Erasing Queer Voices: Author Bill Konigsberg on Book Bans and Democracy

When the pages of a book become a battleground for human rights, conversations like the one I have with Bill Konigsberg become not just relevant, but vital. Award-winning and openly gay, Bill Konigsberg has been on the frontlines, both as a sports writer for ESPN and now as a YA author facing the harsh reality of book bans. In an era where queer-themed literature is under siege, Bill's voice is a beacon for authenticity and representation, illuminating the importance of storytelling in the lives of queer teens and the broader community.

Transitioning from the adrenaline-infused world of sports journalism to the heartfelt realm of YA fiction, Bill's tale is not just a career shift but a testament to courage and the power of living one's truth. He shares the intimate details of his journey, underscoring the impact that embracing his identity has had on his writing and ultimately, on readers who see themselves reflected in his characters, as well the life-threatening impact that books bans in Republican-led states can have on queer kids. It's a poignant reminder of the resilience required to navigate personal and professional landscapes that aren't always welcoming or safe for the LGBTQ+ community.

The episode wraps with a focus on the future, not only for Bill but for all writers and readers in the LGBTQ+ space. We touch upon the collective effort of Authors Against Banned Books and the diverse challenges faced by authors across the spectrum of queer identities. Bill's insights and experiences reveal the multifaceted nature of storytelling in times of adversity, and his commitment to enriching young adult literature with queer narratives that inspire, validate, and empower. In this episode, Bill explains how he navigates the tides of change and censorship, and how he remains hopeful and tenacious in crafting stories that affirm queer lives.

Recommended:
Destination Unknown - Bill Konigsberg
The Music of What Happens - Bill Konigsberg
Openly Straight - Bill Konigsberg

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**Artwork: Dovi Design
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Transcript

Bill: 0:00

the book that you read, destination Unknown is the book that has the most, I would say, sexual. It is certainly the most graphic of my books, and I made that choice on purpose, because I was trying to depict a time where sex was death. It was very important. The music of what happens does not have anything like that in it, and so I was very confused. But that school board meeting was picked up by Fox News and some other right-wing media outlets and I became an enemy and people were coming after me. I was doxxed on the internet. I got a flurry of emails and messages on my social media calling me a pedophile and a groomer, and it was the, I must say, as much of a hard shell as I have created, having grown up and lived around homophobia for so many years. This hit me in a raw place and I actually I developed shingles. My body could not handle the rage that I was feeling. So that's a part of this that has happened to me.

Shawn: 1:05

Welcome to Deep Dive with me, Shawn C Fetting. In recent years, there's been an alarming rise in book bans and challenges across the United States, particularly targeting books with queer themes and characters. Since 2021, over 4,000 instances of book bans have been tracked in public schools and libraries, part of a coordinated political attack on the part of the Republican Party on Democratic norms and civil liberties. These book bans disproportionately impact books by and about people of color and queer individuals. Removing these books limits young people's access to stories and information that reflect their lived experiences and identities. To be sure, book bans are just one facet of the increasingly hostile political climate against queer rights in America. In 2022 alone, over 200 anti-queer bills were introduced in state legislatures, many seeking to restrict discussion of queer topics in schools, limit trans students' rights and deny gender-affirming medical care to trans youth. This wave of discriminatory legislation is taking a severe toll on the mental health of queer young people. A recent Trevor Project survey found that 45% of queer youth seriously considered suicide in the past year, with 56% of those who wanted mental health care unable to access it.

Shawn: 2:31

Amid these threats to queer rights and representation, the work of authors like Bill Konigsberg, my guest today, is more vital than ever. Konigsberg is an award-winning writer of young adult fiction featuring queer characters and storylines, including books like Honestly, ben Openly Straight, music of what Happens and others. Over his career of seven published novels, he's seen the queer young adult genre evolve in encouraging ways, helping queer teens see themselves reflected in literature, which is what makes the political climate today particularly demoralizing. Konigsberg's books have not been immune to the tidal wave of censorship. His novels, which sensitively explore topics like Coming Out and First Love and Navigating Queer Identity are among those that have been challenged or removed from school libraries under the guise of protecting students. And he's got a particularly harrowing story to tell.

Shawn: 3:26

In our conversation, we discussed his writing career, which began somewhere you might not expect, the impact of book bans and anti-queer politics on youth, and also on him personally, and the importance of queer representation in young adult literature. All right, if you like this episode or any episode, please give it a like on your favorite podcast platform and or subscribe to the podcast on YouTube. And, as always, if you have any thoughts, questions or comments, please feel free to email me at de with Sean at gmai. l. com. Let's do a deep dive, bill Konigsberg. Thanks for being here. How are you?

