The Letter Q Read online

  Title page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Amy Bloom

  Michael Cunningham

  Julie Anne Peters

  Jacqueline Woodson

  Eileen Myles

  David Levithan

  Jasika Nicole

  Rakesh Satyal

  Doug Wright

  Melanie Braverman

  Brian Selznick

  Stacey D’Erasmo

  Adam Haslett

  Terrence McNally

  Erik Orrantia

  Jennifer Camper

  Martin Moran

  Armistead Maupin

  Arthur Levine

  Malinda Lo

  Maurice Vellekoop

  Michael Nava

  Larry Duplechan

  Ali Liebegott

  Paul Rudnick

  Linda Villarosa

  J.D. McClatchy

  Anne Bogart

  Eric Orner

  Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  Tony Valenzuela

  Carole DeSanti

  Gregory Maguire

  Christopher Rice

  Jewelle Gomez

  Bill Clegg

  Erika Moen

  Sarah Moon

  Bruce Coville

  LaShonda Katrice Barnett

  Howard Cruse

  Bil Wright

  Michael DiMotta

  Carter Sickels

  Diane DiMassa

  Brent Hartinger

  Mayra Lazara Dole

  Benoit Denizet-Lewis

  Susan Stinson

  Marc Wolf

  Lucy Knisley

  Nick Burd

  Ray Daniels

  James Lecesne

  Paula Gilovich

  Colman Domingo

  Richard McCann

  Marion Dane Bauer

  Lucy Thurber

  Randall Kenan

  Paige Braddock

  Jaye Maiman

  David Leavitt

  David Ebershoff

  Acknowledgments

  Contributors

  The Trevor Project

  Copyright

  Thanks for reading. We hope you like this book.

  When I (Sarah) was a kid, I was really lucky and really unlucky. Unlucky because I lived in the middle of nowhere and was an enormous homosexual; I knew it, my friends knew it, every-one knew it. Long before I came out to myself or to anyone else, people were calling me a dyke or a boy in school every day; they spit on me and threw eggs at my house. Not such great luck.

  Luckily, though, I found myself surrounded by adults who’d been through what I’d been through and lived to tell the tale. They weren’t like a lot of people I knew; they weren’t hypocritical, or scared, or unbelievably boring. They were these smart, queer, caring people who decided to help me. They told me stories. They wrote me letters. I folded them up and carried them with me to school every day. In the beginning of tenth grade, things started getting a lot worse. I was sick of it. I started shouting back at the people who called me names. Not exactly the path of least resistance. My friends started to feel like hanging out with me was pretty risky. I started eating lunch in the bathroom. Then, I found the back stairwell where it was quiet and there was a window. I’d sit on the stairs with my french-fry lunch (very clever revenge on health-food-nut parents, I thought), and I’d take out the right letter for whatever was going on that day. When the school ruled against the Gay-Straight Alliance and it became clear to me that I would be spending much of the year in the principal’s office, or one kid had followed me around calling me a dyke all morning and I just couldn’t imagine facing the rest of my day, I would take out the one that said, This is the life of an activist in a small town. It is not permanent, but it is difficult. I swear to you, you will not be sixteen forever. When I was crushing on straight girl after straight girl after straight girl, I got some hard-learned advice: First of all, the straight ones are no fun. Second of all, they will break your heart. I settled for them too, back in the day. But the good stuff is worth waiting for. When I finally found a gay girl to date, I read the one that came with instructions: Ask her out, honey! Call her up and take her to the movies. Halfway through, hold her hand. When we broke up (after three weeks) it was: The first one hurts the worst. It’s okay to hug pillows and cry until you can deal. When I started to hurt myself my junior year, the directions were clear: You need to talk to your mama. And there was one that I read every day, one that saw straight through me, that said, You are not a terrible person, baby. You are terrified and angry. The more you talk, the more it’ll lessen. I promise you. Now promise me. I had no idea how she knew. I promised.

  So, what does someone who hated school grow up to be? A teacher, of course. That’s how I know that while a lot has changed since I was a teenager, a lot hasn’t. I’ve taught in cities and suburbs, public and private, even a jail, and they all have one thing in common — they’re full of kids who are trying to make their ways through moments of fear, insecurity, doubt, despair, confusion, hilarity, openheartedness, giddiness, and overwhelming joy. Just like all of us.

  It didn’t seem quite fair to me that I should have been the only teenager to get wonderful letters to carry around with her. The first person I asked to write a letter for this book was James Lecesne, founder of The Trevor Project, an organization dedicated to preventing LGBTQ teen suicide. You can get in touch with them anytime, day or night; check the back pages of this book for more information. Together, James and I asked writers we trusted, liked, admired, and made us laugh to write letters telling their younger selves what they could do to make their lives a little better, a little lighter. In turn, they asked their writer friends to do the same, and we have this book. The letters we got back are funny, kind, and honest, like the best sort of people. Mostly, though, they are very good company.

  We hope they help.

