About Me
One of my formative memories as a kid was receiving a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. For the younger people reading this, I may need you to bear with me for a moment. I promise this is going somewhere. It may be hard to understand now, but at the time, J. K. Rowling was just a woman in a crowded market who was doing something different with fantasy, maybe for the first time since J. R. R. Tolkien published Lord of the Rings and introduced the idea that fantasy stories didn't have to be for children. Her books (and movies) were everywhere. Kids and their parents were standing in lines snaking down streets in major urban centers all over the world just to get their hands on a copy of the latest book in the series, and in 2001, I was late to the party. But there would be no waiting in line for me. No going to the bookstore to try to get my hands on a copy on release day, or participate in the quirky events bookstores in that day would host. I lived in a small town, somewhat ironically called Hawley. I was nine years old and in the third grade, and the school library had a system in place which restricted kids like me from accessing the books we wanted to read in favor of the ones that made sense for our reading level.
The problem for me was that I was behind. My reading levels were too low to read much other than the Dr. Seuss books I'd already been stuck with for a year. No Child Left Behind would prove to be the bane of my existence throughout most of my childhood as, while I had no difficulty taking in the information I was reading, I couldn't read fast enough to finish those block text portions of the standardized testing they did every year or two.
My time spent in the school library didn't so much feature reading what I wanted to, but rather what I was stuck with. So when that book came from my grandparents, with my grandfather's handwritten note inside the cover, it meant a great deal to me. I was finally going to be able to read what I wanted to, and I was satisfied with that. Now, J. K. Rowling wasn't a world renowned TERF in those days, and she would enjoy a bit of a heyday in which she was at least accepted by the LGBT community for having openly expressed one of her characters, Albus Dumbledore, was gay; but we know now where she stands on queer and trans issues. It's important to note; however, that hindsight is 20/20 and the discourse surrounding her back then was much different than it is now. To be clear, I do not support her views. ​
Later, it would be Gary Paulsen who captured my interest, and my fascination with him would take me through two moves, new schools and everything that comes with that variety of upheaval. I suppose it was something about the folksy, rustic woodsman's authenticity he exuded both on the page and as his persona that caught me up as I read my way through titles like Hatchet, Brian's Winter, and Guts. The latter had the side effect of getting me interested in the Boy Scouts for a brief period of my life. It was Stephen King in my teen years. I inhaled his works, enjoyed his humor and his twisted imagination. But it was ultimately a lot of hubris, a competitive attitude and an English teacher who told the class how old S. E. Hinton was when she published The Outsiders that drove me to start writing. I started reading more fantasy around that time, too.
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My initial decision, as I prepared for college (riding on the heels of having come out to my mother, and then the rest of my family, and friends, in increasingly bold ways), was to avoid writing queer characters and queer stories, as I didn't want to be known as a queer author. At nineteen, I believed that if I got published on the back of my identity it would somehow mean less than if my sexuality didn't dictate what went into the work. I'll be the first to admit this line of reasoning was misguided, and largely predicated on internalized biases I was still working out as someone newly out of the closet and still trying to find my identity. But as the years went on, and I plundered the depths of the fantasy genre (with a particular emphasis on long series, as I loved how deep and nuanced the characters became in those works), my attitude toward writing queer works began to shift. You see, I was beginning to notice a pattern. The books I was reading might use coded language to establish that certain characters had a queer phase (like most of the Aes Sedai in Wheel of Time), or there might be a side character who was bisexual but not so in your face about it, or a Gay(TM) whose entire arc and identity hinged on being the main character's friend; but I hadn't seen an overtly gay character on the page since reading Stephen King's It. All other problematic content aside, if you've read that book, you know exactly what happened to that couple.
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Like many queer people, I was left hungering for books that featured people who I could see myself in. Sure, I could identify with the characters on the page, empathize with them, immerse myself in the stories being told about them, but I couldn't seem to find anything in the genres I loved so much that featured queer men as their protagonists. Queer women were becoming increasingly visible as I tapped away at my keyboard, as I passed copies of what I'd written to friends, as I watched Brandon Sanderson's lectures on writing, read Stephen King's work, engaged with podcasts and writing blogs galore in order to improve my craft and tell the stories I so badly wanted to.
And the culture changed. Slowly, but surely, it changed. You now have authors like T J Klune and Marlon James writing stories centered on queer men which people buy, read and fall in love with, but this is a recent phenomenon. It's also not the last frontier. I do feel for the trans people out there who are going through the same thing I went through in trying to find representation in what they like to read, because I understand what a representation desert looks like, and how difficult it is to find anything that isn't a steamy romance written by a (well intentioned or otherwise) heterosexual woman who doesn't really grasp how poorly her characters reflect on the lives of actual queer and/or trans people.
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But I'm getting off topic.
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All of this is to say I started writing because I loved reading. And I started writing books with queer men front and center (and queer casts that are more broadly representative of our communities) because those were the stories I never had as a kid, a teen or a young adult. My hope, in writing these stories, remains that people read them, and see their own lived experiences reflected to some degree in the characters I've become so fond of as I write my assorted works.
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Now, living in Philadelphia where the culture is far more fluid than anywhere I've lived before, I find myself more committed than ever to writing the sprawling epics I have so loved for so long, and keeping the lens through which the stories are told trained on the gays within them; because its about damned time we had an abundance of stories about us, for us, and by us. And though I am but one voice among many, it is my belief that every story about our communities makes the future that little bit brighter for us all.
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A last note. You'll notice, as you read my books, that the vast majority of the characters I write are of color. This is for two reasons. First, I have always felt that writing diverse characters in diverse settings is a net benefit for everyone, assuming those narratives are not leaning into harmful stereotypes without actively seeking to challenge the ideologies behind them.
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The second reason is a lot simpler and, for many people (I think) easier to understand.
I'm mixed race. My father is black and indigenous. My mother is white. I am far from the exception to the rule in the regard that those of us who grow up at the intersections between two cultures tend to view the world through a nuanced lens. I feel my works should reflect that, and so I tend to write characters who don't fall neatly into one box, and develop cultures within the worlds I build that draw from many different sources of inspiration and blend them into something different. I think it's important to note that mixed race people are almost never the majority in any room, and we may often feel that we have one foot in the door and one foot outside of it where it pertains to the cultures we grow up with. Some of the touchstones monoracial people might take for granted as commonplace may never apply to us, and at the same time our lived experiences don't reflect a one for one comparison to either (or any) of the groups to which we belong.
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To the mixed race people out there who might be reading this, I have two things to tell you. The constant existential crises will slow down eventually, and you will absolutely find yourself one day. And (this probably pertains to most people, if I'm being honest), no one has the right to dictate how you engage with your identity or your heritage to you. I spent way too long trying to please people, but you don't have to.
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As always, Thank you for reading,
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D. A. Holley