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Sassafras Lowrey: Why not Peter Pan? It's amazing. It's a classic story that has so many themes that come up within pop culture and especially within queer culture. The big thing that stood out to me was how dark it was. I grew up with a VHS tape of a stage performance of Peter Pan, and I saw the awful, racist Disney version. But I had no idea how dark J. M. Barrie's Peter was, so incredibly seductive and unlikeable and cruel in this way that felt very appropriate for dynamics that exist in our world.
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The image of Peter was one of the things I felt most clear about before I started writing. There is this caricature that exists in queer culture of "the person who hasn't grown up." They're hanging out with 19-year-olds and everyone thinks that's cool and they're super hot and super popular, and they go to every punk show and live in every squat. And they're still doing it somehow at 45. I wanted to complicate that.I love J. M. Barrie's version, even just on the level of the language of his sentences. But there's a lot of fucked up stuff in there. How did you decide what to keep and what to lose?
I used his original text as a guiding outline, and then thought about what was important for the story I wanted to tell, which was trying to rectify some really fucked shit that [Peter] does. One of the Easter eggs in Lost Boi is that it aligns chapter for chapter with J. M. Barrie's work: Every chapter corresponds to one of his. The biggest change was that I got rid of the "Indians." The Urban Primitives were my reference point to what would have been J. M. Barrie's Indian characters.I was also really interested in separating gender and care-taking. So Wendi is this very important femme, caretaking presence. It's an intentional relationship dynamic role that she's taking on, but it's not inherent to her femininity. Her counterpoints are the Mermaids, who are hyper-feminine and super-femme, and not caretakers. Or they're caretakers of each other in their own house and community, but they're not caretaking the bois, and they're definitely not caretaking Pan. I didn't want to write a book that [said] "This is who all femmes are," any more than I wanted to write a book that [said] "This is who boys or butches or trans guys" are. I wanted there to be difference there.You obviously put a lot of thought into how you want to communicate with your community in writing. Why is that important to you?
I'm trying to write queer books for queer readers. I don't have an MFA. I'm never going to get an MFA. You don't need an MFA to write books. The big thing is figuring out what you want to write and who your niche audience is. I knew I was not going to write the next Harry Potter. I'm not trying to write the next Harry Potter.My biggest hope is to write stories that give queer folks a chance to see our lives and our relationships and our bodies in print, without a glossary and without definition, and without having to explain or justify ourselves. The biggest reward of doing this work is getting letters from readers that they see themselves or their world in these characters.Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.