Bill Konigsberg's Blog, page 6

Stonewall!

So THE PORCUPINE OF TRUTH has won the Stonewall Book Award!

Thank you so very much to the GLBT Round Table of the American Library Association, for choosing the Porcupine.

Thank you to my family, which has supported me when I’m unbearable while writing a novel, and when I’m slightly less unbearable when it is published.

Thank you to my fans, who send me love via email and Twitter and Facebook. You have no idea how much it means to me to hear from you that my books mean something to you.

May this award help those who really need to read The Porcupine of Truth find it!

 

 

Starting a Novel

The hardest thing about starting a new novel is everything.

-Which of the 20 ideas that have been floating around in my head is the one I want to focus on for the next year or so?

-Once I choose one, who the hell are these characters?

-What the hell is going to happen to these characters?

-Where does the novel start?

-How will it be told?

-How will I connect with the individual voices?

-How will I stay in my seat when I just want to run away and do something easier?

I like to use a cave metaphor when describing the process of writing a novel. You enter a pitch dark cave and you start feeling around for anything to hold onto. You feel along the ruddy walls, hoping to find a door that you can push open, anything to illuminate the cave. You find what you think is a doorknob, but most often it’s just more wall.

I have found that the most important thing is to get comfortable in the dark. Because that’s where the magic happens. The moments of illumination will come if you can simply learn to be okay with not knowing.

HONESTLY BEN was a particularly daunting book to write, because it’s a sequel to OPENLY STRAIGHT. I never expected to have to know what happens after that first book, so it was a new type of cave exploration, where I had to search out clues from the first book to figure out the second one. There were times when I felt pretty sure that dark cave was going to swallow me whole. I was certain that I wouldn’t be able to figure it out.

And then I did. It just … happened. One clue led to another, and suddenly Ben had his own life, separate from Rafe’s. And I am utterly certain that readers will be very happy to re-enter the universe of The Natick School for spring semester. All sorts of surprises await!

Now I find myself entering the cave again. I’m starting work on a book I’m calling CRAZYTOWN. It takes place in the late 1980s in New York City, and it’s a dark romance between two high school seniors. While I’m definitely afraid of the cave as always, what I am enjoying about this is the world, which was my teenage world. Remembering those times and that place is giving me lots to work with as I figure out what’s at stake for each of the boys.

So that’s what I’m up to these days. I still don’t know when HONESTLY BEN will be released. I’ll update you when I have a date.

An Update on Honestly Ben

I constantly get emails and messages asking the same question: when will we see HONESTLY BEN?

Sadly I don’t have an exact date yet. I can tell you that I just turned in a revision I am really happy with, and I am quite sure fans of Rafe and Ben will be excited to get back to The Natick School and see what happens in the Spring Semester. Surprises abound!

I expect the book will be released a little over a year from now. Have patience, fans! It’s on its way!

 

Dating While Teenaged, 1980s Version

I just helped a friend out by filling out a questionnaire for her psych class, and it kicked my ass a little.

These were questions about dating as a teen, and I realized while answering that I have absolutely no answers for what LGBT kids did in the 1980s for dating. For me, there was no one “appropriate” to date, really. I had one other gay kid in my high school class and we were good friends. I remember keeping an eye open and hoping to find someone in the closet at my school whom I could fall in love with. That didn’t happen.

I went to a couple youth groups for LGBT kids in New York City. It really wasn’t for me. I was the kid whose hair WASN’T blue, or pink, who DIDN’T have multiple piercings. It was frustrating. Like, I was too weird to find love like the “normal, straight kids” at school, but not weird enough for those groups.

I went for what was behind Door C.

I have always felt a tremendous amount of shame for how I behaved as a teenager. I’ve talked a lot and written a lot about “acting out” as a teenager. I met college-aged and adult men. That was my early dating life, such as it was. They were too old for me, and I know now that it was tremendously damaging to me to have had some of those formative experiences.

And yet, it wasn’t until today, answering that questionnaire, that I realized something:

What were my options?

Seriously. What was a gay kid who was lonely and intrigued and all that stuff supposed to do? There was nothing for me. Unless I wanted to date females, which I did do a little bit (with no success), what were my options?

There were dances at Columbia University back then that I used to go to, and I loved those. I went a few times with friends from those youth groups I mentioned, and we had a blast. And the men were college students (borderline appropriate) and older (not appropriate).

There were also bars. Starting when I was 17, I went to gay bars. And no one in there was really an appropriate person to date.

