI: I think my connection was, first of all, because I went to school in Salt Lake City, in the 2000s and was just like a pretty – I wasn’t a sheltered kid, I just didn’t have a ton of awareness of the world outside of my immediate field of vision. So I was definitely the kind of person that if you had told me when I was 16 that Abraham Lincoln had a boyfriend, I would’ve been like, well that’s impossible because gay people didn’t exist before Rent came out. I was definitely that kind of person. And then I started reading more widely. I started encountering stories of historical figures whose queerness is sort of inseparable from who they are. It’s not something, like a footnote that you can edit out or it’s not, “And also he had a close male companion with whom he shared apartments and a collection of fabulous scarves.” And you can just, there’s not plausible deniability in a lot of it. And part of it was just my own growing awareness of how “white and straight and cis” almost all western history narratives are. And just becoming aware of that fact and trying to work in my own research and own reading to challenge that and to change that. And part of it too was that I was coming out. I was figuring out my own identity. And I love history. And I wanted to find stories of people like me in history. I wanted to know that I come from a – we want to know our ancestors, right? It’s the same reason we do genealogy. We want to know where we come from. I think with queer people, we want in the same way queer people often seek out found families in the present, we want to find our historical found family. We want to find our historical ancestors. And I think you can find a lot of validity in knowing where you came from as well. So, for me, it was a combination of just wanting to find my place as a bisexual person in history and know that there were people like me before. But also just consciously expanding the scope of what I was reading about and trying to challenge narratives that had been fed to me a lot as a kid and as a young person studying history. And then naturally, because I became so interested in this topic, I became curious about these things, I wanted to write about them and I wanted to share them with other people. And especially knowing there was not a lot of queer historical fiction for teens out there, part of me was very worried that that was because nobody wanted it, right? I was like, “I’m going to publish this book and I’m going to be like, there’s a reason nothing like this exists.” But that was the sort of stuff I wanted to be reading. And it didn’t exist. So I started writing it. and that’s kind of the long and short of it.

JEN: You’ve been obviously very successful as an author which is a pretty hard field to be successful in. But have you seen a lot of pushback toward your dedication towards inclusion. Because your inclusion isn’t just queer. Your inclusion is bigger and broader than that from all of the reviews and stuff that I’ve been reading. Have they pushed back about that and said, “Maybe ease up a little bit. Not everything has to include everyone?”

MACKENZI: The most push back that I’ve gotten is in terms of queerness. I’ve tried really hard to include non-white characters in all of my books because that’s another thing. We have these ideas that Europe has always been all about white people when really there was a huge amount of movement between Europe and Africa in the 1700s and part of that was due to slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade and all that terrible, terribleness. But also, there were colonies of black people settled in England at the time. And in truth, historical London would’ve looked a lot more like Bridgerton for the amount of non-white people populating the stories there. So I never really got pushback about that. I was trying to be conscious about not writing outside my experience but still wanting to include these characters but not speak for their story or their voices and wanting to include representation. The most pushback I got was definitely in terms of queerness. I remember having conversations with my publishers early on about the fact that in Gentleman’s Guide, pretty early on in the book, there’s a scene that was sort of – you’re still writing about teenagers so you want to be careful and don’t oversexualize that or anything – but there was a scene of two boys having a moment as teenagers and having a transformative sexual experience. And it wasn’t explicit. It was still for teenagers. But they made me dial it way, way, way back. And so it ended up being a sort of a kiss. And then about 20 pages later, one of those characters, in a sort of jealous rage, hooks up with a woman who he ends up naked and she’s pretty much naked and they’re almost having sex. It’s so weird to talk about teenagers. But they’re almost having sex and nobody ever said “Boo” about that one. And so it was things like that where it was just nobody ever specifically said to me, “You need to dial back the gays.” It was just, “This scene seems really explicit for teenagers. The other one’s fine though.” There’s only one difference between these scenes and it’s the genders of the romantic partners. And that always felt weird to me. And then it got better, though. That book did really well and publishers with, studios with anything, it’s money that talks, right? And that book sold really well so they were willing to trust me. They were willing to let me do anything. And then I went and worked with another publisher that was not as cool with that. and so I had the same battle as we started out. And that one, they never warmed up to it and it was always, I felt the – I’ll just say it, It was with Marvel – Marvel I always felt this, it wasn’t homophobia, it just felt like panic at all times. We can’t have anyone thinking this is gay. And it’s like, “Yeah. But why? Why is this such a big thing for you?” And I had it in my Loki book which is a Marvel licensed title. And I went into that book with them saying, “If you hire me to do this, you know the kind of stuff I write. I know who my audience is. I’m going to write a pansexual, genderfluid Loki. Which, A, has already been done and confirmed in the comics. B, if you read any Norse mythology it’s there. But also, this is what my audience wants from me. It’s here in the character. It’s canonical in the comics. Let me do this.” And they were like, “Great. We love it.” Signed the contract. Announced the book. And immediately they way pulled back on that and they were like, “We don’t know if we want to do this. We don’t know if we want to have this.” I have a same-sex kiss in Loki that somebody changed. I don’t know who, but some higher up changed on the page to being a kiss on the cheek and did not [inaudible]. But on the flipside of that, though, I had a great editor at Marvel who was on my team about this and was helping me push back up against it. And she recognized that it was sort of the side effects of corporate nonsense. And so I had a good ally on my team for that. So, as much as I’ve hit pushback from within the publishers – not in a way that anyone’s ever, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a rejection or if I have, I don’t know – never gotten a rejection that’s like, “Because the characters are gay we’re not interested in this story.” It usually comes in much more subtle ways like, “Because you’re writing a queer book, it’s not going to have the same broad reach that it would if you wrote a straight book. So your marketing budget’s going to be a little less.” Or, “We’re only pitching you to queer media outlets for interviews for this book. We’re only pitching it to queer review journals.” And it's like, that’s great, but also it’s not just a book for queer people. That’s sort of the most frequent and common and honestly kind of insidious way that I have experienced homophobia in the publishing world is this idea that queer books are only for queer readers, when really they should be for everybody.

