Coming to you from the dining room table at East Barbary Lane. Welcome to a special episode of Full Circle the Podcast. I am your host, Charles Tyson Jr. And today I am so thrilled to have our guest TJ. Klune is the number one New York Times in USA today, best selling Lambda Literary Award winning author of such works as The House and the Cerulean Sea, Under the Whispering Door, In the Lives of Puppets, The Green Creek Series for adults, The Extraordinary Series for teens, and so many more.
Today we will.
Be discussing his newest work, The Bones Beneath My Skin. I am so thrilled to have TJ. Clue at the Full Circle Table.
Hi, TJ. How are you? I am good, Charles. Thank you so much for having me. I truly appreciate it.
I have been looking forward to talking to you because, let me tell you.
I love the book. That's good.
The Bones Beneath My Skin is a fabulous book. And you know one thing I am so grateful for. When I got the invitation to read the book, I saw queer science fiction, and I got a little nervous, only because I love the genre of science fiction. But when it's a book, authors tend to do one of two things. Either they get bogged down in the science or they embrace the fiction. And when you do one and not the other, it's just not fun. But the same can that cannot be said about this book. This book was
so much fun. In fact, when I wasn't reading it, I was thinking about reading it, and I love when that happens. So tell me a little bit, tell me what the bones beneath my skin is about.
Yeah, So this book follows the character of Nate. When the book opens, Nate is probably at the lowest person a person can be. He's at the lowest of low's. His parents are dead through a horrific act of violence. His brother wants nothing to do with him. He's just been fired from his job as a journalist in Washington,
d c. For some unethical practices on his part. So we have a very flawed, broken person when the novel opens, and what he wants to do is with nothing left, he goes to the only thing that he has left, which is a cabin in the mountains of Oregon, and he wants to go there to refresh and regroup and figure out what his next steps are and when he gets there, he expects the cabin to be empty. It
is not. Inside is a man with a gun and a little girl who calls herself Artemis darth Vader, who is not exactly a normal child, And from there Nate learns about them and about their past, and he has to make a decision if he wants to let himself continue to drown in his anger and his grief, or he wants to do something that could change the world. And the book follows his journey with these two other characters,
Artemis and Alex. And what I love about the book for the most part is, yes, there's the big sci fi adventure that goes on on top of it. There's all there's a big cast of characters, but at its heart, it is about Nate and art and Alex. They are a triangle. Without them, Without any one of the three, the picture wouldn't be complete. They are pieces from a puzzle, from different puzzles, but when they go together, they still
somehow fit and still form a picture. And you know when you're writing, when you include romance in books and stuff like that, that there's a tendency to focus on just the two main characters that are as part of
the romance. But with this art she is ten years old and she is on every single page because she is just as important as Nate and Alex are, and her journey is what sends Nate off into a world where he realizes it's not what it seems and he has to go and figure out how to do what Nate or what Alex and art have started out to do trying to get her home.
That's yes, it's so. It was so much fun to read, and the character of Artemis is very charming, it's so charging, and the you know, I had suspected what made her special a bit beforehand, but I was almost wrong. And I love that, and it kind of gave me. The dynamic between the three kind of gave me Louis Lastadt and Claudia vibes, except not quite as creepy.
Not quite as creepy. We do not want to go to that direction, Yes, and I doubt that art Art can be a little creepy sometimes, but she's not a child vampire queen, right, So.
What drew you to the creation of this story?
So initially, the genesis of this book goes all the way back to twenty fifteen. I wanted to do my own spin on a specific kind of story you have to think of, like Stephen King's It or Et or Escape from Which Mountain, which is basically a group of kids, a group of young people have to come together to
face something. I hadn't quite figured out what that something was, but I knew I wanted to go in that direction, and so the more I started thinking about it, the more I thought, Okay, what if we put these young teenage boys in an adult novel and have them have to surround and protect a girl who moves to their
town who exhibits some extraordinary abilities. And I hadn't started writing anything, which is probably good because the very next year, a funny little show called Stranger Things came out and completely did everything that I was wanting to do, And that happens sometimes. My novel Under the Whispering Door, a rumination on grief and what it does to people, was
initially going to be something very different. It was initially going to be I was initially inspired by a very specific scene from Beetlejuice where Alex Baldwin and Geena Davis first die and they go to the afterlife and they sit in the bureaucratic room where everybody has to take a number and do that. And I had this idea that that's what the afterlife was, and that there would be like some kind of system where it assigned morality, and then what came out after that the good place,
and there the exact same thing that I did. Right. It happens, though, and you have to roll with the punches. So with the bones beneath my skin, I set it aside for a little bit and let it cook in the back of my head and maybe something would come
of it, maybe something wouldn't. But then when I was randomly doing one of my research spirals where when I have I have ADHD, so that means when I find something interesting, I hyper fixate on it and it becomes a personality, like right, exactly like a kid, it becomes that. And I stumbled across something that I had not heard about since I was a kid, and that was a
man named Marshall Applewhite. Now that name might not be familiar to younger people, but to people of a certain generation, saying, like born in the eighties and nineties like I was, you probably remember that name. Marshall Applewhite was a leader of a cult called Heaven's Gate in the late nineties. He believed this cult believed that the recently discovered comet Hailbop, had an alien spacecraft in the tail of the comet. And you can go online and look at all of
Marshall Applewhite's videos. They're still available. He is a very striking figure. He's very planned, leathery skin, his ears stick out, he has the most inhuman eyes I have ever seen on a human being. And he talks about what the beliefs of Heaven's Gate are, what they do and the Again, these videos are readily available. But what happened. They all ended up committing mass suicide and there's some very indelible
images that came out after this. For the most part, when people remember Heaven's Gate, they remember a the comet, and b the aftershots of what happened, which were in a bunker with bunk beds, people with their tracksuits and their white sneakers and sheets applied all over everyone. Then they were dead. And to this day, Heavensgate dot Com still you can go to the website right now and look at it. It looks exactly like it did in the nineties and I spoke to the people who run
Heaven's Gate the website. It's basically it's not an active, come join our cult kind of thing. It's more like a museum piece and archive of what it was like at the time. And from there I just became fascinated by the idea of cult leaders like Jim Jones and David Koresh and how one person can be so charismatic that they can insert their will upon a group of people and basically mold them into whatever they can be.
It is an astonishing and terrifying thing that for some people it is so very very easy to give up your friends, your job, your family, your money, all of that so you can follow something specifically. If you want a more recent example, think of QAnon when that happened during the first Trump administration. That was all online, but that is in essence a cult.
There's yeah, I was thinking of the arm Cheeto monster. I was like, ooh, too real.