Bill: 4:08

Oh, thank you very much for having me. I'm very well.

Shawn: 4:11

Good, I'm glad. So one of the primary reasons that I wanted to have you here is because I've read a handful of your books and I've made a concerted effort to revisit and dig a little deeper into some of your books on the past year, given the political climate. But that made me think you know that I don't know a lot about this world young adults fiction world and I'm finding the books just really fascinating and very different than what I think I had expected and, like I said, I want to get to that at some point, Sure, but I've just really enjoyed your books and so I'm excited to have you here. But in the run up to this, doing my homework, I realized that you've had you're kind of a Renaissance man, this is not your first career.

Bill: 4:51

No.

Shawn: 4:52

And I don't think that you know. On the face of it, people would be able to guess what your first career was, or at least as far as I can tell, which is as a sports writer, correct.

Bill: 5:01

Correct. So that was my first, I guess my first career. I always loved sports. In fact, just so that we understand the time period here, I am 53 years old. I was born in 1970. So my coming out experience was in the 80s. Really, as a teenager I was very, very confused when I started to realize that I liked boys and not girls, because there was no media out there that mirrored my experience. And my experience was, I mean, I'm a Renaissance man, I am very sensitive, I love theater and I really love sports and I hadn't heard of that and so I thought there was probably something broken with me. I didn't understand, but that has been part of my experience has been coming from there, from a place where I did not know that there were people like me and you know, I was not the well. I mean, I guess I would say I was the first, in many ways as the first openly gay man who ever worked at ESPN. So that is, I guess, a big first.

Shawn: 6:21

Yeah, I think what's fascinating to me here and this is me really probably over simplifying I was born in 1976. So I was really coming into my own, probably late 80s, early 90s, which I do want to circle back and talk about why I think destination unknown resonates so much with me. But I've often met a lot of folks that are gay, myself included, that engaged in sports as a way to kind of mask as we were a bit confused or trying to figure out or force ourselves into something that we weren't. I always saw the sports world as very threatening and scary, and so any opportunity I had to not be involved in that world I took. But you didn't, and so I guess I'm a little interested in where you found a place that was welcoming and comfortable to you. And then I guess why you ended up leaving because you did come out publicly.

Bill: 7:15

I did. Yeah, I came out while I was at ESPN. But I mean, I think that the first thing I should say about it, there are two very divergent aspects of who I am. One is that I am a sharer and I was taught when I was very young to share my authentic experience. So I came out early. I mean I was 15 when I told my mother that I was gay. So part of it is that I'm always expressing myself, and the other part was that I was in a place where there really wasn't a lot of respect. It was very challenging. I loved baseball, but my senior year in high school I stopped playing because I had started to come out and I didn't think that that was something I could do on the baseball team. And I was probably right. So it's like two warring parts of me and I don't really know if it's because I'm stubborn or it's because I just love sports so much, but that's what I wanted to do. And you read I think you told me that you read the book openly straight. One of the interesting things about openly straight is that it really is almost like my own story translated into a young adult arena.

Bill: 8:34

I was out, I was living in Denver, colorado, I was trying to be a journalist, and a sports journalist. At moments I really wanted to work in sports and I decided the only way that I could do that would be to go across the country from where I was living in Denver to Connecticut. Espn, where I got a job was to just go label free. I didn't want to lie about it, I just wasn't going to talk about it and of course, what ensues is that that's not a possibility. To be known and leave a part of yourself unknown is really impossible in the end. Does that make sense to you?

Shawn: 9:15

So now you write young adult fiction. Yeah, why did you leave sports writing? Was this just your time was up? Or did something happen? Or did you just have some burning desire to do something different?

Bill: 9:27

I had a burning desire to do something different. In fact, it's not all linear, because I went back to writing sports after going to graduate school for creative writing. So after, in 2002, I went to Arizona State to get a master's degree in creative writing. I did not know what young adult fiction was at that time, but I learned about it in Arizona and, naturally, was writing in a teen voice. So that's why I wound up writing that. I wish I could say oh, I was doing it because it was needed. No, I did it because it was natural. So then I went to the Associated Press. I was in from 2005 to 2008. I was writing sports in New York. At that point. I had had enough. Being a sports writer and editor is not a very healthy place way to live if you want to live a long life. Because you stay up till three in the morning, typically you go to a ballpark and you eat hot dogs. It was bad. So I'm very, very glad I got out of there when I did. But that's just me personally.

Shawn: 10:33

Your first books were written mid-2006, 2007, correct.

Bill: 10:38

My first book came out in 2008, and I wrote it really like 2003 to 2005.

