Let’s say you’re a writer – as-yet unpublished, but that doesn’t matter; you’ve absolutely earned your stripes. You would move heaven and earth to get time at your desk. You’ve attended the workshops, you’ve sought out the advice of beta readers over multiple drafts, you revise obsessively, if not aggressively. Moreover, you are never not writing, technically, because you write in your head while you walk the dog, grocery shop, drive to and from work. You talk to your characters in your sleep, and worry sometimes you might know them better than you know yourself.
Three years ago, this was me. And, if I’m being honest, it’s still me. The only material difference is that I’ve now finally published that book which was eating me alive, and have moved on to being eaten alive by another. Please don’t send help; I’m quite happy like this. If my head wasn’t currently in the mouth of a manuscript I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.
But in September of 2021, I was on the verge of letting it all go. After over a decade at work on my novel, Lightborne, I had nothing to show but a teetering pile of rejections – all told, close to 200, a perfectly respectable number at which to throw in the towel.
I had heard about the International Debut Novel Competition (then known as the Novel Fair) through the Irish writing community grapevine, despite being an American living in Spain. I knew the deadline was approaching and had been dragging my feet on submitting, sure I wouldn’t be chosen anyway. After nigh on 200 rejections, why on earth should I expect a “yes”?
Eventually, I submitted on a whim, telling myself this was it – if I didn’t get in, I’d take it as the universe’s way of telling me to give up.
And let me tell you, by the time acceptances went out, I had given up. In fact, I’d forgotten about the whole thing, and nearly missed my chance altogether when my acceptance letter ended up in spam (CHECK YOUR SPAM, PEOPLE!) Fortunately, I was able to get in touch with the IWC in the nick of time.
But things didn’t end there, because the International Debut Novel Competition is like no other. In fact, I’d just signed up for the ultimate novel-pitching boot camp.
At the heart of the competition are the two Pitch Days, held remotely or onsite at the IWC’s glorious location in central Dublin, wherein we little unpublished hopefuls (twelve of us, at the time) met individually with agents and editors, and, well, did our best to sell them our books. Going into it, I had read press write-ups describing Pitch Days as “Dragon’s Den for writers,” which had done nothing for my nerves. But rather than stone-faced bigwigs just salivating for a chance to dash someone’s dreams, the agents and editors we met with were universally kind, friendly, and genuinely interested in our projects. Even those who were not appropriate for my particular book asked insightful questions and patiently answered my naive inquiries. I learned more about the publishing world in those two days than I had in 10 years.
Let’s say I didn’t strike gold at the Pitch Days – a possibility for which I mentally prepared myself, even as things seemed to be going quite well. An agent offer or publishing deal are after all not guaranteed by participating in the competition. What would I have gotten out of it then?
In a word: confidence. Halfway through the first Pitch Day, well before I received my first manuscript request, I already felt like a rockstar. Moreover, I now had tools I’d never even known I needed as a writer. Pathways I had never thought to try before, or didn’t even know existed, had opened up before me. Yes, in the end I was lucky enough to meet my amazing agent during those days, but even if I hadn’t, I would have come away leagues ahead of where I’d started.
I also came away with lifelong connections to other writers, and to the wonderful Irish Writers Centre itself. Despite living in another country, I know I can find support and resources through the IWC – and, whenever I do make it to Dublin, an open door and friendly faces.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that, as a writer, I owe the International Debut Novel Competition a LOT. Maybe everything, I dunno.
Since I participated in 2022, I’ve seen old writing connections from back home in the States enter and win, I’ve seen writers who thought of themselves as mere hobbyists discover they’ve got a hit on their hands, I’ve seen writers who had no luck on Pitch Days end up internationally published anyway. No matter what, winning the International Debut Novel Competition is not the end of the road, but only a beginning. And what a beginning it is!
Submissions to the International Debut Novel Competition close THIS SUNDAY, September 14th, 2025.
All relevant info, including past winners, submission guidelines, and tips on how to prepare your application (even the dreaded synopsis) may be found on the Irish Writers Centre’s website.
Featured Image courtesy of the Irish Writers Centre.
I must admit I love a good paperback. Smaller, lighter, easy to carry, a paperback book feels like a close friend. I love the subtly textured surface and faint newsprint smell of the paper, and the way the spine of a truly beloved paperback becomes grooved and whitened with age. Hardbacks are great and all, don’t get me wrong – but a paperback is a living thing.
So naturally I was giddy with excitement when my complimentary author’s copies of the forthcoming Lightborne paperback edition showed up at my door the other day. I’ve seen PDFs of the new cover and therefore thought I knew what I was getting into when I opened the box, but no PDF could possibly do it justice.
I think someone in the design department at Atlantic Books must have heard me going on and on about how much I loved the gold on the “deluxe” edition cover from last year, because they went all-out with it. Believe me when I tell you, this baby glows.
And it looks pretty great from the back too.
With the official paperback launch date set for 6 March, preorders are of course available (and encouraged!) But for those who prefer ebooks, the ‘Zon is also running a Kindle Deal on Lightborne for the month of February, where you can score a copy for just £2.19.
It should probably go without saying that all of this is coming at an exceedingly weird time, particularly yet not exclusively if you’re American like myself, and particularly yet not exclusively if you happen to also be queer, and writing queer books, and plan to continue being and doing all of those things for as long as you have breath in your body. I am glad, at the very least, that I made some difficult but necessary decisions to start out the year, and intend to carry that energy with me into whatever comes next.
The intersection of my self and my obsession with history means I cannot avoid writing about queer survival under truly intolerable conditions – history is sadly saturated with them. It also means, of course, that not everybody makes it out alive, and those that do emerge scarred, battered, and at least a little bit broken. But we will always have a future, even in the bleakest of times. History may often show us in our darkest hour, but it also offers hope: we’ve always been here, and will always be here.
For me, the most important words I wrote in Lightborne were these:
You must live because I love you – because you must be avenged – because to live is a form of vengeance, when so many have sought to destroy you.
Sometimes it comes down to that: staying alive. Because us staying alive really pisses off the ‘phobes.
And if I’ve learned anything about myself this year, it’s that I get a kick out of pissing off ‘phobes.
I am stepping down from my panel “Hidden Lives, Forbidden Loves” at the Oxford Literary Festival, which I would have shared with AJ West, author of The Betrayal of Thomas True, and would have been chaired by Sophie Duncan, author of Searching for Juliet. It was scheduled for 3rd April, 2025.
I have made this decision based on the Oxford Literary Festival’s platforming of anti-trans campaigners, who will be holding two headlining events at the festival on 2nd April.
This decision was not taken lightly. To my knowledge, I am one of just three out trans/ nonbinary speakers invited to the OLF, which has put me in a difficult position. Over the past month, I’ve felt a great deal of pressure to go in multiple directions: to stay and not allow myself to be “silenced,” to keep my head down and not ruffle feathers, and yes, to back out, either quietly or publicly. I’ve conferred with other queer and trans authors, cis and straight authors, friends and family, and in the end I feel that stepping down from my panel is the only way forward, both for my personal safety, and my conscience.
I have deep feelings of regret and disappointment towards the leadership at the OLF, which I would prefer not to air here. I will, however, quote something a very good friend said to me recently: “Freedom of speech is not a zero-sum game.” Broadly speaking, calling for the oppression, indeed, the eradication of an entire class of human beings is not engaging in “academic” or “intellectual debate.” Asking me to stand under the same banner as people who accuse me and people like me of being mentally ill, sexually deviant, or simply evil is not allowing for “both sides” to state their case in a “congenial atmosphere.” Not when one of those sides is saying, simply, “We exist, and have a right to live openly, honestly, and without fear for our lives,” and the other side’s response is, “No, you don’t.”
I can’t begin to express my gratitude to the other authors who have also withdrawn in protest over the OLF’s choice to prioritize hate speech over the safety of LGBTQ+ speakers and attendees. I am also incredibly grateful to the people behind the scenes who have supported me in making this decision, and who have shown such courage and care for the beautiful, generous, resilient, and beloved trans community. Not everyone will agree that withdrawing is the right thing to do, but for my part, the alternative would have been unbearable.