Right, And there's a cult in the news right now called the Zizians where they have murdered six different people over the past like eight months, and they are a It's mostly made up of trans people in this cult who worked in the in the technology sector, and their beliefs are that AI is going to take over the world. So their leader, the cult leader Zizian, who has just recently arrested, believed that if they cuddled up to AI, that AI would when it eventually took over, would allow
them to live while destroying the rest of humanity. And they've killed people because of this. This happens to this
day in the year twenty twenty five. There are active cults all over the world and they fall under some of the most similar patterns where there's one person with an idea and an entire movement in their heads, and it's like an infection to other people until other people come in and start doing things that they would never have done before, like taking their own life because they believe in alien spaceship is in the Tale of a Comet. It's it's fascinating because the psychology behind it is at
this point really kind of unknown. We don't why do people follow Why is like say, Donald Trump, a cult leader in a way of shape or form. These are people who can do and say whatever they want and people will follow them to the ends of the earth. It's fascinating, but that is what brought on the new way for the bones beneath my skin? Instead of kids surrounding, you know, trying to fight some great evil, what if
we had two men? And I made this almost like a sad Dad kind of story, right, which is, you know, some kind of trope that happens. And I just I loved the dynamic that came out of this between Nate and Alex and Artemis, because not only did I get to to go on an adventure with them, I got to incorporate things like cults in the psychology behind it and what that means for for people who who would say I would never fall for something like that, but
then they do and they believe it. I mean, why do you think, why do you think people still fall for Nigerian fishing scams? Oh, I'm a Nigerian prince. Here's two million dollars that I need to have saved and you're the only person that can do it. People fall for that. Yeah, maybe a lot of them are older, but people still fall for stuff like this.
Well, I feel like there a lot of times there is an element of desperation, you know, a yearning to cling to something, you know, whatever, or a yearning.
For community, a yearning for people who think exactly like you. Yeah, right. Look, when I when I when I go out on tour and I talk to the audiences that I have, I have to remind myself. Then in a way, that's like an echo chamber, because I'm sure there's people that I speak to who are or that are in the audience that don't think trans people don't deserve to exist. So in a way, I am speaking to an echo chamber
and getting validated by what I'm saying. And on the flip side, there are people who desperately seek that validation because they've never been listened to before, right, and they want they want, And when someone finally listens to them, or when someone finally you know, acknowledges their beliefs and maybe even agrees with their beliefs, that's like this fusion that happens. Then they're all like, guess what we should We should spread our ideas together. You think, like I do,
Let's come together and talk about more people. See if we can get more people into what we're doing.
Right, and that can be a source of good, and that can be a source of great.
Evil exactly, And it's fascinating how how sometimes the line between the two isn't that you know thick that Sometimes it's some people who are thinking they are doing great good actually cause great evil in effort to get to that good. And to me, it's the idea of moral relativism. You have your actions have to be honest and good if you're trying to achieve a good result. If you step on, hurt, or kill people to get your way
to a good result, is that result good? No, it's not because you harmed so many people to get there, right.
And how often, like in the case of you know, this widespread fear against trans people, it's like all you need is a little bit of well, in this case, a lot of bit of misinformation and just lies, and people will grasp onto it just because it clicks with that little thing that they think they believe in the back of their head. And it's like, oh, I'm not the only one.
You know, it's you know, the fact that this book is set in the nineties is a little bit ironic because.
I was going to ask you about that.
Yeah, because of the fact that the morality panic that is going on right now about trans people is no different than the morality panic of the Satanic panic of the nineties, where people were saying, all these terrible things are happening with the devil and children and nothing was actually going on. People just chose to believe because that's what they were told, and they thought, oh, well, yeah, people would do that stuff like that gay people or
teachers or whatever. They would believe in their pedophiles and all of this, But there was nothing to it. Nothing happened. It was just misinformation that had been spread. Could you imagine if the Internet had been as ubiquitous then as it is now what that would have done for the morality panic. Look what it's done for the transphobia that's
spreading across the North America and the UK. It's because all of these people can come together and find people who think just like them and create an echo chamber to make sure that they are listened to and that their beliefs are validated.
And that's the thing I think of yea E. Tangents, I think.
ADC spiral. Here we go.
You know, I read a lot about like the KKK when I was in college and how there were so many white supremacist groups around the country, highly concentrated in Pennsylvania believing.
And Oregon that's the state where I was born and raised. I'm actually, it's so funny you brought this up, and I'll let you continue in a second, because the book I'm currently working on right now talks about the founding of the KKK in Oregon and what happened and everything that went that, So I am like knee deep in that history.
As interesting well. And also it's like the one of the reasons why there are so many different factions and subgroups is because nobody can get their shit together enough to come together in organized.
But we're still seeing now. I mean, I have to be honest, I after the last selection, I kind of disconnected myself from the news. It is a very privileged position to be able to take. But I knew that the news was going to be just a repeat of twenty sixteen, that every single headline was going to be Trump did this, Trump did this, Trump is this? And
I remember when he was inaugurated in January. I just I happened to look in the news thing and it said Trump declares the United States a country of only two genders, male and female. And I was like, this, this is what we're doing that it works, right, you have you have billions, you have millions of people complaining that they can't buy eggs. Right, and this this is
what we're focused on. But then again, this is the same country where there are entire states that have that have enacted laws to go after one trans kid in their states who wants to play sports. Entire states have changed laws because of one child in them.
Sometimes that one child doesn't even want to play sports. It's the fact that they might want.
The child was merely inquiring if they into play sports, and that's what we're focused on.
Or they bought a new pair of sneakers.
Right, We're not focused on We're not focused on inflation. We're not in focused on crime. We're not in focused on having necessary conversations about how to help immigration actually become something that is feasible for this country. We are not trying to help the people who are down and out.
We are not trying to help poor people. We're not trying to solve houselessness or food you know, insecurity, we're trying to We're trying to say, here's one person who isn't like most other people, so let's make sure that they know their place. You are not normal, you are abnormal, you are weird, you are strange, and we're going to make sure the laws dictate that. And that's what's happened. Look, the right to same sex marriage in the United States
is ten years old this year. Yep, ten years old. YEP. Thirty six states in the United States have same sex marriage bands on the book. So if oberg fell, the right to same sex marriage were to fall, like Roe v. Wade, there would be states where queer marriage, same sex marriage would be immediately invalidated. So imagine you've been married, you've been with your partner for forty years, you've been legally
married for the last ten. But if a Supreme Court justice gets a bug up of their ass like they've been hinting that they're going to do, they'll get rid of they'll overturn the right for gay marriage and leave that to the states. And what's going to happen. Look, what's happened with Roe v. Wade. There are people dying, yeah, because they can't get the medical, medical care that they need.
And you know, bringing this back full circle on this tangents there trans people are some of the have some of the highest suicide rates out of any marginalized group in the world, yep. And the response is to punch down on them. That is nothing but cruelty. That is absolutely nothing but cruelty. And you know, we've heard it many many times over the last eight years that cruelty
is the point. But here's the thing. When you're cruelty is on display like that, yes, you may be sending signals out to other people who think like you that yeah, this is what we're doing now, But at the end of the day, history, history, that ever pervasive thing, is going to view you like we view people like Annita Bryant now, like we view people that, you know, all the Chuds in the fifties and sixties, like we view Reagan after he let an entire generation of gay men die.
The history is going to be the ultimate judge of that. And it's unfortunate that we can't say, you know, fuck you now, get out of the office that we voted to put you in. But I just I don't understand why certain people fill the need to punch down on some of the groups that they do, especially when it is never easy to be a transperson in the United States, right, It's never easy. It doesn't matter if you're passing or not.
It's never easy because you're always going to have somebody who hates you for who you are, simply for finding your true self and finding your identity and finding your your your your right to live the way you want. Queer people, the best revenge we can get is to live happily and successfully. But unfortunately there's so many people that don't want.
Us to do that exactly. And that's you know, getting back to getting back.
To the book, look at that to people we did it.
Like I like to focus on, especially with the podcast now because we're starting to burn around the news, focusing on queer joy and queer excellence because you know, like you said, the best way to battle this is to be let our light shine so bright that you know it pushes them back into the shadows where they belong.
Now, I wanted to burn their eyes out.
