The Author Writing Young Adult Fiction Full of Queer Faith Stories

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. This week features a guest interview by Sojourners senior associate culture editor Jenna Barnett. Subscribe here.

In the queer, young adult novel She Drives Me Crazy, author Kelly Quindlen employs a couple of my favorite romance tropes: A fake-dating scenario and an enemies-to-lovers story arc. But when I first read the novel a few years back, I was also delighted by all the plotlines and character traits I’d never encountered in a sapphic YA romance: The two main characters — high schoolers Scottie (star of the girls’ basketball team) and Irene (captain of the cheerleading squad) — are both Catholic, and, most significantly, their Catholicism is not in conflict with their sexuality. Both Scottie and Irene’s parents are affirming; their queerness is a nonissue for their families and their church.

Of course, both characters still have a host of other teenage issues. Scottie, for instance, is hung up on an ex-girlfriend who never treated her well. She’s struggling to see the goodness in herself now that her ex doesn’t want her. Scottie’s parents take issue with that. “When did you stop feeling worthy, Scottie?” her mom asks during a sort of family intervention in the final third of the novel. Scottie’s mom isn’t worried about the gender of the person her daughter loves; she’s worried that Scottie doesn’t feel loveable.

When I interviewed Quindlen, she told me that this scene is one of her favorites of the book.

“I had the space to write that level of a parent conversation because they were affirming, because it was already a given that they were affirming,” she said. “That was really nice — to be able to write an emotional scene with parents that wasn’t about being gay. It was about normal things that teenagers and young people go through when it comes to growing up and romance.”

Quindlen’s first novel, Her Name in the Sky, is much different. The conflict is rooted in the homophobia — both internalized and external — that stems from the main characters’ nonaffirming Catholic community. Her novels, in that way, reflect the queer Christian experience in the U.S. today: Some churches and families are affirming, and others are not. Some Christians don’t flinch when someone comes out as queer; other Christians foster a dangerous culture of shame through what they’ve said or left unsaid. We need stories about both.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jenna Barnett, Sojourners: Congrats on the 10-year anniversary of publishing Her Name in the Sky. For those who haven’t read it, will you just share a little bit about the book and how it came to be?

Kelly Quindlen: Yeah, it’s my first novel, and it’s a self-published novel about two Catholic schoolgirls who are best friends and are grappling with their feelings for each other. It’s set in 2012, the same spring when then-President Barack Obama [became the first president to] publicly affirm same-sex marriage. The two main characters are really dealing with their shame, their internalized homophobia, and also a lot of religion-induced homophobia at their Catholic school and in their church community. And they’re trying to figure out if it’s okay for them to be together, not just in a conventional sense, but morally. Like, are they each going to be square with God — with the God that they’ve been raised to believe in?

In some ways, it’s a conversation between Hannah [the main character] and God. There’s a part in the book where she’s really wrestling with [her faith and sexuality] and she says to God, “Why did you make me this way if it’s supposedly wrong?”

Those are feelings and questions and struggles that I had. I come from a big Irish Catholic family on both sides and I went to Catholic school. And when I was coming out around the time I was 22, 23, I was really struggling with whether or not it was okay for me to be gay. I had internalized homophobia and also external homophobia. ... I was coming into my adulthood as this closeted young lesbian. I was a schoolteacher, and I was trying to navigate that. With this book, I kinda just cut my heart open and let it bleed out on paper.

I love all three of my books and the one I’m working on now, but I think Her Name in the Sky is probably still the most powerful and the most visceral.

I didn’t know that there were so many parallels between your own life and the book.

Yeah. I had started reading queer books at the time, especially queer YA, and there weren’t a lot of young adult queer books at that time. I couldn’t find anything that represented this collision between my faith and my sexuality. So, I intentionally set out to be in the middle of that Venn diagram and write — for myself and for other people who found themselves in the middle of the Venn diagram [where faith and sexuality meet]. 

Since then, I do think we’ve gotten much more representation. I mean, the market is flooded — in a good way — with LGBTQ+ books.

As I’m sure you know, in the U.S., there have been an alarming amount of book bans in the past couple years, and books by and about queer people and people of color are disproportionately the ones censored. Christians are often the ones spearheading these bans. With that in mind, why is the representation of queer people — from across the faith spectrum to no faith at all — important in books?

What’s really interesting is all religions [exist] because of storytelling. Like, we would not be Christian if storytelling didn’t work. One of the most persistent stories is this 2,000-year-old story that many of us believe in and live our lives according to. So, it’s really ironic to me and painful that some people in our faith are now trying to stop storytelling, in any form, and especially for young people.

First of all, it discredits how discerning young people can be. I don’t like the way we patronize middle schoolers and high schoolers and say, “Well, they’re so susceptible and they absorb things so easily.” Like, yes, all children do, but, we don’t give young people enough credit: They understand what applies to them and what doesn’t.

It’s important for kids and teenagers, but also adults, to be able to find stories that reflect what they’re going through, that are available publicly and privately. I know we’re seeing a spike in adults who have been coming out over the last decade or so as gay or lesbian or transgender or anywhere in our queer family. And some of them, they’ve had this delayed adolescence because they didn’t get to be who they were when they were adolescents and so now they’re seeking [young adult] literature. ... My friend Julian Winters, he always says he writes these books because he didn’t get to read them when he was a young, gay, Black boy in the South.