  All our love,

  Sarah and James

  Dear Amy,

  There’s all sorts of good news from here in the future: You really will get the hang of high heels (you will not go through life feeling like a soft-boiled egg on stilts) and then you will have a big fat epiphany and choose not to do that to your feet (except for very special occasions). You will not be waitressing into middle age. (You could but you won’t have to.) Your abysmal performance in all things mathematic won’t really matter (computers and calculators and common sense will fill in your ginormous educational gaps).

  Please, love your eighteen-year-old body because it’s not gonna get better than that. (Better at tennis and the foxtrot, yes — more perfect, no.)

  So let’s talk about everything your dear body can do, will do, and does.

  Most of the sensible adults you know will say — if they say anything at all — bad things about one-night stands. I’m not so sure. They are people — certain types, certain experiences — that you might not want to miss out on. Be careful, be smart (you know what this means: Do not have sex with anyone if you’re not capable of driving yourself home; use condoms, always, always; no sketchy drugs from sketchy guys, and good luck knowing when to bail). Once is sometimes enough and once is sometimes necessary. If you hadn’t cuddled up in nothing but your panties to that cute girl from the other high school — after a night of rock and roll and her mother’s Tia Maria — you might not have known that you liked girls too. And that would have been a shame. It’s true, you don’t know anyone just like you, but they’re out there. And, furthermore, what strikes you as an unusual but not disturbing penchant is going to make your life bigger and better, as well as bumpier. It will probably help you become the very good couples therapist that you become. (Did I mention this? You become a shrink and then a writer. I know — you really did think you’d be wa
itressing at O’Malley’s into your fifties.) When the men say their wives nag them to death, you sympathize, ’cause you’ve had girlfriends. When the wives say that they wouldn’t nag if the knucklehead just listened the first time, you sympathize, ’cause you’ve had boyfriends.

  I know you worry that you don’t have enough sticking power, that when you get fed up, you leave, and not too many people get a whole three strikes. You worry that you can’t stay the course of things that matter. I know you worry that your distant father and anxious mother have produced in you … mostly a desire to get out of Dodge at the first signs of disappointment. You will get better at this, although you do — sorry to tell you — continue to struggle. You will discover that your mother’s warmth and your father’s unshakable and baseless confidence in you, although it takes the form of no intervention and not much interest, combine to make you a loving, weirdly confident person. Could be worse.

  You will find yourself with a best friend (thirty years and counting), a beloved sister (yes, you start talking to each other, finally), three amazing children who have many of your best qualities and only some of your faults, and the kind of spouse (as it turns out, a husband) you hoped for and thought you’d never find.

  Much love to you, self.

  Amy

  Dear Michael,

  Worry less. Use what the world has given you.

  That’s all I’ve got to tell you, really.

  I can, however, elaborate a bit.

  You’ll get to be a writer, even though I know that right now, it seems as if publishing is Jupiter, and you’re trying to get there using only the tools you have around the house. Even though the rejection slips seem to arrive the day after you’ve sent your stories to a magazine. I know you’ll keep writing — you’re nothing if not determined. But try to entertain a lower degree of panic as you do.

  And, in your writing, do stop trying to conform.

  I know you all too well. I know that you’re going to spend years writing the stories you think readers want to read: relatively conventional stories about, yes, straight people. I wish it wasn’t too late to talk you out of that. I know how desperate you feel; how convinced you are that anyone who hasn’t made it by his mid-twenties has been left munching the dust as the parade marches on. You’ve started writing stories at the age of fourteen and, yes, it seems they’re a little too “arty,” too plotless and contemplative, for your high school literary magazine (which favors tales of surfing, dating, and triumph over vice). Later on you’ll be slinging cocktails in various Southern California gay bars, and, finding that your stories are still too “arty” for larger magazines, you’ll imagine your future self as the oldest living bartender, all red-faced and snaggle-toothed, with wiry hairs sprouting from unfortunate places, telling anyone who’ll listen that you’re really a writer, and are just waiting for that first big break.

  With each rejection slip, that future feels more horrifyingly likely.

  And now, here comes the big surprise.

  As you’re nearing thirty, you’ll say, screw it, maybe I’ll never be recognized, but I still want to write. It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. So I’m going to start writing about the people who matter most to me, the people I know best. I’m going to stop trying to court the New Yorker with tales of adultery and divorce in Connecticut. I’m going to write about gay people. I can live with the idea that no one will ever publish me. When I’m the oldest living bartender, I’ll try to keep those errant hairs plucked.

  And that’s when your writing career will take off. Try to believe me.

  After ten years of writing the stories you think editors will want to edit and readers to read, you’ll learn that you were mistaken. What editors want to edit and readers want to read is fiction that’s passionate, urgent, and true. It doesn’t matter to them if the characters are gay or straight.

  I told you it was a big surprise.

  The New Yorker (aka the planet Jupiter) will buy the first story you send them that isn’t some trumped-up tale of adultery and divorce in Connecticut. As it’ll turn out, they’re tired of those stories too. They see dozens of them every day. A story by an obstreperous and unapologetic gay man, about obstreperous and unapologetic gay men, is a rarer bird there.