I almost said that, and then I'm back, thank you, No, that's your job, than I look.
Last eight years have taught me something very, very very important. It's when Michelle Obama in twenty sixteen started to use the phrase when they go low, we go high, and I understood it at the time. I understood it now though, when they go low, we go lower. We drag their faces down into the muddy, We step on the back of their necks.
That's how you sound like my bestie, she said, when they go low, you kick him in the face. I mean, they're already down there.
Absolutely, they're already down there. Why not get down there with them? What's the worst that could happen. They're going to call you a fag, They're going to call you they're going to call you some a horrific slur.
I have no idea that right I have.
I have heard that from far worse people in the world. And if you want to go now, we'll go in the mud. We'll go in the mud.
And that's the interesting thing about setting the book in nineteen ninety five, because I was just having this conversation last night at our local p flag meeting. I was saying, how this is feeling like I came out in ninety two, ninety three, and this kind of feels like that, where you know, Whereas then my mindset was I'm here, I'm queer, and you're going to deal with me. I'm taking up space,
whether you like it or not. I'm taking that same energy, and I'm using it to protect folks now because you know, I'm not scared of anyone anymore. But it's crazy like that. I remember standing on street corners in broad daylight and having a car go by and bottles be thrown at me, you know what I'm saying. Like, at that level of ignorance and hatred, it's like it's it's coming back, and I don't like it.
Right and so right this book, it is set in the nineties, and it is for a very specific reason. First and foremost, I posit the idea that the nineties were the biggest technological leap for humanity because at the beginning of the decade, nobody had cell phone or internet in the United States. At least by the end of the decade, internet was ubiquitous and most people had cell phones. Yea.
And what did that allow you to do? Well? It allowed you to contact people from other cultures, other parts of the world that you may never have gotten to have interaction with in your entire life. Yes, And it could broaden your horizons, it could open up your mind. I was a white kid from rural Oregon who did not have any people of color in the tiny little town that I knew, white right, right, we were white trash that is that I come from. I come from
that background. And so you know, getting the Internet in nineteen ninety eight, I was sixteen years old. Yeah, it would have been, Yeah, nineteen ninety eight. It was the first time we got and we didn't even have we had three channels on our television. The first time that I had anything like that was when we got internet, dial up internet. Yeah, but internet all the same and so. But at the same time, you have to remember this was the nineties, and it's weird how we were then
versus where we are now. In the nineties, we were coming off the HIV in the AHS crisis. It was
still a very big thing. We were also entering the Clinton era, which became the era of don't ask, don't tell, which, for those who weren't alive in or don't quite remember, was basically the military's way in the United States government way of saying, hey, gay people exist, but we don't want you to talk about it, and you can't talk about it either, so say that There was like a military bigger closet benefit, a military ball, a military event
where people were invited. Straight people could bring their partners gay people. You could not why because you don't ask and you don't tell. Basically, it's none of our business. But if you make it our business, we have to
do something about it. There were people in Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the military who were dishonorably discharged because of don't ask, don't tell and because of their homosexuality, who who in only recent years have gotten that overturn to be an honorable discharge, Because think about it, that's a shitty way of doing things in the nineties, but that's where it was. In the nineties. We had gone from HIV and AIDS, a gay cancer that only affected
gay people, to let's not talk about gay people. Let's not talk about them. They exist, but they're over here. And I wanted to explore that in this book. I wanted to explore that what it felt like to actually meet somebody who is like you, who is there. I remember the first time I met a gay person who wasn't me, and I was like, you're like me, right, we're friends. I remember the first time I went to a gay bar in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of eighteen with my fake ID. I got to go in there,
and what happened. I immediately ran into a drag queen who adopted me and took me up to the where the drag queens were and told me all about drag and everything like that. These were my people. I got
to be surrounded by people like me. And I think that even now in twenty twenty five, people forget how important that is for queer people, especially queer people who live in rural areas, especially queer youth who live in rural areas, who don't get that kind of exposure unless it's on the internet, right, And that's not always the safest place for young any people to do anything like that.
So I think of the nineties. I don't necessarily think of them fondly, but I do think of the nineties as a very pivotal time, not just for queer people but for humanity as a whole, because at the beginning of the nineties we weren't connected. At the end, so many of us were, for better or worse.
Yeah, Because like I spent the bulk of the nineties ninety three to two thousand in college, because it took me seven years to get my four year degree, and so.
If it makes you feel better. I have one semester of community college under my belt, so you understand.
But so I associate the nineties with that time of being a rebel, being an upstart. I was getting a dance degree, so it was like I was a creative you know, so everything was you know, challenging what's going on. So that was the perfect time. The nineties was the perfect time for all that. And the birth of the Internet created so much culture, like cyberpunk, you know, became so prevalent.
But it also allowed you know, it also allowed gay people to talk to other gay people. I'm not talking about like like you know, hookup apps or anything like that, and.
I'm talking about like community at all, chat.
Rooms, chams, message boards, all of this kind of stuff where people who were once unable to talk to anybody like them were able to actually talk to other gay people, queer people, lesbians, trans people. You know. It's just it's for all that I hate that the Internet has brought upon this world, I still have to remember that it has connected so many people who've probably felt alone and finally found somebody like them a community.
And created helped create conversations like so much of the vocabulary that is frankly being weaponized against us. The word woke comes to mind, was born on the Internet, like Tumblr, for instance. If it wasn't for Tumblr, I don't know when I would have learned the term non binary. I don't know when I would have had the larger conversation.
About the gender spectrum.
You know what I mean. And that's when the Internet is being used as a tool. It's a wonderful thing. But then it's like the snake eating its own tail. Because yeah, because of things like now Grinder, where you can order dick like pizza, you know, the the community that is the gay bar and queer spaces, they're going away because you know, the underlying reason for these places existing.
You can separate out and and like I said, order like pizza so you don't need to go through the the the social dance of meeting other people.
And and then if you haven't met the right person standing outside the bar during like the meat market hours after the bar closes, and everybody's trying to find someone to hook up with, so you can go home after that, right, you know, and and and you know even further beyond that, you know, gay bars are are I don't think that they are as prevalent as part of our culture as they used to be. But even worse than that is lesbian bars. Those are pretty much not existent at this point. Yeah.
I when I lived in two on Arizona, there was IBT's, the gay bar, and then there was the lesbian bar in another part of town. And the lesbian bar was closed a few years after I got there. The lesbian spaces for queer women, those shut down quicker than the spaces for gay men ever did.
Yeah, it's so sad. And like every time I hear about someone trying to open up a lesbian centered space or women's centered space, I shouted to the mountaintops. It's like, yes, please, let this succeed longer than five minutes.
Right exactly exactly, because you know, when we're talking about queer women especially, we don't just necessarily mean lesbians, because these women centered spaces were there for trans women too, They were there for all of these people who identified as a woman. And when you get rid of that that, I mean, look what is out there right now. Youth centers, which are very important, absolutely important, But your journey doesn't stop once you reach eighteen or once you reach twenty one, and hell.
Your journey doesn't start when you hit eighteen.
Right. This is one of my biggest issues, is this idea of coming out being the be all and the end all of our journey. Like when you look, there are far greaters authors and I who've written coming out stories about young people. But at the end of the day, that is not the end. No, because anybody you meet for the rest of your life is someone you potentially
have to come out to correct forever. That's always going to be something that will be part of a conversation with anybody new that you meet if they plan on sticking around in your life, right, And it's it's the fact that you know, we don't have spaces necessarily geared towards older queer people that aren't you know, alcohol related in bars or hook up related and stuff like that. You know, I've seen in bigger towns, I've seen like like queer book clubs or queer meeting spaces. I mean there.
