![]() One Last Stop’s back-cover description starts out like this: “For cynical twenty-three-year-old August, moving to New York City is supposed to prove her right: that things like magic and cinematic love stories don’t exist, and the only smart way to go through life is alone.” Everything about this setup is so exactly what Brooklyn seems to promise young people that I read the novel’s first 50 pages feeling alternately dewy-eyed and bitter-why didn’t I get that NYC experience? Or did I, and it just didn’t feel so cool from the inside? I even found myself calling my best friend and former roommate to complain about how perfect everything seemed, how easily August managed to fall into a group of welcoming, queer friends who just happened to have a spot open for her in both their home and their hearts. August gets a job at the Platonic ideal of a New York City diner: open 24/7, poorly named (Pancake Billy’s House of Pancakes), managed by a gruff Eastern European immigrant and home to a diverse staff and sticky vinyl booths. ![]() They live across from an actual accountant who is also a popular local drag queen. August is white and bisexual, Niko is Latinx and trans, Myla is Black and adopted and queer, and Wes is white and gay and Jewish. He quickly approves, and August becomes part of a quintessentially Brooklyn-queer household that includes, in addition to Niko, his girlfriend Myla, an electrical engineer and sculptor of sorts and Wes, a mostly nocturnal tattoo artist. The book opens as its newly transplanted protagonist, August, is being interviewed as a potential roommate by Niko, tattooed and psychic, who asks to touch her in order to get a feel for her vibe. ![]() But I recognized One Last Stop’s setting-the young, queer utopia of Brooklyn that thrives underneath a roiling mess of capitalism, gentrification, and dashed artistic dreams-from my own time living there. Unlike approximately 95 percent of the queer people I know, I hadn’t read Red, White, & Royal Blue, McQuiston’s bestselling 2019 debut. Approaching history at a slant, letting it be fun and inventive as well as enlightening-what could be more queer? Still, when I began reading One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston, I was both skeptical and self-aware. One place I never expected to find queer history was in the pages of a newly published romantic novel, but maybe I should have. Meanwhile, today’s queer activists and artists in the United States and globally draw on their own histories and are working to promote LGBTQ rights as human rights. Chevalier d’Éon was a genderfluid diplomat, soldier, and spy in 18th century Europe. The Jewish Mishnah, compiled in the second century CE, includes references to six genders. Hindu mythology and ancient texts not only don’t condemn queerness but include key figures that we might think of as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans. ![]() Abu Nuwas, an 8th-century Baghdadian poet, wrote about same-sex desires. In pre-colonial Uganda, for example, people assigned male at birth who dressed and behaved as women were treated as such and could marry men. I learned that queer identities have always existed all over the world. I learned queer history from movies that didn’t represent queerness very well from conversations with my lesbian aunts from novels and criticism and essays from oral-history projects and, eventually, from articles and books dedicated specifically to the topic. Instead, I’ve learned queer history (or, more accurately, histories) slowly and haphazardly-a process that I realized, after conducting a very unofficial survey on Twitter, seems to be quite common. I never took a class dedicated to queer history. Queer history is many times, many places, many persons. Casey McQuiston, author of One Last Stop (Photo credit: Sylvie Rosokoff)
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