Shawn: 10:44

Okay, and the reason I mentioned this is because the country was a very contentious time period for the queer community. Yeah, if you remember, I think Bush in 2003 was endorsing the constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman. At the same time, you had some other states that were pushing for marriage equality, like Hawaii and Iowa, massachusetts, and yeah, so you already mentioned that. The reason that you transitioned to writing young adult fiction is because that was kind of the voice that you wrote in, naturally, but at the time it seems like it may have been what's the word I'm looking for. I feel like you were taking a chance in writing queer focused young adult fiction 100%.

Bill: 11:27

I mean 100%, but my whole life in some ways and this is not me tooting my horn, it's just true my whole life has been this thing about just being authentic. And so this was authentically where I was at that time and I was writing sort of about that white hot period of my own life which was my coming out, and I translated it into a young adult novel and I needed to do that. And you are right, and I think it was really a very early part of this genre, because so my book out of the pocket when it came out in 2008, first of all Penguin, which bought it whenever 2006, was taking a chance. There weren't a ton of books with gay protagonists and I think the Lambda Literary Awards that year there were 24 books, I believe, that were up for the possible award I actually won, which was cool. But if you look at that now, compared to where we are, where there are probably 300 to 400 books a year, it'll tell you when I got involved very, very early.

Shawn: 12:34

Did you ever get any pushback from an editor or a publisher?

Bill: 12:40

I think that the editors and publishers wanted this. I don't think that they felt at first that they could have it, but I do think that their hearts have been in the right place from the get-go. I think there are a lot of LGBTQ folk in publishing, but I think that they started to take chances with these books around 2005. They were niche titles. They certainly weren't on the bestseller list and all you have to do is go forward about five, 10 years and they started to make those lists. That's how quickly it all changed.

Shawn: 13:15

I don't know if you ever think about yourself this way, but you're a bit of a trailblazer when it comes to writing your young adult fiction. Obviously, people have been writing stories like this for a while, but you were at the front end of that kind of tidal wave, yeah.

Bill: 13:31

I guess. No, I don't think of myself that way. I think of myself as somebody who just was in the right place at the right time and I think, as I've said a couple of times, I am somebody who really likes to tell the truth and I think that was born at a time where I was a little early for that. I mean coming of age in the 80s and being somebody who had to tell everybody their business. Nowadays that's pretty normal. Back then it was not. So I don't think of myself as a trailblazer as much as I'm somebody who was in that right place.

Shawn: 14:08

I think I told you in the green room that I don't have a long history of reading young adult fiction, even when I was a young adult I wasn't reading that much, so I've just kind of started doing that in the last handful of years and I didn't know what to expect and because of that I think I had some preconceived notions of what young adult fiction is.

Shawn: 14:29

I thought maybe it was very vanilla, very immature, that I couldn't connect to it. And I don't mean that in the sense that nobody could. I just mean that at this stage in my life it probably wouldn't mean much to me. But I was really surprised and again, I haven't read a lot of other authors, but your books deal with some really heavy topics like suicide, drug use, abandonment, sexuality, aids, sex. I wonder if this is something that when you began writing, if this was something that you were consciously trying to do to tell really raw stories that reflected the lives of young adults, if you were drawing from your own life or if you felt like this was topic that wouldn't receive any type of backlash.

Bill: 15:17

I think that, organically, the rules changed from about 2005 until now, so there has been a change in what is acceptable. I would say that my first book out of the pocket is maybe a tiny bit disnified Just a tiny bit and I think that authors like me who were early into this scene began to think, and we weren't even discussing it. I mean, another name is David Levithan. He became, and has become, a close friend. He's also been my editor. He was somebody who was very early.

Bill: 15:54

It wasn't as though we were all talking about changing the rules. It's just that the rules seem to occur to all of us about the same time, and I guess what I mean about this is that the first books were all coming out books or, for the most part, all about coming out and suddenly it felt like oh, we've dealt with that, let's talk about other things, let's move forward. What a lot of people don't know is that there's been a young adult renaissance. I mean, I am not special in that. There are a lot of incredible pieces of fiction that are being written. I'm not at the top of the list and it just seems that people came of age who wanted to tell the truth about what it is like to be a teenager, all at about the same time.

Shawn: 16:43

We talk about destination unknown a little bit. Yeah, please. When I was coming back to some of your books, this was the first one that I read, because it's the newer one yeah, the newest, and I have to say so. I was coming of age in, I think I told you, in the late 80s, early 90s, right, and it's not something that I've talked a lot to people about and I guess I want to set the table here.

Bill: 17:06

Yeah.

