In The Den with Mama Dragons
You're navigating parenting an LGBTQ+ child without a manual and knowing what to do and what to say isn't always easy. Each week we’ll visit with other parents of queer kids, talk with members of the LGBTQ+ community, learn from experts, and together explore ways to better parent our LGBTQ+ children. Join with us as we walk and talk with you through this journey of raising healthy, happy, and productive LGBTQ+ humans.
In The Den with Mama Dragons
Telling Queer Stories with Nico Lang
We have introduced several LGBTQ+ people on this podcast in the past. Our hope is to better understand the unique and individual lives of people who are not always represented. We also hope to remind our listeners that there is a world of possibility that exists for our kids–the same possibilities as any of our straight and cis kids. This week In the Den, Jen explores some of those ideas with nonbinary journalist Nico Lang as they share their unique life experiences as a reporter covering the fight for equality.
Special Guest: Nico Lang
Nico Lang is a journalist, editor, culture critic, and essayist. Lang is the founder of Queer News Daily and has previously worked as the deputy editor of Out magazine, an LGBTQ+ correspondent for VICE, the news editor at Them, and a contributing editor at Xtra magazine. Their work has been published in Rolling Stone, Esquire, The Daily Beast, HuffPost, and BuzzFeed News, among others. Lang was named the 2023 Online Journalist of the Year by the Los Angeles Press Club Association and is the recipient of 10 awards from the National Association of LGBTQ+ Journalist, a GLAAD Award, and the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund’s inaugural Visibility Award.
Links from the Show:
- Neco on IG: https://www.instagram.com/queernewsdaily/?hl=en
- Neco’s latest articles: https://www.them.us/contributor/nico-lang
- Neco on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nico-lang-03608567?original_referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
- Neco’s articles on the Daily Beast: https://www.thedailybeast.com/author/nico-lang
- Join Mama Dragons today: www.mamadragons.org
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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 this journey of raising happy, healthy, and productive LGBTQ humans. Thanks for listening. We’re glad you’re here.
We know that parents, for good or bad, often have ideas about how life is going to play out for their children. We parents have a way of looking at our babies and our children and projecting our thoughts about what makes a good life for them, onto that baby. Because, of course, we want them to have a good life. But, sometimes we learn things about ourselves or about our children that make us pause and realize that specific circumstances arrive and tell us that we need to rethink what a “good life” might look like for that particular child. Because so many of us are raised without a lot of exposure to queer people, it can feel a little bit murky when we’re trying to picture a “happy” or a “good” life and what that might be for our children. We have introduced several LGBTQ+ people on this podcast in the past. Our hope is to better understand the unique and individual lives of people who are not always represented. And we hope to remind our listeners that there is a world of possibility that exists for our kids. The same possibilities, really, as any of our straight or cisgender kids.
Today we are going to explore some of these ideas with Nico Lang and hear how they grew up and navigated life. Nico is a nonbinary award-winning journalist with over a decade of experience covering the transgender community’s fight for equality. The list of their accomplishments and accolades is long and I encourage all to read more about those details in the show notes! Welcome, Nico, to In the Den with Mama Dragons.
NICO: Thank you. Thank you for having me and thank you for not reading my entire bio. I was really worried for a second, like, “Oh no. Is she going to do the whole thing?” It’s really long. My publisher forced me to do it. And I cringe every time I hear it.
JEN: There’s just a lot of really cool things in there. I hope people go read them and I hope we get to talk about some of them.
NICO: Yeah.
JEN: So can we start, right off the bat, just taking a couple of minutes and have you give us a bit of an intro to you so we feel like we kind of know who it is that we’re listening to? I’m especially hoping that you will touch on some of the intersections in your life that inform your perspective. And then we’ll slow down and dive into the details.
NICO: Sure. I grew up in the ruralish outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio. I was technically born in Batavia. If anybody knows where that is. It’s a really tiny, tiny, tiny town. But I went to high school in Milford which I actually really liked. I was out in high school which was nice. And everybody was surprisingly cool to me. I got very lucky in that I came out right around the time of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. So it was suddenly cool to have a queer friend. So that really did a lot for me. So thanks to those folks, a real benefit to my life. My parents were divorced. I lived with my mom. We were very, very, very poor. After her third divorce we lived in what was literally like a falling down, rotting trailer that she inherited from a woman whose husband died because we didn’t have anywhere to live and we didn’t have anywhere else to go. And this woman just gave us her house. So we’re like, “All right. We’re in this trailer now.” And the guy had literally died in it. And the chair that he died in was still there when we moved in. And then we had to build a roof. The roof didn’t really exist. It was caving in like this when we first moved in. So we had to make sure that the roof stayed up. I think for like a year, any time it rained, we had to literally pull out the pots and pans which I had always thought was just a stereotype. I didn’t think it actually happened, but it does. There was a room that didn’t have a floor. So you couldn’t walk into it for a long time. We had to build one for it. It was an interesting way to grow up. I’m very glad that I grew up the way I did. But it was hard. It, definitely, being the poorest easily out of all of my friends, definitely taught me to appreciate every single thing that I have. My friends are often awed by the fact that I will literally clean my plate. I almost lick every drop off of it. I sometimes make it a little game to see how little food I can throw away. Like the other day at dinner, we went out to a Chinese restaurant and I ate every single tiny piece of rice off the plate even if it was miniscule. I stuck it with the chopstick, put it on the chopstick and put it in my mouth, even though it was totally pointless. I’m like, I want to make sure that not a drop of this food is wasted.
And other than that, in terms of the intersections in my life, I know that that was something important to you coming up in the conversation. I am a Buddhist as of relatively recently. I’d kind of, more or less, identified as a Buddhist for a really long time. But I started going to a temple. And now I go every weekend and I absolutely love it. It’s been such a benefit to my life and to my husband’s life. I’ve sort of got him into it a little bit and that’s been fun. I am white. My grandfather is black which we found out relatively recently even though he had always said that he was Italian. It turned out that’s not true. Found out from 23 and Me. It really caused some drama in the family. So I enjoyed that aspect of it.