It’s immensely disappointing to all of us who have stepped back that we won’t be able to take advantage of what should have been an opportunity to share our work, our love for literature and history, and hopefully to inspire others to read more, learn more, write more, feel more. To be more open, more human, and more gracious. That’s all anyone should want or expect from a literary festival.
I sincerely hope that more OLF invitees will join us in demanding a festival that is welcoming and safe for all lovers of literature and learning. I believe the OLF can and should do better. This should have been a chance to celebrate humanity and art, and I hope we all continue to do that in whatever way we can.
All my💙to my trans siblings.
A memorial to what might have been: the event page for “Hidden Lives, Forbidden Loves,” accessed 08/01/2025.
On the eve of the US presidential election, this historical fiction writer has some thoughts.
CW: Racism, medical abuse, SA
I keep thinking about the several weeks this past summer, just before Joe Biden announced his intention to drop out of the US presidential race, when social media became absolutely flooded with appeals for a return to “precedented” times. Even now, type the word “precedented” into any search bar, and you’ll get thousands of hits, all expressing the same mixture of exhaustion and dread: Free us from nonstop whiplash. Give us boring and predictable.
I understand the sentiment. Our particular historical moment feels uniquely dire. But every time one of these posts pops up in my feed, I can’t help but think that all times have been both precedented and unprecedented, that we exist just as our ancestors did and our descendants will, putting one foot in front of the other as we trudge the treadmill of history. The shape of our times, and of our little lives within them, will inevitably be decided by those who outlive us – a hazard of being situated on the inside rather than the outside of a story.
Were we capable of peeking into future history books, what we’d read about the early 21st century would likely surprise and bewilder us. Possibly, we’d barely recognize ourselves – as would our ancestors, were they privy to our contemporary take(s) on them. Just as myths and folklore evolve over eons – as old tales are rewritten, lost, and rediscovered – history changes wildly based on who is telling the story, and when, and for what purpose. Whether times are precedented or unprecedented is not a matter of fact, but point-of-view.
Still, we, the players on that stage, are not helpless. Our work is in the making of those future historians – in the shaping of that point-of-view. Here and now, we decide what truths will be self-evident in the decades and (hopefully) centuries to come.
Take J. Marion Sims, for example: medical doctor, known as “the Father of Gynecology,” immortalized in statues, medical schools, and public buildings all over the United States. For most of the 130+ years since his death, Sims was lauded as a champion of women, having revolutionized a profoundly neglected field and led the vanguard in techniques ranging from fistula repair to anesthesia. It’s only within the last few decades that Sims’ use of enslaved Black women and girls as test subjects for his agonizing experimental procedures – performed without anesthesia, due to his belief (which many in the medical field still absurdly hold today) that Black people cannot feel pain – began to overshadow his previously spotless legacy.
J. Marion Sims statue located in Columbia, South Carolina. Wikimedia Commons.
The reason why it took so long is that prior to the 1990s, Sims was mainly written about by white men, occasionally white women, for whom Sims’ well documented anti-abolitionist stance, Confederate sympathies, and medical (and possibly sexual) abuse of enslaved women and girls simply made him “a man of his times.”
It took Black women scholars like Durrenda Ojanuga and Harriet Washington to shine a light on the harrowing stories of girls like Anarcha, a thirteen-year-old fistula patient on whom Sims operated without sedation more than thirty times, often before an audience comprised of both medical students and morbidly curious looky-loos. But even prior to these scholars’ work, Anarcha was not some deeply buried secret in Sim’s story. In his memoirs and diaries, Sims himself had painstakingly – and proudly – documented his own mistreatment of Anarcha and other young Black women.
A self-evident truth in the worldview of Sims, and many – too many – who came after him, was that Black lives mattered less. All Black researchers did was simply ask that Anarcha be given full consideration in the story – that she be treated as a human being, not merely a tool for the “hero” to make use of on his journey to immortality. Nowadays, the women and girls who suffered under Sims’ knife are more frequently depicted as the main characters of their own story, appearing in documentaries, plays, paintings, and even, at last, a monument installed in Montgomery, Alabama in 2021, dedicated to “The Mothers of Gynecology.”
Here’s the point: the history we learn about Sims now, in 2024, is immensely different from what was taught just 30 years ago. The past, obviously, did not change. The way we see and understand the past changed, in large part thanks to a wider diversity of voices involved in the researching and shaping of history, and culture in general. Such has led to a slow shift in the way humanity views itself: a long overdue upheaval of who fully “counts” as human in the Western world.
The infuriating truth of the matter is, we are still only at the very beginning of that revolution in thought. The powerful and privileged still look much the same as they did 30 years ago, 130 years ago, 230 years ago, only a tiny minority of whom have plucked up the raw ore of the idea that humanity is a trait equally and innately shared by all human beings, none more or less deserving than any other, and are puzzling over what to do with it. How does this idea fit into their worldview? What’s in it for them?
[Historical fiction] brings you up against events and mentalities that, should you choose to describe them, would bring you to the borders of what your readers could bear. The danger you have to negotiate is not the dimpled coyness of the past – it is its obscenity.
Hilary Mantel, The Guardian, 2009
I can’t be the only historical fiction writer who is also a disillusioned former academic. In a sense, all history is historical fiction, in that all historians make decisions about what to highlight and what to suppress. But there’s a spectrum between “truth” and “straight-up bullshit.” Whether you’re writing literature or academic history depends on where in the spectrum you land, or at least aim to land, which itself depends (rather a lot more than some would like to think) on who you are and what you believe.
Even the most impartial and considerate historian can rarely ever hope to get much further than halfway from bullshit. Read too deeply into almost any subject and you’ll soon discover that “experts” are frustratingly fallible people, prone to contradicting themselves, repeating falsehoods, confusing conjecture for empirical fact, encoding bias into praxis, cherry-picking their sources, etc., etc. It certainly doesn’t help that the field of History has been so long dominated by men first, white men second, and wealthy white men third – demographics generally adverse to challenging one another in any way likely to disturb the overall homogeneity of their precious worldview.
Title page of Thomas Bowdler’s infamous The Family Shakespeare (1818), a heavily expurgated version of Shakespeare’s plays which omitted “words and expressions… which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” Wikimedia Commons.
The Victorians did immeasurable damage in their time, committing just about every academic fallacy under the sun, shoehorning all the terrible and beautiful chaos of human history into prissy parables about the virtues of piety and obedience. It’s frankly criminal that much of the Elizabethan history I studied in school came secondhand from those Bowdlerizing little creeps, forcing me to waste many hours in simply peeling back layer after layer of bias and bullshit in order to reach a kernel of truth, if any had managed to survive. And yet, the Victorians were only “men of their times,” working in the grand tradition of a field developed in service to the moral and martial instruction of aristocratic young boys. “Close your book, Master Algernon, and tell me: what was Xerxes greatest mistake at Salamis?”
Don’t get me wrong – I loved studying history (theatre history, specifically), but decided to write historical fiction instead because I saw a potential in literature to do what scholarship could not: to somehow transcend the narrative imposed by generations of Ivory Tower greybeards and recover the fugitive now-ness of the past, at the point when it was still present. The raw, churning, messy humanity of it all.
Maybe the potential is there, but achieving it is a pipe-dream. Firstly, because books are meant to be enjoyed. For the sake of the modern reader’s comfort (and sanity), the only way to bridge the gap between, say, 1593, when my novel Lightborneis set, and 2024 is to bring 2024 to 1593, and not the other way around. Characters might speak in an approximation of period dialect; certain events might have to be simplified or ignored; the broad concerns of a person alive in that specific time and place will have to be selected based on their relevance to the story and their relatability to the modern reader. In historical fiction, the “now-ness” of the past is an illusion, refracted through the now-ness of, well, now.
