If Kate Bush and Björk had a baby, it would be The Maidenheads, the debut book from Benny B. Peterson. This novel is a queercore punk symphony of the human heart and limbs. Benny and I discuss trans resilience, art, and the soundtrack of our lives. This book is front row to the concert where you are checked out, and move with body and soul. We dive deep into queer history, and hope for the trans youth of today.
Jorge Estupinan: How does it feel to finally have the finished book in your hands and soon out into the world?
Benny Peterson: I have been writing fiction daily for 20 years before I sold this book, without publishing anything. I wrote two novels and a million short stories. I tried to sell the other two novels. So I think that I went into the publication phase of something I didn’t expect and I didn’t come out of my MFA assuming that I was going to publish a book at all.
And in fact, I came out of my MFA at like 30, I was like 36, 37 about to have a second kid, and I was just sort of like, maybe it’s not gonna happen for me. It doesn’t happen for everybody. I think that selling the book was exciting. And I think for the most part, I’ve been able to just enjoy it. I’m just super excited. This has been such a dream and I’m just really grateful.
JE: There was a transgender day of visibility post where you say “Visibility to ourselves, meanwhile, is what allows us to find ourselves, to grow, to heal. Without that, we’re lost.” Do you have advice for the youth of today who are lost and need guidance?
BP: I mean, it’s such a hard time to be a young trans person. It’s such a hard time to be a trans person at any age. But I think especially a young trans person, especially if you’re in a state where it’s really unsafe to be yourself.
I think what I was trying to say in that post was, I think up until the last couple of years, there’s been a lot of focus around visibility in terms of outward visibility, you know, like we need to be seeing trans people in public life. We need to see trans people in our movies. Also, in a situation where outward visibility isn’t always safe, can we still connect with ourselves? Can we still connect with other trans people and find community? Can we still embrace ourselves? And find ways, because I think there is, it is unsafe in many places to be out. It is also unsafe, I think, to not be out in certain ways, to not be allowed to be yourself.
I think as a community, we need to find ways to allow each other visibility in ways that remain safe. You find one friend that you feel safe with, and then you can be safe together. You find a community where you can be safe, you find a place where you can be safe. But I think finding those places is really, really important, finding those people in those places. Because if we can’t be visible to anyone, I think that’s when we really fall apart.
JE: Were there any books that you read that helped shape “The Maidenheads”?
BP: I came out pretty late, both as queer and trans, and all basically in the timeframe. I’ve been working on The Maidenheads for 10 years. So in those 10 years, I came out first as queer and then as trans. And when I was first coming out, I think there was a year where I just didn’t read any non-queer writers. I mean, that’s still kind of my life. I mostly read queer writers. I was reading everything back to lesbian pulp novels from the fifties to Radclyffe Hall, and Patricia Highsmith, who’s like one of my favorite all-time writers. And I think so many of those books shaped how I write about desire and queer physicality.
We joke a little bit about yearning and how it is such an aspect of queer fiction. It has a real history, and yearning and longing are so present in queer fiction, because it has historically been hard for queer people to get together or even know who we are. So you’re yearning because you’re being kept apart from the person that you want to be with.
I read Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas. That was a book that really meant a lot to me in terms of thinking about how to write about gender nonconformity, and that novel is set in 2001. And the main one of the two characters is very clearly a trans man, but is never described as that in the book. When I read that, I was like, Wow, this is what I want to do. I was really thinking a lot about how to talk about experiences like dysphoria through a character’s perspective who doesn’t really know how to use that language for herself yet. Also, Detransition Baby’s ending, I read that ending like maybe 40 times. That ending is so, so good. I thought a lot about that as I was working on the end of my book. How do you leave a window open at the end of a novel?
And with the ending of Maidenheads, I wanted it to be like a little bit of openness at the end where you’re sort of like, the things are in place for something to happen, but you don’t yet know totally if it’s gonna happen. So that book really helped me figure out how to do that.
JE: Oh, I love your ending. I’m happy with it. I mean, Jamie, I was a fan of, and Mari was very complicated for me. She was talented and super badass, but damn. But I was happy for Jamie though. Was that always the ending of your book? Or did you change it around?
BP: I played with different versions of it. I don’t want to give spoilers, but forms of connection, forms of queer connection that are not romantic, but are still very powerful. Also, the way they’re brought together by music. It’s queer people who often kind of band together in these ways that are really vital, and that go far beyond the romantic. And I wanted to explore that a little bit. In terms of their future, it might go in a direction like that.
JE: Have you attended a lot of concerts? And did you use some of those shows to reflect on this book?
BP: Yeah, for sure. I’ve been to many shows. Actually, one show I was allowed to tour backstage as well for this novel. So they let me check out the backstage room. It was really, really cool and exciting. I was so starstruck. The rooms are really, really neat. Being at concerts, being at shows, feeling that physical connection to the music. I think music is such an embodied art. It’s not like writing where we’re kind of up in our heads and just typing. You create music through your body and you experience it so much through your body. And I really wanted this book to feel in general, very embodied.
It’s a real body book for me where I was really thinking about all these different physical experiences like pregnancy and transition and sex. All these things that are so physical and really take us out of our heads. And for me, music is one of those as well. So that was why I wanted to really enter that.