JEN: That stuff’s opened up all the family secrets, that 23 and Me.
NICO: It was nothing what I expected. I think I had these other ideas about what would be in it, like, having a black grandfather was not something I necessarily expected. But it’s definitely answered a lot of questions in my family and been a fun little genealogical dive. He was adopted by his grandmother who had adopted his mother as well. And the woman who adopted him was the third black woman to graduate from Harvard. And that just feels really cool to have that in my family history and in my lineage. I feel like I descend from these incredible women. And that also extends to my own grandmother as well. So that’s just been really nice to be connected to.
And then my actual great grandmother was this aspiring Hollywood starlet who had this wild career, and a historian sent me a bunch of clips of her, like old newspaper clips of what she was doing and just her absolutely wild life. I get too much into it because that’s an entirely different rabbit hole. But I got to watch a couple of her old movies. She passed herself off as a Turkish dancer, because as a black woman in Hollywood, just roles were really limited for you. So she was a Turkish belly dancer in all these movies. And I’m just obsessed. It’s nice to have this chaotic, messy grandmother with this incredible history. She lived in LA and that’s where I am. So it makes me kind of feel more connected to the city. So it’s been just a really cool journey to go on.
JEN: That is super cool.
NICO: It is cool. And other than that, I’m trying to think of other things about me. I really like old movies. It’s pretty much what I do with all of my free time. If it came out after 1960, I’m not very interested, is pretty much my rule. I love poetry and eating different kinds of food. I have a life’s mission of eating from a restaurant from every country in the world because I know I’ll never be able to visit every country in the world. So I would love to just eat their food instead. And that’s going to be really hard finding food from Lesotho. I think I would have to go to Lesotho or make my own recipe or something. Or like, Nauru.
JEN: You’ve got a fighting chance in LA.
NICO: Maybe.
JEN: I think you’ll be able to get a lot of them in LA.
NICO: But there’s, Nauru is like this tiny – I think Polynesian is what you would call it – island country where it’s only the population is really small and the island itself is really small. And essentially, their cuisine is just whatever is available at the local bodega. So you would have to just go get spam or something is pretty much it. So I would love to find a way to have traditional Nauru cuisine at some point. But I think that might escape my grasp. We’ll see. If there’s anyone from Nauru listening to this podcast and you have recommendations, I would love to take them. It would be my pleasure.
JEN: All right. The call is out. I want to ask you one of the most common questions that probably seems almost annoying to you at this stage of life. But it comes up for all the new people entering that space, right? When did you know that you weren’t just like everyone else around you? When did you start to get words for some of the ways that you identified? And did you have ideas about that that you had to break through previous misconceptions? Or was it just normal and it was just you. Kind of talk about recognizing yourself.
NICO: Sure. I mean, I always had kind of a trans or gender nonconforming childhood. But I think the issue was that, when I was really young, there just weren’t words for that. So I was trying to explore my identity. But the concept of who I was, it wasn’t available to me and it wasn’t really available to my parents. When I was really, really, really young, I identified as a girl. And I used a female name. I called myself Nicci instead and I would draw little hearts over my I’s and it was pink everything and I wanted to wear dresses and all the stuff. But I think it was more that I just didn’t identify as a boy rather than I identified as a girl. And at a certain point, I think the rush that I got from just exploring who I was and putting on these dresses and trying something else, kind of dissipated. I don’t know if it was social pressure or it just didn’t feel right. I was six years old at the time, so I just don’t really have access to a lot of those memories. But I think it took me a really long time to land on who I actually was because the idea of not identifying as male or female was only presented to me as a concept when I was in college. And the first word that was ever given to me as an option was genderqueer and I kind of resisted that word a little bit. I just didn’t like it. There was just something that felt – I get squiggly about it – I cannot define for you what squiggly was. But, I don’t know, it wasn’t right. And it wasn’t until a number of years later that I think people started using the word nonbinary more. And that felt very much like the term among friends of mine that identified outside of the gender binary. And that felt really good. I was like, “Oh. Nonbinary. That seems nice.” But it still took a while. I had come out as genderqueer initially, but there was just something that didn’t fit about it. And I kind of imposter syndromed myself a lot because I felt like I wasn’t doing that much to seem genderqueer or to express myself outside of the binary. Mostly, because I have a hard time finding clothes that fit me. So the idea of finding a new style, I’m like, “I can’t possibly do that. I can’t reinvent the wheel all over again here.” And even now, I came out as nonbinary during the early pandemic because there were all these anti-trans bills that were being introduced all over the country at the same time. And just this historic unprecedented attack against the trans community and I was having a really hard time with it and a hard time doing my job. I’ve been doing LGBTQ+ reporting for a really long time. And I was just really struggling with all this. And I think it just felt really important to tell people why that was hard for me and to be visible in a way that I just hadn’t before.
JEN: So wait. Go back for one sec, for me. Go back a little bit. You said before that you had come out in high school. What did you come out as in high school?
NICO: So in terms of gender, I didn’t come out as anything in high school. I didn’t start exploring my gender until college.
JEN: Okay.
NICO: I was queer in high school, but that’s a different thing.
JEN: Okay. So in high school, you used the word “Queer”?
NICO: Um, it didn’t exist, bisexual, probably would’ve been the term that I used and still use to a certain extent. It’s kind of difficult because I like the word bisexual but I think there’s sometimes a connotation of it’s “male and female” when a lot of bi people I know are kind of just interested in everybody. I’ve always just been interested in people who are different from me, is kind of like my rule. I don’t want somebody who’s too similar to me because that’s like the least sexy thing in the world. I just want somebody who has a different life experience than I do, somebody I can learn from or bond with. That to me feels really interesting and compelling. And then the rest of it comes later. But when it comes to being nonbinary, that was I had flirted with the term genderqueer in college and then, during the pandemic, came out as nonbinary. And it’s been good. And that feels very right to me.
