TJ Klune, We Burned So Bright

Brett sits down with author TJ Klune to discuss his latest book 'We Burned So Bright'. They talk books from when they were younger, and find more than one in common. They touch on the Heated Rivalry zeitgeist, where the idea for the book came from, centering a story on older protagonists, age and maintaining curiosity, and the ultimate belief in the goodness of people.

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https://www.instagram.com/tjklunebooks/

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Transcript

Brett Benner 0:00

Hey everybody, it's Brett Benner and welcome back to another episode of Behind the Stack, where today I am sitting down with author TJ Clone for his new novel We burned so Bright. A little bit about tj. He is the number one New York Times and number one USA today bestselling Lambda literary award-winning author of the House and the Ilian Sea, somewhere Beyond the Sea. Under the Whispering Door in the Lives of Puppets, the Green Creek Series for Adults, The extraordinary series for teens and more. Being queer himself, Klum believes it's important now more than ever to have accurate, positive, queer representation in stories. So I hope you enjoy this episode of Behind the Stack. Hey everybody. I'm thrilled to be sitting down today with TJ Clone for his new book, we Burn So Bright. This is such a treat for me because I am such a fan of yours and, this is just one more book that's solidified it completely. So thank you so much for being here today.

TJ Klune 1:10

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. I'm so excited about this book.

Brett Benner 1:13

I actually have all your, uh.

TJ Klune 1:15

See them,

Brett Benner 1:16

you're, that's so cool. Yes. All lined up before we started.

TJ Klune 1:20

30 more announced right now. Jesus.

Brett Benner 1:22

I know. I was gonna say, congratulations. You are all in the news this week and you have so many upcomings, so it's really, really, really exciting. It must be thrilling.

TJ Klune 1:31

It is. It's thrilling. It's also exhausting, but it's also just the coolest thing in the world. I'm very, very lucky to be in the position I'm in.

Brett Benner 1:39

Yeah. Well, you've also worked. So hard, and so you're very deserving of it as well.

TJ Klune 1:43

There's worked my butt off for the last 15 years, but you know what, it's, it's, it's paying off and I, I couldn't be more appreciative.

Brett Benner 1:50

Yeah, completely. Were you always a, a, a gracious reader as a, as a kid,

TJ Klune 1:55

absolutely. I, I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. Unfortunately, I grew up in a household where such things were mocked. My, my mother and stepfather loved to make fun of me for my love of reading. And writing and all of that. I was, I I, it actually turned into me being one of those cliched kids at 10 o'clock at night under his comforter with a flashlight reading books, because I knew that if I got found out, I learned very early on as a kid that things that brought me joy were things that could be taken away. So I, I was a voracious reader, but it was usually done kind of in secret because I didn't know how other people would react to my love of books. And look, it's, a lot of people had a shitty childhood, and I could say that I did too. But at the same time, I'd like to think that that childhood, even though it was not allowed me. To it. It gave me the confidence and the courage to do what I wanna do, to do the things that I think are good to do, things that make me happy and to do things that can make other people happy or feel any other kind of range of emotion when you're reading a book. And it stuck with me ever since I was a kid. I mean, I remember the first book that made me cry. I remember the first book I saw with gay people in it that made me cry. I remember my librarian, the first person I came out to, giving me the first book with queer people in it that I've ever read. You know, I, I, what was

Brett Benner 3:12

that?

TJ Klune 3:13

The Front runner by Patricia L. Warren.

Brett Benner 3:15

Oh my god.

TJ Klune 3:15

You know that book?

Brett Benner 3:16

Oh my God. Oh, oh, tj. Like we're gonna have, I think like we may not even talk about your book because we can just literally do memory lane together.

TJ Klune 3:25

I have a signed first edition of the front runner sitting in my house. Okay.

Brett Benner 3:29

Listen.

TJ Klune 3:30

Yeah.

Brett Benner 3:30

Do you have, I had, and I just gave this to my neighbor, the paperback edition. Do you remember this? Yeah. With the, which had the image,

TJ Klune 3:37

the, in the, in the locker room with the, with the towel. The

Brett Benner 3:40

coach. Right. With the towel around his waist. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And I, oh my god, that cover alone mm-hmm. Was so like. Oh my God, yes. That book, that book And for

TJ Klune 3:50

the, for the people. For the people not in the know, Patricia L. Warren, who wrote the book, that that book is off considered the first critically and commercially successful gay novel. And Patricia L. Warren was a straight white woman, but she was a very much an advocate for the L-G-B-T-Q community when my first book came out in 2011 with an independent publisher. Shortly afterwards, I received a. Message from a woman named Patricia Nell Warren. And I was like, I know you. She was telling me that she had read my first book and how excited she was for me and for my career. And I said, you're Patricia Nell Warren. And I said, the f the front runner was the first book with gay people in it that I've ever read. And you know what she said to me? I am so sorry.

Brett Benner 4:33

Oh my God.

TJ Klune 4:34

cause the front runner for those not in the know, it's not a romance, it's a love story that ends in tragedy and it's very confronting. And that book. That very specific book, and I've told Ms. Nell Warren, this, that that book made me wanna write books exactly the opposite of that. That book made me wanna write queer people getting to be happy, getting to go on adventures, getting to live happy, successful lives. And my most prized possession is the fact that Ms. Ne Warren sent me, uh, signed for sedition copy of that shortly before she passed away.

Brett Benner 5:04

That's amazing.

