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Ariel Schrag on “Adam,” queer identities and writing for “The L Word”

When Ariel Schrag was living in New York City in the early 2000s, she found herself in an interesting time for the queer community. She was dating a trans-identified woman and many of her friends were transitioning into men, so she was entrenched in a community of varying gender expressions and sexualities.

“I was really obsessed with it for a while,” the out writer said during an interview at the Abbey in West Hollywood. “My girlfriend was actually one of the organizers of Camp Trans so it was all very in my mind.”

The kinds of things she learned through her friends and from her own experiences went into her new novel Adam, which is already upsetting people who haven’t read more than its premise. What’s so upsetting to some is the that the title character, Adam, is a 16-year-old middle class white teenage cisgender boy who pretends to be a female-to-male transman in order to date an older woman he meets while spending the summer with his lesbian sister in New York City.

“It’s been really interesting just kind of seeing responses and so many people just read the premise and then stop. Like, ‘No. No, I’m offended. I can’t move forward from this point,'” Ariel said. “Which is, if you think about it, really, like, the reason I wrote it. Because that’s disturbing and I wanted to see what that meant and explore it. And it feels so weird to me that somebody would see something that rubs them the wrong way and not find that interesting. I wouldn’t want to read a book just about something I agreed with. That’s not interesting to me.”

Known primarily for her work as a graphic novelist, Ariel has been publishing her work since she was a teenager. Her memoirs Likewise and Potential are her most famous, and also landed her a spot the writing team of The L Word for two seasons. But it was writing a novel that interested her most as a project she kept close to her heart, and even her closest friends didn’t know what it was about until it was ready to go to print.

“Because I didn’t want to talk about it and I didn’t want other peoples’ opinions to taint it,” she said. “I didn’t want anybody to say ‘Oh you should be careful’ and be nervous. I just kept the idea inside my head for the five years that it took. And so because of that, there was always the idea that ‘OK, if I think this is too weird, I don’t actually have to publish it. I’m just going to try this.'”

Adam is a coming-of-age-story about a teenage boy who isn’t as closed-minded as his peers, but enters into a world he knows little about with a balance of curiosity and naiveté. His older sister, Casey, is an activist in Brooklyn who hangs out with other queers at gay bars, sex clubs and L Word viewing parties. When Adam goes to live with her, he is invited along and gets an inside look at a community that is generally privy only to those who identify as one or more parts of the LGBT acronym. Because it’s so rare a 16-year-old straight teenage boy would find himself in these situations, Adam is mistaken as a transguy by two different women who are interested in getting to know him better, including a breathtaking girl named Gillian. In an effort to keep up the charade and continue to date her, Adam researches everything he can about transitioning, and all of the facts he learns helps readers to understand basic information about trans identities that they might otherwise not comprehend.

“I wanted to make the story as grounded and naturalistic and real as possible. It was such a bizarre idea that a teenage boy would do this that I had to make it as real as possible to make it actually seem believable, “Ariel said. “I didn’t want it to seem like a stretch our outlandish or crazy. The whole book was really me creating this extremely real world and cratfing–doing everything I could to make you say ‘OK I understand how this could happen.’ It’s like the hook of the book is that he pretends to be trans to date this lesbian but that doesn’t even actually happen until page 200 so much work was done getting him to that point.”

Adam is bigger than the plotpoint that has some up in arms, as Ariel includes characters, conversations and subjects that aren’t often touched upon in mainstream or queer novels alike. In one gay marriage rally scene, a small group of queers are protesting against marriage altogether. There’s a lot of gender, sexuality, classism and racism policing, and none of the characters are without their distinct flaws.

“I’m including myself in those people. When I was in my early twenties, I couldn’t jump fast enough to put people in their place about what the right politics to have were,” Ariel said. “I was thrilled to know, to be able to say ‘Well gay marriage isn’t necessarily good’ or ‘Michigan is bad because of this.’ And part of it was because I politically believe in those things and part of it was because I got a jolt of power and excitement getting to school someone. I think that’s, on the internet, there’s all this schooling and calling out. I don’t know that it’s always pushing us in the right direction.”

The scenes set at Camp Trans and Mich Fest are interesting in that they are set in 2006, but reveal a conversation that we are still having as a community today.

“I obviously think trans women should be welcome at Michigan, but I was always fascinated by the thrill that people get from, ‘Oh my politics are more sophisticated than yours,'” Ariel said, “and I also thought it was disturbing the way they would put down these older lesbians who had been through so much and experienced things that these young kids hadn’t experienced. And I felt like there was a lack of respect. Even though I did agree with what kids at Camp Trans were saying, I did think there was a lack of respect and I kind of wanted to comment on that as well. The sort of brattiness you find in younger queers these days.”

It’s refreshing that Ariel allows her characters to be as real as possible, even if that includes some negative aspects of the queer community. Despite the backlash she might receive from some (though she says it hasn’t been too bad thusfar), Ariel said she knows she is ultimately doing the community justice but making us three-dimensional individuals vs. flat portraits of unrealistic and flat bores.