JEN: When you were a little kid and in high school and stuff, did you have dreams and hopes for your future? Were you going to be Batman when you grew up? What did you want to be when you were little?
NICO: I don’t remember that well. Honestly, I had a really traumatizing childhood. Two of my brothers died and pretty much my early childhood was very much centered around that. And I just don’t remember a lot of stuff that well. I remember things that people tell me because you’ll have your parents or your grandparents will be like, “Oh, when you were little, you were like this or like this.” But I have just sort of like shadows of how everything went. But a lot of the specifics I don’t remember that well. I feel like I was told that I wanted to be an actor or a lawyer. I remember some years later, I got really into the idea of being a scientist, but only because I wanted to play with the beakers. I think in terms of actual science, I didn’t even like science that much. I think just playing with potions sounded really fun. Which isn’t a scientist, that’s a witch. I really wanted to be a witch. I think for as long as I can remember, I was always writing stories. And I don’t think I had this idea in my head that I would be a writer, only because it seemed kind of intangible to me. You know, like, “Oh, you just go out and publish your little books?” I was just always uncertain about how that would go. But ever since I was very young, I would write these stories that were thinly veiled fan fiction of whatever I was into at the time. I got really into this Christina Ricci movie called, “Gold Diggers of Bear Mountain” or something. It was her and Anna Chlumpsky who was in “My Girl”. And they were just doing adventures in the mountains and searching for gold. And I really loved that movie which had super lesbian energy now in retrospect. And I wrote myself into the movie as the Christina Ricci character so I could hang out with Anna Chlumpsky and go on adventures. And that was pretty much all the things that I wrote through the end of high school. I wrote a version of “Memento”, essentially, where I put myself in as the lead. But I had a brain trauma and there was a griffin, a mythological griffin tormenting me. It was very strange. And then I rewrote “Mulholland Drive”, the David Lynch movie. But I was the lead. I was a lady in that one so that was fun for me, and I got to go on bisexual escapades. So that pretty much, I think, was the pathway to my future.
JEN: So talk to us about dating from the beginning all the way up to now. You said that you are drawn to people who are not the same as you. But talk about that. Did you date a lot in high school? Did you date a lot in college?
NICO: I sort of discovered my sexuality really early. I had my first experience when I was 13. Wait, 13 or 14, one of those. And I was very “active” in high school. I “got around” as they say. And I don’t know. I think there are a lot of people who are ashamed of those kinds of experiences but I’m really grateful that I had them. I’ve had a life where I’ve gotten to try a lot of things and make mistakes and learn from them. And make a lot of mistakes over and over and over again and eventually learn from them. And I don’t know, I feel lovely about that. I feel like I’ve gotten to experience so much of the world whether that’s by having different experiences with lots of different people or just the kind of life that I had. I feel like I’ve always been somebody who wanted to try everything. I think that’s one of the parts for me about being bi or being queer is really wanting to have a full life. My grandmother, who I deeply love, she has had to raise her own children and then her children’s children because my parents weren’t really around because they were going through so much. They were experiencing a lot of trauma. So my grandmother, I feel like, didn’t get to do a lot of the things she might’ve wanted to do because she was always taking care of kids. And for me, I just feel like I don’t want to live with any regrets. James Dean used to say – who’s bisexual – that he didn’t want to live with one hand tied behind his back. So for me, that’s like I just kind of want to try everything and see how it goes. And it’s like, if you don’t like it or it’s a huge mess or a disaster, you’ll have a great story at the end of it. And meeting my husband was just very much trial and error. I’ve always been somebody who’s been very interested in a relationship. The goal for me always was always to have a partner or something, any experience I had was always I wanted it to end up as something. I’ve never done anything casually in my whole life. It’s just not how my brain’s wired. So there’s always been that romantic notion of the whole thing. And after a lot of bad relationships that did not work out in Chicago, and some good ones – I lived in Chicago for 10 years and then I moved to New York for my job in 2014. And my husband was my first date. Which I’m told is unheard of. All my friends were incredibly jealous of me and very mad. I didn’t think, because we were really, really different from each other. He’s this weird art kid from Portland and I’d lived in Chicago for 10 years. I’m from the Midwest. And sometimes I talk like a character from a screwball comedy. And we just seem like our energies were so different and our life experiences were so different. The references we draw on were so different. And I worried we wouldn’t have anything to talk about. but he was just so pleasant. He was really nice to be around. He was always available. He was really emotionally available. Like so many guys I know are really withholding with their feelings. It seems like they don’t want to be present for you in the way that you might need. And they’re always like keeping this part of themselves back at least in a relationship context. And he was just so there for me. I was fostering a dog at the time who I didn’t realize when I first agreed to do it that the dog had seizures. And the first time it had a seizure, it freaked me out. I had no idea what was happening. I was crying and hysterical. And I called him because I didn’t know who to call and I knew that he would pick up. And I asked him to help me take this dog to the vet because I didn’t know what to do. And he did. He just came right over. He dropped everything he was doing and helped me take this dog to the vet. And I think we’d only been dating for three weeks at the time. And I think it was then where I was like, this is something serious. I always say that I fell in love with him at Coney Island because that was a couple weeks afterward. We had this beautiful moment where there was this stupid Megan Trainer song that was playing on the speakers and we both were like, “God. I hate this song.” And there was this beautiful moment of bonding and you’re just like young and in love. And I think I would say that I realized then that it was going to be him. But it was really knowing that this guy would drop everything for me, for someone he barely knew, technically, to help take my dog to the vet. That’s somebody to build a life on.
JEN: That’s awesome. That’s actually a really beautiful story. Obviously, as I mentioned in the intro, I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear that you are a journalist. That you’ve had a very successful career as a journalist so far.
NICO: So far. I just love “so far” because it’s like, well, there’s always time for it to fail from here.
JEN: No. I meant already. It’s just going to get bigger.
NICO: I know. I’m just teasing.
JEN: I assume it’s only going to get better from here but it’s already been amazingly successful.
