In the Dream House

by Carmen Maria Machado

I wanted to associate sex with something besides fear and guilt.

We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people.12 They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough.

Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.