Sitting at the Cool Table: Christina Cooke and Marissa Higgins on the (Supposed) Renaissance of Queer Lit

During a late-night chat with Marissa Higgins, we discussed the claims that the US is experiencing a “renaissance” of LGBT literature—that queer books, in particular, are having “a moment.” Marissa and I are queer and our debut books have both been recently published by Catapult: my novel Broughtupsy, an intimate and enthralling journey through grief and girlhood, has been on bookshelves since January 23; Marissa’s A Good Happy Girl, a raucous exploration of family secrets and female desire, arrived a few months after on April 2nd.

“Are we one of the cool kids now?” I texted Marissa after reading the many articles.

“Omg Christina look at us,” she wrote back. “We’re finally sitting at the popular table!!!!!”

But what do we mean when we say something is having “a moment?” To me, there’s something about that term that denotes an impending finality, a discreteness that transforms this expansive sensibility into a spectacle—into a packaged thing that can be set apart and observed. In that sense, the idea of a “moment” seems a little limiting, like it’s an attempt to cast the growing interest in queer titles as nothing more than an anomalous blip on our collective timeline (“Don’t worry, folks, we’ll all return to our regularly scheduled programming soon!”).

So where does that leave Marissa and me, writers who live inside queerness and feature that culture as a major throughline in our work? Should we think of ourselves as hip and trendy? If so, to whom? And most importantly, for the post-publication lives of our books—for our labors of love—considered hip and trendy for how long?

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Marissa Higgins: Well, what do you think Christina? Are we chic and cool and here to stay?

Christina Cooke: Can we back up for a moment? I know it’s crazy for me to come out swinging but I just gotta say it: I think all this hysteria around queer and LGBT titles domineering the market is dumb.

One article you sent me used the fact that queer titles are no longer relegated to a single shelf in bookstores anymore as evidence of this boom. That there are so many queer books on the market now that they have to be categorized under “Experimental” or “Coming-of-Age” along with straight titles in order to all fit. In other words, the books have to be organized according to what happens in the story instead of whatever social or sexual categories the writer or characters happen to inhabit.

Call me cynical, but touting queer literature as having a “moment” because it’s expanded beyond a single shelf feels a little like saying, “We did it, guys! We achieved peak integration because the Blacks don’t have to use that one, separate water fountain anymore!”

This is probably a good time for me to mention that I’m Black. Specifically, Jamaican. So I can’t help but side-eye anything that comes from the mainstream; it has not exactly been kind to people that look or sound like me.

What I will say is that when I sit down to write queerness, I am not summoning all my intelligence and capabilities to reach toward a notion floating on the edges of my ether. Queerness is my default. It is as commonplace for me as the blue of the sky. So including it in my work feels very much like living out the old adage, “Write what you know.”

But, my default is equally informed by my Jamaicanness and Blackness as it is by my queerness. It is impossible for me to “write what I know” without all those other facets of my understanding coming along for the ride—especially for my debut novel Broughtupsy, my first time out of the gate.

There’s a part of me that feels like basing Broughtupsy in my sense of Jamaicanness and queerness was a bit like cheating: I grabbed the lowest hanging fruit to make the story shine. But, in reality, I did what every writer does: I used what I intimately know as the foundation for me to write towards what I don’t.

For instance, two of the pivotal characters in my novel have either died or are about to die when we meet them. Thankfully, I only tangentially know the depths of such harrowing grief. I think it’s okay to do yourself a kindness by taking the leg up wherever you can get it. As I’m sure you well know, writing a novel is very fucking hard.

MH: It’s so hard!! I really relate to what you said about writing what you know in order to write toward what you don’t. I don’t think I’m good at writing straight people, or people whose core identities are far outside of my own—insofar that I’m not really sure what good it’s doing for the work, what those choices do on the page that I can’t do from my own lane.

But it’s still fiction, it’s stuff that we made up, so in my own book A Good Happy Girl I don’t know that I’m writing my own queerness, or queerness as I experience it myself. I’m writing the queerness that powers the imaginative space in my head. The same is probably true for you, no?

When I was young, and even in my early fiction workshops, I wrote queerness in a way that felt in conversation with (in my view, lol) “classic” books—everything was very suggested, something you had to interpret and make an argument about; I wrote queerness the way teachers prime us to dig deep and come armed with sources.

I felt nervous about explicitly writing queer characters because I worried the workshop conversation would become about only that one aspect—distracting questions about when had this character come out, were they doing this or that queer thing because they couldn’t be out in high school or whatever. Questions about presumed trauma, basically, because to be queer is to be damaged or something.

It also felt weird because I wasn’t sure my instructors would know how to redirect those conversations, if they’d feel comfortable with the content themselves. I carried that anxiety into querying agents; I worried they’d subtweet my submission on social media by talking about how it was too sexually explicit or inappropriate for the mainstream, that I somehow wasn’t writing my own queerness correctly.

