Flahsback! Read the essay here: WNDB: “NO MORE GHOSTS! A (Queer) Picture Book Love Story”
We Need Diverse Books, Nov. 16, 2021
On a multicolored background, the cover of the picture book Love, Violet and the author with light brown, shoulder-length hair, smiling in a red dress.
When I wrote this essay to celebrate the launch of our picture book, Love, Violet (Chua, FSG, 2022), the book bans and anti-LGBTQIAP2+ laws had just begun to surge. Since then, this movement has swelled into a tsunami. Yet before this public backlash, our culture demanded silence about queer identities. And when we were shown, it was in haunted house mirrors, stretched and distorted into monstrous spectors. Our society tried to erase us. And when the world tells you it doesn’t want you to exist–too often, we comply.
In this essay, I share my own queer ghost story and why I wrote Love, Violet into that dangerous, haunted silence. Why I wanted to replace fear with LOVE. And tell an honest story about being a queer kid, sans howling lies in our ears. Just us, just LOVE.
I reveal the resistance this book faced throughout its journey to publication, sometimes from unexpected places. And to better understand that anxiety, I unpack the most common lies (ghost stories) about queerness that stoke fear and oppression. None of what is being said now is new.
This essay is about the stakes. But it is also about the joy of finally being free, of loving yourself and others. We can do this de-ghosting together. For all of us, for queer, BIPOC, immigrant, disabled, religious or nonreligious, or any identity resisting violent erasure. We do this to reclaim ourselves. We do this for kids. Together we can imagine a world in which every child knows: We want them to LIVE.
WNDB: “NO MORE GHOSTS! A (Queer) Picture Book Love Story”
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