TJ Klune 5:05

It was like, it was like for a moment, and you know, we became friendly. Before she passed away. But for a moment it was like I was having a conversation with God. I was

Brett Benner 5:14

like, what? Yeah, no, I am. I, Ima I imagine it, it's funny'cause my son, was in my office last night and, he was asking what should I read? And so all of a sudden I was pulling out these things. And for me, like that Giovanni's room

TJ Klune 5:26

mm-hmm.

Brett Benner 5:27

And the tales of the city. The city were the three harvest.

TJ Klune 5:30

Yeah.

Brett Benner 5:31

For the three first books that were so developmental and so instrumental in like, formation in terms not only just reading, but in terms of seeing yourself

TJ Klune 5:41

And, and while I did touch upon it, you know, some of those books did touch upon it. What I loved most about those books was that they weren't necessarily about HIV and aids. Which was necessary and vital because most of the fiction coming out the, the gay community at the time and nonfiction was about HIV and aids, which was necessary for us to be able to have our voices so people could understand what's going on. But that's not. That's not us. Everything about us that is, that is a part of something horrific that happened to our community, but we are so much more than our tragedy. We are so much more than our, yeah. Than the things that happen to us and the people of the government that ignores us. We're so much more than just those things. And I think it's important to have those stories, but to also have stories where we get to see people like us get to go out into the world and do things

Brett Benner 6:28

joy

TJ Klune 6:28

and not suffer because of who we are.

Brett Benner 6:30

Well, and it's one of the reasons I think, like right now. Heated rivalries. It's such a zeitgeist too, because it is in this world that we're living in presently, it is so. Positive for anything else. It is, you know, showing these people and that there is potentially, there's happy endings. It's not just grief and tragedy.

TJ Klune 6:51

And I, I hope, I hope that a majority of the people who are consuming that show have that mindset. Unfortunately, the loud noise that you see online is people saying, oh, this is, this isn't for gay men, this isn't for queer people, this is for women. And then you have women saying, this is for us. This is not for you. Gay people can't criticize this show. Yeah, it's not, and as with anything that gets popular, there's gonna be discourse around it. That kind of varies, of course, why it became popular to the first place. And the reason being, I, no full, full confession. I have not seen the show, I have not read the books. I do not know the author of those books. It's not really my thing, but the fact that it exists. That so many people consumed it is wonderful. But I do also want to point out, like I just had a friend of mine text me, um, a queer woman text me that she has a extremely transphobic family member who is very much saying, you know, do. Down to trans people. Trans people are groomers, trans people are pedophiles, trans people are coming after your children. And then she texted my friend going, have you heard about the show heated rivalry? It sounds so cute. I can't wait to watch it. And I'm like, you can't. You can't, you can't have that mindset. You can't be like, this is making, this is something I want to do, but I don't wanna have anything to do with queer people in general. I, I cherry, I'm consuming male, male content. If there was person mentioned in there, oh my God, that would be hell and blah. I. Discourse surrounding that show.'cause it, it, it's frustrating. It's absolutely frustrating to hear, to see so much blatant homophobia come out around it. While it should be a celebration of acceptance, you know, and then we get to the Olympics and you're seeing the, the men's and women's Olympic hockey team doing great and extraordinary things of winning gold medals. And then they kind of shoot themselves in the foot afterwards when they're in a locker room talking to the president who says, oh, now I guess I have to invite the women too. And they all laugh about it. That's any, any goodwill that heated rivalry brought forth, I think was lost in those little tiny moments like that. And that's unfortunate because I know the author, Rachel Reed, who's the author of Heated Rivalry, the series, her literary agent is my literary agent. And so we share an agent, so I know how, even though we don't hear it a lot, how many people, how many men. How many athletes have seen that show and said, wow, this is, this is me. This is my world. This is what I feel like, and that is getting drowned out by the people who are saying, you know, saying stuff like, this isn't for you, this is for women, this is for blah, blah, blah. I just get frustrated when stuff like that happens.

Brett Benner 9:35

I, I get it. I unders, I understand totally.

TJ Klune 9:38

But I'm just happy that that show exists for the people who consume it. That's great. That's absolutely wonderful. Now, would it be cool if we could have, uh, the same thing done for a book by a queer man? That would be even better. Right? That would be amazing. Right,

Brett Benner 9:50

right, A hundred percent. So I know that when you were young, you started writing, you were journaling, right? Yeah. You started to just to to write or in books. When was it that you finally started to think oh my God, this could be something interesting and, and was the, the kind of fantasy thing was that. Always a part of you right from the beginning when you started to write?

TJ Klune 10:08

Well, you know what's so funny is fantasy has science fiction. Fantasy has always been my safe space. It's, it's the what I love to read the most, aside from horror, and I love the worlds that can be built. I love how you can either create new worlds wholesale or you can have fractured worlds that are just not so different from our own. I just love that feeling of, possibility of magic that anything can happen. That being said, my first book was not fantasy in any way, shape, or form.

Brett Benner 10:32

Mm.

TJ Klune 10:33

My first book was called Bear Otter in the Kid, and it was a family dramedy without any magic or any fantastical elements whatsoever. And I remember it comes with the hubris of being in your twenties thinking, oh, you know what? It's time. I'm gonna sit down and write the Great American novel. That's what I'm gonna do. And so that's what I told myself when I sat down to write the Great American novel. And then I finished that book, the first full length novel I'd ever written. I went online and keep in mind, even though it wasn't that long ago, this my first book came out in 2011. It might as well be a lifetime in terms of the publishing world and how that works now, because back in 2011 what I did was I went online, I Googled gay publishers, clicked on the first one, submitted my book to them, and then my book was a publisher. That's not how it works really. That's not how it works.