“In my heart, and at the end of the day, I believe that my politics are in the right place and the book will ultimately promote ideas that I believe in which are basically the idea of celebrating diversity,” Ariel said. “And, really, it doesn’t have to be more specific than that. Let people do what they want to do, let people be what they want to be, let them change what they want to be. And so I felt that if that was the sort of core, you can at the same time create realistic portrayals of how people talk about these issues. I just wasn’t interested in writing anything that was sugarcoated or sanitized or boring, basically. All the conversations in the book are conversations that I’ve witnessed or been a part of of so I thought it was important to put all these different perspectives on the issues out there.”

When it came to selling the book, which has a few sex scenes but nothing more graphic than you’d find in Fifty Shades of Grey, Ariel said it was initially pitched as YA, which elicited some funny responses from publishers.

“I was like ‘I honestly don’t care. Whatever you think will sell the most books or get it the most attention.’ And I thought it could be great to educate people,” Ariel said. “I think it would be awesome if all sorts of teenagers read it. The sex might be graphic but it’s also all consensual, it’s not actually that disturbing. If you think about it, it’s queer so it’s unfamiliar, but it’s not actually that weird. So she sent it out to a bunch of young adult editors and they were all freaked out. And I think that they actually–because she would send me the responses–and some people were like “Whoa, I don’t know! I’ve never read a young adult book with lavender dildos!” And what’s so bad about a lavender dildo? You can have a penis but not a lavender dildo? Why?” Anyway, Some people responded to the sex but a lot of people seemed to respond to the depictions of queer people. One wrote back and said, ‘My daughter has gay friends and they don’t act like these stereotypes.’ It’s like, ‘OK, first of all, straight lady, shut up. This is actually my life, and this is what it’s like.'”

The character of Gillian was based on Constance McMillen, the teenager who wasn’t allowed to bring her girlfriend to prom in Mississippi. Ariel took inspiration from the idea that Candace was very publicly declaring her lesbianism at such a young age, and wondered what might happen to her in the future.

“All I kept thinking was, ‘What if in a year or two this girl is into guys'” How and what sort of shame or what sort of anxiety will that cause her and how fucked up it is that could happen and she had become this poster girl,” Ariel said. “I think labels are fun and they can be useful but really am very anti the whole label phenomenon. If anything, I would say the book is an attack on labels across the board.”

Without spoiling anything, it’s fair to say that Adam does not get any kind of terrible repercussions for his lying to Gillian.

“I’ve been reading a lot of reviews where people who are nervous about the premise want Adam to be really punished, and they’re not happy that he, in their sense, gets away with it,” Ariel said. “I don’t see it that way. … I think it’s the whole idea of Adam being punished is really interesting because he’s deceiving somebody – he’s lying, that’s wrong. But people are really angry specifically about appropriating an oppressed identity. I just think that’s fascinating to think about because what is so terrible about appropriating an oppressed identity? And what’s terrible is that people are oppressed. But ultimately his deception is just a deception. He’s also lying about his age but no one seems to care about that. Why is one deception worse than another? I just think it’s interesting to think about that.”

Ariel’s including a group viewing of The L Word in an early scene in the book is very meta, as she said she had input into several storylines Max/Moira was a part of, although she didn’t write the specific episode they are viewing in the book.

“I was 25 and it was my first real job and I got to move out here and work with so many cool people,” Ariel said of the experience. “It was really really great. I really love the process. Just being in the writers room and writing scripts. I found it really really fun.”

Ariel said it was a very collaborative experience in the writers’ room, but shared a few episodes she outlined and is proud to recall.

“I definitely contributed a lot to the trans benefit party, to what sort of things would be happening there that somebody would have cupcakes that looked like breasts,” she said. “I wrote a large part of Season 3, Episode 3 when Moira who turns into Max, when they all go to dinner and she worries about how expensive it is and tells this really awkward lobster story. I think that came up in the room and I wrote the outline, so a fair amount of dialogue in that episode of mine.”

Being a writer for the series also afforded her the opportunity to visit the set in Vancouver, although it did break the spell of the show a bit for her.

“It was so cool but also a little depressing because you think Bette and Tina live in this amazing house and it’s half the front of the house inside a dark warehouse,” she said. “It’s all taking place in a dark giant warehouse in Canada. Everything!”

Ariel is hoping to continue in her graphic novel work, TV writing and novel careers, but is also still waiting for a film adaptation of her graphic memoir Potential.

“It’s still in the works,” she said. “I’m working with a new director right now so we’re kind of doing drafts on the script. Hopefully it’ll happen!”

And if there were to be a feature made about Adam, even better. But it would definitely have to be told from the point of view of the teenage boy and not, as many have suggested to her, his queer older sister, Casey.

“I wasn’t interested in just telling a story about what it was like to be queer in early 2000s New York,” Ariel said. “I mean that’s certainly a huge inspiration for the book and where it takes place. But I was ultimately interested in why would a cis guy passed as a trans guy and what would happen if a cis guy passed as a trans guy and that story had to be told from Adam’s perspective. I also wanted to make this world accessible to everybody and doing it through the eyes of a newcomer was a way to do that.”

Adam is available now.

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