Linda Villarosa has long used her writing to raise awareness. A journalist, editor and now a novelist, she’s written about a variety of important subjects from LGBT issues, African-Americans and HIV, to parenting and health. In 1991, as the executive editor of Essence magazine, she co-wrote an article with her mother entitled “Coming Out.” The article – about, you guessed it, how coming out affected Linda’s relationship with her mother – received a record number of responses at that time in the magazine’s history.
Villarosa is also the author or co-author of three books: Body & Soul: The Black Women’s Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being, Finding Our Way: The Teen Girls’ Survival Guide and The Black Parenting Book. Dafina Books recently published her first novel, Passing for Black. The book follows Angela, a young black woman whose search for identity crosses lines of race, sexuality and family. Villarosa spoke with AfterEllen.com about the book, what inspired the novel and the challenges of using her skills as a journalist to write fiction.
Warning: Some spoilers for Passing for Black
AfterEllen.com: Toni Morrison has famously said, “If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Is Passing for Black that kind of book?
Linda Villarosa: I think so. Someone asked me last week, “I finished your book and I was surprised at your age that you’re doing a coming-out novel.” And I thought, well, that’s just the book I had in me. I hope I have another one, but this is the one I definitely had in me.
Also, I like coming-out novels. I like to read about people who are struggling for something and then they get to it. That’s what this character was doing. It felt really natural. I don’t think I’m a natural fiction writer, I’m much more natural as a journalist, but this is the book that I had in me.
AE: As a journalist, you’ve written about many of the things your main character Angela experiences in the book – from coming out to how gays and lesbians are accepted within the African-American community, to the Bible and homosexuality. How was it different writing about these subjects in a novel? Did you have more freedom?
LV: I felt like I had so much more freedom. I went through a lot of drafts because I had no experience. People said: “Oh, you’re a good storyteller, you’re funny, but it doesn’t come through in your journalism. Your journalism is so serious.” I thought that was interesting. And it’s true. My “in print” voice had been much more serious than I found it in my real life. So it was really nice trying to find that voice.
The other thing people say when you’re a beginning novelist is to write what you know. These were a lot of the things I knew mushed together. I just started to get into the flow. I thought, this is what I’m supposed to be writing, this is stuff I know about. It’s just through a different rubric. But it’s nice to be able to write in my own voice, which is funnier and more upbeat, crazier than the more serious journalism that I’ve done.
AE: The book addresses important issues such as race and sexuality, but one of the many things I loved about it was how all of the characters are so authentically and richly flawed.
LV: Something I’ve found with fiction or movies [is that] you’ll see black characters either completely flawed or perfect. I just saw Sex and the City, and Louise, the Jennifer Hudson character, they were calling her Saint Louise. You have the four women in the movie who are total train wrecks and you still love them, and then you have this goody two shoes perfect black character fixing everybody else. I was like, “I want to have black people and a white woman who are a mess.” Everybody is a mess.
AE: I thought that contributed to its sexiness.
LV: Thanks. That just happened with the story. I had never written a sex scene before and when I showed it to my agent, she said to me point blank, “Did you write this?” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Did someone write this for you?”
I was like: “What are you talking about? Of course I wrote it.” She said, “Wow, I didn’t think you had that in you.” [laughs] She’s my agent from my medical books, too, so I felt like it must be pretty good.
AE: In the article “Coming Out,” which you co-wrote for Essence magazine with your mom, Clara Villarosa, you talk about the idea of passing and how it can be both more difficult and easier to stay closeted. I found it interesting that Angela’s lover Cait forces her out of the closet. Can you talk about why you wrote the scene that way?
LV: It just seemed like the natural thing. It would have taken [Angela] longer to come out of the closet because she was so unsure of what she wanted to do. There was no pressure until Cait came along to put the pressure on her. I thought, she’s not brave in that way, she’s not really radical, and so she’s going to need a catalyst to get her out of the closet.
AE: In the article, “Coming Out,” you also write that you had to reinvent yourself after realizing that you were gay and no longer fit into the straight world. Even though that was over a decade ago, it’s interesting that this is still one of Angela’s primary struggles.
LV: The idea of passing is really interesting to me. The first draft of the book had nothing to do with passing. There was another title. It was different. And when I would have people read it they said, “There’s not a theme here.”
I read it again and I thought, so many of the people here are passing. Angela’s passing. Tatiana’s passing. The transgendered people are passing – those were the ones who came right to mind.
Angela’s passing in a lot of ways. She’s passing for straight. She’s passing for black because she feels she’s not the right kind of black. She’s struggled with her black authenticity and that’s a common theme in my thinking, just trying to be the right kind of black. Angela had to pass in many ways. And I thought, this makes sense.
This whole thing is about passing. Someone said [I] should read Nella Larsen, and so I read her book Passing and realized this is exactly what I’ve done. It helped me get the book out of my computer and into the world, to find that underlying theme and tie it together and move it along.
AE: What was the original title?
LV: Someplace to Happen, which in my family is really hilarious because it’s one of my mother’s favorite sayings. When I was growing up, I never dressed how she wanted me to dress. We’d be going to church and she’d say, “OK, show me what you’re wearing.”