Brett Benner 11:21

Wow.

11:22

But,

TJ Klune 11:22

Yeah, I was with a small independent publisher for quite a few years before getting called up to the big leagues with.

Brett Benner 11:30

Well then I think I remember the, the whole Wolf series.'cause that was with a different publisher. I remember seeing the original covers for those.

TJ Klune 11:37

Yeah, that was with, that was with before tour, kind of together. That was primary, that was with my first publisher. And then, when fortunately, that publisher decided to embezzle monies from, from the authors, from their cover artists. From their editors. And so back in 2018. I had, I made the decision to pull every book I had published with them and self-published them on my own while at the same time getting ready to work with McMillan and tour in the publication of the Housing in Re Sea, which came out a couple of years after that. So I had to republish 20 something novels. In the space of like a couple of months all while getting ready to start doing all the big things with McMillan and to, it was a crazy time. It was an absolute, you were literally crazy time.

Brett Benner 12:25

You were like the literary Taylor Swift taking back properties.

TJ Klune 12:30

That's right. I took back my masters and I, I redid the bunch of stuff in them and I republished them. Yes. Yeah,

Brett Benner 12:36

exactly. Oh my God. I know that you talked about when you were young reading Stephen King. Yeah. Which again, that was so much of my childhood too, like you were talking about remembering things and I could remember getting Kerry, the first king I ever read out of the library and sitting down, I remember the cover.

TJ Klune 12:54

Yep.

Brett Benner 12:54

But, the other one, and I wanna get back to King in a second, but the other one you talked about was again. I was like, we are on the same trajectory was Boy Life by Robert McCammon.

TJ Klune 13:03

That is my favorite book ever written.

Brett Benner 13:06

Okay. I have to show you this edition. I dunno if you've seen this.

TJ Klune 13:09

No, I haven't. That is gorgeous.

Brett Benner 13:11

Okay. Yeah, and it comes Slip case. It's from a company called Sun to Up editions. It's like Sun, T-U-M-T-U-P. But. It is so beautiful. Yes. And it's illustrated and, um, but this was another book for me. Like You, it blew my mind. Like it's, it's one I wanted to write books those down as one of my favorite.

TJ Klune 13:33

Yeah. I read that book when I was 17 years old for the first time. And I've probably read it a dozen times since. But I wanted to write just like that. I wanted, that's the kind of writer I wanted to be was, was doing stories like that.'cause it was Stephen King esque, but it was very much McCamm in's own book. Yeah. And it was extraordinary. Yeah. I, it is my favorite book ever written and I've reread it many, many times. I love it to pieces.

Brett Benner 13:56

Well it's interesting talking about King and talking about Robert McCammon.'cause both of them, and I was thinking about it in relation to now. This book of yours because two of others of King's book, my favorite is the Stand

TJ Klune 14:10

Hmm. King book I read at age 11.

Brett Benner 14:14

Wow.

TJ Klune 14:14

I did not understand most of it.

Brett Benner 14:17

Yeah, I get it. I get it.

TJ Klune 14:19

Because it was, it was not even the stand, it was the complete and uncut edition that was like that 1500 page brick. Yeah.

Brett Benner 14:26

Yeah.

TJ Klune 14:26

That's the first book by Stephen King I ever read,

Brett Benner 14:28

God, there's such like touchstones of that book that walking through the Lincoln tunnels and mm-hmm. There's so many parts of that just, and just the characters, the

TJ Klune 14:35

trashcan, man,

Brett Benner 14:36

the

TJ Klune 14:36

characters. I freaking love the trashcan man.

Brett Benner 14:39

But the other one is. McCammon, um, Swanson Wan song, which was kind of his

TJ Klune 14:44

version of the stand,

Brett Benner 14:45

his version, and because I felt a bit that this is your stand in a lot of ways because of the kind of apocalyptic end of the world. And, and so wait, I just should take a moment and say, if you could just give a log line or a elevator pitch of this book, that would be amazing.

TJ Klune 15:04

Yeah. We Burn So Bright is a story of two queer men who've been, who've been together for over 40 years. Like the rest of the world, they hear the news that a black hole has is coming for Earth and our galaxy, and that in a month's time, everything and everyone will be gone. So they set across the country from Maine to Washington State to fulfill a final promise that they made before the world ends. And the book itself is just an amalgamation of different. Pockets of humanity and what it looks like and how different people react to the idea of the end of the world. And I had, I had two options with this book. I could have either gone, like the stand, I could have gone big and told many different types of stories all leading up. Like one part would've been one group, another part would've been another group. And then the third group. Or, or I could have written a tiny, small novel, the shortest book I've ever written. And the reason I decided to go the short route is twofold. One, writing short novels or short stories or novellas is infinitely harder than it is to write a full length novel for me. So I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could do it, because look, I know I'm a good writer, but I wanna be a better writer. If I practice, if I challenge myself, then hopefully I will learn to be a little bit better than I was the day before. And the second reason I chose to go with a shorter route is I knew this kind of story would be carrying a lot of emotional weight to it. And I worried that if I went the long route, that the weight would be become too heavy and the whole thing would just collapse. That would be too oppressive. That would be too dark, that would be too much. So instead, I decided to focus on two men. The people that they meet on their journey rather than a whole bunch of people. And I think the book is better off for that because I can imagine a version of this book that's 3, 4, 5 times as long and would it have the same emotional punch as the short version does, and I don't think it would. So I'm, I'm pleased that I decided to challenge myself to go the shorter route.