Shawn: 17:07

What I mean by this is I was coming of age at the time when AIDS was red, hot, scary, yeah, and I was also beginning to identify as gay. And those two things were happening at the same time and they influenced each other, yeah, and I think, in a very negative way, right, it probably kept me in the closet longer than it needed to. It made me afraid to have relationships with people Sure Reading, destination unknown. I mean. It did two things, and I don't want this to sound like platitudes. One is it made me realize that the fact that you had characters that were kind of wrestling with the same types of things, right, suggested that other people were feeling the same way, and it really validated a certain point of time in my life that I think.

Shawn: 17:50

To some degree I look back in shame because I was too afraid to be something that could have been empowering, not just to myself but to other people. I think that this is an example of how some of your books carry. It can carry so much weight, or people writing in this genre, if they're doing it as well as you are can carry so much weight. And I guess my question to you is what's the catalyst for a story like that, how much of that is drawn from not necessarily your own personal experience, but just your experience of the environment at the time.

Bill: 18:24

It was the seventh book that I've published, and I was not ready for a long time to write the book about what life was like when I was a teenager, and that was really the challenge. I grew up in New York City, so not only was I, like you, coming of age at a difficult time, but I was coming of age in the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic, and it was at a time when there was just no media. There was nothing for me to watch or learn that I could easily find it was petrifying, and so I wasn't ready to write that book until that book came out in 2022, a couple of years after I turned 50. So it'll tell you a little bit of how hard for me it was to go back there and look at it with real eyes wide open. It was a terrible time, and I think that so many of us carry trauma from that time because the messages that I was getting as a teenager about gay people I mean.

Bill: 19:26

I hearken back to Eddie Murphy's comedy when I was 12 and 13. I think one was called Comedian. I can't remember what his albums were called at this moment, but we all listen to them all the time and laughed, and one of his jokes was about AIDS and something about faggot, ass, fattigot, all of this kind of stuff. So I internalized all of that and it's impossible not to. And I think you're right, you are not the only person who didn't come out. The only reason that I did come out is I don't actually possess the filter that normal people do to just say, oh well, you know, right now this is difficult, so I'm going to take care of myself, I just go straightforward. It's just part of who I am. So I've carried that trauma and I needed to write about.

Shawn: 20:14

So this is just a personal note that I made to myself to ask you. So, missing persons, the band I did not know what that band was or who that band was, until I read Destination Unknown. I get the feeling that they meant something to you. Is that incorrect?

Bill: 20:32

No, completely true.

Shawn: 20:33

Yes, OK, yeah, I could see the love affair that you kind of had with their lyrics and maybe the impact they had on your life, but they are very specific to the moment right. Absolutely. I love that you wrote the book around that.

Bill: 20:46

It's so typical of me. There is another book called Like a Love Story, written by a friend of mine, abdi Nazemian. That was far more popular, in fact, than Destination Unknown. It predated it by a couple of years and it's called Like a Love Story. So it's done with Madonna. And here I was already writing this book and it's just humorous to me that it's about missing persons that nobody knows about. It's just a perfect example of how left of center I have always been. Of course I wasn't following the diva of the world, I was following Dale Bozio, who you either knew or you really didn't. But that band, it was such an oddball band and I was an oddball. I loved that music.

Shawn: 21:30

I ended up just watching. I think it might have been on YouTube, so it was like a rabbit hole for me. They just toured recently and I think they did that entire album in concert. Yeah.

Bill: 21:40

Yeah, it was amazing, so thank you for that.

Bill: 21:44

Yeah, no, I'm so glad to hear that. I mean, for me I kind of almost wanted more attention on missing persons from the reaction to the book than I got, which is funny because that is, by the way, my least bestselling book Destination Unknown. Destination Unknown, it was not. It was very well received, a lot of good notices and very few bad notices, but it did not capture the attention of the young audience. In fact, I would say that most of my readers of that book are men and women, well, and trans folk, people of our age group.

Shawn: 22:21

As an author. How does that land with you?

Bill: 22:24

It's hard. It's very, very hard when you put your heart and soul into something and it isn't recognized. And I mean I've had a very I've been very fortunate in my career. I mean, I would say that most writers write in obscurity their whole careers and I have been blessed not to have done that. But it has been challenging later in my career to feel like maybe I've aged out a little bit. But the other side of that and I'll be happy to talk to you about this later is that I'm actually transitioning out of young adult now. I have said everything that I need to say to the youth of this world. I mean, I'm so glad I had a chance to say those things, but it's like it's time to pass that on to younger voices who have more understanding of what young people in the 2020s are going through.

Shawn: 23:17

Yeah, let's put a pin in that. I do want to come back to that, although you may have just answered my next question, which is I think we have a tendency to think that all artists are purely altruistic or that they're in it for the art, which I think is probably largely true. But I also think it would be remiss for us to imagine that artists and creatives are not also interested in generating positive feedback in a wide viewership or listenership or whatever. When something like that happens, does it make you even for a minute think about, like, what is a topic that could be spun to greater sales?