JEN: I was surprised that these books were new to me because I spend a lot of time in these spaces and talking about queer literature. And I’m not queer and I like to read them. I’m not even a young adult and I like to read this kind of stuff. So I think your publishers are just wrong about that. And I disagree.

MACKENZI: Well, there was also, in 2017, when Gentleman's Guide came out so I was working on it in 2015, there was less of a precedent for it. Again, they had sort of had Simon and that was kind of it. And there was still just a creeping trickle of queer books. And so the fact that you’re taking a queer book which is already they consider to be an already niche market, and making it historical fiction which is even more niche. And there was also some sort of general confusion and delight when the book came out that people were like, “Wait, so it’s queer. So they’re going to be sad, right?” And I know it’s a spoiler for the book, but I want people to know going in that this is a happy ending. It’s not a “happier for now.” It’s not a “We parted but we parted better people and someday we’ll be happy.” It’s exactly what the happy ending you would want out of a romance. And I want people to know that going in because it’s definitely not a given in queer historical fiction. And so I think it was sort of met with confusion but also delight, largely from readers that they just sort of didn’t know those two things could co-exist.

JEN: Nobody’s dead. We’re not used to that. Nobody’s miserable.

MACKENZI: Nobody’s persecuted. Nobody’s jailed. They sort of meet run of the mill homophobia throughout their relationship. But it’s like nobody’s being Oscar Wilde style pilloried for it.

JEN: So your first main popular series is the Montague siblings, right?

MACKENZI: Right.

JEN: Will you kind of highlight for us the broad, general maybe what they would be reading on the book cover anyway?

MACKENZI: Yes. I would be thrilled to. So the first one is the Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue which is set in the 1700s and it is about a grand tour of Europe which, if you were a young rich white guy in the 1700s and you had this awkward period of time between finishing school and then waiting for your dad to die so that you could take over his estate holdings, often how you would pass some of that time is you would go on a grand tour of Europe. So you would travel to all these different capitals. You would live there for several months. and the purpose of the tour was you were supposed to get a cultural education and be uplifted and changed by travel and experiencing the world. And this sort of unspoken piece of it is that you were supposed to sow your wild oats and maybe drink yourself sick a couple of nights. And then return to England and have that all out of your system so that you could be a functioning member of the peerage. So the book is set on a grand tour. It is about a young nobleman named Henry Montague and he’s about to set off on his tour with his best friend Percy – who he has had a secret crush on forever – and his little sister Felicity who he thinks is a huge stick in the mud. And so they set off on their tour. And along the way, accidentally come into possession of a possibly magical artifact which makes them the targets of a manhunt across Europe. So that is sort of the gist of the first one. It’s historical fiction with a very light fantasy touch to it. And then the second one is called The Ladies Guide to Petticoats and Piracy. That one follows said stick-in-the-mud sister Felicity who is desperate to become a doctor. And 1700s Europe is desperate to not let her become a doctor because she’s a woman.

