The Writer Turning Romance Gay

Red, White & Royal Blue author Casey McQuiston knows exactly what they are doing.

- Kathryn VanArendonk

“I CAN TELL YOU who I’m writing for, and I can tell you who I’m keeping in mind,” romance novelist Casey McQuiston says. We are one cocktail in at the Scarlet Lounge, an Upper West Side bar co-owned by the actor Michael Imperioli. “I am writing for trans people—capital-F For,” McQuiston says. “Trans people, queer people, those are a lot of the people who engage with my work in ways that make me feel like they got it.” But McQuiston, blockbuster queer-romance author of The Pairing (out in August), is always aware of the broad audience of American romance readers. There’s the old-school image of the straight white midwestern wife tucking a mass-market paperback into her purse, and there’s the more probable reader of today, someone who might pick up The Pairing at a Target with no idea that its leads are queer. “You’re gonna be 60 percent of the way in before you know that’s what you’re reading, and I have now Trojan-horsed you into reading a trans romance,” they say. “I’m really interested in those people, too. I think they have often been underestimated. And I think they should peg their husbands.”

Red, White & Royal Blue, which came out in 2019 and was McQuiston’s first novel, is a publishing fairy tale. A love story about Alex, the politically driven son of the first woman U.S. president, and Henry, a reserved British prince, the book is maximalist and swoony, leaning unabashedly into joyful sentimentality. The line “History, huh?,” which Alex first mentions in a letter he writes to Henry about a possible gay romance between Alexander Hamilton and a Revolutionary War hero, becomes a rallying cry for supporters of Alex and Henry in the book as well as in real life, where the quote is a popular catchphrase on