Guest post written by Renegade Girls author Nora Neus
Nora Neus is an Emmy Award–nominated journalist and writer who has reported from inside wartime Ukraine during the Russian invasion, from behind bars at a maximum security prison, from 14,000 feet above sea level in the San Juan Mountains, and from rural Puerto Rico after devastating earthquakes. Nora studied the history of journalism, with a focus on the turn of the twentieth century, for her master’s degree from King’s College London.
About Renegade Girls: A swoonworthy queer romance set against a riveting story of social change in the 1880s, this historical graphic novel reimagines the life of America’s first stunt girl—a young undercover reporter—and her whirlwind summer of romance and fighting injustice.
When I start writing a new book, I just have a seed of an idea. It’s often something I’ve stumbled upon while researching or reading, some image or fun fact that I can’t get out of my head. The first few months of my writing process requires figuring out everything else about the book: the characters, the setting, the problem, the plot.
But there’s one thing I’m always sure about.
The characters live happily ever after.
Now, that might be a spoiler, but it’s one I want my readers to feel confident about. In a world where LGBTQ people are under unprecedented attack, where lawmakers have introduced 527 (!!) anti-LGBTQ bills across the country so far in 2025 and it is only March, and anti-queer rhetoric is being spewed directly from the White House, media representation of happy endings for queer people is an important political statement.
Because the reality is, while our community is under attack and there is an enormous amount of fight left, so many queer people do get the happy endings they deserve. You should see how cute my spouse, my apartment, and my dog are! That’s something I wish I could tell my younger self, even of a few years ago. And that happy-end representation is especially important for younger readers who are subjected to the firehose of media representation that is anything but hopeful.
For much of the history of queer media, happy endings were practically unheard of, for intentionally nefarious reasons. Starting in the 1950s, millions of copies of cheap paperback novels known as “pulp lesbian fiction” were sold at newsstands and bookstores around the country, named after the cheap pulpy paper they were printed on. But the “rules of the genre required that the relationship end badly,” writes journalist June Thomas in her incredible new book, A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women’s Culture.
Publishers were allowed to print such racy books and sell them openly in stores during an era known for queer censorship because they always ended in horrible tragedy. The books typically followed the story of a usually-femme woman who “succumbed” to the seduction of a usually-butch lesbian, ending in ruin for the femme who “strayed” from heterosexuality. The stories were promoted as cautionary tales.
That didn’t stop them from becoming extremely popular with queer readers, though, especially young lesbians.
“Queer readers, skilled in the art of translating straight narratives to fit the contours of their own lives, learned to enjoy the love story that preceded the mandatory misery,” Thomas writes. But that misery always lurked just around the corner, reminding readers, falsely, that a life of sadness was all that homosexuality held for them.
At first thought, it might seem that historical fiction, the genre of my new book Renegade Girls, is harder to realistically end happily. But that is untrue! History is full of happy endings for queer people. That includes the real-life inspiration for one of my main characters, photojournalist Alice Austen, who fell in love with her partner, kindergarten and dance teacher Gertrude Tate, in the 1890s and lived openly with her for fifty years. In the 19th century!
All of that is not to say that homophobia is not a major, systemic challenge facing the LGBTQIA+ community still in the 21st century. Of course it is. I don’t want to sugarcoat the enormous struggles our community has and continues to face, which are especially challenging for queer people of color and gender diverse people. But if it’s my book and I get to choose how it ends, I’m giving my characters a happy ending. As queer readers, we also deserve happy endings in our media and the hopeful power of those few words, “…and they lived happily ever after.”
