Guest post written by Fireblooms author Alexandra Villasante
Alexandra Villasante’s Young Adult novel, The Grief Keeper, won the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Children’s Literature/Young Adult Fiction and was a Junior Library Guild Gold Selection. Alex is a contributor to several Young Adult short story anthologies and is a co-founder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival and the Latinx Storytellers Conference. When she’s not writing or painting, Alex works for the Highlights Foundation. You can visit Alex at www.alexandravillasante.com
About Fireblooms: An absorbing speculative Queer romance, set in a town that uses technology to prevent hate speech and bullying. From the LAMBDA Award-winning author of The Grief Keeper.
I don’t know how to explain to you that trans, nonbinary and queer people deserve human rights.
Even though people in my own extended family fight me when I say trans and nonbinary people exist, have always existed and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, I keep trying to explain anyway.
But it feels like describing how to breathe. I think, you must already know.
My parents were immigrants who thought that anything they didn’t understand was invented by Americanos.
Mental illness? You picked that up from your friends.
Queerness? That’s not something we do.
My parents saw identities they didn’t understand as other and dangerous (something you could pick up from school kids, like mono or lice) If I hadn’t found punk and alternative music, if I hadn’t found queer Latine comics that reflected my own mental illness and queerness, I might never have known I wasn’t alone.
I love writing for teens because it’s the age where they are becoming. It’s this intense wrestling match with life between the world and your own heart. It’s often a shitshow. But it’s important, life-affirming work, being a teen. You start to see in yourself someone who you can be.
In Fireblooms, Lu is an anxious, nonbinary teen with a loving family and a poet’s heart. They live in a town that protects them from bullying by restricting the words teens can speak or use on their devices. But Lu has trauma scars from their past that not even a quasi-utopian town can heal. They are safe, but they are stuck, afraid of change in case it puts them in the path of another bully. Meeting Sebastian challenges Lu to live—and love—fully.
Some teens who are becoming get celebrated—dinners at favorite restaurants, a bat mitzvah, a quinceañera, a sweet sixteen (your cultural mileage may vary).
For queer, trans and nonbinary teens, it can be all those things, too— if they have family that supports them, if they have teachers and a community that value them. If they don’t, becoming themselves can lead to being rejected, dehumanized, erased.
According to a recent report from The Trevor Project, “Latinx transgender and nonbinary young people reported significantly higher rates of suicide risk compared with cisgender Latinx LGBQ youth, with over half (53%) seriously considering suicide.”
If you don’t already respect and care for our LGBTQIA2S+ kids, I don’t know how to convince you. You should already know.
But if you don’t, consider this an invitation: Put aside the fears that drive you to place queer kids in the ‘other’ category. Make room for their voices, their stories, their humanity. I promise, it won’t take anything away from your own dignity and respect. There’s enough, more than enough, love and respect for everyone.
I write the truest stories I can about queer kids because I know we are all tied together in this world. To respect LGBTQIA2S+ people, care for them, root for them is to ensure a safe and welcoming future for all of us.
Consider this recommended reading list an invitation to know even more.
Adult
- So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer and Two-Spirit People of Color by Caro De Robertis
- Rules for Ghosting by Shelly Jay Shore
- What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
- The Influencers by Anna-Marie McLemore
Young Adult
- They Thought They Buried Us by NoNieqa Ramos
- Homebody: A Graphic Memoir of Gender Identity Exploration by Theo Parish
- Let Them Stare by Jonathan Van Ness, Julie Murphy
- Thirsty by Jas Hammonds
Middle Grade
- A World Worth Saving by Kyle Lukoff
- Zenobia July by Lisa Bunker
- Ciel by Sophie Labelle
- Mallory in Full Color by Elisa Stone Leahy
