Every book I've written so far has lived in a world that already had a name for what my characters were. That's easy to take for granted until you try to write a story set before the name existed at all.
I came of age as a writer inside a specific, relatively recent stretch of queer history — everything after Stonewall in 1969, most of it shaped directly by the AIDS epidemic. That's the water my fiction has swum in. Where All Your Attempts Cease, my new novel set on an 1840s wagon train, is the first time I've written backward past all of it — into a period before “gay” or “lesbian” existed as something a person could even be, in the way we mean it now. Working on it made me go back and actually look at what my own backlist has been doing this whole time, because I think it's all been circling the same question from different centuries.
What the earlier books were actually about
“The House of Wolves” is the most explicit about where it comes from. The men in that book have already lost their founder to AIDS before the story even starts — the household is failing, faith is failing, and the entire plot is the work of grieving that loss while deciding whether to keep believing in what the group was built for. I didn't set out to write an “AIDS novel.” I set out to write about brotherhood, and grief showed up because it had to — because that's what brotherhood in this community has actually required for forty years. Roy and David don't fall in love in spite of their losses; they fall in love as an act of continuing, which is a different thing.
“Milton and the Morning Monk” is the closest thing I've written to a straight-up coming-out story, and it's the one that maps most directly onto what I found doing research for the new book. Bill grows up in small-town Idaho, enters a seminary, and spends the whole novel reconciling his faith with who he actually is. That's the shape of nearly every gay coming-of-age story from the back half of the twentieth century: you already know what you are, you just can't say it yet, and the plot is the process of saying it. Hidden, then out in the open. It's a story that only works because the category already exists — Bill has a word for himself even while he's hiding from it.
“The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Getting Over Yourself” is the lightest of the bunch, and it's still doing the same work from a different angle: a comedy about survival after heartbreak, about a friend group holding you up through the desert until you're ready to believe in love again. Less visibility, more resilience — but resilience is the same muscle.
“Brief Moments” and “Esoteric Minutiae” are microfiction, which turns out to be its own kind of argument. Each vignette is small on purpose — a fragment, an unfinished gesture — and the idea is that enough of these fragments, held up against each other, add up to something like a whole life. That's the same claim I keep making at book length, just compressed: identity isn't a single revelation, it's an accumulation. The distance between who we are and who we're becoming isn't crossed in one scene. It's crossed in hundreds of small ones, and most of my work is really just an argument about which small ones matter.
What changes when the word doesn't exist yet
Every one of those books assumes a reader — and a character — who already has language for queerness, even when a specific person in the story doesn't have permission to use it yet. That's the whole engine of a coming-out story: the gap between knowing and saying.
Writing into the 1840s meant working without that engine. There was no “gay” to come out as in an Oregon-bound wagon train. There wasn't a closet in the modern sense, because a closet requires a door with a name on it, and the culture hadn't built the door yet. What existed instead — and this is the part that reoriented how I was thinking about the new book — was something closer to total omission. Not “hidden and shameful,” which is at least a relationship to the thing. Just absent from the available story entirely. If something like queerness existed inside a person crossing the plains in 1843, it existed with no vocabulary, no precedent, and often no framework even for the person living it to name to themselves.
That's a much stranger kind of hiding than Bill Emory's. Bill knows exactly what he's hiding and exactly what it would mean to stop. A character on the Overland Trail in the same position doesn't have that clarity available to reach for. Whatever he feels has to be lived entirely inside behavior — inside the specific, practical shape of a friendship, a partnership, a refusal to marry, a devotion that reads to everyone around him as something else because there is no something else on offer. The feeling isn't hidden behind a word. The feeling has no word to be hidden behind. That's a harder thing to dramatize, and I think it's a truer thing, for a period this far back.
Where the two histories actually touch
Here's what surprised me: once I stopped looking for a direct line from Stonewall backward, I found the actual hinge point in the research I'd already done for this book — the same material behind the wagon train's leadership and loss and transformation.
Jesse Applegate organizing a wagon train's night watch in 1843 is, among other things, a portrait of intense, practical, unnamed intimacy between men under pressure — invented institutions, mutual dependence, a kind of care that had no need to explain itself because it was doing an obviously necessary job. The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, which let a married couple claim land together and, unusually for its time, let the wife hold half the title in her own name, is a piece of legislation entirely blind to any relationship it wasn't built to recognize. The frontier didn't have room in its paperwork for anything outside a very narrow definition of a couple — which means anyone living outside that definition simply isn't in the record. Not persecuted on the page. Just absent from it.
That absence is the same shape as the Burton family's own archive — a box of papers that skips the actual crossing and picks the story back up decades later. History has a way of only keeping the parts of a life it already had a category for. My backlist has spent years writing directly into the categories that history built after Stonewall. This new book is an attempt to write into the years before those categories existed, using exactly the same tools — endurance, transformation, what love costs and what it survives — that I've always reached for. The difference is that this time, nobody in the story gets to call it by its name.
Why this is still the same book I always write
I don't think Where All Your Attempts Cease is a departure so much as the same question asked from further back. Every book I've written is about the distance between who we are and who we're becoming, and about the people, places, and hardships that close that gap. “House of Wolves” closes it through grief and brotherhood. “Milton” closes it through faith and disclosure. The microfiction closes it one fragment at a time. The new book closes it without ever getting to open with the vocabulary the rest of my work has had the whole time.
That's what the AIDS years and the decades since Stonewall actually gave writers like me, whether we noticed it happening or not: not just visibility, but a language flexible enough to write a coming-out story at all. Reaching backward into an 1840s wagon train meant losing that language on purpose and finding out what the same emotional truths look like with none of it available — love, endurance, transformation, the same distance between who you are and who you're becoming, closed the only way it could be closed in a world with no word yet for what was closing it.
