But first—sex. And sexuality. As early as the first line of the book, you have an eight-year-old boy recognizing his homosexuality. Reviewers have said that your take on a Brown gay boy growing up on the rez is a new story—not a new story in real life but a new story on the page! At some point in the book, you reference Dan Savage and the “It Gets Better” campaign, and I felt some cynicism, like “DOES it get better?!”
At the same time, I think your book would help make it better for gay teens, simply in identifying with Jonny as a loveable person and a loveable way of being in the world. I wonder if you could talk about the role of fiction. Is that a goal that you set out for yourself? To make it better? Is that a realistic expectation of fiction?
I mean … Yes. But to place the onus of mend-ing all Two-Spiritedness on me is too huge of a responsibility. I did set out to write a book opening right away as a queer YA book. YA books often have the home-away-home narrative. The character is at home but it’s not going well so the character leaves somewhere—often to green spaces—and then returns. Queer stories are often informed by brutal stories of Stonewall, and also Matthew Shepard sets a precedent for gay literature to feature trauma. We have the same traumatic approach to gay literature in “Brokeback Mountain”—by a non-queer writer Annie Proulx.
I wanted to defy that expectation. We’re watching Queer as Folk, and Dan Savage comes in, and we’re idolizing queerness in queer utopias like Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, San Francisco.
I wanted to ask: what about queerness outside of those queer urban “utopias”? I wanted to show that I could stay in rurality and be queer. We can have queer farmers or queer cowboys or queers on the rez in the middle of the prairie. Not just queer in the big cities.
The popularity of media like Queer as Folk and more recently Looking and Travis Chantar’s photo series Tribe, as well as contemporary queer Indigenous examples with the films Fire Song and Wildhood, demonstrates how queerness (primarily white queerness) cannibalizes the idyll and Indigenous sexualities for itself.
There was already work that represented a haven for queerness, but without taking the idea of Blackness or Indigeneity or class or gender or nonbinary identities into consideration. There are white gay cis men who have a queer experience and can still enact racism or misogyny or femmephobia or fatphobia against those of us who have multiple intersecting identities. So, I wanted to raise that precedent—the kind of queerness we’re used to with Dan Savage, for example—and then shatter that image, moving into this vicious but vivacious world that is queerness on Manitoba reservations and in the middle of the prairies. I wanted to use that queerness in that context as the grounding mechanic of Jonny Appleseed. I wanted to show we can thrive in our own homes. We don’t have to flee or migrate to cities and abandon part of our identities. We can be Indigenous and we can be queer and we be rural—all at the same time. Those spaces are our homes. What Jonny shows, and what I hope people see, is that we can stay in our communities, and we can stay attached to our families. It’s worth it.