NICO: I just thought it was funny. I have this thing, my coping mechanism in life is that I always choose to find everything a little funny because then you just realize how much in the world around you is hilarious. It’s how I get through journalism. If I didn’t do this, I would not be able to survive in a very difficult industry.
JEN: I’m curious what drew you to journalism.
NICO: So I didn’t plan it. When I was a kid, I was really into Roger Ebert's film reviews because he was so warm and funny and they were just filled with life. And it was like all his life experiences and everything he’d learned and all the relationships he’s had, the books he’s read, the other movies he’d seen, were all poured into these reviews. And there was so much knowledge and wisdom there. And I think I wanted to have the kind of life where I could write a review like that. Do you know what I mean? That you could be the kind of person who’d had such a diverse range of experiences that you could sit down and write something like this. And because of that, I think I mistook that for a long time of wanting to have a full lovely life for wanting to be a film reviewer. So I think that’s where I thought I would go. And then I did do it and it just didn’t make me very happy. I found out I didn’t really have that much to say. I sort of exhausted what I had to say really quickly. But despite the fact that that didn’t work out, I think when it came to the kind of journalism I do now, it was much trial and error. I didn’t think that I’d be very good at this because there was a time in my life that I don’t know if I took myself that seriously. I always thought that in order to be a serious journalist you have to be a very serious person. And I was a little Elle Woods-y. So I didn’t see myself as being a very serious person. Elle Woods thinks she wants to go to Harvard. And I’m still like a silly little thing. But I think that silly little thing is kind of an asset to journalism because I’m not what you expect often from a reporter. I make jokes. I’m friendly. I goof around with people and I make them feel like they’re hanging out with a friend. It can be, I think, disarming for people to feel like this is a safe space, like I can be a person with you and we can have this human experience and you’ll understand. But I didn’t realize that at first. I just didn’t think I’d be a good fit for something like this. But I found out that I have an aptitude for journalism, kind of, one thing at a time. I was doing film reviews and op-eds and that for a while was going well. But then Trump ran in October 2015 and with that we saw – not necessarily because of Trump, it sort of tied around the same time – we saw all of these attacks on LGBT folks happening around the country. A really good example is, in North Carolina there’s HB2 which is the anti-trans bathroom bill that was passed in March 2016. And there were a lot of people who looked at that as kind of a blip that, “This is just a weird outlier. North Carolina’s just doing something weird. And it’ll all go away. Things will just return back to normal.” And I had just saw in so much of the rhetoric in so many places across the country that it wasn’t going to go back to normal. We were seeing something really grow and evolve and shift here in a way that required our continued engagement. So all the stuff that I’d been doing before then, just for fun because I wanted to, like I really needed to shift gears and shift my focus. So at the time, the Advocate asked me to be their East Coast reporter. I don’t know why they thought of me for that, but they did. And I said yes. It was like $42 an article or something. I was making no money. But for me it was a way to almost go to journalism school, to kind of practice this. And see like, all right I think I have some understanding that I need to do this kind of reporting, but how do I do it? I didn’t have any tools. I had to develop them myself. Put them in the tool belt myself. And then I got better and better. I started taking more and more opportunities and everything just kind of led from there. I had never been somebody who operated with a five-year plan or a ten-year plan. I find when you do that you end up disappointed because nothing in life goes the way you think it’s going to. So I’ve just always been really open to new opportunities and open to growing and to things going a little differently than what you expect, just kind of going with the flow and seeing what happens. And I think where things ended up, journalism’s really hard. And anybody who does the kind of journalism I do knows the psychological burden it can have and the kind of trauma that you’re vicariously living with all the time because you’re experiencing these things with other people. I’m often talking to people about the worst thing that’s ever happened to them and then having to process it along with it. That’s not easy. But I can’t think of what else I’d rather be doing with my life. I can’t even envision what else my life would be right now. I try to think in a sliding doors kind of way of, if this never happened, if any of this never happened, what I would be doing. And I don’t know. I don’t even think that would be me.
JEN: Like it becomes part of your identity, that’s awesome. What is your subject? What do you write about?
NICO: I pretty much specifically focus on LGBTQ+ discrimination cases. So this looks like a lot of different things. I can be like a trans woman went to go pick up her medication from the pharmacy and she was turned away and that could be because the pharmacy was discriminatory or it could be because of an anti-trans law that was just passed in the state. Andrea Montanez, in Florida, that’s based on a real thing that happened to her. The state passed a law there that allowed pharmacies and other medical providers to deny care to trans adults. That has now been blocked in court. But they went through a whole battle there. So it can be individual cases of discrimination. It can be systemic discrimination in terms of a state banning medical care, a state that is restricting the ability of trans students to play on sports teams that align with their identity. I did a long investigation for Huffpost where I looked at all the states that had passed anti-trans sports bans and found that very few of those states – I think only a handful – had had any cases of any trans student playing on sports teams that align with who they are. So they were just sort of making up this issue out of nothing. They’re using trans kids, essentially, as a boogie man to do all the other things that they’ve done. Not only taking away sports participation, but also taking away medical care, taking away the ability to use names and pronouns that align with their identity at school and just ramping it up more and more and more. And that’s really my focus. I try to focus on stories that I feel like haven’t been told before or making the news more human. That we’ll hear about this thing that happens in a state – like Florida’s just done this thing. They’re restricting trans people from using public bathrooms that align with who they are – And rather than just looking at that as some bloodless story that doesn’t impact people, because you’ll read this report in the Washington Post where this happened. And then they don’t actually talk to anybody about who it impacts. My entire job is to talk about who it impacts, to talk to people who are being impacted, to tell their stories, to talk about their fears about what’s happening, how they’re coping with all this, and how people are organizing against it. That trans people aren’t just like these helpless victims. They are dedicated advocates and organizers who are fighting back. So I always try to really center that too and make sure that people know that folks aren’t just taking this lying down. They see all of the attacks across the country and the way that certain law makers are making it harder for them to exist and they’re doing something about it.
