Why queer folks need more travel & adventure stories, an essay by Mae Marvel

What does it mean to find home—and how can a book help you get there?

For Pride Month, Mae Marvel reflects on why queer travel and adventure stories aren’t just escapes, but roadmaps for becoming who we are. From leather pants in Berlin to treasure hunts in fiction, this is a love letter to the journeys that change us. Read this beautiful essay below and borrow their latest romance, The Guest Book, releasing on June 2. 

Ruthie was in Berlin, thousands of miles from her central Ohio hometown, when she bought her first pair of leather pants. Did anyone wear leather pants where she was from? No. Big no. But in Germany, she saw women wearing leather pants as casually as she wore jeans, and she suddenly wanted to be one of them, slinking around all sexy-casual in a way she never had—in a way no one did, really, back in Ohio.

Far from home, she could express a part of herself that she’d never before identified or revealed. She could push back, however gently, against a roadblock that stood in the way of self-actualization.

When you’re queer, there’s always something or someone trying to prevent you from getting where you’re going. Sometimes it’s you—a lack of self-knowledge, an inhibition, an inability to find a way to show who you are inside. But even when the destination is something as simple as “trying to be who I am in my natal family, or my hometown, or the country of my birth,” it’s not simple. All you want is to use your own bathroom, dress in your own clothes, express your own self, but there are laws and customs in the way. There are family members who don’t approve or friends or peers who make it impossible. Sometimes you don’t have the resources to fight back. 

There are steep obstacles even to escape. Plane tickets cost the earth. Security lines are long. There are so many reasons why we can’t, won’t, or don’t want to run away. There are so many reasons why running away doesn’t work.

But a book about characters leaving home promises a reader so much. Without barriers.

Every travel or adventure story comes with a guarantee that its characters are going to move not just through space but in time. They’ll have to look at where they’ve been in order to figure out where they’re going. They will have to look inside of themselves. They will have to stay in the present, maybe for the first time in their lives.

There will be singular, crystalline, meaningful experiences that get a story’s characters to where they should be, but only after they defeat inevitable obstacles. The healing part of a travel story is the knowledge that nothing will stop these protagonists from getting to their destination. They will find a way to catch the plane on time. They will fall in love. They will discover the treasure. They will dig deeper and more intimately to find out about themselves and each other. Nothing can keep them from the new places, things, and people that allow them to figure out what home is.

What “home” looks and feels like—who is home—is one of the most central questions to the queer experience. It’s the reason that “found family” is a central trope for the queer community. What is “found family” but finding home? The world is such a mess. So many of us are trying so hard to find a safe place to be, a place we can be loved as we are. All of us travel through something, from something, with someone, to get there.

A book reminds us why we want to find home in the first place. A book with travel and adventure isn’t so much an escape, it’s the friendly pub that seems to appear out of nowhere when we’re too tired to go on, or the perfect nap on a train where we wake up leaning against a beautiful stranger. These books send us back out into reality with renewed curiosity and hope for love and welcome.

Ruthie found her home years later with Annie, and together we write queer stories as Mae Marvel. In our most recent novel, The Guest Book, two characters have hit rock bottom. Cosima and Edie both find themselves at an English inn frozen in time. They discover a hidden set of clues to a treasure hunt in the guest book. They had meant to escape somewhere to tend to their wounds, but this unexpected mystery wants them to do something that is only possible if they do it together. And what happens along the way is the real treasure.

Cosima and Edie talk about the past and think about the future. There is a transformative garment (not leather pants). There are ruins and skeletons, love letters behind the wallpaper, and wallpaper made of love letters. There is a castle, and there are boulders blocking the way forward. It’s a book that allows queer readers to recognize the skills we already have to open the road. It invites us to believe in home again—to believe that we can find home again—and to know that it’s necessary to look for treasure, follow clues, and believe in magic to get there.

A book, so often, shows us exactly what home looks like, but it can’t tell us how to get there. Every treasure map has secrets, puzzles, and redirection. The X moves position until we’re the X.

A book reminds us that we’re the priceless treasure, in leather pants, roads open in every possible direction.

About the author

Mae Marvel is the alias of cowriters Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare, bestselling authors of over a dozen acclaimed romance novels between them. Mae lives with two teenagers, two dogs, one cat, four hermit crabs, and a plethora of snails and fish in a witchy century home in Wisconsin whose extravagant perennial garden gives them something to look forward to in the depths of winter. In addition to romance, they also write mystery novels and cannot promise not to branch into new novelistic territories at a moment’s notice.

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