I was a closeted gay kid who grew up in the 1990s Midwest. I lived a very suppressed, and I would say, unhappy life where I sheltered and hid my own private secret up to the point of my coming out, and I think that made me, as an adult, as a storyteller, and as a journalist, really keyed into and interested in marginalized groups. [I was] really interested in any sort of underground, and utterly fascinated with the human phenomenon of denial which we cannot admit to be true. That formed the basis for all my journalistic and historical work. I am a reporter who covers marginalized communities and I'm a public historian who writes books — who excavates forgotten histories; I take marginalized communities but in the past. In my journalism, this was all I was doing. I was [writing about] marginalized communities in the present, but I was covering economic underclasses in New York City. Weirdly enough, [I’d never] written about my own community, the LGBTQIA+ community — the gay community — and, I thought I knew gay history. I came into contact with the upstairs lounge story, and it was this whole phase of queer history I knew nothing about.

Generally, it's always the achievement gays that get highlighted in biographies, but what about the people who are wage earners? And so, I came upon this upstairs lounge story, and I couldn't stop being fascinated by it. It was this fire — just a notoriously unsolved arson fire at a working class gay bar in the early 1970s New Orleans, in a bar on the fringe of the French quarter that was barely visible from the street, because closeted queers in New Orleans were in such hiding that they couldn't even have street level bars. This arson fire happened that killed 32 people — claimed 32 lives, and injured about 15 others. It was the night of June 24, 1973, and [after learning about the fire], I couldn't stop thinking about it. I got obsessed with it.

I started having conversations with a book editor about this topic. He was marginally interested and wanted a book proposal. I flew from New York City to New Orleans, stayed with the only two people I knew in town. I'd never been here; I knew nothing about the city. I fell in love with the queer subculture of New Orleans, and I became fascinated with the queer South. So, there were some long term reasons, and some short term, practical reasons that sort of inspired me to get involved and get interested in gay liberation.

Not by my editors, no. Essentially half of my book is divided into three acts, but by the time you reach the fire scene, at about 90 pages, you're halfway through the book. The fire scene itself is amazingly grotesque because that's what happened. It's non-fiction, and it's not my obligation to lie or to sand down a rough edge especially when there was an injustice that took place, and especially when the society in which it took place told people that what they suffered didn't matter and wasn't gruesome. My delving into the grotesqueness had a lot with disproving the society that had censored them, that had oppressed them, and that had shoved the story under the rug. I was trying to showcase how this grotesque event did matter, was consequential, [and] affected real people. So, when you have a rationale for why you want to put forward the grotesque information, it becomes intensely relevant.

I think a lot of grotesquery can be important in books. If you just do it for the sake of it, it's not gonna come off well, even in a story. Let's say you get into serial killers; if you go too deep into what the serial killer does to a victim, you sort of glamorize the act of injustice as opposed to who the victims were. There's a book called "Last Call" that Elon Green [wrote], which was about a serial killer who killed gay men, in I believe 1980s New York. To correct that injustice, [he] only told the life stories of the victims — who these victims were. He didn't focus on the heinous acts that the man who killed them brutally performed, and that was some way to restore essential dignity to the individual.

As a writer, you need to understand, where am I doing this? Or where is this serving some broader context of what my purpose is for writing the story. If your purpose is to restore justice, you want to provide enough information so that the reader understands what's happening. But you don't have to always zoom in for the close up every time. Sometimes you can back away and do what a Hollywood director does, where you do a soft-wash and sort of give [the viewer] the idea without getting into all the detail. But again, it’s up to [the writer]. You're the storyteller and you have the mechanism to decide what's appropriate and what's not, and what will serve what you're trying to do and what won't, while staying within the vein and frame of truthfulness.

The fire scene that I wrote is 10 pages long. It took me 3 months, and I cried and threw up [while] writing it. It's a terrible experience to write about. What fire does to a human body because we're made of water… it's really gruesome. It's a terrible way to die. And there are scenes and sequences that writers have to tangle with all the time.

You're asking about stamina, which is the most important skill a writer or any sort of artist can possess. Stamina will apply to your work itself, and your ability to complete the work that you want to complete. It also applies to your ability to survive discouragement and rejection, which is the nature of living as a creative, unfortunately, in this brutalist capitalist system that we live in.

There are techniques and tactics you can use to manage discouragement and panic. I do mindfulness meditation; I meditate [about] twice a day, 5 to 15 minutes. I call friends and ask them how they are. But beyond that, I'll have a work setup for myself. I have enough structure in my life to facilitate creativity, not so much structure to strangle it. I get up, I have a time of day I write. I write best from 10 AM to 3 PM. That's when the creative bus is moving through my head, and if I'm not at the desk by the time the writing starts I'm gonna be speaking into a voice memo about what's happening. I've trained my brain to just do it at that time. Every day I have a word count goal; I try to write between 1,000 and 1,200 words. Once I reach my word count goal I stop, no matter what time it is. If it only took me to 11:15 and I started at 10, guess what? I got the rest of the day!

The reason I do that is because you want to keep your energy reserved, because long form writing is marathon writing. It's not sprint. [I] try to reach [my] word count each day, and then I stop, then I'll go and I'll live my life, and then the next day I try to do the same thing; I make my word count and then I live my life and eventually you build up what athletes call momentum. The reason I utilize this is because I grew up in 90s Chicago when Michael Jordan played for [the Chicago Bulls]. He would oftentimes talk about when games were going well, he would discover momentum and that's an internal motor or a kind of energy urging you forward that you get through sustained effort, and so if I make my word count three days in a row, I have momentum, and that momentum takes me into the fourth day, fifth day, et cetera. Generally I write every day while in the writing phase. Sometimes I've structured it too much. I get trapped in my own maze, and I need to break the loop, and I'll step away for either several days or I'll find some other project, or I'll fly to Chicago and spend time with [my nieces]. Then [I’ll] return and go back to my work. But you have to be able to face the existential dread of the blank page with the blinking cursor and you got to put some stuff there. Anything on the page is better than nothing on the page. Editing is less energy intensive and actually really fun to do, because you can make whatever you wrote that sucked, better.

You have to give yourself permission to just put something there that you can improve from. That’s the way I figured out how to do it. 10,000 words is a chapter, and if I give myself momentum, I can finish the chapter. If you can finish a chapter, you can finish a book because all [you] need to do is do that 10 times, and that's 100,000 words and it's a book.