JEN: That’s beautiful. And I’ve followed you on social media for a while and appreciated much of this keeping me informed but also sort of connected. I hope that I’m not wrong here – you’ll fix it if I am – but you’ve never picked a single source. Is there an advantage to trying to find one spot or to do some freelancing things? Are there disadvantages to that?
NICO: So I would love to work for a publication. I hate freelancing. I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns. It’s one of my least favorite things in the whole world. If I had the chance to walk over hot coals one time, but then never have to freelance again, I would take the coals. Please. I’ll do it. Whatever you want. But it’s just there are so few opportunities in journalism and some of those just don’t end up being a good fit for your emotional or psychological health. I worked for this publication THEM for two years. And that is lovely. And most of the people that I worked with were amazing. But I just had a bad boss who made my life a living H-E-double hockey sticks. And I just got to a point where I almost thought about going to law school. Paying $250,000 to go to law school to get away from this man. And it was like, or you could just quit. You know, one of those things.
JEN: That one seems easier.
NICO: And I studied for the LSATS and it turned out I did not want to be a lawyer. I talked to a bunch of lawyers who don’t like it. So it seemed like nobody that I spoke with was much happier than I was. And it just seemed like a heck of a thing to risk $250,000 of your money on. So I’m good. There are lots of lawyers that are doing great. So if you’re out there and you’re doing law, great for you. We appreciate your sacrifice. But not for me. In order to tell the kind of stories that I want, I’ve had to sacrifice a lot of material gain and comfort in order to do that. And that, to me, if I have to make that trade off, I’d rather take doing something I really love and telling stories that really matter, rather than – I get these people who are like, “You should write about tech stuff and do tech reviews” – what point is there to that? I have specific gifts that I would like to use to benefit someone. I don’t really see how writing tech reviews, just random product reviews, really benefits humanity in any way. And sure, there’s a lot of money in that, but I’m going to die anyway and when I die I’m not going to have any money then either. So I didn’t really see the point of any of it. A friend of mine often jokes that I’m the world's youngest Gen-Xer because Gen-Xers were all about not selling out and “Don’t give in to the man!” I think I would sell out, maybe if I could, but I don’t even know what selling out would look like for me. I think I tried in the past and here’s me still doing what I love and trying to make a little bit of money out of it.
JEN: That’s awesome, but also sounds scary, like a scary career path.
NICO: It is scary. I would never recommend journalism to anybody. I always tell people that if you’re thinking about journalism, if there’s anything else you have a back up in mind – like I want to do journalism or I want to do this – do the other thing. You don’t want journalism. The only reason you should be a journalist is if you cannot think of anything else you would rather do with your life. If it is truly your heart's desire and there is no backup for you, and this is it, absolutely do it 100%. You just have to really, really, really love it. Because if not, it’s just not worth it.
JEN: That’s some good career advice and interesting to me. I don’t know that much about journalism as a career. So thank you for all of that. I don’t know if you’ve been doing them simultaneously, but the last little while you’ve been focused on a different project. You decided to write a book. Can you talk to us about what motivated this decision to write a book and how you did the research and stuff for this book?
NICO: Sure. I wanted to write this book because I knew that I could. And I knew that I had the access to do a book like this and to do it in a way that was just deeper and more meaningful than just about everybody else on the planet. I know a handful of journalists who could’ve written a book like this and a lot of them are tied up with full time jobs. I was at a point in my life in which the timing was right and I knew I could do it, I knew a lot of the families already, and there was also just a responsibility to do it. That a book like this really needed to be written that humanized the stories of trans kids who are being demonized and otherized and really erased in the political discourse. We’ve seen so many anti-trans bills that have been passed across the country often without really considering the perspectives of trans youth or talking to them about how this would impact their lives. Often lawmakers willfully don’t want to talk to these kids. Or the kids will go testify in the legislature and the lawmakers don’t listen. They’ll be on their phones or staring up at the ceiling, checking their emails on their computer, or they don’t go to the session. They’ll just skip that day, so you’ll see a handful of GOP lawmakers even necessarily present for this. And the kids are paying attention to that. They know. They know that people aren’t listening to them. They know that politicians don’t necessarily have their best interest in mind. I think some do. You’ll find these outliers of folks who are really listening and engaged and really care. But so many people don’t. And for those people who aren’t listening, I wanted to try to bring this conversation to them in any way I could. That “Here is a book. You can read it. It’s 244 pages long. It’s not even that long. And you can understand all of the voices and perspectives that you have been actively ignoring for years and years because trans kids and their parents are trying to bring this conversation to their elected officials.” You’ve got these lobby groups who are trying over and over again to give people briefings, right? “We’ll come to your office. We’ll talk through this stuff with you. Any questions you have, we’ll do this.” But they don’t get those meetings. Or they do get those meetings and the person doesn’t even really care anyway and nothing really changes. And I don’t harbor any fantasies necessarily that this book is going to change everything. But as a journalist, it’s my job to try. It’s literally my job to try to reach people if I can to tell stories and to get them out to as wide an audience as possible. And I feel like, for the most part, this is probably going to reach the already converted. That it’s mostly going to be trans kids and their parents who benefit from this or allies who are just looking to educate themselves more on the issue. And, heck, if I’m aiming for this goal but I’m still reaching trans kids and their families, I feel like that’s a pretty great thing because so many kids right now need to hear that they’re not alone and that there are other people going through this with them. Parents need to hear that they’re not alone and there are other people going through this with them. It can be just really normalizing and humanizing to hear that. And I hope that’s what people get out of it. I hope that trans kids and their families take some solace in knowing that we’re all going through this together. That for all of the hurt and anguish that they’ve felt over seeing what’s happening in our political system, that there are so many people who are also dealing with that. And I think there’s strength in numbers and I hope this reminds people of their own strength.
JEN: So, essentially, you have eight teens in seven different states – and if I understand correctly – you went and lived by them for a month.
NICO: Some families I did. I literally lived in their house for two and a half weeks.
JEN: Oh, in their house.