  When that story appears in the New Yorker, everything will change. It’ll stand out in ways that the more conventional New Yorker stories don’t. Editors who’ve read this particular oddity in those rather staid pages will start calling. You’ll be on your way.

  I’d be lying if I said it was going to be easy or fun all the time.

  Will some people, critics prominent among them, dismiss you as a niche writer, at first? Yes. Will Terry Gross, on NPR, want to talk to you about your sexuality instead of your book? Uh-huh.

  Will your parents, who were traumatized enough when you came out to them, be re-traumatized when you become a public gay person? Will they fret over the fact that you’re not only out to them, you are now out to the entire nation of Japan? You can count on it.

  Don’t waver, though. Literature is moved forward by writers who insist on their own particularities, and even their peculiarities. Critics don’t matter, not over the long haul. Parents get over it (though not necessarily as quickly as you might like them to).

  By the time you’re in your fifties, you’ll be seen as a writer first, and as a gay writer second. You’ll get uncountable letters from readers who’ve been moved by your books, and you will treasure especially the letters from gay men and lesbians who thank you for telling stories that include them.

  One more thing.

  I should tell you that I recently received a letter like this from myself at the age of eighty-five. He told me essentially the same thing. Worry less. Love being exactly who and what you are, which, at present, is a middle-aged writer who’s come to question the importance of novels in the larger scheme of things. Don’t fret about aging, don’t worry about your career, just do what you were meant to do.

  As he tells me, I’m only fifty-eight. Lap it up, he says. When I’m eighty-five, I’ll look back and wonder why I worried the way I did.

  So lap it up, young’un. Worry less. Have faith in the fact that your sexual identity, which sometimes seems to you like an impediment, is one of your greatest gifts.

  And oh, don’t worry about the time you tipsily confess your passion to your best friend, and he never speaks to you again. I know it seems like a huge trauma right now. But you know what? As a few more years pass, you won’t miss him. You’ll barely even notice he’s gone.

  Love,

  Michael

  Dear Julie at 16,

  Sitting on that picnic table in Woodbury Park at midnight, hugging your knees and bawling your eyes out, wishing someone would come along and murder you because whatever method they chose would hurt less than the pain you were feeling at being dumped by him — the actual, physical ache inside, as if your heart had been crushed, or cleaved in two and you were bleeding internally, and you knew you’d never heal or be loved again with the same intensity and raw emotion. The worst part was that you’d loved with your whole self; you’d given him your most precious virtue. Irretrievable. Lost forever. And the funny part, if any of it was funny, was that you didn’t blame him. You were unlovable. You were defective. You weren’t good enough for anyone to desire in the way you needed so desperately to be wanted and loved.

  I wish there was a time machine because I would’ve jumped aboard and set the controls to that park. I’d have held you tight and told you that it wasn’t you; that in a few short years you’d meet the love of your life, and it would shock you to know who it’d turn out to be.

  They say life is lived backward as much as forward, and it’s easy to see now that your earliest leanings were for girls. Your relationships with your friends were always tight, solid. You could trust them completely, and you did. I know you remember Lea from that summer camp at Flying G Ranch when you were twelve. You and Lea instantly connected. She made
you laugh. You made her laugh. You giggled long into the night until your other cabin-mates complained and the camp counselors told you to shut it down. Whenever you weren’t assigned to be on the same team for camp activities, you were totally bummed. But then you’d be back together later, hugging, or linking arms and talking and laughing.

  You cried for a week when camp ended. It wasn’t over the runny oatmeal for breakfast or the s’mores or the hokey ghost stories told around the campfire. (You and Lea giggled your way through those too.) After camp, you promised to write, and you might have for a while, but then you lost track of her, or she forgot, and your life went on.

  When your parents divorced, and you moved to North High in Denver, there she was! You don’t know if, in the hall the first time your eyes met and held, she recognized you or not, but you definitely knew her. Of course, she was with her friends and you were too shy to just go up and say, “Hi, Lea. Remember me from Flying G?” Because what if she didn’t?

  You made your own friends — you’ve always made girl friends easily — and Lea wasn’t one of them. She had her own clique. But then you signed up for this Outward Bound raft trip for two weeks and it was as if destiny was changing the course of a river because she signed up too. You were even assigned to the same raft. Raft #5.

  The trip was a rerun of Girl Scout camp, a thousand times over. Inseparable. Laughing and talking until only the stars were awake. Giggling at nothing and everything. Just feeling sort of goofy in love. You’d never felt such a strong bond with any other person, including him.

  After the trip, you expected to be “joined at the hip,” as they say. And you tried. Lea had a scooter and took you out on joyrides. You hung out for a while, but her friends weren’t your friends, and vice versa, and eventually you both gravitated back to before Raft #5. Even if you had recognized that the feelings went beyond friendship, this was the 1960s. Girls didn’t do that kind of thing.

  You know now you had romantic feelings for other girls in your life. There was Nancy and Cathy and Becky. But it wasn’t until college that you came out to yourself. You didn’t even have a word for it. Lesbian. Even now it makes you cringe a little. You prefer gay. It makes you happy, that word, and all you ever wanted was to be happy. Free of pain and suffering. Secure in a relationship.