Brett Benner 17:07

Yeah. I'm so curious because I was. Because my first thought when I, I closed the last page and it sat there for a moment and I was like, wow, TJ goes dark. But, I have a question for you because I read this interview sometime ago and I had to look it up again. When I was getting ready for this, Steven Spielberg had talked about, he acknowledged a kind of. Shift towards kind of darker and more mature, more socially conscious themes in his work. Mm-hmm. As his career progressed that were part of it because of personal reflection, but also as a reflection of what was happening in the world around him. And so I'm wondering if that was a similar thing for you if you're finding it in your writing as you're moving forward, if this was something that was a reflection of something that you were witnessing and experiencing or, or just what that was for you.

TJ Klune 17:53

Yeah. So. I don't, even though the words COVID-19 and pandemic are not mentioned at all in this book, I don't know that this book could have been written without having gone through that. And the reason being is because we saw just how much the pandemic broke a lot of people, and I don't know that they have recovered. At the end of the day, I don't know that the world has recovered in the United States alone. Over a million people died and we just kind of moved on. I don't know that we've given ourselves the time to grieve, and that's just the way the world is now. Because if you're not keeping up, then you're getting left behind. You know, we have in the United States, we'll have mass shootings that are in the news for a single day, and then we've all moved on. When Alex Preddy, Renee Goode, Keith Porter, Jr. Were killed in the ice raids we heard about them for, which was. This book, I wanted to explore what would happen if something like the pandemic happened, but it was something that could not be stopped, something that was more global, something that was more universal because I saw the way people reacted during the pandemic as if their very lives were being destroyed by the simple fact that they had to wear a mask by some people who, by quite a few people, in fact. Decided to say, oh, the vaccines are killing people, or the vaccines are injecting things into, you know, all the, all the random conspiracy theories that rose up around that. And it, it took me a little bit to figure out why I wanted to go that direction and, and. The reason is is I am constantly fascinated by humanity. I often say that I don't like people because people are cruel and mean and disappoint, but I love humanity because humanity gave us books and music and art and dancing and all these wonderful things. Humanity is such a a thing that we have in every single one of us. Yet we are so focused on the divisions that separate us rather than the things that bring us together. And I just, I find that fascinating, this idea of how would people react when they can't do anything to save the day. How would people react if they're told, look, there's nothing you can do. This is just how it is and this is how it's going to be. Would people break? Yeah, I think so. Would other people rise up in the face of that kind of adversity like we saw during the pandemic? Absolutely, they will. It's just I am, I am constantly interested in the way that humans react to different situations, both the good and the bad, and I wanted to explore that with this. There's a, in we so bright, it's a very. Dialogue, heavy book, because I want to have these discussions about how we are as humans, do we deserve to be remembered? What is our legacy? Let's say that something happened to this world and a black hole came and everything was destroyed. What would our legacy be? Would we be remembered in the universe for being kind, for being good, or would be remembered for being cruel and destructive? And I think that there's no right answer to that question. I think that would be a mix of both. And so I wanted to explore that mixture

Brett Benner 21:02

and it definitely. It definitely evokes a ton of discussion. I mean, for anybody reading it, and it would be an interesting thing, I think, to see a book club discuss this book to see how you would act in a particular situation like this. And talking about the COVID-19 19 thing, I, I remember so distinctly, like I was so shocked at, at how, um. Well, frankly, selfish people had become and fighting over paper towels and toilet paper as if COVID-19 caused you to go to the bathroom,

TJ Klune 21:30

right?

Brett Benner 21:30

I mean, it was such a weird, all these weird things that, and

TJ Klune 21:33

that's a, were doing's a good word to use and some people might bristle at it, but the word selfish, I think is a very apt word to use because what else is it? What else is it beyond that, right? That you're, you're not thinking about anything other than yourself. Okay, look, let, let me walk this back a little. When something like that happens, if you are concerned about your family, and that is absolutely understandable, that is, but when your actions cause other people to have more concern for their wellbeing or for their families or for anything like that, that's where I have to kind of like draw the line because at the end of the day, you are not, you don't need to help. You can just be quiet. That's, it's very simple. Mm-hmm.

Brett Benner 22:12

Mm-hmm.

TJ Klune 22:13

But if your livelihood is to try and make things worse and try to make things harder, then to me, that's all you are. You're, you're basically an instigator who, who doesn't have the world and other people at the forefront of their mind. And I get it when you're scared. Yeah. And stuff like that, selfish behavior comes out. It's kind of like the same with grieving. Grief is inherently selfish because it's about something that happened to us, but at the end of the day, we can't let that consume us and let it become all we know. We have to be remembered that we are in this world with other people who have thoughts, feelings, emotions, and all of this stuff. Even if those thoughts, feelings, and emotions are counterintuitive to our own, we have to, we have to remember that people are just people even when they make stupid, dumb mistakes.

Brett Benner 22:56

Yep. So let's talk about your guys for a second, Don and Rodney. I loved these guys. I'm just so curious, what made you decide to center your story on these two men in their seventies?