NICO: Oh, yeah. I kind of treaded lightly in the book just because I felt like it was too much information. So it really just depended on where I could stay. There are some families that had very easy accommodations. You’ve got a room in the basement or a spare room. And that was nice. But for other folks, I was staying anywhere I could. I was in – there’s one chapter when I talk about staying in a $25 AirBnB with this very bitey dog that was always trying to nip at me whenever I walked past. Very cute, but very bitey at the same time. There was another state in Florida, I was sleeping at a friend of a friend's couch. And his roommate was going through a messy breakup at the time. So their house was very messy. And I did a lot of sacrificing of comfort to make this book happen. But it was just really however I needed to do it. That I knew I had to do this on a really small budget with very little resources and whatever it took to make it happen, I was doing. But I think I just needed to get in as close a proximity as possible to these families, whatever circumstances allowed.
JEN: I love that. You can’t talk to somebody on the phone for an hour and actually then tell their story. You wanted to really know these kids so you could do justice to their stories. And I think that’s brilliant. And I’m hoping that we can – I don’t want to give anything away to the listeners – but I want a little bit of who these kids are, who we would get a chance to meet in this book. So talk to me about Wyatt. Who’s Wyatt?
NICO: Wyatt’s my little buddy. Wyatt is a trans boy who at the time lived in South Dakota. He has since gone off to college although he’s not all that happy at college, so he might be transferring to a different one. But we're there at least, so he’s got that going for him. He, at the time, was 15. He’s just such a poet, which is what I love about him. He has this beautiful deep and empathetic soul. And he’s just such a sensitive boy. He did ballet at the time. I don’t know – ballet’s really hard and it’s physically difficult on your body so I don’t know how much more ballet we’re doing. But at the time, he was very into ballet and [inaudible] and his mom in South Dakota runs the South Dakota Transformation Project which is the statewide trans advocacy group. She’s been really supportive. And a lot of their family is about religious rejection. They were at a church that wasn’t super supportive when Wyatt came out as trans, as a trans boy. They eventually had to leave that church and carve out their own path. But they’ve done so beautifully in South Dakota because they just have a lovely family that really has each other’s backs. There’s something so “Leave it to Beaver” about that family. They’re just so wholesome, 1950s Americana. And just so warm, and lovely, and welcoming. And I tried really hard to convey that in the chapter of just how wonderfully affirming this family is to be around. You’re with them for two and a half weeks and you feel like you’re a part of their family.
JEN: Love that. I want to be friends with Wyatt. All right. Help us meet Rhydian. Tell us about Rhydian.
NICO: Rhydian is interesting because I feel like in some ways Rhydian is still kind of figuring out who he is and what he wants to be in the world or who he wants to be in the world, rather. And part of that has to do with – and we talk a lot about this in his chapter – that Rhydian, I believe, was 17 at the time and he feels like he was really denied a trans childhood and a chance to really grow and mature and develop during that formative stage when other kids get to do that. He didn’t get to have a boyhood. So he feels like he’s still catching up in a lot of different ways. And his house in Birmingham, Alabama, they built a playroom for him so he can reconnect to that childhood that he missed and get that kind of development. But he’s a cool kid. So much of the chapter is about him attending a pretty much all-queer high school in Alabama. It’s one of the few like it in the entire country. It’s called The Magic City Acceptance Academy. It’s a very lovely place where you get to see kids with every color of hair that you could ever conceive of and even many colors you could not possibly conceive of. One kid wears “shants” to school which are like shorts/pants. So one leg is short and the other one is pants. And it’s just like a wild wonderful place that I wish I’d gotten to go to school. How wonderful would that have been. And his family is Puerto Rican. They make wonderful Pinan which is kind of like – they might describe it differently – but it’s kind of like this Puerto Rican meat lasagna. And they’re just so in each other‘s business in a really great way. They’re just so close to each other and checking in with each other all the time and always hanging out with each other and playing board games. And I don’t have a family that’s very close. We are in our way. I call my grandmother a lot. But we don’t have that geographical proximity to one another. We’re all just so spread apart throughout the entire county. So it felt really cool to talk about this family who just is so loving and so physically loving and in each other’s space all the time. It’s like they’re all just sitting on each other but in a really good way.
JEN: That’s so fun. Okay. So Mykah, talk to us about Mykah.
NICO: Mykah. I originally wanted to tell Mykah’s story because I had met them at a queer youth summer camp in West Virginia. And if you meet Mykah, you’ll never forget it ever. It’s impossible because they’re just such a character. This one-of-a-kind, buoyant, larger-than-life personality. And I had thought that the chapter would very much be about trans joy, just about this person’s lovely personality. But at the time that I visited they were experiencing a mental health crisis because they had just bombed their interview for NYU. They want to go to the NYU theater school. It didn’t go well because they had COVID during the audition and just bricked it. And it was that moment in your life where, as a kid, all the stuff you’ve been planning for might not go the way you want. Like your dreams might not happen. And Mykah had just had confidence in themselves, this perfect confidence in themselves for such a long time that there was never a moment in which they thought that NYU wouldn’t happen or that all these things that they’d envisioned for themselves since they were really young wouldn’t happen – which is they had to believe in themselves, what other choice was there. So really, that’s what the chapter ended up being about, us hanging out for two and a half weeks as Mykah deals with a mental health crisis. It was tough. But I felt like that was really valuable to get to portray because so many trans kids right now are really struggling in this current political environment and are sort of dealing with their own mental health crises for different reasons. But getting to talk about this one person’s coping, to create space for that and for other people to feel seen in their own struggles, I’m really glad that I got to tell that story, even if I know it's not the one that Mykah and I had really envisioned going in.
JEN: And how generous of Mykah to allow all of us to better understand that by sharing it.
NICO: Absolutely.
JEN: How about Ruby? Tell us about Ruby.