JEN: That’s not really a path for that.

MACKENZI: So she ends up making her own path which is joining up with two other women from very different walks of life to join together to form a girl gang that does science and piracy. And then the third book is called The Nobleman’s Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks. And it is about the youngest sibling in the Montague household who is the younger brother of Monty and Felicity. And he has just lost their mother and he is supposed to ascend to his position in the House of Lords. He’s very political. He’s a radical when their father is a very conservative politician. So he’s ready to upend this whole legacy of family politics. But he also has crippling anxiety and OCD and doesn’t feel like he can function in society. And he just lost his mom who was sort of the only person who he felt like understood these things about him. And discovers that when she died, she left behind half of a spy glass which may contain some sort of clues to her death and clues to a curse upon the family. So those are the three books in the series.

JEN: And then you left that series. I mean, you completed it. You didn’t leave it. And turned to this idea of the anti-hero.

MACKENZI: Right. So when I was doing Gentleman's Guide, I got approached – right after it came out – I got approached by Marvel about doing a series of books for them about anti-heroes in the Marvel universe as teenagers. So they sort of pitched me the first one would be about Loki. And they’re like, “We want you to do it with all of them having a historical sensibility to them but not necessarily historical fiction like Gentleman's Guide is.” So the first one is about Loki as a greasy emo teenager in Asgard who gets sent to Victorian London to solve a series of Jack the Ripper-esque murders. And then the second one I pitched as being about Gamora and Nebula who are Thanos’ daughters from End Game and Infinity War and Guardians of the Galaxy. And they were super fun to write about because they have been totally reinvented. Their comic legacy is nothing like what they’re new legacy looks like. So where with Loki I was dealing with a lot of continuity in, this is what’s happened in previous issues and they have the TV show they were working on at the time. So they were like, “You can’t do some of these things that you want to do.” And So Gamora and Nebula are sort of blank slates when they got popular from Guardians of the Galaxy, Marvel erased the back cannon of them. And now they’re sort of reinventing new backstories for them. So I got to tread new ground and sort of write origin stories for these two extremely cool interesting women in the Marvel Universe. And so that book is sort of a space western about the two of them on a dying planet that is being stripmined for resources that resemble sort of the old west. And that was fun to get to tap into the red rock, pioneer, western mining origins that I grew up with and those stories. And then the third one is a World War II story about Buckey Barnes who is Captain America’s best friend. He is a precocious young teenager in World War II who gets involved in over his head with the SOE which is the British special forces that were in charge of the precursor to MI-6. So I got to write a Victorian detective story, a space western, and a Cold War spy novel. And disguise them all as Marvel books which was just a fantastically cool thing to get to do.

JEN: And which one of these, like in all of these books that we’ve just talked about, which ones have been optioned for show?

MACKENZI: The Montague series.

JEN: The Montague series. OK.

MACKENZI: The Marvel stuff will always stay books because that's what Marvel optioned it as. So I don’t think they’ll ever – I have some people who are like, “Is your book what the Loki TV show is based on.” It’s like, “No. No. No. It’s a supplemental reading to existing media to go with Marvel.” But the Montague stuff has all been optioned for film by Greg Berlanti who is a fantastic producer who has the most shows on simultaneously of any producer in history. He makes so much stuff. He produces so much stuff. And he’s gay and his whole office is gay. And they are so queer friendly. And they do a lot of the DC stuff, like the license stuff. And they're good at sliding queerness into existing narratives where you do the thing where you’re watching Supergirl because I love Supergirl and then, and everybody’s gay in Supergirl. And so they do a little bit of that. But they also make explicitly queer stories and I just love what they’re doing and I feel extremely lucky to be working with them.

JEN: That’s so exciting. I’m so excited to hear how that all goes moving forward. So, if we have listeners, like myself actually, or a listener’s child who’s interested in creative writing as a career, do you have suggestions that you recommend for people? This has got to be your most commonly asked question?