Bill: 23:59

You're very smart to ask that question, because the book that I began to write that was going to be a young adult, was absolutely going to be a change. I started to joke after Destination Unknown that I'd written out all my trauma and I thought, well, now I'm going to have fun and now I'm going to make some money. So I started to write something, but it just didn't. It was actually futuristic and it really, while there is an LGBTQ character, that's not what the book is about. It just hasn't spoken to me. So I would love to do a money grab. I mean, I think that that's probably a terrible thing to say, but so many artists and music and any medium have that same feeling of like. You know, I have this readership. I have a name Boy. I'd like to make money with one book, but you know there's a cost to your soul for doing that and I have not moved forward with that.

Shawn: 24:57

So there's a question that I have and, I think, the uniquely bad present moment for queer folks aside. I did some work on marriage equality in like 2013, 2014, and 2015. And that was probably the period of time in my life that I felt most connected to a community of people like me and felt like there was a purpose. And what I didn't see coming was that once we had achieved such a large goal that a lot of people would be aimless. They didn't know where to go next and so the bottom kind of fell out. There wasn't a need to come together. I mean, there was a need, but I just hadn't been identified, so people weren't coming together to work on anything. People became a little less focused on community and staying together as a community.

Shawn: 25:41

The only reason I'm telling you this is I'm wondering again, this present moment aside, you started writing at a time where there was a huge appetite and this was kind of an emerging, visible community to the rest of the world, and I think that creates opportunity, and I'm wondering if there's an odd effect to it negative effect which is that you reach a tipping point at which the world is just so diluted, not even with the content I mean the community has become so accepted and become so part of the world that the content itself just doesn't seem as critical. Did you ever experience something like that?

Bill: 26:18

Absolutely. I think we all did, and I don't think any of us saw the backlash that was coming. I was very surprised. I had a thought in around 2015 to about 2018 that, at least for certain, that the fight had changed, that in some ways the right wing had sort of grudgingly said you know what, we're OK with the gays and we're now going to look at the trans folks in the same way we looked at the gays in 1980. But I didn't see that coming and I'm so angry and I'm furious about it. But it's thrown us all back in because we are all one and so we were all I was aiming at writing.

Bill: 27:05

I mean, one of my books that came out in 20, I think 18, is called the Music of what Happens. It is a rare book in that it's a gay novel that is not about coming out. There are two post-homophobia characters who are both accepted by their family and they're living their lives and it's a love story. I think that that's very 2016 through 18. It's not very 2024, is it? So it's like we've been pulled back into a fight that we were out of.

Shawn: 27:35

Well, let's dig into that a bit, because, as you just alluded to, and as probably would seem pretty obvious to anybody that's in this world, is that there's no way that you could be immune to what's happening as a writer of young adult fiction. There's two things that I really kind of want to dig into on this issue with the anti-queer legislation and the rhetoric and the violence. So there's two ways I want to talk about this. One is I want to kind of focus on kids and queer kids. At a time in their life when they're vulnerable to so many things, they're especially vulnerable to these types of attacks that seemingly came out of nowhere. This can have long lasting impacts on their well-being and their development.

Shawn: 28:14

So, to me, the books that you write are incredibly important to them. It speaks to their lived experience. It gives them something that they can escape into that still feels relevant to them. So I guess my first question, then, is what is your response to anyone that suggests that content like this and this is what we're hearing from the right is that it's too mature for young adults and, at its worst, it is actually doing some type of damage? I guess even worse is that it's some type of manipulative tool, grooming right?

Bill: 28:46

Yeah, that's my visceral reaction to the word grooming. I could go on a diatribe about this for an hour, but let me just say that I end my writing. Counterparts and this is across the board, regardless of race, ethnicity, where you are on the sexual orientation, gender orientation spectrum we're all furious. They have effectively weaponized rhetoric against us, and when I say they, I mean the right wing. They have done a very good job. They've gotten involved at the school board level with a lot of these talking points and I have been a victim of it.

Bill: 29:28

I'll tell you a story about what happened to me. First, I'm just going to mention that I've just written a story or an essay for what's called. It's a young adult book collection called Banned B-A-N-N-E-D Together and my book, my essay, is called Groomer. So I am very much thinking about this. I am very upset about it for the well-being of all of us, especially young people. It's a very precarious time. Okay, I was about to tell you what happened. Okay, so this was in the beginning of 2023. I was just minding my own business one day when I got an email that said basically, stop pushing your agenda on kids. There are real pedo vibes, like pedophile vibes, in your books? Are you friends with Jeffrey Epstein? And I was just taking it back because I had never gotten an email quite like that. I've gotten hate, but that was a very different tone.