I did a tour last year for one of my books releases, and one bookstore that I went to was a trans owned Everybody who worked there was trans and it was one of the most joyful experiences I've ever had, because I was surrounded by not only trans joy, but queer joy. And that's something that no matter what people try to do, they can't take that away from us, because we found each other, we've found community, we've found other people like us, and you can't take that away
from us anymore. You cannot. You can try, you can scream and shout and say horrific things about young people who are trans and finding their truth, but at the end of the day, we still have each other, and we have always been here and we will always be here.
And that's the thing I was thinking about this just the other day. It's like these people, not all of them, but most of them that are trying to take away all of our rights and trying to like legislate us out of existence. It's like they're these basically like cis had, white people who've never really had to like overcome anything right going against us, who historically have had to overcome
all of the things. And we are nothing if not resilient, we are nothing if not creative, We are nothing if not a bunch of people who make a way out of no way. So it's like, ultimately, you can't fuck with us like.
That, and some of us, some of us are very vengeful. M M, I can't like you know, it's funny. You're right. Our entire country is a patriarchy. It is run by old, rich white men. And look, I hate that I have to say this, but frankly, I sometimes I just don't give a shit. One day soon all these old white people in power are gonna die. They will. Maybe they'll be replaced by clones who are younger and just as
white and just as rich. But maybe, just maybe, when all these old rich white people die, right, And why haven't they yet? Honestly, if I haven't seen Mitch McConnell's face one more time, I swear to Christ.
What if old give up?
I don't know. I don't know how is he functioning as a person. But regardless, change will come. It will come. It will take time, and it's going to be a lot of work. But when these old white people die, who's going to replace them? Young people? Young people who are going to change this world to what it should
have been from the beginning. Welcome to all, Welcome to everyone, God, where we get to exist and be who we want to be without fear of retribution from people who think that because we're different or othered, that we aren't worthy of life, existence, happiness. If these people cared as much about anything else as they do about queer and trans people, we could probably solve world hunger. We can solve Musk.
If Elon Musk gave seven billion dollars to the United States, it would be able to solve the United States hunger and housing housing problems like that. Yeah, we could. If rich people, If Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, all of them came together and said, hey, let's use our money to make the world a better place. Right, it could be, but it won't happen. It won't happen. We have to fight tooth and nail for everything. And you know what, when I was younger like you, I had
a chip on my shoulder when I came out. I came out in nineteen ninety eight, and then I graduated high school in two thousand and I was the out and proud young queer punk kid who when we did Pride parades would be the one yelling in the faces of the evangelist, standing there with a sign saying it all burn in hell, and stuff like this and as I got older, I started to soften a little as I was trying to find myself and trying to find
who I wanted to be in the world. And I honestly expected it to get myself to get softer as I got older. But holy fuck, dude, in twenty twenty five, I'm just now as pissed off as I was when I was eighteen years old. If I see Evangelsis on the street with it in a queer celebration, I'm forty two, I will go up and yell in their faces to
ask him what the fuck they think they're doing. You know what you have to sometimes, you know what, Sometimes even though my job is words, sometimes words just don't cut it. Sometimes you have to show them that you mean business. And frankly, you know, it's like the idea of all those Nazis that we see pop up in Ohio and they're standing on bridges with their thing and they're saying, we're proud of being white, we are the white racist superior. Why don't they ever show their faces?
If there's part of being who they are, why don't they ever show their faces? Because they know the repercussions of what happens when you're a Nazi or when you're you know, some kind of racist homophobe. Transform They know the repercussions because they know it's shitty way to be, so they hide themselves while telling everybody else that they're better than everybody because they're white.
White supremacists are very very very rarely slash never any kind of superior white.
Because they all look the same. That's why whenever I see those news and there I'm proud to be white. I'm like, but you're wearing a you're wearing a black lavah. You're wearing something over your entire face, so nobody can tell that you're white. You're wearing and you.
Left your mama's basement to come here, right exactly.
You rented a U haul moving truck where you all hid in the back to be driven to this area where you got out and hung up your signs, and then when confronted by other people, you're like, oh, and then they run away. That's what I love. It's it's so fascinating to me. People are filled with so much hate.
They go online, they spout hate, they scream hate, but when they're confronted in person, uh huh they crumble, They crumble, the argument suddenly flee out the window, and they go about, well, this is this is what I believe, this is what I think. Let's shut up, shut up. Nobody cares about you. Nobody cares.
And part of that is, you know, there's a whole generation of people that were not raised with like I believe your your generation A listen to me, but like I think your generation might be the last generation that was properly socialized.
Yeah, yeah, we were. I was my generation probably the last that was not raised by computers, right, stuff like that, right, right, because we didn't. I mean, I remember when I was eighteen years old and I got my first text message. I was like, what is this?
My first text message? Is the wrong number? And I was like, what is this going on?
Too? It was wrong? It was meant for me. It was like some ad for something I don't remember. But I remember being eighteen, going you can do this now that part phones and stuff like that, I mean, hell to show you how much of a ludite I am. When smartphones first became popular in like twenty eleven, twenty twelve, I didn't get on that train. I was like, I
don't know what that means. I have my flip phone when I was happy with it, and then in twenty like fourteen, I got a smartphone for the first time, and I'll never forget going to the Verizon to get my smartphone and asking the gentleman behind the counter what's the address for the app store, because I thought it was a physical location you had to go to in
order to get apps on your phone. So, yeah, ours is probably the last generation that was not you know, Internet was not a part of our daily lives, right.
I remember I remember going, have you heard about this Google? You can just ask it questions and it gives you information.
Or jeeves, Yeah, ask jeeves what? Oh and did you do that too? Do you remember using AOL instant messenger? Oh? God, and the and the AI called smarter Child where you could write to you could write it was a friend on your friend's list in uh instant Messenger and you'd write to and it was just like AI that they have no right back to you. It was very It wasn't very proficient, but smarter Child was a big thing in the late nineties where you would talk to an
AI on AOL instant Messenger. I remember just being like fascinated by that, like this is this is the future, and now I look where they are in twenty twenty five with Ai, I'm like, y'all, right, y'all need to do human things. That's why. Look, I've said this often. I do not like people. I love humanity. Humanity gave us movies and books and music and art and dancing. People just suck.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
And I'm not trying to say this like with any edge of cynicism, you know, I try not to be a cynical person, but it's the truth.
So it's hard to yeah, because every time you try to be like, well, maybe I should be softer towards other people because.
You know more understanding. You don't know what they're going through. You don't know if they have trauma that formed their beliefs. But before you can finish that thought, so like, Okay, I moved to I live in a very small town in the state of Washington. I live in the mountains, in the Cascade Mountains in a log cabin. I live up in the mountains, up on a hill. And what did I do when I first moved to my house.
I put a gay pride flag outside my house, you know, the big one with the trans and everything on it, because that's my belief. And plus, when you buy a new house, you have to make it gay. It's just what it is exactly. And what I did not know when I put that up was that my neighbor, who I had not met at that point, was a raging homophobe.