TJ Klune 23:09

it kind of struck harkens back. To the conversation we were having a little bit earlier about how in the eighties and nineties, a large portion of the gay community was decimated by HIV and aids. There should be an entire generation of queer men above me, what we would lovingly refer to as queer elders, and they are there. There, some of them are there, but so many of them. We're left to die or we're killed off by Ronald and Nancy Reagan in the United States government. And what I wanted to do with that, as I get older, I'm 43, I turned 44 this year. As I get older, I find myself less and less interested in the stories of people in their twenties. Not to say that those stories aren't valid and important, but we, when do we get to see. Older queer men, queer as a lead of stories. When do we get to see 70 year olds in as the leads in science, fiction and fantasy? When do we get to see 70 year olds who are in a committed relationship, who are queer, get to be the leads of science fiction and fantasy stories? We, we hardly ever get to see anything like that. Love, romance. Finding your place in the world isn't just something for the young, it can happen to anybody at any age. And the fact that I get to write. These two gentlemen who are in their seventies who have been together for 40 years was such a joy, even with the subject matter, because there's this idea that that only the good things or only whatever things happen to, only to the young, but it can happen to anybody at any time. And the fact that we get to see these two people who have such a storied history together, such longevity, it is a type of love story that I don't know if I could have written. I don't know, five years ago, 10 years ago, just because I didn't have the life experience. But look, we know that women read more than men. That is, that is infinitely. That is infinitely provable. We know that, that because of that, women tend to be more empathetic and kind and open-minded and curious. But a curious byproduct for me over the past few years is just how many queer men have been coming to my events, coming to read books, especially older queer men who say. I didn't know books like this existed. I didn't know that there were books like this.'cause there were, there were books when I was your age like this. And if there were queer people in them, were there to teach. The straight characters a very valuable lesson. So it has been extraordinary to see queer men from all ages, from all walks of life, pick up a book and say, my God, I can see myself in a book. That's, that's never happened. So I hope that continues on with the release of this book because. You know, life doesn't stop when you reach 30 or 40 or 50. It may stop because of a black hole when you're in your seventies, but hey, you got to live that long to be able to see the world both. It's good and it's bad, and I just, I'm so thrilled that Rodney and Dawn exist as characters and that I got to be the one to tell their story.

Brett Benner 26:04

No, I am too. As someone. Who is one of those elders,

TJ Klune 26:10

we, you look

Brett Benner 26:10

good for

TJ Klune 26:11

it. So let's say that,

Brett Benner 26:13

no, I mean, I listen, being in the desert, I'm certainly surrounded by enough people who are, you know, mature, shall we say. Mm-hmm. So I, I just think it's. Kudos to you. I thought it was beautiful.

TJ Klune 26:26

Thank you. I appreciate that

Brett Benner 26:28

and I so appreciate it. Because I do think certainly in, in life in general and how we approach people and how we pro produce, I mean, how we react to elders and especially, you know, also in the GATE community, just in terms of, elderly gay men. It's like you reach a certain thing and then suddenly it's, you're invisible. And I know that kind of thing happens.

TJ Klune 26:47

Really? It does. It absolutely does. And you could be, you could be, in your forties or fifties and feel invisible in the LGBT LGBTQ community. Yeah. Because for however accepting we are, there's a, there is a significant ageist and, and sexist and, and you know, hell, I'll even say it sometimes transphobic and racist angle when it comes to the LG LGBTQ community, certainly. And so I, I, I, I want to remind people, you know, I'm a storyteller first and foremost, so I'm not necessarily thinking about the audience, but when I finish a book and a book is about like this. I think about the people who are going to read it and what they can mean, what it could mean to them. And I picture myself, I picture an an older queer man reading this book and, and thinking, this is the life that I lived. This is, this is what I went through at the time. These are the things that I lived through. There's a scene in the book, and this isn't gonna be a spoiler I'll, I'll try to keep it as vague as possible, but there's a scene in the book where Rodney and Don meet up with a younger lesbian couple and they have conversations about basically queer elders, that's what they call them. They have conversations. There's like this monumental decades long divide between these two, but they're coming together to find common ground, and I think it's so important. Especially for younger queer people who are, who are coming up and out into the world to know their history, to know where they came from, to know who stood before them, to be able to give them the rights that they have today. And I, I think that a lot of times, not everyone, of course, but I think a lot of times young people aren't necessarily interested in that. Knowing that, and I, I get why I remember being 18, 19, 20 years old going, eh, screw all of you guys. I'm coming out with a chip on my shoulder. You think you think it was bad before? Wait till you see it now. But I remember. In Tucson, Arizona where I lived at when I came out, I, I came out at the age of 18 and uh, I remember marching in my first pride parade in Tucson and an older drag queen who had adopted me. When I tried to get into the gay bar with a fake id, an older drag queen, you know, told me afterwards, you know, why we do this? You know, I was thinking, you know, me in my twenties. Yeah. It's pride. We're gay, everything is cool. We're story. The reason that Pride started in Tucson was in the 1970s, a queer man, a gay man, came to Tucson to visit some friends. They went to a gay bar, and as he was leaving the gay bar, Richard Heins was murdered by four teenagers in a gay bashing. And the four teenagers got probation. Their, that was their punishment for that, and that's how Pride started in Tucson. It started because of devastation. It started because of tragedy, and it led to these moments of joy where people like me. Could walk down the street looking like a twink covered in rainbow glitter and holding flags and everything like that. And it really added a weight to what I was doing to know that history, to know Richard Kins died. He was murdered by people who never paid for that crime. And here we were. Walking down the street singing, you know, pride songs and, and being happy and we're doing that because this man gave his life. And I think it's important that we, while we remember the joys and the celebrations, we have to remember what came before us for us to be able to stand here today.