Secondly, as I tried to illustrate above with the case of Sims and Anarcha, historical truth is political. Unfortunately, we novelists are as human as anyone else, each of us with our own little agenda, which is often secret even from ourselves. Nowadays we say that “the personal is political,” meaning we are obliged to examine our biases, and correct them to the best of our ability; meaning also that, for some of us, our personhood, our mere existence, is politicized whether we like it or not. Quite naturally, this effects how we write, and what we write about.
Some writers might aim for a neutral view of humanity – a so-called “universality” – but I’m afraid there’s no such thing. Just as true political centrism is a myth, a “neutral” view of humanity presupposes that there is a single, standard, immutable shape, size, color, and kind of human being. Nearly always, this true “neutral” human is presented to us as white, heterosexual, cisgendered, male, Christian, and “middle-class” (another myth).1 When authors and literary critics employ terms like “universal” to describe stories or characters, they are often (perhaps unknowingly) doing the work of white supremacy.
Those awful Victorians owe much of their awfulness to the fact that they lived in a time and place where the definition of humanity was about as narrow as it gets. Worse, as historians, their profession obliged them to be ruthless guardians of those borders. Prior to the egregious intellectual and cultural wrongs inflicted by early anthropology and psychology – not to mention eugenics, whose poisonous influence on the western world cannot be understated – history was the scholarly field most responsible for shaping the way humans viewed themselves. Therefore, it bears enormous responsibility for our still-blinkered view of the past as a string of white men’s accomplishments, in a world utterly devoid of queer, Black, non-European, non-Christian, disabled, and/or women’s ingenuity, innovation, or simple relevance.
Essentially, every human story is political – because politics determine, firstly, who gets to be human.
So much of human history is selecting what to remember, deifying or reifying some aspects and forgetting others. I’m not suggesting the past haunts us, but until one comes to terms with it, the past will be a haunting – something you can’t shake.
Two months ago, many of us were shocked and horrified by images of hundreds of books piled high in dumpsters at the New College of Florida, the former contents of its recently dissolved Gender and Diversity Center. But few of us who had been following the US book bans closely, or who know our history, were surprised to see the inevitable fruits of the right-wing war on free speech and free thought. As Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry point out in their excellent article, incidents of mass book removal, disposal, and/or destruction go back far enough to demonstrate a chilling pattern:
Would-be tyrants have been destroying books for centuries, and once you start destroying books, it’s usually not long until you treat groups of people the same way.
As the infamous Nazi burning of the library at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology made terrifyingly clear, it is a remarkably short step between burning books and burning people.2 And yet, for all that the extreme right’s rhetoric has grown increasingly violent and dehumanizing over the past few weeks, major media outlets such as The New York Timesare seemingly twisting themselves into ever more Gordian linguistic knots in effort to normalize the, excuse the phrase, utter batshittery of what is being said and done. Meanwhile, even historically “apolitical” types are looking over their shoulders, wondering, Are we at the point of no return yet? Has it gone that far?
Reader, I guarantee you: in 1933, people were asking themselves the same question.
The presumptive architects of an American autocracy have made their plans freely available to read online. Those of us who like to know what our enemies are plotting can now recite highlights from the Project 2025 playbook point-by-point. The apparent goal is to “take back” the United States to some illusory, simpler time, when humanity was uncomplicated and unalloyed, when white was white and black was black and never the twain should meet – a vision not far from that of those accursed Victorian moralists. But the “perfect,” homogenous nation of obedient, pious and patriotic white, Christian, patriarchal households for which the right desperately longs can only be imposed through violence. Humanity was never thus, and never will be. America was never thus, and never will be.3
By banning LGBTQ+ books and the teaching of Critical Race Theory (which is simply uncensored US History), the right is testing our endurance for violence. For the destruction of books, and the denial of the right to an education, are indeed acts of violence. In the right’s perfect world, we will be told what to accept as “truth,” and forbidden to question it. There will be no historical fiction, only fictional history.
… he who has been treated as the devil, recognizes the devil when they meet.
James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
It’s no accident that history and literature are often among the first targets of tyrants. Throughout the tumultuous Tudor era, in which my novel Lightborne is set, theatres, schools and universities became political and sometimes literal battlegrounds as each new religious binge or purge rocked England’s foundations. With the country swinging from Protestant to Catholic to Protestant again, artists and educators frequently found themselves caught in the crosshairs for failing to obey the current dogma, whatever it happened to be. Some conformed, but others suffered horrendous fates. Lightborne is, of course, about one of the most famous dissenters of that age: queer poet, possible spy, and accused heretic, Christopher Marlowe.
Marlowe is now often known for the goriness of his plays, but what truly defines him as a writer was his obsession with power: how it was obtained, defended, employed as a hammer against ordinary people; how power, in its fierce need for ceaseless expansion, could crush whole civilizations in its path. Contrary to the ruling doctrine of his day that power was a gift endowed by God upon those most deserving, Marlowe’s plays suggested, rather, that power was a deadly weapon, won not through one’s innate virtue but through greed, megalomania, venality, and bloodshed.
Under the rule of Elizabeth I, who, as both Head of State and Head of the Church, demanded cultish devotion from her subjects, this was an extremely dangerous position to take, and one that may very well have cost Marlowe his life. Perhaps it was his experiences in espionage that “radicalized” him, as we might put it today; or perhaps it was simply his life as a queer man working in the rough-and-tumble world of the Elizabethan theatre – not the glamorous lifestyle we might think of now, but a precarious, marginal existence, likened in its day to sex work. Either way, Marlowe, like so many who came both before and after him, would have often found himself forced to choose between living freely, or simply living another day.
I dearly hope that one day, we’ll no longer have to concern ourselves with the same fears our ancestors faced 400 years ago. I hope for a future with fewer impossible choices in the name of basic survival.
But that hope feels more tenuous by the day. The Tudor monarchs and Donald Trump may bear little resemblance to one another at the surface, but both arise out of the same vicious impulses: to crush dissent without mercy, to villainize the vulnerable, to pander to grotesque wealth, to self-style as demigods, to reward violence and cruelty, to criminalize critical thought, to censor art and education, to undermine fact, to enforce religious conformity, and to make brutal examples of any who oppose them. Different yet equally terrifying tyrants, with different yet equally ridiculous hair.
Now, in our minute and perishing present, we risk becoming the intellectual property of bigots and autocrats, who will ensure the future remembers us as best suits their narrative. For many, this means losing access to our own humanity, a distinction which far too many human beings are still denied. To be Black or brown, queer or trans, an immigrant, non-Christian, disabled, working-class, unhoused, or certainly, Palestinian – to be in any way distant from historical power and privilege – is to be rendered into historical fiction while you are still alive, written out of your own story and into the shadows of some grand, artificial narrative, at best as villains and bogeymen, at worst as silence, as the blank spaces between words.
What greater threat is there to humanity than the desire to erase our history, our curiosity, our creativity, our defiance, our resilience, our joy? What greater evil is there than dehumanization?
And what are we going to do about it, while we still can?
If you’ll forgive me nerding-out here for a sec, the notion of class universality in literature goes way back as well. Take Everyman, a play printed in 1530 but possibly much older. As the title suggests, audiences are meant to interpret the main character as a universal representation of “man,” although in the play he is clearly depicted as a person of wealth and resources – much unlike the vast majority of people alive in in the 16th century, who existed in a state of indentured servitude. ↩︎
I’m echoing Heinrich Heine here, whose book Almansor was among those burned, and contained the words, “Where they burn books, they’ll burn people too.” ↩︎
“No,” you’ll say, “‘America’ is in fact a nation built upon the blood and bones of colonized and enslaved peoples” – but of course, those people were here, and still are, and are more than their suffering. We can care about justice for the dead without being apathetic to the living. ↩︎
I look back on the past version of myself who brought their laptop to their US book launch with the intention of keeping their blog updated and think, “Oh, you sweet summer child – so innocent, so full of big dreams!” In the end, I didn’t have time to unpack the laptop, let alone to sit up through my jetlag reaping the whirlwind of emotions for content. Even now, much of my trip to Boston, Massachusetts remains a blur of happy reunions with old friends, rooms filled with watchful, attentive faces, visits to old stomping grounds, old favorite beers in old favorite bars, new favorite books bought in new favorite bookshops.