Bill: 30:29

I went looking on the internet to figure out what had happened, and what had happened was in Southern California, at a school board meeting, a parent had gotten up and gone on. A diatribe about it was that their first grader had a computer that had as part of it an app that allowed kids to download audiobooks, and they could download any audiobook they wanted. So this parent took it upon themselves to just look up books about LGBTQ subjects, I suppose, came across my book, the Music of what Happens, and focused there and basically claimed that I had written this book to lure first graders into a lifestyle. Now, first of all, it's a book for ninth grade and up. Second of all, it's not obscene. This person went on to talk about how it was obscene and I still don't know what they mean.

Bill: 31:27

The book that you read, destination Unknown, is the book that has the most, I would say, sexual. It is certainly the most graphic of my books and I made that choice on purpose, because I was trying to depict a time where sex was death. It was very important. The music of what Happens does not have anything like that in it. I was very confused, but that school board meeting was picked up by Fox News and some other right-wing media outlets and I became an enemy and people were coming after me. I was doxxed on the internet. I got a flurry of emails and messages on my social media calling me a pedophile and a groomer, and it was the, I must say, as much of a hard shell as I have created, having grown up and lived around homophobia for so many years. This hit me in a raw place and I actually I developed shingles. My body could not handle the rage that I was feeling, so that's a part of this that has happened to me.

Shawn: 32:27

I don't even know really how to follow that up, except to say that I feel like, to some degree, first of all, the far right and the right wing has hit on something that I think is just so abhorrent to everybody across the board that it's the last thing that you could be called without falling off the edge, and that is essentially a pedophile or a groomer, and so the fact that this had some type of an impact on you is not surprising. And yet, because of the way that this has kind of been implemented into our society, what it does is it removes the ability for people to have compassion for what it is doing to people.

Bill: 33:05

I want to say one more thing, or just maybe synthesize that point a little bit more, because there is a point to why this hurts so much for me. That point is that I grew up in a time when there was no media, as I said, and there were no outlets for people like me, and because of that I was very much in danger of being groomed, and in fact I was. I then came away from that experience and purposefully became a helper. I did not want young people to go through what I went through, and I believe that young people are sacred, so I was trying to be a helper and to have somebody call me the exact opposite, hit me in a place I hadn't been hit before. Please ask me your question again. I felt like I needed to say that.

Shawn: 33:55

I guess I was just actually making the point and I think where I was going with it was, in a lot of ways, the only way that we can get the support that we need is just from each other. So I just wanted to acknowledge that impact on you. Thank you.

Bill: 34:10

We're in a very precarious time. I have been mentoring a young trans person. When I met this person it was prior to their transition or their decision to transition, and I have now. This person is named Magnus and they are a trans male and they are, I think, now 20. But I've been mentoring him for two years.

Bill: 34:33

I see what this is all doing to Magnus and to people of his generation and it is infuriating that we have been brought back here by the really evil right. I mean there's no other word I can come up with because it's exactly wrongheaded in every possible way. The way that I look at this and I think Andrew Sullivan, a sort of conservative author, actually wrote this argument back in the early 2000s that there is a conservative reason to back gay marriage and anything that leads to healthy LGBTQ people I mean really, in some ways, that should be a conservative want because it allows people to grow up feeling part of a community and the idea should be, I think, that we all get along. But of course, that is exactly not right. That's not what they're doing and it's not what they will ever do.

Shawn: 35:30

I'm glad you brought up book s s s, because that was the second thing that I wanted to talk about, but I do I mean, outside of the direct kind of attack that this has on not just the books on shelves but the authors themselves, the secondary impact is that it can have a chilling effect on authors or potential authors, in that they're motivated away from writing stories like this. And I guess I wonder for you personally, but also in the community that you're in, so other authors are you getting a sense that people are feeling like they should write more of this or maybe they should back off of it?

Bill: 36:10

I think that people because we have been through that period that you talked about prior to the backlash I think that people are really motivated to fight and to write more of this content. I think there's a lot of bravery in the LGBTQ writer community, so that's a great thing. In terms of being published and dealing with all of the things around this book ban, I will tell you that it is not good for us financially. That's so little compared to what it is to us emotionally, but I'll tell you that financially I've taken quite a hit because there are many states now, more and more all the time, that are banning these books from school libraries completely. That was a big part of my audience, and some of these places are also now telling librarians that or putting bills through that say that a librarian I think West Virginia is the most recent a librarian could be held liable and could be arrested for having LGBTQ content in a school library. I can't even begin to talk about the level of fascism that we're dealing with here. It's so frightening, but we're in the middle of it and we are banding together. There is a new group that's getting formed. We're, in fact, speaking, having a full meeting online tomorrow. It's called Authors Against Banned Books and it's a national movement and there are going to be a lot of us at that meeting and we are trying to figure out how we can help and how we can fight.