MACKENZI: I do get it a lot. I mean, grow a thick skin. Get used to rejection. All of those cliché things. I actually teach a workshop every summer for a week. I teach a novel writing intensive course at Interlochen Academy which is a boarding school in Michigan where I teach teenagers how to write novels. And the biggest thing that I have found with them, and so I now give it as advice to every teenager or young person who asks me about writing, is to develop a habit of completion. Because we all do the thing where we get a great idea like, “Oh, my gosh, this is the best idea anyone’s ever had. I’m going to write it right now.” We start writing, we start writing and it’s great and it’s fun and it’s just sailing along. And then you hit about 10,000 words and it just grinds to a halt. You hit the first plot hole or you hit the first – oh, this is as far as I planned. And you’re stuck and suddenly it’s not fun anymore and it’s work. And then you get a new idea. And this new idea is calling to you. and it’s like, “I am so much easier. I am never going to betray you at 10,000 words. Come write me instead.” And you go, “You’re exactly right.” And you bail on the first project and you go write the next thing. And you write and write and write and it’s great and it’s fun and it’s easy. And you hit 10,000 words and you hit that plot hole. And then the next new idea comes, and the cycle repeats itself forever and ever. The biggest barrier between most people in writing the novel, is actually writing the novel. You have to sit down and you have to finish it and you have to see your ideas through to the end. And then you have to revise them and make them better. No perfect novel was ever written in a first draft. It’s going to take drafts and it’s going to take time and it’s going to take years. And the first thing you write is not going to be good. And it’s probably not going to be the thing that gets published. And in hindsight you’re probably going to be really glad about that. Nobody actually wants their first novel published. You just think you do. Because, then as soon as you write something, you’re immediately going to be able to write something better because of everything you learned writing the first thing. And then you’re going to write something better. And then that’s not going to get published. And then you’re going to write the next thing. And so it’s the habit of completion but also just the persistence. I think there’s so much to be said for the difference between published writers I know and unpublished writers I know is just persistence and just sticking with it and knowing it’s never going to be easy. It’s never not going to be uphill. You’re never going to be for everybody. And just understanding that taste is so variable and that doesn’t mean you're bad. It doesn’t mean you’re not good at what you do or your stories aren’t worth telling. It just means everybody likes different things. You might have found a reader who just doesn’t like the thing you’re doing. And that’s never going to stop. Even when you’ve published a book and you think you’ve made it. The rejection just turns into bad reviews. And then it’s just people on Goodreads telling you -- they’re not really telling you, but telling the rest of the world how terrible your books are. And so developing a thick skin. Developing a habit of completion. And just being persistent and just continuing to do the work. Continuing to show up and write because it’s the only thing you can think of doing, the only thing you know how to do.

JEN: When people are coming in and asking for book recommendations for queer affirming or queer inclusive novels. Do you have your – obviously your own – but then do you have other standard go-to recommendations?

MACKENZI: I’ll be honest. I have never found a way to sell people my own books without being weird about it. I’ve had people ask me, “Oh, you must sell your own books all the time.” And I’m like, “If people could come into the book store and ask for a book about a bisexual Lord on his 1700s Grand Tour with a little bit of magic...” And I would be like, “Never heard of anything. I have no idea.”

JEN: That’s very relatable to me.

MACKENZI: I was working at the King’s English in Salt Lake City which is a great little independent bookstore. And this woman came in and she had her dog with her. I love dogs. So I was like, “Bring your dog in.” And I gave her dog a treat and we were chatting and we were having this great moment. And I was like, “Can I help you find anything?” And she goes, “Yeah. I’m looking for a book called The Ladies Guide to Petticoats and Piracy.” And I just blacked out. I just was like I can’t help you with that and ran away. And one of my coworkers came and got me a minute later. I was hiding in the staff room. He was like, “You need to come sign this woman’s book. Be normal.” It’s so weird. I’ve never found a not-weird way to do it. In terms of what I would recommend, Oh, gosh. It’s so hard because it’s so dependent on the person. And you want to talk to them and say what do you like? And are you drawn to realism or fantasy? I do always recommend Becky Albertalli’s books. She wrote Love, Simon. She wrote, Imogen, Obviously. There’s Leah on the Offbeat. The Opposite of Unrequited. She writes these sort of really sweet but also funny and sardonic teen romances that are largely about queer teenagers. And I just really resonate with her humor. I really resonate with her voice and her experiences in writing about these kids who are never the coolest kids in their school but not the total dweebs. And that is sort of where I occupied in high school. They all feel very true and they feel very optimistic. And they’re all – it’s “Judy Blume for queer teens”. And I really love that. And I’m glad somebody’s writing that in the teen range. One of the sneaky queer books that I love to recommend in terms of it’s not in the jacket copy so if you need to just slide something by your parents – Alex London wrote a book called Proxy which is about a dystopian society in which you can essentially, if you are in trouble, if you have a debt to society to pay, you can hire a proxy to serve your prison sentence for you or to essentially take your punishment for you. So it’s about a rich privileged kid who lives without consequences who meets the poor kid who is his proxy for all the bad things he’s doing. And the world-building is just so great. It’s a great dystopian society. And then has this sort of very casual, sneaky queer element to it.

