Jason June’s ‘Out of the Blue’ is the Perfect Summer Read

Diving into the many definitions of the word “home,” Jason June’s sophomore LGBTQ novel Out of the Blue shows how love can help us find the truest versions of ourselves.

Following Crest, a teen merfolk who is not excited for their month-long sojourn on land, they must help a human within one moon cycle and return to Pacifica in order to grow up and become an Elder. If all fails, they will remain stuck on land forever. When Crest meets Sean, a human lifeguard whose boyfriend recently dumped him, they agree to help Sean win his ex back. However, as the two spend more time together and Crest’s perspective on humans begins to change, they will soon be torn between two worlds.

June, who has always had a passion for writing queer-inclusive children and young adult stories, hopes his powerful and inspiring characters will help change the mindset of the world we live in today.

Earlier this summer, he held a book donation drive to fight against the multiple book bans happening across the country, and folks could donate copies of Out of the Blue to be delivered to LGBTQ community centers that have teen programs, which are safe because they’re private. This way, queer teens could have access to a relatable summer beach read without being challenged by the public.

The drive, which ended in late June, was a huge success, and over 300 books were donated.

OFM caught up with the genderqueer author to chat more about the book, his queerness informing his work, the road ahead, and more.

Congrats on your latest novel, Out of the Blue! How excited were you to release this project out into the world?

I was so excited! I’ve always loved merpeople since I was very little. The first movie I ever saw in the theater was The Little Mermaid, and I’ve just been obsessed from then on. So, to be able to finally have a contribution to mercannon is really delightful.

Can you tell us more about the inspiration behind the book?

One, I’ve always wanted to write a merperson novel, so I was waiting for that perfect opportunity to be able to find the right story that could feature a mercharacter, but I always like to have an emotional heart in my stories. For this one, I wanted to explore the idea of love for a place versus love for a person. I think with a lot of queer people, we fall in love with a physical location, and it can either be because we feel warm and welcome there, or because we don’t feel it.

When we finally find a city that embraces all of us, that city becomes a part of our being, and we truly fall in love with it. We feel physical sensations being in that place because it feels right to us, but then on the other hand, we can find a person that also feels right to us. They should be in our life, but due to life circumstances like a job, school, or whatever, that person lives in a different location, and you’re forced to choose between a person or a place, and that’s what I wanted to explore with this.

I felt like a merperson would be perfect for that because they literally have to choose between love for their home, which is the ocean, or love for a person, which is the human they fall in love with during their short time on land. I think that’s interesting to play with. What do you do when you literally can’t choose both?

That is an interesting concept to think about. Well, considering that Out of the Blue landed you on the New York Times Bestseller list under “YA Hard Cover,” I’m assuming it has been received well by audiences?

(Laughs) That was such an amazing surprise, and I attribute a lot of it to a multitude of things. One, there’s the mercommunity. These people are so loyal, and they were very excited about Out of the Blue. They helped me get the word out about the book, which was amazing. It’s also nice that a light layer in this book is exploring gender and portraying it through the merperson’s eyes. Through Crest’s eyes. They go about it like when you meet strangers for the first time.

They don’t describe them as a man or woman. They’ll describe them as having a masculine energy, a feminine energy, or an energy that’s not encapsulated by those two words. I feel like that’s been refreshing to a lot of readers, especially nonbinary and trans readers, where there’s a true example from somebody’s perspective of how this could be and how everybody could function from the jump. I think word has gotten around about that aspect, which has been touching and lovely. It’s resonating with folk.

Ultimately, what do you hope they take away from the book?

I hope that readers realize that there is no right or wrong answer when you’re choosing love in your life. If you have a moment in life where you’re really falling for a person, and you realize it conflicts with the place you want to be in life, the physical space you want to be in life, it is not wrong to choose the space over the person, and it’s not wrong to choose the person over the space. It’s whatever is most true to you at that point in time.

I think we get caught up in this notion that we need a person to complete us, so I think people who might choose a place over a person can sometimes be seen as foolhardy or selfish. Then I also think that there are times where we focus too much on a person completing us, so we don’t get to truly explore and develop our full sense of self, which for many of us, happens because of the physical place that we’re in.

Both choices have their pluses and minuses. They’re cliches or stigmas in society, and I hope that readers realize that the correct answer is the answer that’s right for you. It’s not based on romance tropes or ideas about how to be a strong independent person. It’s whatever is best for you.

How much does your life experiences as part of the LGBTQ community influence your writing?

Usually, it gives me a small seed of where to jump off from. With Out of the Blue, it was the whole idea of falling in love with the place. I hear about being enamored with a place and falling in love with a city in all my queer circles, and like I was saying before, a city is very much involved in us being accepted. It’s a part of a city’s ethos and a lot of us grew up in areas where part of the ethos was rejecting queerness and sometimes being literally violent about it.

When we find a place where we feel truly safe, we fall in love with it, so that experience of my queerness helped sort of shape the overall idea of Out of the Blue, as well as my experience as a genderqueer person and being femme. I’m male bodied but feminine presenting most of the time. That came into play a lot when I was in Crest’s point of view. Describing how they feel about gender and some of the arbitrariness of the rules that we place just because of a part that’s between our legs.

There’s always a nice little jumping off point, and then it gets embellished, elaborated on, and explored through many more layers of fiction.

When I interviewed you last year, we talked about why you gravitate toward writing for children and young adults, but I guess I never realized how much they intersect fantasy and real life. Can you talk more about that?