And how did I find that out? Well after I put up the flag, my handyman was leaving one day after having a meeting with me about a project that we were going to do, and my neighbor, again who I'd never met and my handyman had never met, stopped my handyman on his way out of driving past his house, made him roll down the window, and then asked him
point blank, what's that faggot up to up there? My handyman is a straight man with children, and literally, not before he left, we were having a conversation where I told him, look, this is a pretty big project that I'm hiring for. I trust you. We've worked together for a while, and I trust that you do what you do. But if you hire anyone that's homophobic, or anybody who's even remotely smacks of that, I will fire all of your asses without a second thought.
Yep.
And so when that happened, right after he left, he called me, He goes, I just want to let you know that I took what you said seriously, and your neighbor called you some really horrific things, and I said, all right, straight ally, you got right, right, right right? And so what did I do as a queer person? I thought, what should I do in a situation like that? This is the house I want to live in for
the rest of my life. I love it here, and what can I do knowing that my neighbor is a homophobe for all I know, Maybe he's the type of person that'll escalate. Maybe he'll get angry at me, Maybe he'll come up, maybe he'll talk to someone who hates gay people more than he does. Maybe they'll do something. Maybe somebody could hurt me, come after me. So I got revenge. And the way I got revenge was I found out that he does not own the house, he rents it. And I found out that his realtor was
a big or. His landlord was a big realtor in the state of California who worked for a very big realty company. So I tagged the realtor his realty company on Instagram, and I asked, why do you rent to a homophobic tenant? Why do you rent to this person who is very vitriolic in what he says. I have never gotten a call from a realty agent that fastened my entire life. They called me, and of course they said things like I'm so sorry that I did not know. He was like that I would never do this, and
I told him flat out, here's what I want. I want you when you get back into town to Mark, bring your tenant up, march up your way up to my house, knock on my door, and when I answer the door, your tenant will apologize. The reason I want this is not to rub it in his face, not to make him feel lesser. The reason I want this is that my books are taught in middle schools, high schools, and colleges all over the world. He has children. What happens if one of my books is taught in their schools?
And what happens if one of their kids picks up the book and says, Daddy, I really love this book. I heard this author lives here. Can we go meet him? And this daddy has to say sorry, honey, I call them a faggot. We can't, we can't go see him. That's what I wanted. I wanted him to know that actions have consequences, not just because I was upset, but because what happens if your kid turns out to be queer?
And if you think that this gentleman who stops someone he never met and use that kind of word, do you think he's never said that in front of his kids before, Come on, come on. So that the landlord says, I'll do what I can. Never happened. Never happened. But what does happen is two different things. First and foremost, whenever these people see me, they run inside their house. Second, the landlord reached out to me late last year and said, hey, their lease is up in April. Either they'll move or
do you want to buy the house? Do you want to become their landlord? I had to weigh that for a moment because a most I don't want to be a landlord, even if it means having these people. So what am I going to do? I'm buying all the land around the house. Work. Yeah, I'm not buying that house. So even if they choose to renew the lease, I will still own all the land around their house. So now when they try to go outside and try to go on in my property, I will tell them you
cannot be on my property. I'm sorry. Then, so I don't have to be a landlord, but I still get to be a dick.
And those are my three favorite qualities when it comes to queerness. Our resilience are our creativity and our pettiness.
I love that I don't. I don't take you know, when I was a kid, I took a lot of shit. I'm in my forties now, I don't take shit from anyone, anyone at all. If you want to try to walk all over me, that's fine, you can try, but you should not be surprised when this faggot fights back, because I won't. I won't let people win like that. I won't. I refuse. I refuse because for all I know, maybe, just maybe this will be the one thing that this dude needs to be like, holy shit, I'm a fucking asshole.
Maybe that's what will happen. I doubt it. I rarely find that homophobes are introspective in any way, shape or form. But maybe it could happen. Maybe he'll stop and think, holy crap, I did this that chances of that gut thrown out the window a couple of weeks ago, because now they have a big Trump flag sitting in front of their house. So I keep waiting for him to be like, hey, what do you think about my flag? And I want to say, I don't care about that kind of stuff.
Like you do, right exactly.
Just remember revenge, revenge, living happily, living successfully, being your own person, making space for yourself, and never letting anyone take that away from you exactly.
Well, like in our immediate area, like I love where we live. I was a city boy for forty two years. I lived in Philadelphia and now we live in Jersey in the suburbs, and I love where we live. We've got, you know, a few Trump flags around us. We noticed that they would have their flag poles and they would have their American flag flying, and then underneath that we either have a Trump flag or a Blue Lives Matter flag or something like that.
Or like the Virginia flag that says don't tread on me with a snake that exactly.
So we're like, okay, well, on our flag pole, we're going to have our American flag in our progress part pride flag because you know, we're following the rules and we dare you to say something. And we have four corners to this property, so we're going to have four
pride flags. You see us coming, So you know that. Plus, you know, Martha and I we've had we're getting ready to start our fourth season of this podcast, and we've noticed that the listenership in our immediate area and the surrounding areas has gone up a lot, so folks know who we are, and I think that's helped create our bubble because it's like they've heard the things we'll say, and I have no problem saying it.
But the the biggest thing that I think is it should be the focus now, especially going forward, is how we can protect young queer people, How we can how we can You remember a few years ago, it's probably even longer now, when that that movement came out, that that it gets better movement. Yes, I hate that with a fiery passion, because you were telling young people it gets better, not now. It's not going to get better now. It'll get better at some point in the nebulous future.
It gets better, not today. Coming up tomorrow, but when you get older and you don't have to live under your parents' thumb or live with under this kind of homophobia. It was never actionable, It was never It was more like, hey, let's put things off for a little bit. My big thing is now is that we have to remember that there are queer trans youth that are getting picked on, not just by their classmates or their teachers, but by politicians. Yeah,
and there are. And here's the thing. I've spent the last few years talking to young people all over the world. They are smarter, savvier, more empathetic than we ever were. Oh my god. Yeah, because they have the phone. They literally have a little magic box that can connect them with any piece of information known to humanity. That's what they can do. And they know that their LGBTQIA transmit
classmates are being targeted. They know books are being removed from their schools, they know laws are being enacted to target one person, and they're pissed off about it. They are angry. They're upset because they see how older generations are built on the backs of marginalized communities, without giving them their due, without giving them their respect, without giving them the hope and enjoy that all other white people get to have, so why not let other people have that?
Young people, I know it's going to be a difficult fight, but they are going to change the world. They absolutely will, because they are better than we ever were never.
Oh, I love like every time I read about students having a walkout.
Yeah, over their queer classmates, or over a jurisdictional thing or everything. They walk out because they know. Are some of them walking out so they don't have to go to school? Yeah? Probably, But you know what a lot of them are doing standing up for what's right, right, fighting for what's right. We saw it. We've seen young people do this for generations. We've seen we saw the queer riots in the Black Cat and Silver Lake and
Stonewall in New York. We saw the young, queer, young trans people, young people of color coming together to fight for the rights of us, the rights that we now take for granted. Sometimes I just I wish not only do I wish for the safety and protection of young people, but I wish that more people remembered their history, especially queer people, knowing where we came from, knowing who fought for your rights, that it was trans and women of color,
who really were the ones fighting for our rights? That the reason it's called LGBTQ. The reason why lesbians are first when it used to be glbt is because lesbians were some of the only people who came into the hospital rooms of dying Hi being an age man. They put us first, so gay men put them first. This
is why it's LGBTQ. We need to know. Most a lot of people know about Marsha p. Johnson and Stonewall and everything that happened there, but the police raids actually started in Silver Lake, California, where there was an entire row of gay and lesbian bars until one nine in the seventies, the Black Cat was raided. All of those bars were raided. The Black Cat still exists, it's still there. It's a historical monument now with a restaurant inside and whatnot.
