I’m thrilled to share a guest post from YA author Kit Rosewater, and it fits neatly into the “What’s Up in YA?” ongoing series exploring popular YA genres, tropes, and themes as seen through the eyes of those writing them. Each guest piece offers insight into a topic that’s beloved–or deserves more attention–in the world of YA, including hallmarks, highlights, and books that exemplify the theme at hand. Ryan Douglass launched the series with a look at YA retellings and reimaginings. Since then, Carolina Ixta explored activism and hope, Stacey Lee offered up her experiences and insights into Gothic YA, Diana Ma dove into the popular world of franchise novels (where were Power Rangers YA books like hers when I was a kid?), and Kody Keplinger wrote about what makes cult stories so dang appealing.

Rosewater talks about the inspiration behind her latest work, Buried Feelings. While this piece looks at how treasure hunts inspired Rosewater’s latest novel, it’s also about where and how treasure hunting intersects with queer history and queer community. There’s been a growing world of YA novels that offer deeper perspectives and insights into LGBTQ+ history, and you’ll find several of them included in this piece.

Too often–particularly from book banning crowds–there’s this belief that queer people are a new phenomenon, but queer people have always existed. Their stories have been buried and censored for generations. But more and more, we’re seeing YA authors not only offer historical queer stories; they’re also offering more contemporary stories that explore where and how LGBTQ+ people have lived, breathed, and loved throughout time and space. These stories build queer community that bridges the past and present in profound and moving ways.

Without further ado, though, here’s Kit Rosewater.

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The Treasured Past of Queer Community

I have always wanted to write a treasure book. 

Admittedly, I wasn’t drawn to fictional treasure stories like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.  But there was a picture book about treasure called Masquerade by Kit Williams that my teacher introduced to us in the third grade. I became utterly obsessed with the book for one simple reason: the treasure within the story was actually real. In 1979, Williams buried a golden necklace, then hid the clues to its whereabouts in Masquerade. Though the necklace had been found well before I ever came across the book, I was transfixed by a treasure story that gave so much weight and gravitas to its actual treasure. 

Later, when the film National Treasure came out in 2004, I was once again drawn to all the aspects of its treasure hunt that were rooted in the real. The letters of Silence Dogood penned by Benjamin Franklin. The detailed illustration on the back of the hundred dollar bill. There was so much that grabbed me in both stories—so much I wanted to understand and name so I could create a story just like it. 

My poor agent probably knows my love of treasure hunts better than anyone, as I sent her countless proposals and samples for treasure books over the past nine years.  I wrote about treasure hunts that took characters through the New Mexico Petroglyphs, where I grew up. I wrote about treasure hunts with double agents and spies. But I could never crack that aspect that most drew me to treasure stories as a child. I hadn’t yet found the real. 

But everything changed when I was writing a nonfiction proposal on treasure hunt books and came across The Secret, a niche treasure book produced by Byron Preiss that came out in 1982, right on the heels of Masquerade. The Secret saw 12 treasures hidden in 12 cities, and its clues drew on lore from the cities themselves, as well as a different immigrant group chosen to match each location. 

Finally—finally!—I saw the marriage in everything I had wanted to put into a treasure story. I wanted a final treasure that felt rooted in its burial grounds, and I wanted a treasure hunt that felt genuine and sincere. I had been obsessed with a fictional treasure hunt that paid homage to American history in the Revolutionary War era, a history which I admittedly cared little about. But where was the treasure story that paid homage to the history I hold most dear, to the untold stories of queer heroes and communities in the United States? 

That was my treasure story to write. 

The book that came from that epiphany is Buried Feelings, a story of a treasure hunt set within San Francisco that sees its characters uncovering the history of the wider queer community that rose together and took shape in the Bay Area after World War II. The book started from my childhood love of treasure hunts, but has ended in the most cliché way possible, as I realized that researching and discovering this queer history was the real treasure all along. 

Books that Explore Queer History

The following YA stories—some contemporary and some speculative—lead readers on an archeological journey through the glimmering facets of queer representation and queer community rooted in various times and places.  

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Kit Rosewater lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her partner and two small children. She is the author of YA romances Buried Feelings and All’s Fair in Love and Field Hockey from Penguin Random House, as well as the Derby Daredevils, a middle grade series from Abrams Books. Kit has been a theater and English teacher, a bookseller, and a children’s literature academic. She is the chairperson of the Freedom to Read New Mexico coalition, and advocates in schools and at the state legislature against book censorship.