NICO: Oh, Ruby’s great. Ruby, I feel like of all the kids, is maybe the one I’m the most like. So that was kind of fun. She’s also really into old movies. So when we were coming up with her pseudonym – because they used a pseudonym for her chapter – her pseudonym is based off the legal name of Barbara Stanwyck, who's my favorite actress. She was originally Ruby before she was Barbara Stanwyck and that just made perfect sense for her. She’s such a fashionista. She wants to go to fashion school for costume design. And she’s so tall. She’s like a model. Everywhere she walks she’s like this giant swan with these long lanky arms. And everyone is always like, “Ruby, you should model.” And she really should someday. I was like, Tom Ford should snatch her up. But more than that, what I loved about Ruby’s chapter and getting to tell her story is that when her family pitched including her in the book to me, they mentioned that they had this kind of Schitt’s Creek kind of existence where they just haven’t really experienced homophobia or transphobia in their community. She came out in church. She’s very religious. And the family’s very religious. They are this Episcopalian, evangelical tradition. And when she came out, everybody just kind of loved her and accepted her as she was, right? And I think at some level they’d been planning for it for a long time. So it was just like, “Okay. You’re ready to tell us who you are. Great. Let’s do it.” And that felt really nice because so many kids experience this overwhelming rejection in their own communities. And when we were pitching the book, one of the publishers who turned the book down said they didn’t feel like it was realistic because none of the families rejected their kids. But I didn’t really want to tell that story. Kids already know that story. They don’t need to hear it again. I wanted to talk about all the families that are doing a good job or who want to do a good job and are maybe struggling a little bit. Because nobody comes into this perfect. Nobody has all the answers right away. And there’s so many families who are just really figuring it out as they go along. I think all families are figuring it out as they go along, right? I think every parent knows there’s so much trial and error that you go through not just parenting a trans kid, but parenting a kid at all, right? When your baby’s little, right, there’s so much fear that you deal with about “Am I going to do all the right things? Am I going to say the right things? Am I going to be the parent that I’m supposed to be?” But you learn. You get better. You grow. And I wanted to provide a lot of space for that in this book. So there is a lot of growth. But then there are a lot of parents who just are great and are doing the work and are showing you that work. And Ruby’s family is definitely a family that is doing the work.
JEN: That’s awesome. OK. I’m going to ask about the rest of them. But first, I have to tell the listeners because you guys can’t see. But every time I mention one of these names, Nico’s face lights up like I’ve just asked about their little sibling and there’s like this genuine attachment Nico has to the people that they were able to interview. You guys can’t see that. I wanted to throw it in there. But tell us about Clint.
NICO: Oh, yeah. It’s funny that you say that because you really bond with these folks. As a journalist you’re not supposed to be friends with the people that you cover. But you become part of their family. They feel like family members to me at this point. We spent such a long time together. We had to work on this book for two years with each other. We’ve all gotten to know each other really well. So there is just this really deep connection that you form with people.
JEN: I can see the affinity.
NICO: You just grow to love them, you know? Like your own family, sometimes they frustrate you, sometimes you fight, but there’s still so much love there. You want what’s best for each other. So I just adore these kids and their families. And I’ve been so grateful to be invited into their lives. It’s just truly the honor of a lifetime.
But Clint, Clint is great because he’s such this little … I want to say turd, but in an affirming way. He’s just so himself. He’s very stubborn but also he knows what he wants in the world. He’s confident. And he’s just carving out his own path. I thought the Clint story was so fascinating because he really doesn’t identify with his transness at all. He’s Muslim and his family is Muslim, Pakistani. And he really identifies with his Muslim-ness. And not like as a knock against his transness, it’s just that he feels that his journey is to be seen as a boy, not as a trans boy. So that trans part of him just doesn’t really align with how he sees himself. And he always says that, of course he doesn’t think that much about being trans because if he were to think a lot about being trans, that would be dysphoric for him, takes him back to a time in his life in which he experienced so much shame and dysphoria around his body. So why does he want to think about that? But he is so connected to his religion and he loves being Muslim. He loves talking about being Muslim. And a lot of my time there in Illinois was going to worship service with them, eating food with them. His dad, Joe, is one of the best cooks, if not the best cook I’ve ever met my whole life. So we just spent a couple of weeks eating the best Indian food you’ve ever had. I probably gained 30 pounds when I was there. I don’t remember. And I just love so much about it because I felt like we really got to complicate this sort of narrative around trans life in ways that were really interesting to me and make it so much richer and more complex. That his family hasn’t rejected him for being trans. There’s not a lot of strife around that at this point. The big source of strife in their family is that his mom is this incredible, wonderful, wild, free-spirited woman who’s very much the same way Clint has, carved out her own path and decided what woman she wants to be and her parents aren’t very supportive of that. They have very set ideas of how a Muslim woman should behave and they want her to live in accordance with that, but that’s just not her, right? She’s had to do her. And her parents haven’t been very supportive. So it’s been interesting for her to wrap her mind around the fact that they’ve been so supportive of her son being trans, but she hasn’t really gotten any of that same love and affirmation. And she’s really struggled with that. She’s really happy for him, not like she’s jealous. But there’s definitely been a journey that she’s had to go on where she just let go of needing that kind of respect and that kind of care that she just hasn’t really gotten. And that story was just one I’d never heard before. And so many of the stories in this book, I was hoping to just tell stories that I’d never gotten the chance to hear because I imagine that for the reader that would not only be more compelling but maybe they’re stories people have been waiting for.
JEN: Do you want to talk about Auggie and Jack together?
NICO: Talk about them together.
JEN: Okay.