Bill: 37:44

I was asked to be the state coordinator for my state, the state of Arizona, and you've said such nice things about me. This won't come off as well. I actually turned it down, and I turned it down because I'm tired and I've decided that at 53, I have the right to be tired that there are younger people who have that energy that I had when I was in my 20s and 30s and so on, and I'm going to let those people take the lead, and that's just the decision I've made. But I'm definitely going to be part of the fight. I just don't want to be on the front lines anymore.

Shawn: 38:20

You mentioned fascism and we don't have to go too far into that. But I always do find it fascinating when people talk about a potential, you know, democratic backsliding in the United States and the potential rise of fascism. And I think to some communities. They've been living through various degrees of fascism since the dawn of time, right, I think of people of color, but also like queer people and queer authors, right Already experiencing fascism. At what point do we say we've arrived at fascism? What community has to essentially have been impacted for us to say, yeah, okay, we've reached it? When folks in the queer community or people of color, increasingly women in the United States, are experiencing what amounts to fascist legislation?

Bill: 39:02

Absolutely, and we have been and it has. It's not new. And I want to just make sure that I am clear about some of the things that I've said, because I'm speaking from my own perspective and my perspective is as a cisgender, gay, white male, and that is decidedly a different experience than BIPOC authors who are queer BIPOC authors, in general, trans people. It's a different situation and so I am a very sensitive person. I always want to be inclusive, but I do speak from my own experience and I think that a lot of what I've said is from a cisgender, gay, white male perspective and I can't, I don't want to apologize for it. It's who I am, but I want to make sure that I don't make it sound like I think everyone has had my experience. Results vary by a lot.

Shawn: 39:58

Bill, let's do something lighter. Which one of your books is your favorite?

Bill: 40:03

You know I can never answer that. One of the nicest things I can say is that I'm really happy with my seven novels. I appreciate something about all of them. The most popular is openly straight. Probably the most successful in terms of awards is the porcupine of truth, and I love them all like they're my children, and I love them for different reasons, and usually the funny answer to that question is whichever one I've just written is my favorite.

Shawn: 40:29

Yeah, I was going to ask, is it? Yeah? Okay, so you mentioned this earlier, but what are you working on now?

Bill: 40:35

So right now I have I'm in the midst of a possible career transition I have found another agent who deals with adult literature and I've written my first gay adult literary novel called Cage Free, and it's out with publishers right now and I'm really hopeful and scared because it's been the first time that I've had to deal with possible rejection in 15 years. Really, the young adult stuff went really well. I've been working on that and I'm working on another novel in that same genre of writing more about the adult queer experience.

Shawn: 41:12

How is it? How is the industry different? I don't know yet.

Bill: 41:16

Okay, I don't know, I'm afraid to find out. But I mean, I know a lot of authors. You know, I do come from the world of queer literature and so I know a lot of the main players. I know Edmund White and I know Felice Picano and I know Patricia Nell Warren. I knew her. So I know that they're made of the same stuff, that we are, and have gone through a lot of the same battles. The only difference is the lack of the hand wringing by the right. About what? About the children, which is, of course, where they always go, are you?

Shawn: 41:51

anxious Always. Well, they're actually more specific.

Bill: 41:58

I'm anxious about moving into another genre where I don't know all of the rules and I'm nervous and anxious about whether I will be successful. So those things are really challenging and I'm doing my best to kind of accept that I don't know. Destination unknown, you know.

Shawn: 42:16

You know what, though? What I will say is I've met a lot of folks that have great ideas and are too afraid to pull the trigger on it, and there are people that have great ideas and then just do it, and, regardless of how it plays out, because of that type of personality, they end up there's something beneficial and rewarding, and they don't have regrets for it. So I think that you come off to me as somebody that is willing to just, kind of like, walk into the wilderness, so yeah, it will be sadly.

Bill: 42:48

Yeah, it's been a long journey through the wilderness, but you know it's just who I am and you know one of the nice things that's happened and it's one of the outcomes of having written these books it has allowed me to really come to like myself in a way that for a gay man born in 1970, that sort of self-esteem was harder to come by before. I had this experience Right, so I feel lucky in that way.

Shawn: 43:17

Hey, I meant to ask you. You said you came out to your mom when you were about 15, right, yes? How did that go.