So the feeling I have today, as I think back on that, is less one of shame and more of anger. I grew up in a world in which people like me were no supposed to exist. Older people who were “like me” were dying, and the world didn’t seem to care too much about that.

There were few healthy pathways, and tons of unhealthy ones.

This is why I’m happy when I see kid couples, like I saw all over the country on my tour. It gives me hope for this generation. That their existence won’t be quite as … existential … as mine was.

An Orthodox Jewish teen responds to The Porcupine of Truth

I get wonderful emails. This one came from a 16-year-old Orthodox Jew who had just finished The Porcupine of Truth. For those of you who are thinking about writing an author to respond to a book, take a look at the way she does it here: it is respectful, yet honest. It is an expression of her opinion and reaction, which I cherish as an author, even if it isn’t entirely positive.

Here is her note, followed by my response.

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Dear Mr. Konigsberg,

The Porcupine of Truth was one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Thank you for writing it, and also Openly Straight. I love writing and I’d love to be an author one day (I’m 16), and getting to the last page of your books makes me feel like, ‘this is what I want to do. I want to be able to create something as fantastic as this.’

There was one thing that bothered me. It’s not against your book specifically, it’s just something I feel is applicable here. I actually wondered if you got any angry letters from religious fanatics, but trust me, this is not what this is. I’m an Orthodox Jew, but I have no problem with gay people. I just need to get something out there.

One of the harder parts to read of The Porcupine of Truth, for me, was the way Carson thinks and speaks about religion, and also the attitudes of most of the religious people he meets. It made me sad that this was the only portrayal of religious people you gave, as strict, anti-gay, mindless followers, etc. (Besides for Turk, whose religion is cool, PC, and hippyish, and not really anything specific.)

Truthfully, I struggle with a lot of doubts that Carson brings up, about God and organized religion and things like that. But it is something important to me, and I know I want to have some sort of moral code when I’m older.
(But like I said, I’m not anti-gay.)

I’m pretty sure that the point you try and bring across at the end is that you can be religious and open-minded at the same time. That really resonated with me, because I’ve tried to think that way my entire life.

There is one thing that bugs me, though. I can’t disagree with your portrayal of rural, religious Christians (because I’ve never met any) but being religious, even very conservative and strict, does not necessarily make you a blind follower. What I wish I could tell Carson and like minded-people is that there is a philosophy behind everything we do, no matter how absurd it may seem. (At least, in Judaism. I can’t speak for Christians.) It’s not something you can explain in five minutes, and its not about proving God’s existence, either. Religion (for me :)) is about being a good person, and making the world a better place. I know it gets a bad rep from extremists and people who say all kinds of terrible things in the name of God. That sucks. And you’re right, we don’t know what God wants, or if he exists.

It annoys me terribly, though, that people can go around making statements that religious people are blind followers, or that they live their lives according to someone else’s rules. Not that there aren’t people who are sheep-like in their beliefs, but I’m sure there are lots of atheists who are, too. But there’s this consensus out there that if you’re an individual thinker, you must speak against religion. I hear it everywhere.

 I guess what I’m trying to say is that we don’t like being bad mouthed, either. Part of being open-minded is respecting the beliefs of others, no matter how crazy they may seem. (But obviously not if people are getting hurt. That’s just plain illegal.)

Thank you for listening to me rant. And thank you for your books- they gave me a perspective I may not have gotten otherwise.

If you have any wise author-y tips, I would love to hear them.

Sincerely,
XXXX

—
My response:

Dear XXXX,


Thank you for the note. I do appreciate your perspective, and I thank you for sharing it with me. Truthfully I didn’t intend to paint religious people in that light–as blind followers–but clearly my book made you feel that way so it is something for me to examine.

For me, I’d point to the Mormon family in Utah as a good example of the diversity I tried to render. As both the mother and father say when Aisha calls them out about Prop 8, just because their church feels a certain way doesn’t mean they feel that way.

Carson and Aisha do badmouth religion in the beginning of the book. They do so because they’ve been hurt. Aisha has been kicked out of her home by her religious father, and Carson put his trust in his parents when he was a young boy–parents are our first Gods–and they let him down by splitting up his world. As the book goes on, my intention is for them to explore these prejudices. I don’t believe that all religious people are blind followers, not in the least. Nor do I believe that religion is inherently evil or hypocritical. That said, I do think that religion has been used in hypocritical ways that have hurt many people.

Anyhow, that’s where I stand on it. I liked hearing where you stand, and as Laurelei says in the book, the most important thing is to allow each person to believe what they believe. I embrace your beliefs for you, and mine for me. I hope you feel the same way!