And, it’s funny, sometimes well-meaning people will almost congratulate me for being on a banned-books list because they see it as a kind of a badge of honor — hey, your work is known enough to land on a [banned] list ... But I have to think about what it comes down to, which is it comes down to a closeted or questioning 14-year-old in Galveston, Texas, who’s trying to secretly find a book in the library that might help them make sense of who they are, what they’re going through, how they can come out to their mom or how they can come out to their evangelical grandma, and they don’t get to see that [when the book is banned]. The harm of that and the invalidation of people’s identities and dignities, is so, so opposite of what our Christian faith is supposed to be.

That makes me think about how, as much as I love the tangibility of books, I’m thankful for Kindle and even Kindle Unlimited for the ways that people can read more discreetly. Maybe they’re not ready to be on the bus or subway with an obviously queer book cover, but they can have the story on their phone or e-reader and figure out what’s resonating —just figure out themselves a little bit more.

Yeah, sometimes I feel that way about book piracy. Not necessarily for my traditionally published books, which are Late to the Party and She Drives Me Crazy. But I am the sole person in charge of Her Name in the Sky. I self-published it. I still maintain all control over it. And sometimes people will tell me that there’s a free copy of it floating around. Sometimes I don’t even want to step in because I know that there are closeted queer kids out there who can’t ask for their parents’ Amazon account or their parents’ credit card or whatever to read a book, and to me, it’s more important that they are able to read it. I actually had someone slide into my DMs once after I wrote something about piracy and [confess to pirating my book]. And my response was essentially, “Just pass the book on. It’s not great that you pirated it, but I’m glad that it helped you. So, maybe you can help someone else be helped by it.”

There was a part of Her Name in the Sky that I found particularly powerful. It’s when Hannah is going to receive the Eucharist. The priest, Simon, is looking at Hannah disdainfully while holding the wafer, and she just grabs it from his hand and takes it. The Eucharist is a big part of my faith, so I found that scene to be really powerful and loaded. Could you talk a little bit about why you wrote it and what you hope it means to people?

Essentially what it distills to is Hannah is not going to let someone gatekeep a relationship with God from her. That’s the crux of it. And Father Simon has his own warped, twisted, misplaced reasons for doing what he does. But I think by the end of the book, Hannah realizes that nobody’s going to give her permission to be good or be bad; nobody’s going to give her permission to have a relationship with God or not. Does she want it? And is she going to take it? ... I just wanted to have a physical action, a gesture, where Hannah takes back — not control, because that’s the wrong way of thinking about it — her agency as a beloved child of God who wants to be in a relationship with her faith and is saying, “Nobody else gets to tell me if I get to do this or not.”

Sometimes being a queer Christian can feel like you’re loving a church who doesn’t always love you back. Another part that I found meaningful, particularly in She Drives Me Crazy and Her Name in the Sky, is the portrayal of parents. They have different reactions in each book, but a throughline seemed to be that they didn’t always know the right thing to say, but they were trying in earnest to be there for their queer kid. Can you talk a bit about what it’s like writing parents in these books, especially given your work creating safe spaces with Catholic parents and their queer children?

In Her Name in the Sky, the parents are fumbling through it [when they learn about their daughter’s sexuality]. And they don’t say the right things at first, and Hannah gets pretty hurt. In She Drives Me Crazy, Scottie’s parents are a little bit bumbling but they’re not fumbling at all. Through the work I was doing with Fortunate & Faithful Families [a nonprofit in Atlanta offering support and education to Catholic people with LGBTQ+ family members] and parents of LGBTQ+ people, I was like, “I have met a lot of really great parents who are so earnest and well-intentioned, and they do put their foot in their mouths sometimes. And some of them don’t put their foot in their mouth; some of them are more educated than me when it comes to the way that identity is evolving.” I wanted to do a portrayal in She Drives Me Crazy of parents who are celebrated and so lovable and who could provide pretty simple road maps for parents that might be reading it.

What are a couple points on that parenting road map?

The most important thing is to say, “I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I hear you. I am digesting this. I may not say the right thing at first. It’s going to take me some time to learn, but I want you to know that I love you. You are my beloved child.”

My parents did that, and they did not have a perfect reception to my coming out. It went on for months as we all learned how to kind of get used to it. But in the first moment that I told them, they immediately said, “We love you. We love you. We love you.”

My second advice would be to educate yourself as much as possible. If your child comes out to you as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, do your academic research ... but also, read stories about it, watch stories about it. If your 14-year-old child comes out as trans, don’t just read the medical literature or the psychological literature, go read books about trans teenagers; read books about trans adults. You could be a dad who grew up evangelical and maybe does not feel super comfortable talking about feelings with their kid, but you can read a book.

Switching gears a little bit, I appreciated that during the physically intimate scenes of Her Name in the Sky, you often used religious language — “holy” or “sacred.” I think you even used Eucharistic language. Christians aren’t always great about talking about sex. In contrast to purity culture, it was cool to see spiritual language used to affirm physical intimacy. Can you talk about that choice to use religious language in those intimate scenes?

It wasn’t a deliberate strategy. When it was the union of Hannah and Baker’s bodies for the first time, it just made sense to me to do it in a way that reflected the Eucharist, because I think it was a sacramental thing for them. A lot of the imagery and metaphors are heavy-handed. I would probably scale it back a little bit now, but I just wanted there to be a link between goodness and sexuality. Taking the Eucharist is such a physical act and being in love with someone can be such a physical act.