Music From Another World - Robin Talley Page 0,130

transgender women of color at a particularly high risk. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has banned transgender people from serving in the military, and dozens of states continue to allow people to be fired or lose their housing based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. For all the positive changes we’ve seen in the decades since Harvey Milk’s death, we still have so much more to accomplish to ensure that LGBT people and other marginalized communities aren’t subject to violence and discrimination.

The idea for Music from Another World came about as I reflected on this history, particularly in light of the activism we’re seeing around us right now as a new and powerful generation fights back against a frighteningly emboldened conservative movement.

When I started this book, I turned first to researching the activists working during the 1970s against odds that must have truly seemed impossible. I’m very grateful to the journalist Randy Shilts, whose biography of Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street, was one of my most helpful reference books as I was writing. Thanks also to activist Cleve Jones for his memoir, When We Rise, and to Lisa McGirr, the author of Suburban Warriors, a fascinating account of the conservative movement in Orange County, California.

Thanks, as well, to the readers of early drafts of Music from Another World, including Anna-Marie McLemore, Jennie Kendrick, and Nicole Overton. You helped to improve this book more than I can say. Thank you to my agent, Jim McCarthy, who’s stood by me through queer story after queer story and offered amazing insights every time. Thank you to my editors, T.S. Ferguson and Lauren Smulski, and to Kate Studer, for helping to make this book so much better than its first iteration, and to Kathleen Oudit for designing another truly spectacular cover. And thank you to the rest of the team at who helped to put this book out into the world, including Laura Gianino, Bess Braswell, Connolly Bottum, Brittany Mitchell, John Oberholtzer, and Allison Draper.

Thank you to Patti Smith, whose music went totally over my head when I was in high school but still impressed itself upon me so deeply that when I needed to call on it to create these characters, it was right there. Thank you, too, to the classic rock station in my hometown, which provided me with a musical education that I never imagined would come in handy until I sat down to write this book.

And most of all, thank you, as always, to Julia, and to Darcy. For everything there is to be thankful for.

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Friday, September 15, 2017

It took all of Abby’s willpower not to kiss her.

She’d gotten pretty good lately at staring at Linh without making it obvious. Most of the time, at least. Some days were harder than others, though, and today might be the hardest yet.

They’d just gotten back from a Starbucks run, and Abby kept darting looks at Linh out of the corner of her eye. They were sitting only inches apart on the lumpy old couch in the senior lounge, and as Linh sipped her drink and scribbled in her notebook, Abby couldn’t shake the memory of precisely how the echo of iced coffee tasted on Linh’s lips.

She knew she should stop thinking about this. Or at the very least, she should pretend to stop. She and Linh were officially “just friends” now, for reasons Abby was still trying to forget, and she was supposed to be doing her very best to act like that arrangement was perfectly fine with her.

So as she sat next to Linh, her feet tucked under her, Abby really did try to focus on the laptop screen balanced on her knees. Even though it was basically impossible to tear her eyes away from the spot where Linh’s soft brown hair curled into the nape of her perfectly sloped neck.

The senior lounge was nothing special—just a tiny room in a far-off corner of the fourth floor, with a few couches and a dusty TV that had probably last worked in the nineties—and everyone at school except Abby and Linh seemed to have forgotten it existed. Which made it the perfect place for Abby to secretly pine after her ex-girlfriend, since no one else was around to notice and make fun of her for it.

“I can’t believe Mr. Knight already wants my first lab done by Monday.” Linh wrinkled her nose down at