Bill: 43:24

So what's interesting about it is that my mother was always. I mean, I grew up in a liberal, secular Jewish home in New York City and I told my mother because I thought well, she's liberal, she has gay friends, it's going to be fine. The conversation actually went like this it was I said Mom, I need to tell you something. I sat her down at the dining table and I said I'm gay. And she looked at me and she said no, you're not. And I said yes, I am. She said no, I'm not, she's a therapist. So I said that's denial and she said no, it's not.

Bill: 43:57

It was really challenging and I came to understand that politics has very little to do with it. When it comes to parents, I've heard so many instances of, in fact, conservative, a conservative parent, doing better than a liberal parent. It often has to do with vision and what a parent wants or expects for and from their child. And my mother and I had a real battle for many years and I'm happy to say we get along well now. But it was a challenge and my father, who I thought at the time was more conservative, was totally fine with it.

Shawn: 44:32

That is interesting. I am not that you asked, but the reason I asked was because, again, I was maybe about five, six years behind you, but the vibe of the time was pretty similar and I also had a very liberal mom and I took her to. Do you remember Big Boy, mark's Big Boy, not the fast food restaurant, do you remember that? No, no, okay, it was a chain for a while, but anyway, I took her. I thought it would be best in hindsight maybe not to take her out for coffee and tell her. And she just stared at me and then put on her sunglasses. I kept me, admitted I was like why are you putting your sunglasses on? And then tears started coming down and she's like, can you get the check? And just walked out.

Bill: 45:19

Oh, I'm so sorry that that. How old were you when you had that experience? 17.

Shawn: 45:24

But it was fine. I mean, the thing is like my family at the time was just so close. It was more of an eye roll moment than anything.

Bill: 45:33

Yeah, I get that. Yeah, you know, I do think one of the things that has changed, even with this backlash, is that, for the most part, parents are doing better with this issue. I say that and I'm grimacing because I know it really, as I think I said earlier, results may vary. You know, kids are still getting thrown out of their homes, and that's just tragic, but I think by and large, the numbers are a little better now.

Shawn: 46:00

Yeah, Bill final question Are you ready for it?

Bill: 46:03

I'm ready.

Shawn: 46:04

Okay, what's something interesting you've been reading, watching, listening to or doing lately?

Bill: 46:10

What I've been doing and this is a 53-year-old cliche is about a year ago I started playing pickleball and I am completely addicted to it, and today I played two and a half hours. I tend to play six to eight hours a week and I love it. I don't even know if that's weird. I'm sure there are a ton of gay people who are playing pickleball. I just haven't found a gay league or anything like that.

Shawn: 46:32

Yeah, I know that it's taken off for sure. I did once read the instructions for pickleball, but it just didn't. I didn't ingest it.

Bill: 46:40

I think that what has to happen is you have to just sort of. I think that 90% of the people who go out and play it's very addictive, because it's really just fun to hit a ball and the rules are fairly simple and you pick it up and people tend to keep going.

Shawn: 46:57

Well, that's fun.

Bill: 46:59

It is sweeping the globe, and I should say that the book that I'm working on right now is called Pickle, and it is a pickleball slash gay novel, as it should be, as it should be.

Shawn: 47:13

Bill Konigsberg, thanks for taking the time. I really enjoyed the conversation and I've enjoyed all of your books, so I'm looking forward to this transition.

Bill: 47:20

Thank you so much. I enjoyed the conversation too.

Shawn: 47:28

Having access to queer inclusive books and curricula is crucial for queer youth to feel seen and validated and supported. Even for non queer students, exposure to diverse stories builds empathy and prepares them for our diverse world. As I mentioned at the top of this episode, and as Bill and I discussed, currently very few queer youth have access to inclusive curricula and books that reflect their identities. Recent waves of bookbans and don't say gay laws, threaten to erase queer representation entirely, and this erasure conveys a crushing message to queer kids that their experiences don't matter, that their lives don't matter, and depression and suicide rates amongst queer kids tracks with this messaging. On the flip side, inclusive education can reduce rates of depression and suicide among queer youth, and studies show that queer students in schools with inclusive curricula feel safer and more accepted and report lower levels of victimization. Who's on the other side of that?

Shawn: 48:27

Bookbans and anti queer legislation are fundamentally anti-democratic. Seeking to suppress disfavored ideas and identities, they impose the views of a vocal minority on all students and families. But schools and libraries have a responsibility to make knowledge and stories representing diverse experiences available to everyone. So we must fight back against these attempts to suppress diverse voices. All students, all youth, deserve to see themselves mirrored in the pages they read. Books actually save lives, especially for marginalized youth seeking affirmation that they're not alone. Protecting access to queer, inclusive education is how we foster a more just and empathetic society for all. Just one more thing to keep in mind when you cast your vote this November. All right, check back soon for another episode of Deep Dive Chat. Soon, folks.