At least one thing is clear: I’m extremely lucky. Not everyone gets their dream launch in their dream location with their dream conversation partner; not everyone gets to sit on a panel of rockstar authors and read their work to a packed audience. But I’ve been lucky for quite some time. I was lucky twelve years ago, when I discovered GrubStreet Boston’s Novel Incubator program and joined a community full of lifelong friends who all share a passion for the craft of writing. I was lucky to have some of the best writing instructors out there, Michelle Hoover and Lisa Borders, who gave me all the support I could possibly need.
There’s a bittersweetness to it all. Returning to the last place I called home just as the whole country is turning its gaze towards the abyss infuses even joyful moments with a sharp tang of dread. I fear for many of the friends I left behind, nearly all of whom said the same thing as we bade each other goodbye: “If the shit hits the fan, I’m coming to stay with you!” They were only half-joking, I could tell, just as I was only half-joking when I answered of course they could stay with me, I’d take every single one of them in if I could. Many told me how lucky I was to have gotten out when I did, how lucky I am to be so far away, which is a hard thing to hear, given how much I’ve missed them, and how much I’ve missed the place where, they say, I’m so lucky to no longer live.
I’ll have more to say on all of that later. For now, I’d like to just hang onto the excitement and gratitude of these days. I’d like to thank Nicole Vecchiotti and Timothy Deer, the organizers of Craft on Draft, as well as our hosts at Trident Booksellers, our Master of Ceremonies Cameron Dryden, and my fellow panelists Thérèse Soukar Chehade, Henriette Lazaridis and Janet Rich-Edwards. Thanks to Porter Square Books and to Marketing Director Josh for throwing Lightborne a launch party to remember, and to my conversation partner Michelle Hoover for knowing exactly the right questions to ask. A huge thanks to my publicist Meghan Jucszak at Pegasus Books, who helped put everything together.
A final shout-out also to the many dear friends who rallied together to give Lightborne the send-off I’ve always dreamed of. I told many of you that we have to come back and do it all again soon, and I mean it. This is a world that needs more art, more joy, more luck to go around. I sincerely hope we get to share in that.
At long last I can finally announce my US “mini-tour” plans – “mini” because it is indeed very wee, but “tour” because it requires way more travel than the average book tour to pull it off. Though returning to my old stomping grounds in Boston, Massachusetts from my new home here in Spain gets more complicated (and expensive) every year, it has always been my dream to launch Lightborne in the same city where it first leaped onto the page – albeit in a very different form than now.
It’s been over ten years since that first version came about, but finally, this October, I’ll be making a few stops around the Boston area to celebrate Lightborne’s US birthday:
October 22, 2024: “Craft on Draft” at Trident Booksellers, Newbury St. Boston, MA at 7pm – 9pm.
From the organizers: “Craft on Draft is a reading series created and managed by alumni of GrubStreet Boston’s Novel Incubator program devoted to great fiction and the mechanics behind it. This session’s topic: ‘Whose History?’ asks, can historical fiction radicalize and revolutionize? Come hear four authors discuss how they’re working to change mainstream perceptions of historical fiction by broadening the genre to include queer folx, non-white/non-Occidental people, even the ‘ordinary,’ non-aristocratic, outsiders, boundary pushers, changemakers… Spend an evening discussing stories that go beyond dead kings and queens to hash out what’s at stake in our reimagining of the past.
With Hesse Phillips (Lightborne), Henriette Lazaridis (Last Days in Plaka), Therese Soukar Chehade (We Walked On), and Janet Rich Edwards (Canticle). Moderated by Carla Miriam Levy.”
October 23, 2024: Lightborne Official US Launch at Porter Square Books: Hesse Phillips in Conversation with Michelle Hoover, Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge, MA at 7pm – 8pm.
From the time Lightborne was still a sprawling mess of loosely connected, overly ambitious ideas, I’d always dreamed of one day having a launch at Porter Square Books’ Cambridge location, just down Spring Hill from my old apartment in Somerville. They’ll be in brand new quarters by the time I finally get to do it, but no matter – we’re still in for a great evening in one of the most vibrant independent bookstores in the Boston area. With lively discussion led by Michelle Hoover, host of The 7AM Novelist Podcast, founder and instructor of the Novel Incubator Program at GrubStreet Boston (where Lightborne was born) and author of Bottomland and The Quickening; along with a reading (or two) performed by yours truly.
Free for all to attend, but please register here to help out our hosts!
Before I jet back across the Atlantic, I’ll also be stopping in at all my old favorite book shops to load up on probably more books than luggage weight restrictions will allow, and to leave a trail of signed copies in my wake. You’ll soon be able to pick one up at Porter Square Books’ locations in Cambridge or Boston, The Harvard/MIT COOP, Trident Booksellers, All She Wrote Books, or the Harvard Book Store.
This post will be updated with further information as it becomes available, so do check back. I hope some of you out there can join me on what will be an incredibly special trip – a return to the city I still often think of as home, even from the other side of the world, and a chance to see friends new and old, some for the first time in years.
It’s summer, 1997. My sixteen-year-old self is in their room, on the phone with their best friend, who says she isn’t interested in being friends anymore.
(This is a conversation I’ve been dreading, having sensed it coming for months – the gradual tapering off of phone calls, the resignation in her voice when I cancel plans, again. My best friend won’t fight for me. Truth is, I don’t even want her to.)
She says, “It seems like writing a book is more important to you than having friends.”
At sixteen, I didn’t have a lot of friends to spare. For starters, though I attended high school in downtown Pittsburgh I lived way out in what everyone referred to as “farm country,” a two hour bus ride away. And then there was the truly unconventional way I spent my free time. Every afternoon, as soon as I got home from school, I’d rush upstairs to my desk and barely move for the rest of the night. I was the only person I knew who wrote books – for fun.
It certainly couldn’t have looked like fun, from the outside. Most nights I ate dinner at my desk like some sad corporate drudge, squeezing in every last minute I could. Some time after midnight I’d crash into bed, get maybe four hours of sleep in before my mother woke me by shouting my name downstairs. Then another two hours to school, in the dark, during which I might write six pages in my head, tucking them into a mental folder to be opened again at the end of the day.
God how I miss that superpower now: the ability to hold whole texts in my memory, to summon them up hours or even days later with all the revisions and additions intact. It would really come in handy.
It came at a cost, of course. I expended so much mental energy keeping stories on ice that I had little left over for “normal” sixteen-year-old concerns. I was emphatically not a “normal girl,” and proud of it. But everything I knew about girlhood came from stories I absorbed through books and media, which were nothing at all like my reality. Girl stories, I thought, were about going to the mall, vying for the attention of boys and counting calories, despite the heroine always being thin, blonde, popular; or maybe unpopular but thin anyway, pretty if she takes her glasses off. Before the story ended, she would learn lessons about the importance of loyalty, forgiveness, sacrifice; the transformative power of a new dress, the transformative power of dropping five pounds.
Above all, in every story, the girls were always surrounded by friends, typically three or four, each with her own small, inoffensive quirks, who were there when the heroine’s story began and would be there till the end, standing by her side with blank smiles, their own stories (if they had them) tidily and expediently resolved.
In hindsight, I think girl stories made me uncomfortable because they were all about being visible, about being consumed. The heroine survives or triumphs because she steps out into the world with arms wide open, having done the hard work of changing herself to please others, or (more rarely) the even harder work of accepting herself.
You could say that girl stories are often “coming out” stories.
Girls almost never figured into the stories I wrote at sixteen. The book I’d spent my whole summer working on, instead of hanging out with my best friend, was a sprawling bildungsroman, loosely based on a true story, about an autistic painter who escapes a Soviet mental institution and defects to the United States. The next summer it would be a historical thriller set in 1899 about a traumatized gay man who builds a vast city underneath Manhattan as a respite from the surface world. After that, there would be a fantasy trilogy in which Lucifer and Jesus Christ are the same entity, and in order to save humanity, they must rally angels and demons alike to kill a smite-happy God.