But you have to know your history. For Tucson, Arizona, the reason pride started in Tucson, Arizona was because in the nineteen seventies a gay man came to Tucson from another state to visit friends. They went to a gay bar. The man left after the bar closed, where he was attacked and murdered by four teenage boys. Guess what happened to those teenage boys. They got parole for what they did.
And that's why Pride started. So many of the things that we do started because of tragedy, because of death, because of pain, and we wanted to make it into something beautiful. It's still a work in progress, but we are doing the best we possibly can. And last thing I want to say on this tangent, please please, As we're getting closer to spring, that means we're getting closer to summer, which means we're getting closer to Pride month.
Please boycott corporate pride bullshit. The ones that change their company logo in June and be like we like gay people now here by day stuff, and then the next month they're like, we're giving money to Republicans right because we want further their agenda. Don't fall for that. Don't fall for that. BS, be queer, be proud, but do it on your own terms, right.
Yeah, it's it's so crazy. We spent so much time battling the man and the establishment only to want to be part of it.
Yeah, it is. It is true. We have some great people in the world, great authors, artists, queer that that are. They are doing transformational things. We just have to ensure that those people are protected. Look again, I'm speaking from a place of privilege. I am very successful, but I'm also a CIS white gay. I am considered a safe gay. I'm not a trans person. I'm not, you know, a person of color. My books do not get banned at the level that trans authors get their or queer black
authors get their books banned. If you look at the American Library Association's top ten band and Challenge books in the United States, every single one of them is queer. Some of them are by black authors about the black queer experience. I am in a very safe position. But what's gonna happen? Do we think they're going to stop coming after they come for trans people? Nope, of course not, because once they get done with trans people, they're gonna
be like, Okay, what about non binary people? What about gender nonconforming if that's not included in the trans umbrella? What about bisexual people?
Right?
I mean exists right? Right? So So either this is going to either a We're going to go back into the closet under don't ask, don't tell something like that again, which I'm a loud, motherfucker man, that will never happen for somebody like me, or they're going to try to eradicate the rights and and of of an entire community. And don't don't think that they won't, because if if if you give them an inch, they will take a mile. They always yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
That's why Martha always says, you know, I'm gonna be as loud and open my mouth as much as possible because if one day I disappear, I will be missed.
Yeah, and you will. And that's just that. That's for me too, for every for every death threat that I get, for every person who hates me. Because I do what
I do. I think about the thousands upon thousands of people I've met, or the thousands upon thousands of messages I've got from queer people, from straight people, from people from all walks of life, from elderly people, elderly men, especially especially the generation above mine, who was decimated by HIV and eighths, not knowing that this kind of literature existed. They did not know that gay people could be in books and do what gay people are doing in fiction
and stuff like that. Now to be able to have that place, especially for older queer people who saw friends and families and lifestyles devastated, that they get to find some kind of happiness and peace and joy after going through that is one of the most remarkable experiences.
That I've ever had, and that reminds me getting back to the book you mentioned. You know that you got pushed back with this book, The Bones Beneath My Skin, cause you classified it as not just science fiction but also romance, even though there's only one quote unquote sex scene.
Oh God, that pissed me off, like he would, Yeah, talk about that a little bit, because that struck me. So this I was with a former publisher, an indie publisher. I had been with them since the beginning, and I sent in this book and I saw a couple of messages that were not meant for me to see. First and foremost was a message to my editor about this book saying, here's the new TJ. Clune. This one is
weird even for him. And then second of all them wanting to say, hey, we don't know that this can be considered a romance, because romances because this book only has one sex scene. And I was lived a because i'd been I'd heard that word weird used to describe me as a majority of my entire life. When I was a kid, my parents would call me weird. They'd make fun of me for my love of reading and writing. I heard that from teachers, I heard that from classmates.
I love my weirdness now, but when I was a kid, that was the thing that set me apart. And I had an almost PTSD like flashback of Oh, weird, that's where we're going with this, that's what you think. That's the word. You don't mean the word weird like when I mean it like it's a good thing. You meant
it as in like this is weird. And second of all, they started they started asking me to include to put in more sex in the book, and I said, no, I don't even like writing sex scenes as it is, But a what does that mean for a sexual people? I'm asexual. Do you think that I am incapable of having romance because I'm not, like, I don't like sex that much. I have never. It was the turnaround that they attempted to do to say face, oh, that's not what we meant. That's what we met. We just know
that there's certain expectations. I said, I don't give a fuck about expectations your If you don't think this is a romance, because these people bone once on page, that's a U problem, not a ME problem. So I pulled the book. I pulled it from this publisher, and I had this grand idea of self publishing it on my own.
What I did not know was that this set off a thing that still goes on to this day, because what we learned after I pulled that book was that this publisher had been embezzling money from not just me, but from other authors, from other creatives that they worked with. To this day, this publisher owes me north of fifty thousand dollars in back paid royalties and stuff like that.
So I had to pull every book I had published with them, twenty plus books and the bones beneath my skin, and self publish all of them at the same time. So the bones beneath my skin to me got lost in the shuffle with all that. And then a few years later Tor came knocking and said, hey, thank you for being successful with the house in Thisralian Sea. We would like to publish some of your other back catalog and I thought bones beneath my skin. I love this
book two pieces. I love the message. I love Artemis Darth Vader more than almost any other character I've written. Please give this book a chance, and they said, fuck yeah, we'll do that, and then they publish it. No issues, No this book is weird. No, this book needs more sex. Nothing they said. They were happy to do it. And guess what A debuted at number six on the New York Times bestseller list. Fuck yeah, that's what you do. Remember what I said, revenge happily successfully get revenge where
you can. And that's what I did.
I love and I also love like the one sex scene that there is, you know, it's I feel like if it were more gratuitous than it was, it would not be as hot as.
If I put sex in a book. It is there for a reason. I'm not writing necessarily to titillate. I'm not writing, you know, for somebody's massive butty fantasies. Whatever I'm writing, I'm by that point in the book. If you can't feel that connection and you need sex to
justify that, then I've failed to do my job. The organic relationship that blossoms between Nate and Alex was something that I took great care in because I was very concerned about the idea of trauma bonding, which is what when you think of when you see a big action movie where there's terrorists and explosions and the guy gets the girl, do you really think that they're going to stay together. They just went through something horrific and profound.
That's what brought them together, is that a relationship built to last. And so with this book, I wanted to take great care to avoid it reading like trauma bonding, to actually make it a real, viable relationship. And when you get to the single sex scene in this book, you believe that there's already something between them that they don't need sex to add it on. Sex isn't necessary, but it is an additive that helps to cement their connection. And it wasn't It wasn't full on penetrative sex. It
was really, let's do this. It's not broke back Mountain, Let's spit on it and let's go in. It was it was a time and place kind of thing what they could actually do with where they were, and that it felt right for that moment to actually happen.
When it did, it felt so real and the tension that was that you created between the two characters was like better, way better than the actual sex scene. And the fact that like what happened was like, like you said, it's what they could do in the constraints of where they were.
Yeah. So it's like it went on for a couple of pages. That was right, That was all right. It was not. There wasn't sex every single chapter. This wasn't a ten thousand words sex scene with penetrative sex and and all this other stuff that goes along with it. That would not have made sense for this And.
It's hard to write that and have it be good.
