Under the Cover with Bradley Somer, author of We Are All of Us Left Behind

We Are All of Us Left Behind was always with me; it just took a while to process how to put it on the page. I started writing it right after my second novel, Fishbowl, had found a home at St. Martin’s Press, back in 2013, and it started with a bizarre prompt structure that still peeks through the more rhythmic parts of the book. I wrote the first draft largely over the course of a month. That dirty draft sat through years on the shelf and more behind a flashing cursor, bending to countless iterations while I tried to find what I wanted it to say, how I wanted the language to be, and what I wished a reader to see.

I was born around the time the AIDS epidemic was emerging as a binding challenge of the gay community. While being too young to bear the brunt of that tragedy, I became self-aware in those stigmatizing years, and inverting the ’60s maxim, grew up fearing making love more than any wars. I learned about myself quietly, relying on friends and family for guidance, tolerance, acceptance, all in the decades before the performative noise of social media became our primary means of interaction and entertainment.

I wrote this book because I’ve found few that deal with my identity. The representations of the queer experience I read in my youth were either of comedic secondary characters, or of primary characters who lived an utterly tragic life. If you’ve not been stunned by Scott Heim’s Mysterious Skin, or Bret Easton Ellis’ Rules of Attraction, do yourself the favour.

Why was it like this? A reflection of the times and outlooks of an emerging segment of society, and an equally emergent attitude toward them. The English language is full of holes. There’s no word for the certain draw that disaster and suffering hold; it’s a core of fiction, and there’s a sweet and empathetic longing in readers to experience such stories, to have something simultaneously elevating and crushing, challenging because of a demonstrated persistence through the destruction. Perhaps it’s a universal desire, this missing word, of always being able to rebuild, of the persistence of tomorrow, of that unrelenting pursuit of something better because there’s no other choice.

There were a few voices standing out from comic and tragic tropes of the time, there always are, but that representation of queer life remained more elusive. And thankfully, in so short a span that we should take a breath from shouting to marvel, the modern queer canon now relates stories of struggles paired with celebrations focused on identity, detailing the challenges and wondrousness of this different way of being. Even still, a gap in the spectrum of queer literature persists, a missed representation: few narratives deal with stories that celebrate a life that’s queer, not solely queer life. It’s a delicate distinction, but a vitally important one. This is a life I strive to live, one that was so rarely represented in my youth, and still today.

A quick experiment, similar in intent to the Bechdel Test, is to apply the Vito Russo Test. This test was developed by GLAAD to evaluate the fairness of representation of a queer character in fiction, and to paraphrase, ask of a work, “Is there an identifiably queer character, who is not predominantly defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity, and who is tied to the plot in such a way that their removal would have a significant effect on the story?” Essentially, is the breadth of a queer character’s life being represented, or is their representation in a work reliant on that part of their identity?

These questions are not intended to diminish works in which being queer is the story engine; that’s a deep well deserving of thoughtful exploration. The modern queer voice is broad and dynamic. It’s wonderfully encouraging for those who need it, but it has more rarely explored this subtler existence, one I craved in my youth and still do today, an active presence of queer life in literature, queer characters operating outside the device of their identity.

At first, I cringed a little to see We Are All of Us Left Behind garnering some attention as queer story. I also fully recognize my own sensitivities, as well as where we are in both the industry and as a reading society. While this book has queer content, there’s much more to it, that I felt it would become diminished if that became the prime talking point. The narrative is not particularly dependant on the protagonist’s sexuality, which is one small part of his much larger character and identity. It’s a life story and a coming-of-age story. It’s an exploration of uncertain, youthful masculinity, and all the things that kids on the cusp do, because they know no better or they know no different.

At last, I’ve become comfortable with this book being framed; however, it is because of an understanding, one that I’ve cherished since my early reading days: a reader gets to define a book for themself, regardless of an author’s ramblings, a marketer’s positionings, a reviewer’s ruminations, or any number of consensus-thought commentariat’s stars or opinions. I trust this book to be whatever an engaged reader needs, in the same way it was what I needed, as its author. It becomes ours, together, this way. There are many more threads that savvy readers can tug on their own: social, economic, cultural, and humanitarian. And while I’m always happy to chat about what a book is to me, I am also always fascinated how that a reader discovers what they need from a narrative, which is so much more important than anything I explicitly put in.

My goal in writing We Are All of Us Left Behind was to focus on a narrative founded in the common theme that love is in whomever you find it, and home is within them, too; to demonstrate that the recognition of identity is not a self-saviour any more than it is an enemy, and the best love lived doesn’t have to rely on anything more than itself, as a fact of existence. I hope this story will demonstrate a universality of humanity in the ways we share our lives with each other and the kindness we owe each other, oftentimes more than we owe to ourselves. There’s Hell on these pages, sure, but more so, there’s redemption highlighted in our unity as passing travellers in a fleeting geography, a demonstration of what we do here, in time and place, is the thing that matters.

Your goal in reading We Are All of Us Left Behind, if you choose to, is…

*portions of this essay have appeared elsewhere in copy.