Brett Benner 30:12

I agree. I agree a hundred percent. It's funny'cause when I was going through this, I was telling you earlier, I was pulling books from my son. I mm-hmm. Gay. And it's such an interesting dynamic. It always has been with, you know, having two dads and, but, I was pulling these books out, pulling out Giovanni's room, the front runner mm-hmm. And explaining to him. Just what that was and what that meant and the kind of history that's locked into just these stories that not everybody is aware of or know about. And also because going back, you know, when I was young, that's all we had. We didn't have this. We didn't have a you, we didn't have somebody who was creating stories that were doing the things or pulling you into the world the way it was. So you really had to look. So, like you said earlier, it was nonfiction, which was predominantly about the AIDS crisis. Mm-hmm. Before some kind of queer theory or nonfiction kind of thing, or you know, those books that we already discussed. So yes. All to everything you just said. I think it's, I think it's, I think it's so important and I love those two characters. I loved that whole sequence in the book.

TJ Klune 31:15

If there's people listening who wanted, who wanna read a fictionalized version of kind of what it felt like to live at the time, especially like around New York City, which is kind of, kind of where the front runner was set. There's a book called Night Swimmer by Joseph Olsen who, uh, it is. It is, has a high barrier of entry'cause it's written in second person. You know, with the whole idea of you do this, you do that, you say this. But it is a remarkable piece of fiction that came out, I believe in the late nineties, early two thousands that talks about that time period. And it is, it is extraordinary. It's not happy. It's not. You know, it's not something I wrote, but it is to me one of the most defining pieces of what it feels like to live, what it felt like to live as a queer man in that time period. So if you're wanting to expand your horizons a little bit, try reading Knight SW by Joseph Olsen.

Brett Benner 32:04

I'm so curious when you went into this, when you started writing these, these kind of characters that. The men come across, did you have generalized ideas? Were you thinking of it in terms of like, I would like this type of person or this type of incident to take place and then create it around it? Or was it more organic or how does that work for you?

TJ Klune 32:22

The only characters that I knew flat out going into this book were. Rodney Dawn, and a character by the name of Amelia. If you know Amelia's chapter, it's my favorite chapter in the book. I love that chapter more than anything in the world. I worked the hardest on that chapter just because I found it fascinating to be able to tell a story that way. But what I really wanted to do was make it almost like a vignette. Each chapter was a different kind of story. Here we have a history lesson here. We have a horror story here we have hippies. Here we have someone considering things that maybe other people didn't consider such as animals. What would animals be doing during this time? I wanted, I wanted to explore different facets of humanity because it's this idea. And I think it, it's a valid one that we are all masking at certain points in time. We are not necessarily saying our true thoughts and saying what we really feel because we're worried about how it's going to be received. But what happens when all those rules go right out the window and really doesn't matter what you say, when the world is going to end, who cares? So I wanted to see what it would like. When those masks started to slip a little bit, the very first group that Rodney and Dawn meet on their travels is a family. And this family is trying to very much hold themselves together. But you are seeing the fissures, you are seeing the cracks coming through, and that is, is fascinating to me. I didn't wanna show necessarily people breaking.'cause we know what that looks like. But what happens between point A and point Z being perfectly all right and being completely broken? What does that journey look like from A to Zed? And that's what, that's what I wanted to explore specifically. Again, talking about the family. We get to see the different dynamics between the mother, the father, and the children. And it's the mother that that takes center stage when her mask starts to slip a little bit. And I find it inordinately fascinating. How multifaceted people can be, especially when facing something as destructive as the potentially the end of the world. And how would we react? How would I react? How would you react? How, and it's, it's speculation because you know, these people don't exist. But it comes from the basis of reality because five years ago we, we thought maybe the world was ending and I saw how so many people acted during that. And so it's not so much of a leap to take that. Idea and to put it into this book and, and go from there. But Amelia was the only one that I flat out knew. The other ones kind of came as I went along. This book was not, I had no plans in writing this book. I didn't even have the idea for this book until my editor made a random comment when we were editing somewhere beyond the sea. In that book, Lucy mentions that black holes can't be seen with a naked eye, and as any good editor does, she wanted to fact check that. So she did. And then she posted in the, in the manuscript in a comment, just a random fact. Did you know that there's a one in a trillion chance? That a black hole could find its way to the Milky Way. And in my head, automatically I went. So there's a chance, there's a chance that could happen. And, so I didn't know anything about black holes. So I read, a book, a a couple of books, one by Carl Sagan, that was written in the late eighties and early nineties, and another one that was more recently released because obviously I, I'd wanna see where science had gotten us. You know, versus when Sagan was writing his book, and then I wrote the book in three weeks. This was the quickest I'd ever written a book. Wow. I sat down and I started writing this book without a huge outline that I normally have without huge plans that I normally have. I told myself it was gonna be, at the very least, if nothing came from it, it could be a writing exercise that I could see what I could do, and then three weeks later, the book was done.

Brett Benner 36:07

Wow. That's

TJ Klune 36:08

incredible. It was that book, it came out that incredible. It came out, it poured out of me. And in fact, I will say that maybe even two weeks of that time were specifically spent on chapter four. Everything else was probably written in like a week, week and a half. I spent on chapter four that has to do with Amelia. I spent twice as long on that entire chapter than I did on the entire rest of the book.

Brett Benner 36:32

Yeah, and what a, and what a chapter. Such an interesting thing because a theme that kind of comes up for me in reading this mm-hmm. is children. Even from the idea of when you get with the family in the beginning with John and Meghan in terms of this father wanting to protect his children, Amelia being a young girl, and facing what she's facing, and then later the stories that come out from this lesbian couple mm-hmm. In terms of them coming out to their families. And it's just so interesting how these kind of threads. Pull through the book.