It can be, yeah, and I've had I've written some that are not very good, and I it's just the idea that the more you write, the better you become, or at least that's what I hope, right right, right, So, but yeah, that sex scene, I'm very really proud, you know, as an asexual person, sex is for me whatever, But I'm very proud of that scene in the book because A I feel it's earned and b it feels like, yeah, that's a next logical step for these two.
People, right, and having that detail about you makes it even better because It's like, wow, it was very organic. That relationship was so wonderful, and it grew from like real animosity to like, okay, you're you're that little kid punching the other little kid because you like them, not because you don't.
Right exactly. They were pulling each other's pigtails. Exactly it is.
And then it became that whole will there won't they will? They all come on? Come on just one time, come on right exactly.
And I love that interplay. I love that. That's why most of the books that I write, if they have some kind of romantic angle to them, I'm going to make you wait, I'm going to make you work. I'm not going to write a book where two characters meet and then all of a sudden they have sex on the first you know, page or whatever. That's not how
I do. Maybe that's more real life than not. But I love it when you, you as the reader, fill the pull, and by the time that that does happen, you're like, come on, huh, fucking chess already you're like a little kid with your g I jo's and your barbies and you're knocking them together.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend that at one point I wasn't sitting in front of the book going kiss him, kiss kiss it.
I always want to make people reach that line and then maybe cross it just a little bit more before I give you what you want.
I love it. I love it so much. Here's a question for that, asked, who are who would you say were your biggest literary influences.
Like many people of my generation, I grew up reading Stephen King at far too young in age same. I read my first Stephen King book when I was eleven, and that was The Stand, which is probably not the best book for an eleven year old. I should not understand most of it, but I remember being enthralled in ways that I hadn't been before. I did not know words could do that can make you feel that way.
And the fact that King is in his late seventies and still putting out two books a year, right, Jesus, I mean he just announced a new novel or a new picture book that's in collaboration with Maurice Sendak, who was passed away many many years ago. Maurice Sendak did a bunch of drawings for this opera, This mystical, terrifying opera that never got done. So Stephen King was approached by this publisher with the artwork and said, do you want to write a story based on Maurice Sendak's art?
And he said, fuck yeah, and so he did. That's cool, man. Maurice Sendak, to me is one of the greatest authors that has ever existed. If you don't know why, and you haven't read it since you was a kid, read Where the Wild Things Are? Do it? It is remarkable fiction. It is remarkable fiction. Growing up, I read a lot of horror, as I said, but I also one of the first experiences I had with gay people in books was a book called The front Runner. Do you know that book?
I do not?
Okay, So, in the seventies it was considered the first critically commercial and successful in terms of sales gay novel. It was written by a straight white woman named Patricia Nell Warren. And this book was about a collegiate coach named Harlan who is training one of his runners, Billy, for the Olympics. And this book was given to me by my library. And after I came out to her at sixteen years old, she was the first person I came out to and so She was like, here's a
gay book, book with gay people in it. You can read this, And I said, hooray. And so I started reading the book and I was transported. I was enchanted. I was moved in ways that I had never I didn't know that gay people could be like this in books. You know, this is pre HIV AIDS. This was set, you know, there was It was very New York City bathhouse era kind of a story. But it was a
love story between Billy and Harlan. And sorry, I'm about to spoil a fifty year old book that was once optioned by Paul Newman to be made into a film. But the book ends with Billy running in the Olympics getting shot in the head by an assassin from the stands. And that's the end. Oh shit, the end of the book. So imagine you're first reading gay people in a book, your first time, and they get murdered, they get killed.
Fuck.
I told myself I never wanted to write a book like that. That if I was going to write a book with gay people in it, they were going to not get murdered. They were not going to get hurt, they were not going to get killed. I appreciated their story because that was funny, A trope for so long. Yeah, fridging, fridging, the lesbians, burying your days. It's still a prevalent to this day. I mean you can still see certain TV
shows that have that problem. But in twenty eleven, when my first book came out, I got an instant message one day on Facebook from Patricia Nell Warren. She had read my first novel and enjoyed it and wanted to reach out to me. What did I do? A fangirl, This is Patricia Nell Warren. She was an institution. She has since passed away, but I remember telling her the first quote unquote gay novel that I read was the front Runner, and I'll never forget her response. She wrote back,
I am so sorry. She knew she had heard from So she was a very fierce LGBTQ advocate ally through and through, and she heard from so many gay men that the book hurt them. So what does she do? She went and wrote two sequels, So that book that showed the aftermath and showed this found family picking themselves up,
putting themselves back together, dealing with trauma and grief. One of my most prized Possessions is a first edition signed copy of The Front Writer that I have sitting on my shelf because the story impacted me so much that I never wanted to write a book like it.
I love that.
I do too. I love I love miss now Warren. I miss her terribly. She was a wonderful person. I got to have many conversations with her before she passed. She was a delightful human being and did more for for the LGBTQ community than most street people ever have.
And that's a conversation that I'm always having with straight people. You don't get to call yourself an ally, No, you have to be told that you are an ally right, Like I say, it's the same as the word diva. It doesn't count when that must be given to you.
Typically it should come from a drag queen too.
Don't hurt?
Yeah? Is there?
Uh? Do you listen to music when you write? Is that? What is the a soundtrack for your writing?
If? Well, it depends on the book I'm writing and for the bones beneath my skin. I made soundtracks that were all nineties focused. It was R. E. M. It was Savage Garden, it was Britney Spears, it was it was all these Michael Jackson, all of these people that I grew up listening to. I included in the soundtrack that that I loud, that I listened or that I
made for the book. But my favorite artist in the world, someone that I have gone and seen live multiple times, will always be Florence in the Machine Good Christ does. She sometimes make me question my sexuality because she is a handsome woman and I adore I've seen her live three four times and it's the most amazing is. I love that music so so so much. But I also am very, very into hip hop and rap music because especially music like by Missy Elliott or Buster Rhymes or
Kendrick Lamar, who are such extraordinary wordsmiths. They can do things with words and rhythm that I will never be able to do, especially Missy Elliott and Buster Rhymes. The fact that they are so fast and can enunciate so clearly that you never miss what they're saying, and they do this wordplay that is so extraordinary. I just I
love all kinds of music. I try to listen to everything, but man, rap music when it's when it's a good lyricist, when it's a good writer, is extraordinary to listen to because it can do things with words that you didn't think were possible. It's so cool how people can do things with words, put them in certain order to make them feel a certain way.
I love it, and I love it when it's clever, like Kendrick Lamar, I'm sorry you want to strike a chords? Probably a minor is one of the most disrespectful and clever words.
When that song first first came out last year and I listened to it and I heard that line, I was like, yeah, yeah. And then the smile he did at the super Bowl, the smile, I was like, God, I would not want to be the person that's directed towards.
It is not a good time to be Drake.
No, it is not a good time. And Serena Williams was up there.
I was like, so beautiful. That whole thing is so perfect. Now you know who is This might may or may not be surprising to you. You know who is a rapper, who was a clever lyricist? Who Bob the Drag Queen?
What really did they have music? They music on there? I did not know that.
Oh yeah, oh oh, Bob the Drag Queen is my favorite line. It's in a song they put out called gay Bars. Okay already clever, and the line is I don't speak Spanish, but I will top of toe you see clever clever.
I love There's there's have you heard have you heard of Todrick Hall? Yes, and his song Fag, the rap song Fag. You should listen to that. It is remarkable. It is his His lyricism in it is hysterical. I absolutely love it. It's basically used to call me fag and now you want up on my nuts and it is the first funniest thing And I love it. I love that song.