All that said, you are definitely on to something: I do have a tendency to have a bias toward a “spiritual, but not religious” mindset, because it is in keeping with my own beliefs. It was really hard to not write with that bias, and I am sure I failed at that. I think for me, the reason I have that bias is as Turk states later on in the book. How can one follow just one religious path when there are so many wise spiritual leaders out there? I consider myself “spiritual but not religious” because my journey involves many faiths. I listen to Buddhist nuns and brilliant rabbis and incredible pastors and inspiring social scientists as part of my own morning spiritual ritual.

One thing we definitely agree on: to you, religion is about being a good person and making the world a better place. For me, spirituality is about that. I am thrilled when I hear people talk about their religion as a means to these two ends. This is as it should be.

Sincerely,
Bill Konigsberg

My first email from a teen in India!

I got a delightful email from a teen in India the other day. This really made me happy! Openly Straight was nearly published in India, but in the end it was decided that too many of the allusions in the book would not translate. Maybe that wasn’t so?

—

Hey Bill…I Am 17 And From India…I Read Openly Straight In August…And It Has Some Reference From India…Trust Me…When I Read The Word India…I Literally Jumped On My Bed…I Was Like How…How Does He Know That Boys And Boys And Girls And Girls Actually Hold Hands Walking Down The Street…Have You Ever Been Here…?? Cause It Is A Minute Detail Of Indian Culture…Though I Never Hold My Best Friends Hand Walking On Streets…It Is Much Common In Smaller Towns…But Yeah The Fact, I Must Say, Is Correct…Now…How I Got Into Reading Your Book…It Is A Funny Story…I Had Ordered Some Books From Amazon…And Accidently Or I Don’t Know What That Delivery Man Was Doing…I Got This Book As Well…I Knew It Was Someone Else’s But Had Already Opened It…I Read The Description…A Very Very Different Story…And I Love Diversity…So I Returned The Book To The Person Who Had Ordered It…And I Ordered One For Myself…And I Read It…Very Different Story…I Must Say…And I Read On Many Sites Many People Saying That The Ending Is A Little Abrubt..But I Did Not Find It Abrubt…I Mean Come On…This Is How Our Life Is…Things Are Changing Constantly…But I Know A Sequel Is  Coming…So I Am Pretty Excited For It…So…Just Wanted To Tell You…I Enjoyed The Book Very Much…And I Would Love It If You Reply…

—

I did reply, as I always do, even if it takes me a week to get to it. I love feeling connected to people across the world. It really reminds me how similar we all are!

Books Save Lives Award!

I was so excited to learn that Openly Straight won Honorable Mention in the 2015 Joan F. Kaywell Books Save Lives Award!

The award went to my friend Meg Medina for her wonderful novel, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass. So well deserved! I love, love, love that book.

The award is named after Joan F. Kaywell, a professor of English Education at University of South Florida. Kaywell is a huge name in the world of English Education. She’s past president of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (ALAN) and currently serves as its membership secretary.

I’m so honored to be associated with this award!

The True Meaning of Patriotism

If I’ve learned one thing on my trip around the United States, talking to LGBTQ youth about coming out and suicide and depression for The Trevor Project, it’s the fact that the concept of unity in this country is an impossibility.

How do we unite:

The 18-year-old gender fluid person of color in Little Rock who has three current partners but really considers themselves only sexually attracted to themselves, and

The older white gentleman in St. Louis who said he liked E. Lynn Harris because he didn’t blame whites for racism, and

The older black gentleman who heard this comment and said, “It’s interesting that you said that…”, and

The cadre of curmudgeons assembled at a table in an East Texas diner, whose conversation I tried to eavesdrop on, but whose words were so drawled that I could not understand any word beyond “Goddamn,” and

The helicopter mom of an LGBTQ teen in Indiana that felt I was doing a “grave disservice” to youth by not starting my presentation with a trigger warning about depression and suicide, and

The self-righteous writer who was unwilling to see that point of view, and who puffed up and called her “a terrible person,” and

The Asian girl in Michigan who made sure she offered me a supportive smile for the entire hour I spoke to a somewhat shell-shocked group of rural high schoolers and came and gave me a hug, and

The married man with two kids in Missouri, who is out as gay to his wife and has always been, and

The guy in the “No Gays Allowed” t-shirt in Indiana, the back of which said “No entry” with an arrow pointed at his butt, and

The Muslim Uber driver in Chicago who, upon realizing I was going to a gay bar, said, “So much good nightlife here,” and

The gay boy from Ohio who froze up and scurried away red-faced when I smiled at him and said hello after a presentation, and

So many others. Men, women, trans. Every possible race and national origin imaginable. Gay, straight, bi, intersex, asexual, pansexual, and probably fifty other classifications changing daily.