JEN: It’s got a little Dorian Gray energy to me.

MACKENZI: Yeah. Dystopian Doran Gray is actually a really good pitch for it. I would go with that. I’m like squinting over at my bookshelves right now. Because, of course too, as soon as you say “Can you recommend a book to me?” I’ve forgotten every book I’ve ever read. Oh, another author I really, really love is Anna-Marie McLemore who is a Latinx author who writes books that are largely engaging with their identity as a Mexican American but also as a queer nonbinary person. Their latest book, I think it’s their latest one, is called Self-Made Boys. And it’s a reimagining of The Great Gatsby that engages with a lot of the things that Great Gatsby doesn’t engage with. Instead of just being a book about class, it’s also about race and immigration and gender identity and sexuality. And I really, really loved it. They also have a book called When the Moon Was Ours. They write in the tradition of magical realism but always with this queer element. And I remember hearing them talk and they said that they want to write the sort of fairy tales they grew up on but for the people they are now. And they’re just really, really beautiful prose. I really, really love their books.

Riley Redgate is another author who has subtle queerness in a lot of her stuff. Her latest one is called Alone Out Here. And it’s about the world ends and there’s all these generational ships that are supposed to go into space. But the only one that makes it off earth is the one full of the kids of the dignitaries and presidents and prime ministers of the world. And now they’re sort of the only survivors of the human race. And it’s sort of Lord of the Flies kids’ society, but in space. But it's great. It was a super, super tense, super atmospheric, spooky kind of 2001 Space Odyssey-esque, but for kids. 

And then the other one I’ll shout out real quick is, She Gets the Girl by Rachel Lippincot and Alyson Derrick which is a very cute queer – I think they’re both lesbians. Maybe they’re two queer girls and they’re falling in love in their first year of college. And I really like it because it’s a book about discovering your identity not when you’re 14, 15. It’s more like when you’re 19, 20. And I think that’s important to as people who come to it later in life or just aren’t exposed to it or don’t realize maybe until they’re a little bit older. So now I’m looking at my list and I’m like, “I could keep going forever.” But I won’t. I’ll leave you with those until I think of something else and probably interrupt you in five minutes. I’m like, “Oh, how did I forget this one?”

JEN: I actually have this picture of all of our listeners pushing pause and going and finding a pen and paper and trying to write them all down. 

MACKENZI: I love recommending books to people. But I especially love helping people find queer books that they need. People come in the store and they’re like, “Here’s my very specific thing I’m looking for.” And I love being able to pair people with those, or parents of queer people or friends of queer people who are seeking out books specifically for education and empathy and awareness and wanting to approach these stories and people in their lives from a place of love and understanding. So I would love to help bring those ultra-specific books into their lives.

JEN: I do want to express my gratitude to you for coming and chatting with us about this topic. I will tell you, again, that this is a common question that comes up in our group from parents. And a lot of us don’t have super specific things to recommend. So this will be a great place to point them. And then maybe we can build on that. But mostly I’m grateful that you’d be willing to donate your time to help our community better understand the world, especially parts of the world that we maybe haven’t been introduced to before. So thank you so much.

MACKENZI: Oh, it was my pleasure. I was thrilled to be asked. I’m always thrilled to talk about books, but especially talking about queer books and the many challenges they face and how we can help combat that in our communities.

JEN: I appreciate it. You’re awesome.

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