I have conflicting feelings about Todrick Hall, but I will say, when you want something, I know, but when you want some top tier faggety ship, that's what he does. Yeah, like period.
But see then I think about, you know, like how rap music was in the early two thousands, you know and sometimes can still be today. Where you think of like Eminem who was you know, notoriously had notoriously homophobic lyrics and stuff like that, but then he learned, he grew, then he came out did all these things with Elton John, did all this music, did a lot of talking, a lot of listening and learning. And yeah, now he's in his fifties. Okay, I get that, but he's not the
asshole that he used to be. He learned, he listened, he talked, and he grew and he's still one of the greatest rappers ever. And but he doesn't have to do this where he makes fun of marginalized groups to.
Do it right.
You don't have to do that. You can, I mean, unless you're queer yourself, you can make fun of right. That's fun.
And that's the thing with hip hop. It's like, you know, you have to be really good for me to follow you after a certain point, because sometimes I know what I'm in for when I hit play, like Buster Rhymes, for instance, top tier lyricist, one of the best. I know I'm going to hear some homophobic shit when I hit play. I know I am, but you know, it's like it's the price of admission sometimes, you know, and.
You know what younger me might would have bristled, Probably like the eighteen year old knee with a chip on his shoulder who came out and stuff like that might have bristled this something I don't want to think. I've softened in my old age, but I also kind of realized that that was kind of the thing to do, right, Yeah, that's how That's how it was. And maybe maybe it has, maybe it's gotten a little bit better than that, But at the time, that's what everybody did, right. Right.
My dog is going crazy because I just got a delivery. He's this big, but he has to the entire neighborhood. You know, this has been an amazing conversation.
Thank you. It has been a delightful and some of it, I know. We did talk about the book for the Bones Beneath My Skin right now wherever books are sold, and if you, if you can, you may be able to find a pretty cool version with painted edges and everything like that. So get it now before they're all gone. Oh it's a really damn good book.
It really really is. I highly recommend it. I actually did have one more question about the book. Yeah, so the book has been described as an action movie in book form, which, okay, I agree with that. If you were on a cast it, who would play who?
So I want to avoid like, like, okay, you know, I want to try to make it as queer as possible, so Alex could be played by Lee Pace, who is a tall drink of homosexual water. He's been in He's been in Pushing Up Daisies, he's been in the Lord of the Rings. All that he is just he's like six foot five and just like gorgeous. Hello. I'd like to be his friend. And then why don't we get somebody who's for Nate? Why don't we get somebody I mean, obviously you'd have to be in as young as he'd
have to be in his twenties. Get one of the popular boys who hasn't done a Jake Gillanoll, Heath Ledger. I'm going to be gay for a little bit kind of thing. Let them get get like, what's his name? What's the the guy? Timmy, Tim Tim Tim True, Tim Tim Chellamy, Tim Timothy. I don't know. I don't know young people that way in terms of acting that well. I could have said Tom Holland, but I just don't want to.
I actually thought Tom Holland, but no, I'll.
Take it no or you know what? Who or oh, you know what? I just changed my mind. I just I'm going to change out white people or for me Pace, what's that guy who's in the top Gun movies. That's everywhere now. And and what's his name? He was in Twisters? Glenn Powell, that dude who looks like who looks like every other handsome white guy you've ever seen. You could do it. You can do it. I could do it.
What about Artemis?
I have no idea. It's probably a good thing. I don't know children actors' names. I have no idea, right, right, I mean, get somebody unknown, somebody who's never been in film or television before.
Didn't I see The Eternals? Oh yeah, the actor that played the Eternally kid.
Oh right, yeah, okay, that could work.
Absolutely, That's why I picture.
Actually, yeah, there would have to be. There would have to be you know, a kind of gravitas there because you're playing a kid. But are you right? Really right? Right? Right? Right?
Wow? Okay, Now I want to see the MOVI so you have to make that happen.
Yeah, I'll get right on that. Yeah, absolutely, Hollywood is if Hollywood isn't broken beyond repair when it comes to adaptations for books. And here's my thing, here's my thing that I'll take away from it. Even if my books never get adapted into anything, which you know, who knows what could happen at this point? Has there ever really really been a book that's better that or a movie
that's better than the book? Really? Can you think of can you list like five different things where you'd say, yeah, this was better. I've never seen a movie where I thought, oh, you know what, I will take that back? There are I just lied. There are four. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is better than the book and also coming full circle, Maurice Index where the Wild Things Are. Spike Jones adapted that with James Gandalfini doing the voice of
one of the main monsters. One of the best book to film adaptations I've ever seen, ever seen.
Okay, okay, there are I was just and I can't think of any now because my brain doesn't want a brain. Yeah, but it does happen. But when it does happen, it's very rare.
It is, and book to film adaptations are already rare to begin with, especially when it comes to fantasy, which needs bigger budget. Especially when you add LGBTQ i A on top of that. You would think Hollywood is like liberal leaning. No, they are very conservative. We had multiple studios turned down the house in the Crilian see because they said, we don't know how to position the Antichrist. I'm like, he's a six year old kid. He's just
a kid, but they didn't want to position it. Sometimes I do wonder, though, is it because of the gay right. I have one producer who told me he wanted to tone down the gay stuff, and I said, well, you'll never be making anything of mine ever, right.
And it's like, what is being a kid have to do with anything? The Omens series exists, right?
Or or or that that neo gayman show on Amazon with David Tennant and and what's his good omens y? Yeah, good Omens that dealt with an Antichrist out of a character who is a kid. It's not that hard. It is not that hard to make. But I'm just happy that I get to write books. At the end of the day. That's all I want to do.
There you go, and I want you to do it because you've made a fan out of me.
Thank you, TJ.
Klune. Thank you so much for joining us and going on Tangent after Tangent with me because it was a lot of fun.
Thank you for having me. This is a delightful conversation. I appreciate it.
I have a feeling this will not be the last time we said no, better not be.
I've told my publicity team that, look, this is a safe space. I've told my publicity team that I'm reading really sick and tired of talking to straight people.
That's a whole word.
I hear, You'm because there are certain questions that queer people, queer interviewers don't even need to ask. You don't even need to do it. But three people like, so, why include gays in it? Because that's why, right, Because I never got to see myself so.
Exactly, the representation is important, damn it.
Yeah, And look, I love all of the people I've gotten to spoke speak to over the past, you know, a couple of months for the release of The Bones Beneath My Skin. But at the same time, there's just something talking to other queer people that can understand that shorthand and that can speak on things that others cannot and should not.
Speak on exactly, Because you know, that's how we get Brendan Fraser winning and Oscar for playing a gay role and then trying to say it's a universal story.
Or when Eddie Redmain played that transformed in the.
Movie and then became a jk Rowling apologist.
Yes, oh, you know how we can end this interview. Fuck jk Rowling and everything she stands for. If we lived in a just society, she would be shunned from any kind of contact with the human race period.
Bam. Thank you T. J.
Klum for that word.
You have a wonderful day, sir, and I can't wait to talk to you again.
Thank you you too, Bye bye bye.
Full Circle is a Never Scurred Productions podcast hosted by Charles Tyson Junior and Martha Madrigal, Produced and edited by Never Scurd Executive Produced by Charles Tyson Jr. And Martha Madrigald. Our theme in music is by the jingle Marys.
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