Those who live for football, and theater, and guns, and gardening, and video games, and cheese fries, and God, and books, and wine, and opera, and politics, and pets, and yoga, and kids, and grandkids, and so much more.

I do believe the word “united” is probably the wrong word for what these states are. United in what?

I think it’s easy and popular for many of us on one side or the other to fret about how things are getting worse, and how we’re falling away from unity, but I think that’s actually untrue.

I think it’s always been this way. We are a society of so many stories, all of them valid, as much as we might like to validate only the ones that jibe with our own experience.

This is not an issue reserved for the political right. I’m guilty, too. I would assume most of us have been, at some point in our lives. We rail against those whose ideas about the world negate our own experience. And that’s natural. It’s abhorrent when others negate our experience. To be an activist, one must rail against those who negate our place in the world. Without activists, change will never happen. Even for those who are not activists, it’s natural. We only know what we know.

Someone recently called me an activist, and it made me think: Am I one? I do want to be part of the progress, and I work for change. And yet this trip has also showed me the limits of that activism. Which should make me sad, but instead makes me feel—comfortable?

Weird, huh?

I just think it’s all going to be okay.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “patriot” recently. I have a visceral reaction to the word, as it is often co-opted by those who would like to harken back to a make-believe time when people like me—I mean gay, Jewish, complicated—weren’t “here.”

I’ve been pondering patriotism, because clearly it’s a misnomer. A person who wishes to not include the experiences of a wide swath of our population is no patriot. That so-called “patriotism” is a love of revisionist history, and it misses, I think, the true American experience I tried to paint above.

To truly be a patriot, in my mind, is to do something that’s incredibly difficult.

To be a patriot, one must love the entire American experience. All of it. The fact that we seem to be a country on the brink of combustion, and we have been that way for so long, yet we never seem to explode. Yet, anyway. To be a true patriot, we must love the clashes of culture, race, national origin, sexual orientation, class, politics, ideology, and religion. We must relish the fact that this country will never be united, because these clashes are in many cases unsolvable. We must accept the fact that hatred and distrust and bone-crushing heartbreak and soul-sucking unfairness and hurt feelings and devastation have always been and will always be part of this experience. I think the key may be to embrace the chaos.

And I think to be a true patriot, one must accept that one’s place is in this mess, and not above it, because there is no above it. I’ve always thought I was above it, but my trip gave me enough opportunity to feel the hatred and disgust and disappointment that tells me I belong here. We’re all humans and we’re all full of shit.

I came on this trip feeling optimistic about finding an America that could be healed, but what I’ve found is a society so steadfast in the utterly diverse exploration of personal freedom of thought and expression that maybe we don’t need to be healed. Or united, anyway. It’s a tapestry of deeply explored and unexplored lives. How do you merge that?

You don’t. You just love it and live it.

Hot Headed in Houston

So here’s what happened when I visited a high school in Houston.

It’s been an interesting tour so far! At moments, I’m keenly aware that I am doing important work. Then, at others–often when I’m driving–my brain takes over.

No one knows who you are, it tells me.

These kids think you’re OLD.

You’re kidding yourself if you think talking to such a relatively small number of kids is going to make a difference.

But then I remember the butterfly’s wings, and how we don’t really know who we impact, and I feel better. A little, anyway!

 

The Dialogue: An old, cisgender guy meets a group of trans teens

What follows is the transcript of a fascinating conversation I had Tuesday night with a group of transgender teens at the Oasis Project in Nashville called TYME (Trans Youth Meet to Empower)

.

I started this journey with a subpar understanding of what transgender really meant, and I’m in the midst of a fast and wonderful education. I want to share that with you, so that maybe you can learn some things from these amazing kids, too. If questions come up for you, I suggest you work to continue this conversation. We learn by asking each other respectful questions. I still don’t know that I fully “get it,” but I’m trying.

In the dialogue, I am ME, and the teens are T. T is not for trans, but for “They,” a pronoun a majority of the teens feel comfortable with. Instead of naming particular speakers, I offer their words as a sort of Greek Chorus.

Finally: Snaps are the group’s way of applauding. They snap.

ME: My understanding of what transgender meant when I embarked upon this tour was a trans person is somebody who was born in the body of the wrong gender. What I’m learning is that’s a very simplistic way of looking at it, and that trans is a very wide range. Can somebody talk to me about that?