All my stories were about escaping, defecting, retreating, un-making, un-doing. They were the opposite of “coming out.”
On a class trip in 1997, looking like a roly-poly Robert Smith.
At sixteen, I didn’t yet know I was queer. Correction: I’d known I was queer even before I’d ever heard the word, but over time I’d managed to wipe that knowledge from my mind. It was a matter of survival. I lived in a town with more churches than supermarkets. Not long before that fateful phone call with my best friend, I’d had to switch schools for the second time in four years because I was acting out, destroying school property, self-harming. The first time, I had been bullied so badly the teachers themselves had suggested my parents find another school for me – I had been essentially run out of my home town, or at least my public school district.
At sixteen, I didn’t yet know I was queer, because even though I compulsively wrote characters who loved or existed unconventionally, changed genders or were genderless, I didn’t live in a world where queer was something I could be. Queer was for other people. (It was the 1990s, so, tragic, doomed people.) But writing was a place where I could safely try on different versions of myself. Some of my characters were parts I stepped into as if for the stage. Others stepped into me. Gradually, I came to recognize which ones brought me strength, or confidence. I started to crave their visitations, to grieve them when they were gone.
My senior year of college, one character would set up shop in my head, and not leave until I’d done him justice. An Elizabethan playwright whose name I’d heard in my early teens, and whose story I’d never been able to forget – Christopher Marlowe – came storming out of one of my mental folders, dragging four-hundred years’ worth of queer rage at having to escape, to hide, to un-make ourselves along with him.
Ultimately, it would take me twenty years of multiple false-starts, failed attempts and “life stuff” delays, but when the dust finally settled, I would be holding Lightborne, my first published book. And I would not be alone: standing to either side of me would be the friends who had never stopped cheering me on, the fellow writers who gave me their time, the partner who gave me all the love and patience I could possibly ask for. I would not be alone in the dark any longer.
Up in my bedroom on the old cordless phone, my sixteen-year-old self has no idea how long it will take, or how much will be lost and gained along the way. They can’t imagine going more than a day without writing, but being published isn’t necessarily part of the plan. They write to live.
When their best friend says, “writing a book is more important to you than having friends,” she sounds as if she pities them. Maybe it is sad. A sixteen-year-old kid who spends all their free time locked away in a room, and who, to be honest, has only one friend in the world. Reality is, it’s 1997 and this kid should be begging their parents for a pager or Alanis Morissette tickets; reality is, this kid survives one day at a time, by pretending they are a stateless refugee, or the queer king of an underground realm, or some half-divine, half-demonic creature, at war with an unjust God. Reality is, this kid survives by being anything but what the world sees when it looks at them.
So, sixteen-year-old me tells their friend, yes – writing a book is more important to them.
And their heart sinks as they say this, realizing they can never take it back. But after sitting with the dread for a few minutes, in the silence after they hang up the phone, it dissipates. They’re at their desk, in their room. Their book is on the screen in front of them, flickering white, like a hearth that burns cold.
I want to tell them: twenty-seven years from now, I promise you, it will have been worth it.
Not because you’ll publish a book.
Because you’ll find out who your real friends are.
Sometimes, book promo can actually be fun! Case in point: during my recent trip to London, I spent two days visiting some of the sites featured in Lightborne, from St. Helen’s Bishopsgate to Seething Lane, location of the Privy Court (Elizabethan MI5); from the Rose Playhouse to Deptford Strand, and Kit Marlowe’s final resting place.
I put it all together into two short videos which I’m posting below for the non-Instagrammers and -TikTokkers among us (seriously, all my respect).
There’s a slight misconception that all of medieval and early modern London has been lost, what with the fire of 1666, the Blitz, etc. In fact, a number of buildings survive, along with traces of the old neighbourhoods preserved in names, the layout of streets, even sometimes quite literally in basements. Please join me as I take you on a tour of some of these places, and offer a few brief insights into their connection to Christopher Marlowe’s story…
I have only a few words, and most of them are gibberish. Lightborne has been given this brief but amazing review from Nick Rennison, author of 1922: Scenes From A Turbulent Year and Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography.
Obtaining reviews in mainstream papers requires a monumental effort mixed with pure dumb luck, and is a resource many authors are shut out from, whether for lack of connections or industry bias against indie published writers. I feel incredibly fortunate to have managed to worm my way in, thanks entirely to the hard work of my publicist at Atlantic Books.
Good press can certainly help sell books, but this is a fickle business, so we’re still in “wait and see” mode. Reviews from readers are naturally one of the best, if not the best determinant of a book’s success, so to anyone out there who has bought and read the book, please do leave your review on sites like Goodreads, Amazon, and Bookshop.org. (Even if it wasn’t for you – reviews are to help other readers decide whether the book is right for them. So help your fellow readers out!)
As for me, I’m going to take a short break from biting my nails, and throw myself into the best cure for debut author anxiety – working on the Next Book….!
Last week, I traveled to London to see my book off into the world and to revisit a few of the locations from the novel, some of which I hadn’t managed to see in person since the early days of research. Call it a pilgrimage. While there was no particular requirement for me to visit London last week, it felt wrong not to be there when Lightborne finally hit the shelves in the city that had inspired me for the past 20 years.
Luckily for me, I have a wonderful publishing team at Atlantic Books, who seemed to know exactly how to celebrate the Big Day. After giving me the full star treatment at their offices in Bloomsbury, they swept me off to the legendary and venerable Gay’s the Word, the UK’s oldest queer bookshop, for a signing and some photos.
Me with Jim MacSweeney, Manager of Gay’s the Word since 1989, looking as if he’s about to ask me what I’m doing standing in front of his shop. You can just see Lightborne by my right elbow! Photo by Laura O’Donnell.
I can’t begin to express how exciting it was to step behind the desk at Gay’s the Word, a staple in London’s queer community for 40 years – nor, for that matter, can I tell you what went through my head when I first saw Jim and Uli putting Lightborne on the shelves. There was such a whirlwind of emotions that the only moment I remember with true clarity is when I sat down to do my signing and noticed a picture of queer artist, author, AIDS activist and personal hero David Wojnarowicz looking down on me from the wall above. There came a singularly strange, out-of-body sensation, as if I were watching myself from across the room.
Photo by Laura O’Donnell.
It’s one thing to write about history, quite another to touch it. To enter it, even, for the briefest of moments. Gay’s the Word is one of those places made all the more sacred by having survived so many attempts to destroy it, much like the queer community it serves. Opened on the brink of the AIDS crisis, raided under “obscenity” laws, threatened with closure, its tenacity in the face of hardship and ignorance is every bit as inspirational as the lives of people like Wojnarowicz and his contemporaries Keith Haring, Candy Darling, Angie Xtravaganza, Peter Hujar, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera – every bit as inspirational as a life like Kit Marlowe’s, queer before “queer” was even a thing. I don’t know whether it’s possible to top the feeling of knowing that I have my own little corner in such a space, for however long it lasts.
They took RuPaul’s House of Hidden Meanings off the shelves for this photo-op, but I’m not bragging. Photo by Laura O’Donnell.
As part of promotional efforts, while in London I also had to take myself and my very patient wife on a tour of locations from the novel in order to record some short videos, which I will hopefully post in the future. Despite the destruction wreaked on London by the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz, you can still visit numerous places that existed during Marlowe’s lifetime, from the Church of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate to Southwark Cathedral, not to mention Marlowe’s final resting place in the yard of St. Nicholas’s Church, Deptford – a living archive to mine for gold.