TJ Klune 37:02

Young people, when they meet the lesbian couple, one of them says something to the effect of, I'm never gonna know what it's like to be old. What does that feel like? And that that I wasn't planning on writing that line until it just kind of came out and I remember stopping and going, oh man, that's heavy. That would be heavy. Could you imagine, say that, that we were facing the end of the world, what would you tell a young person who came to you and says, what does it feel like to be older? What does it feel like? I'll never get to be that? What does it feel like to be in your forties, your fifties, sixties, seventies? What does that feel like? I don't know if I would know how to answer something like that. At the same time, I would know that even though I've been through extraordinary ups and downs in my entire life, I am so thrilled to be 43 years old and still here. I can't wait to be 45. I can't wait to be 50. I can't wait to be 60. I can't wait to get older to learn more about myself. But to, to, to have that line in the book. I'm never gonna get older. That just blows my mind sometimes. Like, think about that when you're on a world scale. What if you were told, this is as old as you're gonna get, you're gonna be a young person forever. And you know, not because you're gonna live forever, but because that's gonna be your legacy. That's when you're gonna pass. And that, that stuck with me. And I, I'll admit that, sent me into a bit of a, a tailspin thinking about that.

Brett Benner 38:22

It's also interesting what you're saying about getting older and, and being 45 and 60 and 70. Mm-hmm. And this is a question that like Don in the book questions all about, wondering when he lost his kind of curiosity and wonder that he found in youth and did it kind of disappear with the cynicism with age? But I was thinking about this and it's. It's hard sometimes because you know too much, right? Mm-hmm. You start to learn more as you go along and about people and just about life, and yet at the same time, something that I'm learning as I'm getting older and watching my friends get older is to remain kind of youthful and vibrant.

TJ Klune 38:54

Yes.

Brett Benner 38:54

It all comes down to curiosity.

TJ Klune 38:57

That's what it is, and for me, for me, that word is to wanna

Brett Benner 39:00

engage,

TJ Klune 39:00

right? For me, the word curiosity more goes to imagination. I. I love being able to use my imagination and I think, have I gotten cynical? Yes. That's what happens with life and especially living in the year 2026 with all the things that are going on now. You can't help but be cynical. Yeah. At the same time, that cannot become all, you know, you cannot let your life become mired in cynicism because it is so much harder to get back from that. Than it is to sink into it. Right? And I think a lot of people don't understand that, that, you know, life sucks. Life is life. Everything is on fire. People are angry at everybody else. People hate people of color. People hate trans people. People hate the queer community. And it's very easy to take a cynical route in that. What I try to do is try to remind myself that the world is so much more whimsical and mysterious than we actually know, and that a majority of people in the world don't really care about all these things that so many people are trying to make a big deal of. In my opinion, and I hope this is true, but I choose to believe that there are more good people in the world than there are bad, but we just hear about the bad ones because they're the ones who make the most noise. I just, yep, you're right. I don't know. It's, it's, it's important to me that I don't get fully mired in cynicism because I worry that I'll lose my imagination and lose that touch of wonder that I still have for the world.

Brett Benner 40:28

So do you view yourself at heart as an optimist?

TJ Klune 40:31

I think so, even though there's an abundance of evidence to the contrary of, of how the world shouldn't be. Yeah. But I, I, I believe in the inherent goodness of people. I believe that people can be stupid, myself included. I think that people make stupid mistakes that are selfish and and mean. I think that. There are people in this world who, who stay, do things like vote simply because they wanna hurt other people. But at the end of the day, I think that we are so much more united than others would have us think. I think that so many of us are just trying to get through our day to day. Trying to be a good person, whatever that means to you. And, and I hope that's the case because again, it is so easy to become tired and exhausted and not fight back for any of your beliefs or anything like that. But if you're not gonna do it, who, who's gonna do it for you? I mean, you can. You can hope that people in power will come to their senses and make the right decisions. But when has that. Happened like ever.

Brett Benner 41:37

Yeah.

TJ Klune 41:37

Yeah. It's, we only got one shot at this man. I don't know if I believe in reincarnation, afterlife, whatever. But for all intents and purposes, for the purposes of this discussion and the purposes of our lives, we got one shot at this. So shouldn't we be doing the most to make the most of. I don't understand why.

Brett Benner 41:53

Agree

TJ Klune 41:53

there are certain people who feel the need to tear everything down and try to make things worse when we could be doing so much to try to bring the world together and, and make us more unified rather than disparate and divisions being placed.

Brett Benner 42:06

I agree. It's very much the, as I'm listening to you talk, it's the Anne Frank phrase, right? In spite of everything, I really do believe that people are good at heart, and I wanna believe that too. I, I, I really do. I wanna believe that. I feel like right now we're in the Empire Strikes Back portion of the world.

TJ Klune 42:22

That is a very good way to put it. That I, I honestly see that too. And what happens at the, at the very end, the, the empire loses, right. Always will lose. Yeah. You know, and it may not feel like it, it may feel like that we are in fact losing right now. But at the end of the day, it's the fight. That's the most important thing. It is the fact that people still stand up and still use their voices. It's the fact that people in Minnesota stood up and said no. When it came to Amazing. Good and Alex Pre, and it's the fact that that, you know. Pushed hard enough, people will respond in kind. And I wish it didn't have to go that far, but maybe it does, man. Maybe it really does. For people to open their eyes and wake up and think, you know what? We need to be doing more to protect not only our homes, but our neighbors, our friends, our colleagues, the people that we see at the grocery store or the bank or whatever. And I don't know, like the, going back to the idea of the pandemic, it, it showed really how selfish we as, as humans, can be where we are. Not thinking about anyone else but ourselves. You know when you're going on a plane and you're wearing a mask and somebody's like, why are you wearing a mask? I still mask when I go on planes because you know what I learned? I don't get sick when I wear a mask and I travel or go to conventions or anything like that. But you know what? I get quite often people side eyeing me for wearing a mask in in public, and it just blows my mind that we are still. Thinking about stuff like that. Like who cares? Live, live and let live. Who

Brett Benner 43:48

cares?

