Moonlight continues to be wielded as the “Obama was president-America’s not racist!” of the entertainment industry. This is about a culture that relegates art by and about queer people of color to the margins, yet hails itself as progressive for the few scraps of representation it throws our way.

This is about the message being sent to young queer folks looking for themselves on screen but never finding a suitable reflection. My qualms about College Republicans aren’t about Logan Lerman or Asa Butterfield or the myriad of white boys and white boy coming-of-stories that will come after them, not really. It is exactly the kind of story I needed to see when I was younger - and yet it’s still one of the few traditionally published coming-of-age rom-coms centering a queer Black girl, even now, a decade after my adolescence came to an end. It’s a queering of the fish-out-of-water makeover narrative in movies like She’s All That, and a play on the tropes of the John Hugesian high schoolers of the eighties (a starred Publishers Weekly review said “Johnson easily channels the self-effacing coolness of 1990s teen comedies with a 2020 sensibility in this heartfelt and laugh-out-loud funny YA rom-com” which I’m taking to mean I made it happen). Crown was an attempt at flipping years of my favorite coming-of-age films on their head.

My book has been out for a little over two months now, and I’ve been fortunate enough to connect with a number of readers who’ve felt seen and affirmed by the story of a queer Black girl named Liz Lighty from a small town in Indiana, attempting to navigate racism and homophobia (while also falling in love) in her run for prom queen.

Liz lighty