Not all have survived exactly as Marlowe might have remembered them, but sometimes the traces left behind feel still realer than brick and mortar, straddling the line between story and substance. Just down the street from Shakespeare’s Globe on Bankside lies an ordinary looking office block with an extraordinary secret in the cellar – the ruins of the Rose Playhouse, the setting of Lightborne’s opening scene:
The curtains part, cutting a gash of daylight through the backstage gloom. Beyond, the Rose Playhouse appears, a vortex of timber and plaster and densely packed humanity that reels upwards, three stories, to a dilated eye of cloud-streaked sky.
The Rose, brainchild of entrepreneurs Philip Henslowe and John Chomeley, was the earliest of London’s theatres to take on the now iconic, polygonal form later echoed by the Swan and the Globe. It opened in 1587 and existed just into the 17th century, hosting the first performances of most of Marlowe’s plays and many of Shakespeare’s. Its performance and financial records, scrupulously recorded in a small leatherbound book by manager Henslowe, comprise some of the most important documentary evidence of theatrical activity during the Elizabethan period. Perhaps most famously, the Rose was recreated for the Oscar winning film Shakespeare In Love.
An artist’s reconstruction of the Rose with a cross-section exposed. By William Dudley.
After lying buried in the Bankside mud for four centuries, the Rose came to light again in 1988 when building works exposed its remarkably well-preserved foundations. But although the playhouse’s discovery was initially met with a flurry of excitement from theatre makers and devotees, writers, archeologists and historians, the Rose has long lain in hibernation while funds are raised to resume the excavations cut short in 1989. In the meantime, the remains of Shakespeare and Marlowe’s first theatre remain mostly dormant, lovingly cared for by a team of volunteers and archeologists, subsisting on charitable donations and high-profile benefactors such as Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen. Last Saturday, for the first time in ten years, I was able to see it again.
The Rose as it appears today. Photographer unknown.
It may not look like much. Due to their centuries spent buried in the Thames’ anerobic mud, the Rose’s foundations must now be kept underwater to forestall decay. Thus, what you see when you enter the former dig site is a pit of raw earth enclosing a dark, shallow pool. Beneath the water’s unnervingly still surface, strings of red light outline the footings of the stage and the yard, throwing an eerie glow onto the steel beams that crush down from overhead. It is cold inside, damp-smelling and dim, lending the space a grave-like atmosphere.
But far from diminishing the Rose’s power, the sepulchral surroundings have a strange way of imbuing it with all the hushed, unearthly hauntedness of an ancient site of pilgrimage. Contrast the chilly silence with the roar of the crowds that came centuries ago, and you can’t help but imagine yourself in the company of many thousands of restive ghosts – maybe Kit Marlowe’s among them.
My hope, of course, is for the Rose to come alive again, however affecting it may be in its current state. Previous excavations carried out on the site were performed hastily and under constant threat of foreclosure by developers, meaning that there’s still much left to uncover. In addition, plans are underway on The Rose Revealed Project, a proposed visitor’s centre, performance space and museum which will preserve the Rose for generations to come. Though there’s an enormous, money-shaped hurdle still to climb, I’m hopeful that those plans will come to fruition – and I sincerely hope all this might inspire someone out there to support the project.
Today, the Rose Playhouse sleeps again, awaiting its next day in the spotlight. A signed copy of Lightborne sits in the front window of Gay’s the Word, gleaming spectacularly gold in the afternoon sun. (May it find a loving home!) And all I can do is wait and see.
(CW: This post contains the f-slur, as well as historical terms for queer people that are offensive today.)
For those who don’t know, in a former life I was a theatre historian, but I began my academic career studying queer history.
Now, even having left academia behind, I’m still writing queer history. Only fictionalized. Historians are storytellers – it’s right there in the name – I’ve simply found myself more at home with a slightly different form of storytelling.
I just can’t quit queer history. (Sorry.) For me, it’s like genealogy – not merely an attempt to reconstruct lives from the past, but in a way, to actively construct my own identity. Every time I learn about a queer person from the past, no matter where or when they are from, I feel like I am meeting my own long-lost family.
There’s just one thing about the practice of queer history that never sat right with me.
I could be reading about a writer, a general, a pirate, a dedicated breeder of cows – it doesn’t matter. If the person I’m reading about was queer, or is believed to have been queer, and was alive at any time before, say, 1900, the author will have included a little disclaimer in their article that always goes a bit like this:
“In discussing the life of X, we have been careful only to talk about them in terms of queer behaviour, not as a queer person. We must not conflate sexuality with identity, which of course doesn’t happen until Freud and his whole deal. Besides, since the word ‘homosexual’ didn’t exist until the 1860s, and was barely known until decades later, we obviously can’t describe anyone alive before then as ‘homosexual,’ let alone ‘queer!’”
That’s it. Open up a brand new book about a queer historical figure and there it is, like a bad penny. I call it the “In the beginning, there was the Word” Fallacy. ITBTWTWF.
The first flaw in this logic is that actually, things are not created with the Word. Words are created to describe things that already exist.
To talk about the other reasons why this disclaimer is problematic at best, we have to go way, way back in time, to long before the word “homosexual” was even a twinkle in some Hungarian guy’s eye.
Because, “homosexual” was not the first word invented that described a queer person.
Before “homosexual,” queer people had been called or called themselves “Uranians,” “fairies,” “fribbles,” “jemmies,” “queans,” “mollies,” and “Ganymedes,” to name just a few. The term “lesbian” has been around since the 18th century, as has “tommy” (the original “butch”), “tribade,” “sapphic,” and the rather visual “friccatrice” (“One who rubs”). Queer people could speak to one another in codes and secret languages. They could tap a friend on the shoulder and ask, in a whisper, about a mutual acquaintance, “Is he earnest?” Or “Is she musical?”
“Are they family?”
The fact that all of these terms and codes were considered slang should not rob them of their legitimacy as words for both queer behaviour and queer people. In fact, they are all rare, precious things, rescued from the dust-bin of history through a combination of luck, and changing circumstances in English literacy.
In England, prior to the time of Henry VIII, literacy was largely inaccessible for all but a privileged few. But following the introduction of public schools (for men, at least), we begin to see a much higher incidence of slang terms entering the written record. Ordinary people who previously could not tell their own stories now had access to the most powerful technology on earth at that time – a pen and paper – and could write in the language of the street, the pub, the marketplace.
Such was the world wherein queer communities were able to thrive: criminalized as a class of “vagabonds and sturdy (i.e., false) beggars,” many queer people made their living as sex workers and performers, jobs that allowed them to build relationships with others like themselves. Their stories survive in legal records and prison lists, but also in plays and poetry, perhaps most famously in The Roaring Girl (c. 1610) by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, which dramatized the life of gender nonconforming local celebrity Moll “Cutpurse” Frith, and put numerous slang terms in writing for the very first time.
Because of their gradual inclusion in the written record, we now know some details about the lives of queer early moderners. In London, they gathered in particular neighbourhoods and houses, often located in “red-light” districts or near performance venues like Whitefriars or Paris Garden. From the 1700s, we have eye-witness accounts of clandestine competitive drag balls and gender-bending spectacles held in the so-called “Molly Houses” where queer men gathered.
Combining the medieval Lingua Franca with the underground dialect known as Thieves’ Cant, early modern queer people even developed their own complex language, Polari, as a way of communicating between each other without being understood by outsiders. Polari had such staying power that it is still spoken by some even today.
If that is not a community, a culture, a people – I don’t know what is.
Now, let’s jump ahead a bit – about three hundred years – to around the time that “homosexual” first pops up. Where did it come from, and why?
This story is full of twists and turns, so strap in…
Towards the end of the sexually repressive 19th century, after hundreds of years in which queer sex was heavily criminalized, things began to change – if not for queer people, then for Western society at large. The rise of the middle class, the end of slavery in the United States, and the Women’s Suffrage Movement (among other things), lead to growing anxieties within white academic circles about the “degeneration” of the human race – specifically, the white race.
While, in this view, non-white people certainly posed a threat to white racial purity, many believed an even greater threat came from within: white people who did not play by the “rules” of sex and gender.