TJ Klune 43:48

It doesn't matter. Right. That's why I never understood like this rise of, of homophobia and transphobia, specifically transphobia that we're seeing who cares what a person does in their home and their life in the state of, say, Arizona, while you live in Texas. So you're raising holy hell.

Brett Benner 44:05

That's exactly right. How does any of it affect you? How

TJ Klune 44:09

does it Nothing. It doesn't, it doesn't,

Brett Benner 44:09

it doesn't. Nothing.

TJ Klune 44:10

It's a simple fact that it is beyond your. Your capabilities of understanding. So you decide, rather than to try and understand, you decide to say that it's evil, that it's the devil that, that you're gonna hell and all that. And you know what do I believe that people can change? Yes, I do. Do I feel the, the desire to give them the grace to do so? No. Maybe not. Maybe not right now, prove to me there's, there's, what's her name, the the Jewish Space Laser Lady. What's her name? Yeah, the politician, Mar Taylor

Brett Benner 44:38

Greene Marree.

TJ Klune 44:39

She's now coming out and saying, you know, this is all bad. This is, stuff is bad, is happening. I Trump is bad. He's doing this. I'm like, okay. Thank you for saying so, but weren't you for years saying all this other stuff about how terrible we all are and all of this, and I remember having, over the holidays, I got into a debate with my sister who's infinitely smarter than I'll ever be, and she told me people like that deserve to have a bit of grace. You know, how else will they learn if you don't, if you automatically cut people off?'cause of something that they did. How will they ever have the space to grow and learn? Just because they're saying things now doesn't mean we have to trust them. But you have to give them the space to grow and learn. And my sister is right, but in my head I'm thinking, screw her. Screw Marrie Taylor. Agree. Screw all these people. You know, it it, it's funny, I told, I told my sister flat out. Look, you don't understand. You don't know what it's like to live as a marginalized person. You don't know what it's like to live. And she looks at me and she goes, I'm a woman. I know how it feels. And I was like, oh, shit. You're right. So I, I get, I get where she's coming from. I get why my sister was saying, and I get that's a very good point, that sometimes in order to find their way back, people have to atone and learn grace and we have to learn the same and blah, blah, blah. But in the back of my head, I'm thinking, screw that. These people are trying to break me down. These people are trying to hurt my community. These people said and did things that, that in a, in a fair and just world would've seen them either fired or put in jail. And now we're supposed to show them grace. Why is it always up to us to show grace? Why is it always us up to the marginalized groups to be like. You have a chance to grow better. I understand why my sister says the bigger person, what she does bigger, right? Sometimes I don't wanna be the bigger person. Sometimes I don't wanna do what Michelle Obama said, and when we go, when they go low, we go high. Sometimes when they go low, I wanna be down in the dirt lower with, with my, with my boot on their neck while they're drowning in the dirt. Yes, I, I get that. And it's, it's just, again, it's humanity. We're, we're all multifaceted, all different, all have our own thoughts, forms and beliefs and sometimes. Sometimes I just wanna choke a bitch what I wanna do.

Brett Benner 46:50

Yeah. I think that's a perfect place to draw the end of this conversation. Choke a bitch, pj, I literally can sit and talk to you all day.

TJ Klune 46:58

Thank you. You've been such a great host and you have very good taste in books, let tell you.

Brett Benner 47:03

Well, that's what I'm saying. I feel like we could, we could exchange reading lists probably. Yeah. Everybody, please go out and get the book. Buy Independent. If you're able to buy Independent, do

TJ Klune 47:12

please, please, please Indy. Find a library. That's totally awesome.

Brett Benner 47:16

Yes, yes. Um, I'm so excited for not only this book, but everything else that you have coming down the pike. A plethora of things. It's all very exciting. So congratulations and thank

TJ Klune 47:27

you. Thank you very much. I'm very excited. Yeah, three books in a year. I'm gonna be.

Brett Benner 47:32

Incredible. Incredible. I mean, sit down, Joyce Carol, oat Stephen King. What are you doing?

TJ Klune 47:39

Right. Because I, I hope that, you know, we can end the note on this. I hope that when I'm in my seventies, like Stephen King, I'm still putting out a book or two a year, man, because that I feel like you're gonna

Brett Benner 47:49

be,

TJ Klune 47:50

do I think so too? I think so. I have so many ideas in my head that I don't have a long enough life to be able to tell all of them. So I'm gonna be until my hands fall off and I can't do it anymore. I'm gonna keep on writing.

Brett Benner 47:59

Well, we're the luckiest for that, Thank you so much, tj, and if you've liked today's episode or other episodes that you have heard on Behind the Stack, please consider liking and subscribing so that you don't miss an episode. Also, what would be really helpful to me is if you could go to your podcast platform of choice and give the show five stars, and if you've got the time, what would be really amazing is if you could leave a review. All of these things are really helpful to get the podcast in front of other listeners. I so appreciate you being here. I will be back next week with another episode, and until then, happy reading.