I think a lot about how our books will be understood in the future, if they are at all. I also think about who traditional publishing supports and who they don’t. I have no problem with closeted or not publicly queer people writing queer fiction—and I don’t think people need to ever identify as queer to write queerness, or that it’s improper for not-explicitly-queer work to be interpreted as such (once it’s on the page, imho, the reader is never wrong; an interpretation is an interpretation).

But it is curious to me to think about a catalog of queer work, of queer literature, and our fixation on interpreting those works as perhaps written from a place of otherness or shame or confusion. That seems to be the general story, from what I can tell. There’s room for that, absolutely, but I think (I hope) there’s also room for queerness written from openly queer people, from people whose trauma is because they maybe face violence or oppression because of their visible queerness—because of their inability (or refusal!) to be perceived as non-queer.

I read a book some months ago by a white writer who wrote from a character of color’s perspective about racism. There was much more to the book, many layers and dimensions. From reading the author’s interviews, I learned that they worked with authenticity readers and had the best intentions.

But as a white person myself, I can’t stop thinking about whiteness, the white gaze, and the ways trying to look around it can lead to once again centering it on the page. So, I can definitely do without my fellow white people adding to the literary canon by writing how racism feels from the perspective of a person of color—and, in the same vein, I can also do without a straight person imagining how queerness feels, about their interpretation of our oppression or desire.

Thinking about the concept of low-hanging fruit: writing what we know might seem “simple” because it’s so close to lived experience…but I’d argue that we not only could but should allow our lived experiences to influence the page. We need that truth, that complexity. Otherwise, people will be happy to add to the canon on our behalf, apparently!

CC: I totally hear you about the anxiety of explicitly writing characters who reflect your queerness, and the gnawing self-doubt of whether you’re “doing it right” in crafting that culture on the page. I felt the same thing while writing the Jamaican characters in Broughtupsy—especially because the few Jamaican novels that have been celebrated, that were permitted to have a major “moment,” present a Jamaican sensibility that is drastically different from my own.

Basically, I was nervous my book would not be seen as “Jamaican enough” because it wouldn’t meet the expectations set in the mainstream by the works that came before me.

It is true that Jamaican culture, in the main, is loud and daring and brash. It is gloriously unruly. It refuses to be contained. But, as an introverted child living on the island, in that thick heat, I felt and experienced a complex softness there – a rich intimacy that buoys the (stereotyped) brashness, makes it round and true.

I haven’t yet seen a book that uses queer characters to explore that side of Jamaican culture, so I thought, “Why not me?”—even as I panicked that Broughtupsy would be relegated to that one forsaken corner in the bookstore, to the dusty shelf by the bathroom amorphously titled, “World Literature.”

These silly little categories ain’t it, man. This hashtag-chasing way of engaging with literature is doing us in. Which I know sounds strident and idealistic, but it’s true! As a queer writer of color, the majority of the books I read in high school and college that helped me sharpen my creative eye were books about straight white people that I was taught represented portals into the universal experience of our modern living condition. In this, the blessed year of our lord 20-and-24, I hope it is self-evident why that notion is fucked.

I think that’s why I rail so intensely against the idea of queer books having a “moment.” I want this growing interest to be a radical opening, an opportunity to widely acknowledge what you and I already know: that thoughtful, engaging, multidimensional books about anybody, in any situation—queer, Black, Chinese, whatever—can represent pathways to looking at our history and humanity anew. Do you think we can do it? That we can meet the possibility of (lol) the moment?

MH: I have a lot of faith that people can find books whenever, wherever. I think about the future a lot, about whether the internet will resemble what we know it as today by the time we’re old. And about how bookstores will operate, same with audiobooks, all of it. I love the idea that readers might find our work without context—or even incorrect context, then make their own meaning, put our work into their own canons.

For me, I’ve been doing a lot of promo for A Good Happy Girl on TikTok, an app that pretty infamously suppresses content with certain keywords—I avoid using “lesbian,” for example, and instead use “WLW” and “sapphic.” My personally preferred word (“dyke”) is a huge no-no on the app, as are words like “sex” (lol). It’s been a fun challenge to navigate my way around these stiff lines to get the word out about my sex-filled book featuring lesbians and dykes.

The labels, the moment…it’s all marketing. It’s a way of getting the work out there—but once we do, it’s now in its own other world: one where it’s a sapphic book for people who want to read a sapphic story, or something else for someone who wants to read it however they do.

When we’re long dead and people are doing archival research, what meaning will they make out of the sapphic versus lesbian distinction? Or the line between queer versus straight? Maybe one day, all the moments will pop like bubbles leaving the books in one big pile. We have so much power over the longevity of our work—and also, none at all.

CC: Alright Capricorn, come through with the surprising positivity. I see you!

MH: Omg Christina stop lol.

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A Good Happy Girl by Marissa Higgins is available via Catapult.