But now that there was a white middle class to maintain, you couldn’t just… hang queer people anymore. A new age required new solutions to the problem of queerness, new words to describe it. Fortunately for the Victorian morality and racial purity police, a revolution in the study of the human psyche was underway on the European Continent: the rise of psychology.
The earliest psychologists called themselves “alienists.” Not because they studied aliens, har-de-har, but because their main interest was in studying those who were “alienated” from society. Naturally, the alienists found plenty of fertile ground (and deep pockets) amongst middle- and upper-class white queer people, many of whom were desperate to cure themselves of their “affliction.”
Rather than seeing queer people as simply monstrous criminals, early psychologists proposed that queerness – or rather, again, queer behaviour – should be reclassified as a mental disease.
But early psychologists did not invent the word. Poetically, perhaps, it was stolen. Coined by Hungarian author and queer rights campaigner Károly Mária Kertbeny (who also coined “heterosexual”), “homosexual” was conceived to describe an “innate and unchanging” sexual identity. Fed-up with having to choose between “vulgar” slang terms and vicious slurs to describe himself, Kertbeny hoped that “homosexual” would be embraced by other queer men, but his goal was bigger still: to humanize queerness in the general population, opening the door for the abolition of sodomy laws.
From 2024, maybe we say Kertbeny won in the end. But it was a very, very long game.
Once the medical establishment got their hands on “homosexual,” Kertbeny’s project came to an inglorious end. Soon, it had been redefined to mean “a person suffering from the mental disease of homosexuality.” Homosexuals who repented their condition and aspired to heterosexuality were subjected to conversion “therapies” such as electro-shock, aversion therapy, even lobotomies. But for queer people who did not desire to change, or who failed to adopt a convincing pretence of heteronormativity, the prisons remained open.
As a result of “homosexual’s” connotations, many queer thinkers and writers of the first half of the 20th century utterly rejected the term. After all, why on earth would anyone want to self-define as a mental illness? Famously, queer author, politician and enfant terrible Gore Vidal, who preferred the term “fag” over “homosexual,” argued for a total separation of personal identity from what he termed “sexual acts” – or, to put it in other words, “sexual behaviour.”
Yes, it was a queer intellectual who first advocated for the separation of behaviour and identity. The call was coming from inside the house all along.
But white, cis, middle- to upper-class gay men like Vidal were only the loudest and most visible queers of their time, and historically, those most often subjected to pathologization by the medical establishment. Just across town from Mr. Vidal’s cushy Uptown digs, in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, you would find very different attitudes about queer identity.
For nearly one hundred years, Black queer culture had been thriving right under the noses of white New York society.
At venues like The Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, and Barron’s, Black queer people gathered to dance, drink, hook up, watch gender-bending spectacles and express themselves in a place of relative safety and acceptance. Even as early as 1869, the Hamilton Lodge hosted drag balls which drew crowds of thousands. To build off RuPaul, it was in the grand tradition of the Hamilton Lodge balls that Paris Is Burning was made.
The reasons why New York’s civil authorities often turned a blind eye towards Black queer culture are enormously complicated, and to no small extent bound up in the racial pseudo-science known as eugenics – essentially, a form of white supremacist racial engineering whose popularity from the late 19th through at least the middle of the 20th century simply cannot be overstated. According to eugenicists, Black people were sexually inferior to whites and naturally “perverse.” Queerness in whites threatened the grand project of eugenics – the building of the white master race – but queerness in Black people did not.
And so, police often let Black queer clubs go about their business. Under this permissive atmosphere, New York City’s drag balls flourished into the Prohibition era, drawing higher and higher numbers of attendees, Black and white, queer and straight. Soon, a fad for “Pansy Clubs” arose, leading to the popping up of drag spectacles all over the country. On a personal note: my grandfather was a drag performer in the 1930s, and plied his trade in the respectable halls of the University of Pittsburgh. He even had his picture taken with the mayor, if that’s any indication of just how normalized it was.
That would be grandpa in the middle (1933). Photo from the author’s collection.
It’s no accident that all this coincided with the Harlem Renaissance, which was not merely a Black movement but also a queer one. Poets, artists, and musicians such as Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Countee Cullen all maintained queer relationships with varying degrees of openness. Singer Gladys Bentley, who performed at the aptly-named Clam House, wore masculine clothing, proudly adopted the term “dyke,” and even married her then girlfriend in a highly publicized civil ceremony.
The golden age was not to last, however. By the time Gore Vidal was making his incendiary remarks about queer identity, McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare had swept American queer culture back into the closet. While Black queer people continued to hold drag balls and found gathering spaces like the now iconic Stonewall Inn, they did so in secret, under constant threat of police raids and vigilante mob attacks.
Meanwhile, white, cis, middle- to upper-class gay men like Gore Vidal sought to distance themselves from the queer culture of nightclubs, sex workers, and drag bars, yearning for acceptance in cis-heteronormative society.
To put it another way: they wanted the freedom to engage in queer behaviour, without having to live a queer life.
Today, perhaps, we’d call them “pick mes.”
What I hope is clear from this longwinded but by no means exhaustive history is that people have been living queer lives since long before there was any textbook definition of “queer,” and that the trajectory of queer history has by no means been one long, uphill climb towards the relative freedoms we know today. And, as most queer people will tell you, queerness is absolutely not defined by sexuality and/or sexual “behaviour.” Nor was it ever. We have only found new ways of talking about what was already there, all along.
Queerness is a social code, a manner of existing, a culture and language all its own. It is intensely private and individual but also communal, signalling both inwards and outwards. It evolves, adapts, innovates. It exists everywhere, regardless of whether the wider culture accepts it.
Queerness is connected to all aspects of a person’s humanity. To reduce queerness to mere “behaviour” is an inherently dehumanizing act.
This brings us all the way back to the beginning: the study of queer history.
The problem for queer historians is that history is basically just a big fat record of human behaviour. Often, a researcher’s first task in writing queer history is to prove that something queer happened, usually by taking an individual or group and exposing whatever might be known of their sex lives, scrutinizing their manner of dress, the people they associated with, things they either said or wrote, in search of evidence. In doing so, we become the Victorian morality police, sniffing around someone’s dirty linens in attempt to “out” them. It feels distasteful, to say the least.
However, without doing so – without first building an unimpeachable case for queerness – queer historians cannot move onto their main premise, whatever it may be, lest it be rejected as mere conjecture, or worse, fantasy. Prove Emily Dickinson was queer, or you can forget about your dissertation entitled “The Lesbian Poems of Emily Dickinson.”
So here we are, trying to please the frowny-faced greybeards who stand guard at the door marked “Serious History.” Maybe, if we say the right words, they’ll let us in?
At some point during my academic career, feeling frustrated and sullied by the constant need to prove that queer people existed without being allowed to say so, I had a revelation:
The ones who need to be convinced by dirty linens are never going to accept my queer little stories anyway.
Why would they? They operate from the assumption that, first of all, the default setting of all human beings is heterosexuality, and therefore, history is straight – the only history that matters, anyway. They will argue that concerning oneself with the sexuality of people from the past is tawdry and trivial, because they believe queerness to be tawdry and trivial. They are the same people who say “I don’t care who you go to bed with” as a way of keeping you in the closet, because for them, queer identity is about who and how you fuck – nothing else.
It might have been because of this revelation that I ultimately became a novelist instead of a historian. But though flawed, queer history is necessary. Urgently necessary. This is evidenced by the volume of outcry against it – the now familiar claims that we, along with Black historians in particular, are “rewriting history,” as if queerness is simply some modern mass delusion that will disappear if we only stop talking about it long enough.
Queer historians are not “rewriting” history any more than human sexuality is being distorted by queer or trans people living openly as themselves. That which has been here all along, buried, suppressed, rejected, erased, is at last being discovered and brought into the story of humankind. We are not rewriting, we are enriching. We are not distorting, we are revealing.
Nowadays, with so many queer terms available to describe ourselves, sometimes it takes a good deal of soul-searching and trial and error before hitting upon one that feels right. But my favourite word is not really a new one. It can be traced back to the early 20th century, but might go back even further.