JE: Here is one of my favorite observations from the book: But I think it’s not so much that people don’t want to dance with her, I think it’s more that she can’t let them dance with her. Like she’s so depressed she can’t conceive of a world in which people would want to dance with her, so she dances alone. Just beautiful. The day that Whitney died, where were you and how did you feel?
BP: That happened in 2012, the same year that the book takes place actually. I just felt horribly sad. She had such a hard life. I don’t think I learned as much about her queerness. Her music has always meant a lot to me. I remember the first time I went to a queer bar, I remember dancing to that song. It’s such a soundtrack for queer life. I just feel tremendous compassion and sadness for her when I think about her.
JE: Do you agree that after the mid-90s, music was not the same?
BP: No, I don’t at all. I’m not one of those people. I think for Jamie at that moment, that’s her cutting off her dreams of being a musician. If she doesn’t believe in music, then it doesn’t matter that she failed as a musician. I think having had periods of my life where I wasn’t sure I was ever going to publish, I think there is an instinct that nothing good ever gets published anyway. Who cares? It doesn’t matter. I don’t feel that way about music at all.
JE: Benny, do you play a musical instrument?
BP: I played the Suzuki Violin for much of my childhood because I’m a dork. I’ve never been in a band. I actually am a terrible singer, like just an incredibly bad singer. I know a lot of musicians, though, and had a lot of people around me that I could talk to. And I did a ton of research to figure out what musicians talk about music. One reason I really wanted Jamie to be a singer is that I wanted her to have this physically embodied experience of song.
And I have heard about singers who lost the ability to sing at a certain point and just how destabilizing it is for your whole identity when you’ve considered yourself a singer and then you just stop, you can’t produce sound and you can’t force yourself to sing. It either happens or it doesn’t. So it was less out of our own life, but more out of a desire to give Jamie this kind of physicality through music.
JE: Do you think music can still save us today?
BP: Yeah, I think Mari’s kind of a nihilist. I think she has this very post-Soviet exhaustion with politics, where she sort of lived through this very dark phase as a younger person. I think she’s had this experience as a very young person of a lot of trauma around politics, and so she sort of lost hope of what can be done to change things. The other characters who grew up in America just don’t really have, and are more privileged and are white, and especially in 2012, have had a much safer, calmer existence than Mari did. I really deeply believe in art, or I wouldn’t be doing this.
I don’t necessarily believe that art can change things or that that should be its job, but on a personal private level, like I see art saving lives all the time, including my own. I deeply believe that music can save lives. I don’t know that music can fix the world.
JE: Why was it important to have this lens of a complicated relationship between Jamie and her father?
BP: I think Jamie has a lot of healing to do at the beginning of the book. She’s very dissociated from herself. She’s really unable to make any choices about her own life. She’s really floating. And I want to understand how she got there. I like her parents, and I think they’re both good people and both trying. Jamie has a lot of anger and I wanted her to get a chance to express that. She’s really thinking about how he didn’t stand up for her and the times when she needed him to. His queerness is something that really confounds her. She doesn’t know what to do about it. She feels that could have been such a connection between them, but it was the opposite. It sort of was part of what kept them apart.
There is so much Queer history in D.C. and there’s so much to look back at different generations and how it was to be queer 20 years ago, 40 years ago in D.C., it was so different. And it was interesting to me to explore that with the dad. He works for the State Department and he gets fired because it’s at a time when being queer could get you kicked out of government. They were enforced through the 70s. They were in place up until the 90s.
It’s not like things are so much better now. But at least in 2012, I think there was an expectation that you would be protected from on-the-job discrimination for the most part, especially as a queer person, not as a trans person. It was also kind of digging into that history a little bit, which I find really interesting.
JE: Was writing always your passion?
BP: I’ve only just wanted to be a writer my whole life, since I was a little kid. When I was little, I wrote short stories, constantly telling stories to my brother and writing all the time. I have diaries from back then. I’ve done a lot of other stuff professionally and have worked as a journalist and have done different kinds of writing that weren’t fiction. But this was just always the thing that I wanted the most.
JE: Do you have hope for trans youth for the future?
BP: Yeah, and I think it’s a really dark moment. I want to hope that things are going to get better, but I don’t currently see the mechanics by which they will, at least not right away. I deeply believe in trans people, and trans resilience and trans courage, and trans creativity. Those things give me hope, and knowing our history. The history of trans people, and surviving through much worse times than this, and creating art and building community and telling their own stories, expressing themselves.
Trans people have done so much with so little for so long. And that gives me a lot of hope.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Benny B. Peterson (they/them) is a writer and editor based near Washington, DC. A contributing editor at Washingtonian magazine, they have also worked at Foreign Policy, the New Republic, and Street Sense, DC’s street newspaper. They have written about culture, politics, gender, and LGBTQ+ issues for The New York Times, Washington Post, Elle, Slate, and The Atlantic, among other places, and received an MFA in fiction from Bennington.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Jorge Estupinan is a kindergarten teacher by day, writer at night. He has been an educator for 17 years with an Associate’s and a Bachelor’s Degree in Early Childhood Education. He is also a two-time published essayist with Huffington Post. A prior student of the Writing Pad. Currently, he is part of the cohort of “The Loft Year-long Writing Project” under the mentorship of Memoirist Kelly Sundberg.