It's a story about belonging.Ģ. 'What comments, if any, would you like to make as a white author who wrote a book that tells the story of an Afro-Latinx family?'

I wanted to make a story about the moment in which a child reveals something essential about who they are, and they are recognized with love. In some ways I think this story was for them-the ones I would never meet, but who inspired me across time and space. So many of the young people who are interviewed in that film had experiences of being thrown out of the house, of being rejected by their birth families simply for being who they were. The iconic documentary, Paris is Burning was an enormous inspiration for the story. Drag is professional make-believe, it's the same kind of dead-serious play that children do, it's that level of commitment, of exuberance and I think it is a similar alembic for transformation. So I was getting to know this family while they were all navigating this big change, and I remember one of the questions that kept getting asked was, 'how should we explain this to the little kids in the family?' This got me really curious about what kind of literature there was out there that swam in the waters of gender and identity but that felt like it was told from inside a child's experience, rather than at the child.ĭrag, voguing and the NYC ball circuit were also huge sources of inspiration for me. But back in 2012, shortly before I had the idea for the book I began a relationship with a man who's eldest brother is trans, and he had transitioned maybe a year before I met their family. I've always been curious about gender and have always had a pretty skeptical attitude around gender constructs and constraints- the themes in this book are questions which have always interested me.

I'm an actor by training, and I think there is a predisposition in professional make-believers to slip into other experiences outside your own. I'm never really sure where to begin when answering this question, because the making of this book was such a big process for me, with a long gestation period, so there are many, many tributaries flowing into the larger river that became Julián is a Mermaid, and it's difficult to name a single source of inspiration, so I'll name several. 'Why did you choose to write Julián? What inspired the book?' I'm including the two questions I get asked a lot, and their responses, below.ġ. On being a white, cishet artist creating outside my experience.Īfter a recent interview for Teaching for Change, I was encouraged to adapt a portion of the interview into a post on my own site.

Jessica love julian