Alasdair MacKinnon

Chloe Danielle Sinclair was fifteen years old in 1985, in a town outside Fort Worth, when she fell in love with a straight cowboy who weighed nearly twice what she did and had never heard the words trans girl — because nobody had. There was no internet. No books. No magazines. No language at all. There were just two kids in jean and high-tops, following their hearts toward something the world hadn't given them permission to name.

It was real. It was wonderful. And almost nobody got to read about that kind of love.

Chloe came of age in the early 1990s clutching a brand-new copy of Tales of the City, claiming Anna Madrigal as her north star and falling for characters who became her chosen family. To Chloe, Armistead Maupin is an angel — she still re-reads the tattered copies she bought new as a teen. But Maupin wrote in the middle of a generation that won liberation only to watch a virus carve through the centers of their cities, and the necessary, unflinching honesty of those books left a young trans girl in Texas grieving people she would never meet, sometimes for years. He wasn't wrong. He couldn't have been. But she has spent her adult life thinking about what else might have been on the shelf for a kid like her, if only.

She has written the books she needed.

Chloe holds a BS in Psychology from the University of Houston and an MS in Research Psychology from Purdue, where her published 368-page thesis on biographical state matrices in studies of gay men taught her that every life is a system of intersecting truths and that no character worth writing is ever flat. She reads Foucault and Derrida for pleasure. She has loud opinions about color theory and 1985 sock layering. She has survived enough political weather to know that this storm, too, will pass — and that we have outlasted worse, with less.

Her novels are populated almost entirely by queer people living ordinary lives full of enormous drama. The straight, white, upper-middle-class monoculture we are constantly told is "our" culture appears in her books mostly as stage scenery. There are plenty of other books for that.

Complementary Colors: The Cowboy and the Artist is Chloe's love letter to her younger self, to her Gen X siblings, to the millennials who came up behind us, and most of all to the young queer readers inheriting a world the rest of us couldn't have imagined in 1985. It is a book about reverence for our past, joy in defiance of oppression, and a hard-won, stubborn optimism about everything that comes next.

It is not 1985 anymore. She was there. She remembers.