T: To me I picture a rainbow. It’s like one color on the end is one gender, and the color on the other end is the other gender. And there’s so many colors in between, so many ways to blend the colors together. That everyone’s on some individual point. You can put as many labels as you want on it. There can be hundreds of labels or there can be two labels. It doesn’t matter. Because you are just some little spot on that spectrum.

T: Everyone’s in their own place, so what’s happening is a lot of the topic of gender is way up in the air. So people are just making up terms that feel like they describe themselves but not a community. What I’m hoping happens is that our community or society as a whole starts to figure things out it will settle into bigger subgroups so that it isn’t so wide and intimidating.

ME: I want to get back to something you just said, because it really interests me and has been eating at me as I travel the country. How do you define gender? What is that?

T: I define gender as the brain’s… what the brain prefers to be. It’s complicated. Some people can feel more than one thing. I define gender as what the brain feels. Everyone’s brain is wired differently.

ME: Is gender a choice?

T: No!

ME: You’re saying it’s a feeling.

T: Yes. It can develop over time. I’m transgender and I consider myself male. I considered myself a tomboy for a very long time. And maybe my intense masculinity, for me I had the desire to be really masculine, but sometimes I wasn’t one hundred percent there, but I really wanted to be like that. So it branched out in that direction for me. But for others, one of my friends who is a trans man, he loves all sorts of girly stuff. But that doesn’t mean he’s any less of a trans man. Because gender is fluid. You cannot define it.

T: It’s almost like you can tell by the way you feel negatively, like if someone calls you a girl and you feel uncomfortable, you’re like, okay, then today or right now I want to be referred to as a man, or as a non-binary person. That’s how I felt for a long time, but I got to feeling a lot more uncomfortable with the female gender itself, so I just kind of, well, I guess I’m just trans.

T: It is different for everyone. For a long time I did identify as transgender. I never did feel very comfortable identifying as female, but I never one hundred percent felt comfortable identifying as trans. So after a while I began to realize I was probably some weird place in the middle on that wide spectrum we’re all stuck on. But a lot of the time I just prefer to see myself as me instead of having some label define me. I’d rather just be the person I am and have people accept me for that rather than whatever word I could call myself. I feel like a lot of the time the problem with society is there are these social norms we’re all expected to fallow and I think that’s really ridiculous. We should be able to express ourselves however we want to, not just for people to recognize we’re a certain gender.

ME: What you’re saying brings something up for me. As somebody who has been an advocate for LGBTQ people for a long time, it had always been my understanding that what people like me were trying to do was to expand the understanding of gender. There are so many things we are told we are supposed to be because of our gender, when we are part of this society. It’s all about, if you’re a boy you’re supposed to play with trucks and not dolls, and if you’re a girl you’re weird if you want to do construction work. And it has always seemed to me the battle is to expand that, but what I’m learning is, and I want somebody to talk to me about this, is that that’s not exactly what’s going on here.

T: I think gender is a very uncontrollable and ever changing kind of thing. And I do think that’s a deeply ingrained part of your person, and it grows as you grow. When I was like 13 I was like the girliest girl, and I went through this cis phase, where I tried to live up to a masculine identity. But then I decided it was okay for me to identify as male and still love pink things. I love thinking of myself as a feminine boy. But even saying that is putting a lot of restraint by giving them words like boy and feminine. They should be very open-ended words. (Snaps)

T: In my mind we’re born with certain body parts but that shouldn’t define our gender. Our gender is mental. And there shouldn’t necessarily be labels on gender. We like what we like, we do what we do. (Snaps)

ME: And we are who we are. What were you going to say?

T: I think gender is a … two people can be male and have very different experiences. Same with trans. Everyone experiences it differently. I don’t know where I’m going with this.

ME: No, you’ve said a lot. Because that difference of experience is whats so interesting about this. Two people can be very, very similar, one can see themselves as cis, and one can see themselves as trans. And just that statement, I don’t know that… do we all know how radical this is? You’re going to change the world. That’s exciting. I hope that’s not scary, but that’s what I think. I think you’re going to change the world. (Snaps)

T: TYME’s gonna change the world!

ME: There are people who are very rigid and resistant to things being changed, to changes to things they’ve already defined but this is so interesting.

T: Gender is a very personal, individual response to an inherent factor that we are raised with in our society. It’s a concept we have to define for ourselves after we’ve been taught what we’re supposed to think about it.

T: I think it’s everyone’s life path. You start out in a place and you can’t help being born there and you go and choose what path you take. It’s in your heart where you’re going to go. From the very start. I feel like whatever happens, you’ll know in your heart who you really are.