Colby: so, which one of you wears the pants in this relationship?

Ryan: on a good day, neither of us

Y/N: Ryan!

Source: unknown

Imagine: Being being Married to John Dutton and Beth doesn’t like your relationship.

Beth: I don’t like it.

Y/N: Beth?

Beth: What?

Y/N: No one cares.

John: That’s my girl

Imagine: Being Married to Rip Wheeler.

Y/N: You know I love you right

Rip: I do because I love you too

Y/N: Good! *Pushes Rip away* Because if you want to prove it to me you’re gonna have to catch me. *Takes off running*

Rip: Damnit Y/N Y/M/N Dutton get that cute little ass back here! *Takes off running after her*

There are two Black queer girls from two different Black cultures in this book falling in love.  What was it like writing a Caribbean and Black American protagonist?

As a first generation Caribbean-American author, I got to connect with the spectrum and multitudes of Blackness that shaped me through writing this book. Audre and Mabel represent aspects of who I am as a Black women who was raised in multiple Black cultures. My mother is Trinidadian and my father is from St. Croix, and I was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I loved writing these girls, because they represented parts of me and the Black diaspora in a way that was eclectic, vibrant and healing.

In writing Audre and Mabel, I wanted to show them falling in love with a Black girl, that was a reflection of them, but also unique and magical in a way all her own. Their love is one that I longed to read as a young person. One that centered weird Black girls in a romantic love.  

You traveled to Trinidad and Tobago to interview folks who are LGBTQIA on these islands. How did that research affect the story?

I wanted to depict with love, curiosity and expansiveness the experience of being queer in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T). There are a lot of assumptions in the mainstream about the backwardness of attitudes towards LGBTQIA folks in the Caribbean region, and this isn’t the only truth. There is also the notion that folks in the U.S. are inherently more progressive and this is not the case. I learned from activists in T&T, that colonialism and religious evangelism from the west has fostered a lot of the homophobic sentiments that persist in the region.  

I traveled to T&T to interview artists, students, activists, government employees, queer party organizers, etc to get their perspective on queer life in T&T. It was a true gift to hear Trinibagoans talk about their queerness and speak to the ways that they live out loud despite bigotry and ignorance about who they are. There were stories of people being exiled from family, as well as others who were embraced and accepted for their queerness. On a personal note, I traveled there with my wife, and was grateful for how we were embraced by my Trinidadian relatives in ways that was affirming and healing.   

Ancestral spirituality, astrology and natural healing are all themes in this book. Why were these themes important for you to include in this book?

With Audre and Mabel, I wanted them to explore relationships with the divine and the sacred that helped them navigate the world and challenges they were up against. As a young person, I loved anything that was mystical and otherworldly, things that seemed connected to intuition and spirit. I wanted these Black girls to be spiritual seekers in a way that empowered and blossomed them. They have to deal with some heavy and difficult realities that required spiritual skill sets that were ancestral, organic and cosmic. I have always loved astrology and love the ways that it has helped me see other realities within myself. The character of Queenie, Audre’s grandmother, represents how Black people can be spiritual in a way that is shaped out of intuition and deep listening. 

Who are the authors who inspired you in writing this book?

As an 11 year-old, I found a book called The Friends, written by Rosa Guy and it was the first book that centered a Black Caribbean girl as the protagonist, and I felt I could relate to. I had always been an avid reader but reading Black women authors in my teen years is what made me want to write and process who I was on the page. I read a lot of Maya Angelou, Octavia Butler and Jamaica Kincaid. I am deeply influenced by poeticism and lyricism from writers like Ntozake Shange and Nikki Giovanni. I fell in love with Alice Walker and the way she wrote Black women’s interiors in a way that was beautiful, sensual, and complex. Toni Morrison, who has just passed and is a literary goddess AND genius, taught me how to be unapologetically experimental and otherworldly. She showed how you could write Black life, while making it accessible in its mundane and honesty of who we are. I have discovered, Alexis DeVeaux and Sharon Bridgforth, in my later years who are mentors of mine and have helped me feel affirmed in writing Black queer stories.

The relationship between Whitney Houston and her best friend Robyn Crawford is a major theme in this book. What inspired that theme?

In this book Whitney Houston represents invisible queerness within Black memory as well as the greater culture. A couple months into writing the book, her legacy unlocked a dimension of the book that was needed for me to understand the erasure of queerness within Black life and memory.

When I was growing up in the 1980s I idolized Whitney Houston. She was beautiful, elegant and had a voice and presence that was bewitching. She was one of the Black celebrity icons that took the grit and gospel of Black life, and made it into an expansive and tender world for the mainstream. I didn’t learn until 2006 when I was in my twenties living in New York City about Whitney and her long-time best friend, Robyn and how central a figure she was to Houston’s life and career. Learning about this bond that was deep and most likely romantic, made Whitney make more sense to me. I loved re-imagining them in ways for this book that wasn’t tinged with stigma and controversy, but instead love and sweetness.

Junauda Petrus is a writer, pleasure activist, filmmaker and performance artist, born on Dakota land of Black-Caribbean descent. Her work centers around wildness, queerness, Black-diasporic-futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer and liberation. She lives in Minneapolis with her wife and family. You can visit her at www.junauda.com.