I think it’s funny that we think we are not magic. Humankind thinks that they have no magic, but we are so, so, so magic. Not literal like witches, wizards, and brewing potions over cauldrons, but the emotions, reactions, and feelings that we can create in each other is true magic. During the pandemic, we realized how special those connections can be face to face. Whether it’s connections through physical touch, sharing our deepest secrets with each other, seeing and hearing each other laugh when we’re right in front of somebody, those experiences are a type of magic.

It just makes so much sense to me to intertwine the genre of fantasy with real life. Out of the Blue is a contemporary story, but it has this magical element of a merperson being on land. We’re just dealing with themes of real life, love, coming of age, and figuring out our path in life, whether it’s a career path, a romance path, or a friendship path. All those magical connections we make as humans, I try to complement with a fantasy element to try to heighten the magic that humans create.

Out of the Blue may be your eighth queer-inclusive title, but it’s your second full-length novel. Jay’s Gay Agenda was your first, which came out last year. How would you say you are evolving as a writer and storyteller?

Wow, that is a really good question. As always I try to be unashamedly gay (laughs). Now, I think I’m evolving in terms of wanting to explore interpersonal relationships within the gay community. Jay’s Gay Agenda was a lot of talking about how to interact as one of the sole gay people in a very straight world. The stories I’m working on moving forward, they’re about how to get all the different letters of the rainbow alphabet to work together. What are times where we’re working against each other, and why? How can we all come together and not have this sort of inner turmoil? Instead, let’s be this great alphabet soup of queerness.

Can you tell us more about the book donation drive you organized for private LGBTQ centers in response to the nation’s book bans? 

That book drive came about because there were all these bans in public libraries and public schools about queer content, books by and about queer creators, and books by and about authors of color. It’s an understatement to say this really bummed me out, so I wanted to find a way to get my book directly into the hands of queer teen readers who need the book, where it can’t be challenged because this is a summer fluffy, fun beach read. I realized going into summer that a lot of these queer teens live in communities where they can’t get a beach read that has characters like them in it.

So, I teamed up with 30 LGBTQ centers that had teen programs, and these are private organizations. No community member can affect what book they put in their libraries. This was a great way to get this book into the hands of teens, it helped independent bookstores because I teamed up with three indies to buy the books through, and it helped me as an up-and-coming queer author.

It was this perfect trifecta of good vibes, and about 345 copies of the book were purchased and have been distributed out. It’s so exciting, and I really am thankful to people for showing up and not only helping me and these indie bookstores, but most importantly, helping out teens that need a book with somebody like them in it.

How much value and power are there for young people to have access to literature that represents who they are?

It is so important! There’s so much value in it. When I was a teen in the early to mid-aughts, I could count on less than one hand how many books I could find that had a queer teen protagonist. I got so sad by that, and I kind of stopped reading when I was a teen because I couldn’t find stories that were emblematic of my experience or made me feel like I was connecting to a part of humanity. So, I’m honored to be a part of this generation of queer authors that are trying to end that.

We’re succeeding, which is why there’s so many concerted efforts right now to ban queer books. It’s because they’re seeing how successful we’re getting at showing all letters of our rainbow alphabet. We’re showing all different types of backgrounds in terms of race, socio-economic class, religion, and location about where these characters are living. We’re entering a golden age of queer literature, which is why we’re entering a stage of increased attacks because people don’t want this. The wild thing is it doesn’t matter how much you try to ban these books. We’re not going to stop existing!

It’s so important that we have books that show the whole plethora of the queer experience, so that kids know that they’re not alone. Even though we’re in the 2020s, there are still areas where kids are the only out queer person or it’s not safe enough for them to come out yet. These books matter. They keep them going until they’re in the stage of life where they can shape the world and people around them, and they find a safe environment where they can really be themselves.

Several LGBTQ books are being adapted into films and TV series. How would you feel if this happened to one of yours?

Oh, I would love it so much! I love the whole medium of movies, and it would be such an honor. I can’t wait to see what happens on that front, so fingers crossed!

Are you currently working on anything new and upcoming?

Yes! I’m hard at work right now on multiple projects. In the next two years, I’m going to have four novels coming out, which I’m very excited about. The first two are a fantasy duology with the Melissa de la Cruz imprint at Disney, and it’s about a magic competition, but if you fail the competition, the competitors lose their magic powers altogether. Two of the male competitors fall in love with each other, so it’s like, what do you do when you have to choose between your love or between keeping the magic that makes you, you?

I also have a couple new projects with Harper Collins, and we’re releasing my favorite book title ever next summer. It’s called Riley Weaver Needs a Date to the Gaybutante Ball, and it follows Riley Weaver, who is a gay, femme 16-year-old. He wants to enter the gaybutante society, which is this world-renowned organization of queer teen tastemakers because he thinks that joining the organization will help launch his podcasting career to the next step.

When you’re trying to get into the gaybutante society, it all culminates in the gaybutante ball, where you need to have an escort. It could be platonic or romantic, but Riley doesn’t know who it’s going to be until he hears another cis gay classmate say that gay guys don’t like femme guys, or else they wouldn’t be gay. They’re into masculinity, and femme Riley is like, “Say what?” (Laughs). He makes a bet with this cis guy saying, if he finds a traditionally masculine date in time for the gaybutante ball, the gut will have to drop out of baseball, which is his big career dream.

If Riley can’t, then he will drop out of the gaybutante society and let his podcasting dreams go with it. So, it’s this exploration of the labels we give ourselves, the labels other people give us, and how those can limit us, liberate us, and who gets to define what it means to be gay and who gets to define what it means to be femme. All these things and how they weave together into that whole tapestry of queer awesomeness.

Stay up-to-date and connect with June by following him on Twitter and Instagram @heyjasonjune, or visit his official website, heyjasonjune.com. Out of the Blue is available at all book retailers.

Photos courtesy of Ryan Bilawsky