Desire and Death: How 'In the Way of All Flesh' Got Gay (Patreon)

Here's our first in a series of releases that will delve into the behind-the-scenes stuff of my upcoming novel! (Gonna tag these "behind the flesh" aka the GROSSEST possible name for this series, you're welcome).

(I might release some of these to the general public later, but I promise not all of them, and you guys are getting them way in advance- so please give me any feedback you can)

It's weird for me to think now that Manee and Stephanie's story was ever NOT romantic, but it's also not surprising since I first got the idea for this book when I was in early high school. I was very removed  my own queerness and queerness in general back then, so it didn't ever occur to me to make the characters anything but "best friends". It also didn't occur to me to make the story a straight romance, because well, those never interested me either for some mysterious reason. The most important person in any of my (always female) main characters lives just defaulted to girl for me, always, even if they had token boyfriends or whatever. (The first time I wrote a male main character was ALSO the first time I touched on queerness in my stories btw- I wrote a story from the point of view of a gay guy when I was sixteen).

I don't remember many details about my not-gay first go, I lost the little journal I was writing it in and never finished it, but the idea stuck with me and I came back to it in college. I wrote a (very bad) short story based on it, which was rightly rejected by my lit mag, and realized the story could only work as a novel. By then, I'd started being more familiar with the queer community and come to realize I was queer.

 So when mulling over how I wanted to go and how intense and fraught their relationship was going to be, I thought- well, what if they were in love? Doesn't that work with how dramatic this is a lot more? Wouldn't that make not being able to touch Stephanie way harder for Manee? Wouldn't that be more of a conflict, wouldn't her yearning make more sense? It was a very "duh" moment, this obviously always needed to be an element in a story, it was the story. I mean you don't really agonize over not being to touch a "friend"! But that's what heteronormativity will do to ya. I'm glad I grew out of it.

My teachers in grad school pointed out to me there's a lot of subtext here. Manee being terrified to touch the girl she loves, her issues with physicality in general, can reflect a lot of queer struggles- but it wasn't conscious. Yet when I looked at the story after it was pointed out, I was like yeah, this does say something, maybe several things. After all, isn't the idea that entering a queer relationship is a death sentence, a ticket to unhappiness, deeply ingrained in our media and culture? Manee will literally deliver death to the girl she loves if she crosses that line into a physical relationship, because some kind of nebulous fate says so. Can she fight that? 

It's wild how this was clearly a queer story from the very beginning, but it took years for that emerge. And once it did, so many things about the story made sense, retroactively. But I guess hey, I guess you could say the same thing about me.