NICO: I’ll talk about Auggie first because Auggie often feels like a little left out in their family. There’s always the caretaker for every family and they’re sort of being everybody’s caretaker. So it often feels like people don’t really get to focus on what’s going on with them. But Auggie is nonbinary. They’re very into horror movies. And want to be a makeup artist for horror films someday or to do practical effects. Their sort of big love in life right now is to volunteer at a local haunted house during Halloween every year where they get to do all the makeup for the scary monsters. And that’s been such a boon and a benefit in their own life. And they’re just so cool. They’re neurodivergent and often a little bit on the quiet side when you first get to know them. But there’s so much depth underneath. I really got to bond with Auggie because the way that they express their nonbinary-ness was something that I’d never really heard before. And it felt cool to talk about because it felt like it reflected my own identity. They just have so much to say on this. They talk about the fact that there are these nonbinary people who feel like they are both and they’re like, “I’m a little bit female and I’m a little bit male,” or “My identity is kind of fluid and it’s somewhere between.” They just don’t really identify with gender at all and they don’t want to be gendered. They see themselves as being David Bowie who’s this alien creature who’s nothing like nothing you’ve ever seen before. And that’s really what they’re going for in life to be this other-worldly being. And they often talk about their gender as a blob from a horror movie that it just encompasses everything around it. This blob will eat the phone and then the phone becomes part of the blob, right? And in the same way, they’re often taking in these different influences and references around them from this horror movie or this book they read or this or that and it just becomes this all-encompassing part of their gender. And that was just so interesting to me. I’d never heard anyone talk about their gender that way. And it was very neat to get to provide space for that kind of conversation because I think everybody has a different conception of their gender. I think even cis people might have a lot of interesting things to say when you talk about “What does your gender mean to you?” Even if you were born a woman, right? “Born a woman” in big air quotes – and you identify with being a woman, the way you talk about that and what being a woman means to you and being a ciswoman might be totally different from another woman. And for Jack, that is Auggie's sibling, a trans girl, she has had a really hard time. She was one of those kids who lost their health care when Florida took it away. She had her health care covered through Medicaid, then she couldn’t get her medication anymore. Her family sort of didn’t understand what was happening and there was a lot of miscommunication with the doctor. So her family didn’t realize that it wasn’t taken away right away. They actually had a couple months. So they even cut her off before she needed to be cut off. So it was this whole saga where she lost her health care. She was essentially being forcibly detransitioned by the state. And it was really just a terrible time for her, where you no longer have control over what happens to your body. She compared it to [inaudible] horror movies to being like a David Cronenburg body horror film. And she’s taken a long time to really recover from the trauma of that. And it’s been incredibly difficult for her. She feels like she’s still getting her old self back now that she is able to take medication again. And she’s still getting her body back to the way it was before. And I feel like when I was there, I got to see her finally starting to come out of her shell. And we still keep in touch. We text all the time. And it’s been nice to see how much she’s grown since then. She has a boyfriend now and they just moved to Alabama together. And I just love seeing her happy because I think there was a time in her life in which she wondered if she’d ever be happy again. How do you ever find happiness when you know how bad life can be?
JEN: That’s brutal for a kid. Last, not least, we have Kylie. Introduce us to Kylie.
NICO: I love Kylie because she’s so unlike all the other kids in my book. And she’s so how I was as a kid in that she’s so opinionated and thorny sometimes. There are these kids who seem wise beyond their years and they’re actually like these 30 year old people who have seen so much and have so much knowledge and wisdom. And not, I think, feels maybe this is backhanded against Kylie, but she seems just so teenagery to me, right? She just really wants to be a kid and to have kid experiences and to do kid stuff. And she didn’t even necessarily want to be part of this book. It was mostly her mom that wanted to do it and she did it because she wanted to make her mom happy. And when we were there, so much of it was trying to carve out the space to be the kind of kid she wants to be and being able to say no to her mom because her mom has this idea of wanting her to do activism and advocacy and wanting to inspire other kids who haven’t had the same privileges and opportunities that they have. Her mom is so into giving back and does this incredible work and she doesn’t really understand why Kylie doesn’t want to do that with her. But here with the book, we got to carve out space to give people permission to give kids permission to not have to be activists. Kylie doesn’t want to be doing this with her life. She doesn’t want to be an activist. She wants to do her own kind of advocacy and just the advocacy of existing and to get to exist as the kind of trans person you want to be. She sees that as very important activism to just not do activism. And I do think that we do put a lot of expectation and burden onto kids where “You not only have to be a kid, but you have to do all this other stuff on top of it. You have to go fight for your rights and fight for the rights of everybody else.” And that’s not for everybody. So for kids reading the book, if that’s not your path in life and that’s not what you want to do, I hope that this makes you feel a little seen and maybe helps you talk about that with your families. Maybe you felt a little shy about asserting yourself before because it feels like you’re expected to do something, that you have a responsibility to do something. But I think Clint actually says it best that “It’s everybody’s own life. You’ve got to live it the way you want to.” And with all these kids and providing these different perspectives, I just wanted to show that. Rather than telling people, I wanted to show you can be whatever kid you want to be. You can be whatever kind of person you want to be in the world. That’s one of the beautiful things about life is its endless possibilities. And this book, to me, just really basks in the endless possibilities, not just of trans existence, but of existence in general.
JEN: That’s awesome. Your book is called “American Teenager: How Trans Kids are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era”. For anyone who’s looking for it, Nico Lang. We will have a link in the show notes to purchase the book. The book is available. So as people are listening, they can log onto their favorite book store and order while they’re listening to you talk about the book. I want to thank you, Nico, for coming to talk to us today about the book and about your personal journey. We appreciate it.
NICO: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I mean, this book has been – as I’ve said before – the honor of my life. And I’m just so excited that people will get to share in it. It’s kind of like we’ve all been harboring this secret together for two and a half years. We’ve all been working on this secret project and now it just gets to be out in the world and it’s just such a cool feeling, knowing when people are listening to this conversation, it will have already been out. I don’t know. I’m just so happy and excited and I hope people love it as much as we all loved being part of it.
JEN: Thank you so much. You’re awesome, Nico.
NICO: Yeah. Thank you and Thanks to everybody for listening.
JEN: Thanks for joining us here In the Den. While we have you, we want to let you know about the inaugural LUV Conference coming up this October 18th and 19th in Salt Lake City, Utah. The conference is all about learning and connecting and creating a more supportive environment for LGBTQ+ individuals and their families. Get more information at www.luvwithoutlimits.org . That’s L-U-V- without limits.org. Or find the link in the show notes under the links from the show. We hope to see you there.
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