Photo: Ashley Markle
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 RW&RB–inspired merchandise and emblematic of the kind of Obama-era earnestness the novel evokes. With little publicity, the book became so popular that it quickly required multiple printings. By the end of 2019, there were 100,000 copies in circulation.
McQuiston has published two more novels since then: One Last Stop, a sapphic mass-transit time-traveling romance, and I Kissed Shara Wheeler, a more personal YA novel about growing up queer in a southern conservative Christian community. Their ability to move among genres while retaining an unmistakable core identity in their work has been crucial to their success. “It would be impossible for me to overstate how important Casey is to the development of queer romance and traditional publishing,” says Leah Koch, co-owner of the romance bookstore the Ripped Bodice. Isabel Kaufman, a literary agent and a friend of McQuiston’s, agrees. Their fans are devoted, “which means they can bring their readers with them wherever they go,” Kaufman says. Amazon Studios released an adaptation of Red, White & Royal Blue in 2023 starring Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez, and the film did so well (including an Emmy nomination) that McQuiston is currently working on the screenplay for a sequel. Their newest novel, The Pairing, is all the things McQuiston is best known for — a book about queerness and found families and self-knowledge, full of humor and the intense awareness of how hot a blunt jawline can be.
But there’s also a noticeable shift in the questions and ideas that animate The Pairing compared with those that define Red, White & Royal Blue. Published when queer romance was still vanishingly rare at the major publishing houses, RW&RB hinges on the story of Henry and Alex coming out of the closet, insisting that their polished, high-profile public personae can include their queerness. RW&RB is full of tenderness and careful first steps. The Pairing is hotter, for one thing — more bodily, more sensory. The book follows two bisexual exes named Theo and Kit who reunite on a food-and-wine tour of Europe as they eat and drink and lust their way across the Continent; it is not a coming-out book or a story about the public celebration of queer identity. Kit is a cisgender man, and in a recent Instagram post McQuiston describes Theo as having “an abundance of gender.” But those qualities are part of who Kit and Theo are, not a driving plot mechanism. Instead, amid its joyful gluttony, the book focuses on misunderstanding, on all the ways that visibility is not the end of the story and how being seen is not the same as being understood, an idea that keeps driving Theo and Kit apart even as they embark on increasingly horny European escapades.
Despite McQuiston’s enormous success, being misunderstood is still a source of anxiety for them. Some of it is just who they are: They love lists and diagrams, they love fully committing to a bit, they need to know exactly what each of their characters is carrying in their bags and what songs are on their playlists. Some of it has to do with gender and sexuality. “I knew that I was queer by the time that I was 20,” they say, “but the gender thing was more of a Saturn-return situation.” They have been publicly out as nonbinary since 2021, but The Pairing is their first adult book to be published since then, and because the film adaptation of RW&RB was released during the writers’ and actors’ strikes, they haven’t done much publicity in those years. “It’s been two years since I’ve been out in the world promoting my work,” they say, “and I feel like I’ve gotten spoiled in this little bubble. Most of the time, I’m engaging with people who know me and understand me and gender me correctly. I forget that sometimes I have to go back out into the wider world.”
McQuiston, 33, grew up in Louisiana, where their high-school experience was much like the one in I Kissed Shara Wheeler. They attended a private Southern Baptist high school, though McQuiston’s family was Catholic; their parents chose it for the small class size and academic rigor, not specifically for the Christianity. “I don’t think they knew the extent of what it was like,” McQuiston says. “Its packaging is ‘Christ-centered education,’ but they’re not going to lead with, like, ‘We’re going to have chapel services where we tell all your children that they’re going to hell if they’re gay.’” As restrictive as the school was, McQuiston says it made them resourceful. “It made me a better writer because I felt so weird and alone and wrong and mismatched in this place,” they say. “I was looking to create my own little book and live there.”
They read everything from Harry Potter to The Picture of Dorian Gray to TV recaps, but they imagined a future as a YA writer in the vein of John Green or maybe someone with more of a fantasy bent. They attended Louisiana State University, where they studied journalism in an attempt to be practical. They had been thinking about moving to L.A. after graduation, maybe writing criticism or pursuing journalism full time, but after their father died, they decided to stay closer to home, working for a local newspaper and writing romance in the off-hours, a side project they started
toying with when the fantasy books they had earlier considered writing didn’t materialize. “As soon as I figured out what genre I was supposed to be writing in, all these blocks I ran into every other time I’d tried to write a book just came down. It was like, Oh, I was always supposed to be a romance writer,” they say.
They began writing RW&RB in 2016, inspired by the election and the 2015 romance novel The Royal We. When RW&RB sold in March 2018, they used their advance to move to Colorado, where several of their friends had landed. They stayed there for two years, living in Fort Collins, renting a house with college buddies, and working odd jobs. Once the book started taking off, they moved to New York just before the pandemic began and have been there ever since. They now live in Queens with their partner, who works in publicity at a publishing firm. They’re planning to get engaged — they even have rings they’ve both designed and made and plans for how to propose — but have not had the time: “I know what I’m doing, he knows what he’s doing, but it’s like, work is really busy right now, man!”
McQuiston has been crafting two projects at once over the past several months. One of them is the movie sequel to RW&RB, which they’re co-writing with playwright Matthew López, who directed and co-wrote the screenplay for the first film. At test screenings, he says, they were getting comments about how the film was a little corny. “When it came to those ‘cheesy’ comments, I was like, You know what? I’m going to view that as a good thing. It’s going to operate in this realm, just the way the book does.”
Writing the sequel’s screenplay has presented interesting challenges, especially because there’s no book to work from. “It’s a mind-fuck!” McQuiston says. “We have things that were left out of the movie, and there’s a little bonus chapter I wrote for the collector’s edition. Other than that, we’re making it up as we go. But I’m also considering it as a different canon. Changes that were made in adapting ripple out into character and story.” Book Alex decides to go to law school, but the movie characters are older, at different inflection points in their lives. What does that mean about what they want now and what they care about?
The other project occupying McQuiston’s mind is the one that will become their next book. It’ll be a spinoff of The Pairing, though they can’t yet say which character will play the central role. Shortly after our time together, McQuiston and their sister depart for a research trip to the Basque Country, where some portion of the next novel will be set.
They love this part of the writing process. Travel and the time and space to research were not available to them earlier in their career. On a day trip to San Sebastian, they realized the beach was full of people swimming in various states of nudity and decided to go for it. “I swam out to my shoulders and rolled my swimsuit down and was like, Here I am,” they say. They had top surgery in November and had never swum with their shirt off before. “I had this moment of floating in the ocean, in this bay, looking at this castle and these mountains in this city full of amazing food and all these different kinds of bodies and people.” They’re so happy to be at this place of freedom with their work. “It is exactly what I want to be putting out as an artist right now.”
