My Stonewall Award speech, June 27th 2022

We stand here on land that should still be stewarded by the Anacostan people, in the Capitol of a nation founded on the inalienable rights of some men to destroy whatever they want in the pursuit of their life, their liberty, and their happiness. 

The last time I won a Stonewall award it was for “When Aidan Became A Brother,” in January of 2020. I had planned out a whole speech, which was, perhaps unwisely, going to include passages from past Stonewall winners that were narrow-minded, unimaginative, pathologized, or otherwise appropriated depictions of trans youth by cis writers—Almost Perfect by Brian Katcher, Beautiful Music for Ugly Children by Kristin Cronn-Mills, Julian Is A Mermaid by Jessica Love. But then the rest of 2020 happened and instead I wrote some doomsday speech that I barely remember, and recorded it sitting on the floor of my bedroom on a hot afternoon exactly one week before George Floyd was murdered.

And now I’m here again, with all of you, and part of me is absolutely overjoyed, honored again, pleased as punch. The novel that I won for this time, “Too Bright To See,” is ostensibly about a drag queen ghost and an eleven year old figuring out that he’s trans. It’s also about the ways that dysphoria makes you unrecognizable to yourself, how grief follows you wherever you go, and that queer people need and deserve both community and elders. I gave up on writing it several times over many years, and am glad I persevered through those feelings of incompetence and futility, not just because I’m pretty sure that I’m the first Newbery winner on PrEP (I don’t know this for sure! I am not actually sharing anything about any of my colleague’s medical history or prescription medications! It is just a guess, and it is also a funny thing to say, and it feels true even though it might not be).

I of course have to thank my agent Saba Sulaiman for finally becoming my agent after rightfully rejecting my first submission, my editor Ellen Cormier who is quickly becoming the Ursula Nordstrom to my Maurice Sendak or whoever, Venessa Carson for organizing my whole weekend, and many others people, including those I won’t name who were less than supportive but gave me the spite I needed to keep on going. But I can’t just talk about my book, or tell some cute story about the publication journey. I can’t just share something pleasant about letting kids see themselves in books, or how important it is for trans people to tell trans stories. Since I have a microphone and an audience I, of course, have to talk to you about the changing climate that we’re living in.

I knew that some of my books would sometimes be banned, but I fully did not expect this arm of a larger theocratic, white supremacist, eugenicist movement to so thoroughly burn through school districts and communities. Which is surprising, because I am not usually so optimistic. Of course I know that books like mine are banned all the time. But I also wasn’t expecting a blown-up image from my book “Call Me Max” to be set up behind the governor of Florida as he signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Every time someone uses that photo I get a Google news alert, including, once, an article with the fun headline “What Is Grooming”?

I don’t want to invite those people and their opinions into this room. This space should be about celebration, and joy, and hope. But I am a gay man and a Jew and a transsexual, and there are alarm bells going off in my skull all day, every day, so while I have had a great time this weekend celebrating books and readers and librarians, while I have your attention I have to leave you with some final thoughts. It would feel irresponsible to do otherwise.

So. Here is something I believe:

There are probably people in this country who truly believe that the attacks on me and my books are naming something accurate. These are the people who really think that I am a pedophile, or at least that I and my work are in service to pedophilia. There are people who truly believe that my work is part of a larger attempt to groom children into accepting sexual deviance and the assault they see as endemic to those lifestyles. There are people who truly believe that any depiction of LGBTQ people is inherently pornographic, no matter how banal or domestic that representation is. Whether through brainwashing or their own fevered conclusions, there are some people who are being, at the very least, honest in their attacks.

But here is something else that I believe, and it is worse. I believe that there are many other people—less, or more, I don’t know—who don’t actually believe the lies they are being fed, but are choosing to regurgitate them anyway. I believe that there are those who could be swayed to the other side if they were to truly consider the arguments, and allow the realities of queer and trans people’s worth to crack through whatever shell has hardened around their heart.

But I also believe that they will not allow that to occur. I believe that these people may not really care about books, or queers, but that they are looking to the future and making their assessments of where we are going. I think they are hardening their hearts in preparation for what they are helping to usher in. I believe they are making their choices about who to stand with and what that will look like.

I am also looking to the future. I am also making assessments of where we are being taken. I cannot know the specifics any more than they do, but I know what has happened in the past, and I know what tactics are necessary to replicate it. Finding a vulnerable minority and churning out propaganda that assigns to them outsized power and influence, convince everyone else that they are powerless against an onslaught of change that would rip away their families, beliefs, and values. Strip that same minority of their humanity and turn them into a rhetorical point, an argument, something to lose to or triumph over. Convince everyone else that they must rise up and stop this powerful, infiltrating force before it is too late.

To be clear, I and they are looking ahead and we are all seeing that there will be violence. It might be stochastic and localized, it might be organized and orderly, if history is any indication it will begin as one and end as the other. But regardless of the specifics, we are all seeing the same future, and some are deciding that they would prefer to conduct the cattlecars than be transported on them, and guard the camps rather than be guarded in them. We are up against people who would choose to stoke the ovens rather than burn in them.