The word is “family.”
Queer people are a family, and like all families, we stand on the shoulders of thousands of years’ worth of ancestors. As a storyteller, I no longer hesitate to call my ancestors queer. I claim them as queer: for myself, for queer culture, and for my queer brothers, sisters, and siblings, both alive and dead.
One big, weird, queer family – with roots all the way to the centre of the Earth.
It’s LGBTQ+ History Month in the UK, which means I’m thinking about Christopher Marlowe – again – even after spending half my earthly existence writing a novel about him. Despite having been a major influence on Shakespeare, an innovator of English poetic form, a writer of numerous homoerotic verses, and the author of the 1st English play to feature an explicitly homosexual relationship between men, Marlowe is often left off the Queer Historical Figures roundups that come out around this time of year. Which, y’know, really bugs me.
So what happened? Who was “Kit” Marlowe, and why is he still important?
Marlowe’s story is often likened to that of a tragic rockstar: the flame that burned bright, and much too fast. After sailing to the highest tier of English poets at just 24 years old, Marlowe’s life came to a violent end before he turned 30, in 1593. His murder continues to baffle historians, and is a huge topic all its own. But right now, I’d rather talk about the circumstances that led up to it, and what they mean for his legacy.
Scholars disagree as to exactly how much trouble Marlowe was in at the time of his death, or what exactly put him on the wrong side of the law. Nevertheless, 10 days prior to his murder, Marlowe was placed under arrest and ordered to make daily reports to the Privy Court in London. Just 6 days after that, Richard Baines, a spy with whom Marlowe had once spent an ill-fated winter abroad, handed in a document to the English authorities accusing Marlowe of sedition, heresy, and sodomy, and suggesting he might have been guilty of far worse.
But it wasn’t Marlowe’s actions that were of concern to the powers-that-be. It was his words.
A section of the “Baines Note,” showing the most infamous of Marlowe’s alleged quotes: “all they that love not Tobacco & Boies are fooles.” Image by The British Library Board.
The “Baines Note,” as it is now known, allegedly records things that Marlowe said, albeit abstracted from any context. Did Marlowe ever say, as Baines claimed, that John the Baptist and Christ were lovers, or that “all they that love not tobacco & boys are fools,” or – very dangerously for the time – that the world was far older than Adam & Eve? We don’t really know, and some scholars dismiss the Baines Note as mere slander. But Marlowe had stoked controversy before. One year prior to Marlowe’s death, his fellow playwright Robert Greene had even made veiled references to Marlowe’s “atheism,” saying, “he hath said… ‘There is no God.'”
Was Marlowe, as accused by Baines and Greene, an “atheist?” Maybe not, at least in the modern sense. He was, however, prompting people to ask questions about the religious doctrine by which the laws of the land forced them to abide. He was poking fun at dogma, and by extension, mocking the queen.
We tend to think of pre-20th century history as dominated by rampant queerphobia, and therefore might expect Marlowe to have been persecuted mainly for his sexuality. But in fact, it was his heresy that made him more dangerous to public order. Marlowe’s England was ruled, above all, by religion. Even now, the myth of the peaceful, progressive Elizabethan Golden Age persists – a myth that was formulated while Elizabeth I still ruled. But in fact, the reign of Elizabeth was marked by war, rebellion, and religious strife, leading her government to impose still harsher strictures than her predecessors on anyone caught deviating from the Protestant Church of England, of which Elizabeth herself was the head.
To so much as voice doubts about “her Majesty’s church” in any form was not merely heretical, but potentially treasonous. Do it loudly enough, and the punishment was death.
Although heresy was the deadliest of the accusations levied against Marlowe, the crime of sodomy also technically carried a death sentence, and had since the time of Henry VIII, with the passing of the “Buggery Act” in 1533. But it would not be until later, with the rise of Puritanism, that this law would be enforced in the extreme against gay men and gender nonconforming people.
During Marlowe’s lifetime, certain forms of homosexual behavior were tacitly condoned, so long as they fell within strict parameters determined largely by class, race, and age. The sexual use (and abuse) of servants by masters, or underage prostitutes by wealthy men, went broadly unprosecuted. Loving, committed same-sex relationships, on the other hand, brought certain dangers, which Marlowe explored thoroughly in his play Edward II.
There’s a group of academics out there who argue quite adamantly against including Marlowe in the queer canon, despite the queer themes found throughout his body of work. Largely, these scholars’ reluctance is based in the fear that Marlowe’s queerness somehow feeds into the feverish speculation that surrounds his life, and to a greater extent, his death. To claim Marlowe as queer, in short, would be unseemly. Hysterical. Melodramatic. Playing into conspiracy.
Whether or not Marlowe was queer is not really the point. Marlowe never married, maintained long-term, intimate relationships with other men for the entirety of his adult life, and was surrounded by rumors of homosexuality both during his lifetime and afterwards. But what really matters is that Marlowe wrote queer stories – was, in fact, among the first English writers to do so, and do so consistently. Marlowe gave queer stories, queer love, queer desire a seat at the table, to an extent that no one would dare do again till centuries later.
So why, in queer history, is Marlowe so often left out of the conversation?
Well, Elizabethan propagandists were extremely successful in destroying Marlowe’s reputation, aided later on by good ol’ Victorian Comstockery. Mere months after Marlowe’s death, moralists and mouthpieces of the state mounted a smear campaign against him, maligning him first of all for his heretical beliefs and, in time, for his rumored sexual “deviance.” The archival discovery of the “Baines Note” in the 1780s led to a firestorm of disapproval in the decades that followed. By the 19th century, performances of Marlowe’s plays were often heavily censored, and accompanied by withering caveats about the author’s “degenerate character.”
To put it in modern terms, Marlowe was “cancelled.”
By the 20th century, Marlowe, once known as “the Muses’ darling,” had become a dark, controversial figure, dogged by a “bad boy” image, overshadowed by his longer-lived and less incendiary contemporary Shakespeare. But here’s the thing: Marlowe’s life was short and violent, but in fact not unusually violent for his time (see: Ben Jonson, actually killed a guy!) Some deride Marlowe’s plays as loud, garish gorefests, but Shakespeare frequently outpaces him in blood n’ guts, and frankly, the perception that Marlowe’s language was overblown or bombastic probably says more about our mania for comparing everything written in this time period to Shakespeare than it actually does about Marlowe as a writer.
Drawing comparisons between Marlowe and Shakespeare does both authors a disservice. Shakespeare built an incredibly successful career on not ruffling feathers (for the most part, see: Essex Rebellion), nostalgia, populism, and sentimentality. Marlowe was a very different writer, drawing on a proto-camp sensibility to tell stories that subverted the jingoistic myths of Elizabethan England. His theatre was political, jarring, irreverent. It was Charles Ludlam, not Andrew Lloyd Webber; John Waters, not James Cameron.
This is why I spent so… damn… long writing a novel about Marlowe, and why I feel like it’s high time he took his rightful place in queer history, as one of our ancestors. I hate all this self-promo stuff as much as any writer on the Internet, but if I look upon the task ahead as promoting Marlowe, and his story, it gets a little easier to show up and do my little dance.
Marlowe lived in a time of moral panics, global strife, and cultural upheaval, not so alien to our own. His story has a lot to reveal about our world today.
Don’t take my word for it: read Marlowe’s Edward II – a devastating play about a king who loves his male lover much more than his kingdom, and pays the ultimate price for his devotion. Read Hero & Leander, an erotic, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking pansexual romp about sexual awakenings and love – or lust – at first sight. Read about his riotous, glorious, tragic life.
Or if you wanna make this humble scribbler’s day a little brighter, preorder my book LIGHTBORNE, coming Oct 22nd 2024 to the USA – or if you’re in the UK, head to your local booksellers or buy online.
(This post is modified from a thread originally posted on Threads, 5 Feb 2024. It was last updated on 14 Oct 2024.)
HESSE PHILLIPS 