I’d come out and look like crap, and my mom wanted the whole family to look good and have it all together for church. This is what she always said: “You’re not going out with me like that. You look like you’re going someplace to happen.” [laughs] That’s not a common phrase.
AE: The scene at the end of the book in the Hair-itage House, when Angela’s mother’s friend debates the owner and stylist about what the Bible says about homosexuality, also reminded me a bit of “Revelations,” your follow-up article to “Coming Out.” Was that an empowering scene to write?
LV: It was really fun. I had this horrible experience right after I wrote “Coming Out” where I was traveling around talking about coming out to LGBT college students. One time I went and there was – against me personally – all these people from a Christian campus group. They were protesting and throwing out quotes at me.
It was so horrible because I grew up Christian and I just could not understand. It was naïve, but I had never been personally attacked by Christians. It was like, “What in the hell, literally hell, is going on here?”
I went back to my hotel that night and read the Bible. I looked up these quotations and I was like: “What is this? This does not say that. This is not what this is about.” And so I started having Bible smack-downs with people. I’d find these Bible quotations and then I’d read them back.
But a lot of people, when you do that, they’ll just say, “Well, I can’t really support your lifestyle because of my pastor.” That’s easy. People are so unfamiliar with the Bible that they don’t know the other stuff that we totally let go about odd food combinations and divorce. To put a character with it was really fun, because it wasn’t as academic as it was in “Revelations.”
AE: One of the other issues you address in the book is the lesbian community’s treatment or mistreatment of transgender men and women.
LV: To have Cait not down with that was a little risky because I didn’t want lesbians not to like her. But there are so many people where it’s like, “No, this is a lesbian space.” Oh my God, who gets to decide that? How do you decide that?
I had seen a little bit of that when I was working at the Times. There was a man who went through his transition to become a woman. It was really great to get to know her. I had never been to Michigan [the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival], but people would come back with the stories and I was like, what is happening there? Where are the transgendered people? Who’s mad? I had everybody break it down for me so that I could understand.
It was funny having friends read [those sections in the book] – “God, that sounds like what I said.”
AE: Did you have people see themselves in the novel?
LV: It’s funny, the people that I did take a little of their personalities didn’t notice at all. The mother character is close to my mother – not exactly, but close. My mother did not notice a thing. I said, “Do you think that character’s a little like you?” And [she said], “No, I didn’t think that at all.”
But friends noticed it about other friends. They said, “Hey, that sounds like so and so,” or “Oh, that’s sounds like you.” But it wasn’t Angela, it was the mother or Mae.
AE: The danger of being friends with a writer.
LV: Exactly. We host a dinner every Sunday with all of our kids and some of our friends and we invite different writers over. We warn them that anything they say is a free-for-all, anyone can use anything.
AE: I thought the treatment of transgender men and women was a compelling contrast to Angela’s insecurity about what it means to be a black woman or a lesbian. At one point she says she’s “wrestled with the tyranny of striving for authenticity.” That’s a pretty strong statement.
LV: That’s what it felt like. When I started thinking about when you have just made your transition as a transgendered person, that is what it feels like. You feel like you are not real yet. You just want to be in your own new skin. And it dawned on me: That’s what it feels like when you don’t feel you’re the right kind of black person. You know you’re never going to be white. You can’t go back to being the man you were; you’re now a woman, but you have to figure out how to be comfortable in this new skin. I was like, wow, I’ve felt that before. A lot of black people have felt that before.
AE: Was that sense of discomfort connected to Angela’s resistance to labels? She does not identify as lesbian or bisexual.
LV: She’s so recently come out, she doesn’t feel the need to do that. She’s not ready. But then again, she may never be ready because maybe she just is, “This is me. This is me and you don’t have to call me anything. This is who I am.”
She goes through all of these labels a bunch of times. She goes through it with what to call Cait – my partner, my this, my that, my girlfriend. And then she also goes through, “Oh my God, first I’m a lesbian, then I’ve broken up my relationships and then I’m going to become a mother.” All of this stuff happens to her very fast, so she can’t even grab onto a label.
AE: A bit of whiplash.
LV: Yeah, label whiplash. [laughs]
AE: Your mom is the retired founder and co-owner of the Hue-Man Bookstore in Harlem. Did she influence your desire to be a writer?
LV: We influenced each other. She didn’t own the bookstore until I was in college. I took a black history and literature course, and my mom hadn’t read a lot of the books. I came home with all of these books, and she got so excited and interested in black literature. She had always liked to read but she hadn’t done it from a uniquely African-American experience. That got her to say, “I always wanted to own a business and I think it should be a bookstore.”
I always wanted to be a writer. When I was a little girl, once a week I would spend the day and the night with my great aunt who was a high school principle. She thought me how to read. I could read really early – before anyone else – and I just loved to read. I remember her looking at me and – you know how one little thing can change your whole life?
I was 6 years old and she said, “I think you’re going to be a writer.” That stuck with me forever. I always thought I was going to be a writer of some sort.
For more on Linda Villarosa, visit her official website, or buy her novel Passing for Black.
