We’ll be Saturday, but our actual selves this time. Seeing how well “End of Everything” and our back catalogue are performing, our lawyers are confident Monarch will want to work with us, and we’ll be able to make some amendments to our contract, to make sure what happened on tour this year never happens again.
I’m sharing the car with the rest of the band. We thought it was a good idea to arrive at the same time, to show what we are now: a united front.
“So, boys,” says Angel. “I was doing a bit of research the other day.”
“Now that’s a scary thought,” says Jon.
Angel crosses his arms. “I’m not telling anymore.”
“Fine, sorry, what is it?”
“Well, I had a quick look, you know, and I’ve found that there is this really nice four-bedroom penthouse currently up for grabs in Marina del Rey. It’s got city and mountain views, and a separate theater room. Plus you can have pets! You know I’ve always wanted a French bulldog, right?”
Somehow, I’m not surprised that even after knowing Angel for this long, I’m still learning stuff about him.
“What do you say?” he asks. “Shall I book a viewing?”
Ruben glances at me. “It can’t hurt to take a look, right?”
“Yeah,” says Jon. “What’s the harm?”
“Book it,” I say.
“Already done,” says Angel, grinning. “It’s next Tuesday.”
The car goes around a corner, and I see the Monarch Management building. Out front is a crowd of about a hundred or so people. Given how widespread the news of our battle with Chorus has been, I’m not surprised they’re here. What does surprise me is seeing how many of them are holding rainbow flags or are wearing rainbow shirts. They see the car, and start cheering for us.
Not screaming. Cheering.
It thrills me more than I think a stadium ever has.
The car pulls to a stop, and Angel climbs out, waving like he’s royalty.
Jon is next, stepping out and adjusting his top button, before flashing a dazzling smile and making his way up to the fans, his posture perfect. If I could have anyone in the world leading us into what comes next, I’d pick him.
Ruben gets out, and turns back, to offer his hand to me. I grab it, and step out into the sunshine, holding his hand.
The cheering gets even louder.
I squeeze Ruben’s hand, and he squeezes back. As we walk up to the fans, I’m hit with a surefire thought: this is going to work out.
It’s not going to be okay, or good.
It’s going to be great.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When Cale approached Sophie to write a book together back in 2019, there was no way to predict how this would go. Neither of us had ever co-written a book before, and we wrote fairly different stories for our solo works. What we did have going for us were three important things: a friendship that started on Twitter in 2014 as we both began to pursue our dream of publication, a love of writing queer stories, and a passion for this story concept. It was Cale who initially proposed the premise of two members of a boy band who fall for each other, but it was together that these characters took form.
It didn’t take long for Sophie’s character, Ruben, and Cale’s character, Zach, along with Angel and Jon, to become real to us. If reading can be described as sharing a vivid hallucination with a writer, co-writing is something else altogether. The way we immediately agreed on the primary character traits and story arcs was uncanny, the suspicions we held about characters’ inner lives were shared before we even discussed them out loud, and the consistency of the characters between the chapters we’d email each other was incredible from the very start. In many ways, it felt as though these characters were real, existing on another plane, and in co-writing this book we got joint, simultaneous access to their lives.
If there’s anything we hope our readers take from this book (other than thorough enjoyment, naturally!), it’s a greater awareness of the pressures placed on artists—particularly queer and/or otherwise marginalized artists—within the entertainment industry. While our characters are entirely fictional, the depictions of exhausting working conditions, invasion of privacy by the media, and abuse of power were unfortunately inspired by endless public accounts given by artists—especially those who rose to fame at a young age—describing their experiences. Closeting, whether blatant or insidious, is a well-documented occurrence, with multiple celebrities over the years openly discussing the pressures they felt to appear straight in order to preserve their careers. If This Gets Out explores how you can start to lose your sense of self when you’re forced into a role you never chose, and the many ways a person can be trapped by those who abuse their power over them.
But it’s also a story of hope, and of pushing back against those bindings. We hope to see a world in our lifetimes when the systems that strip power and agency from individuals working within the entertainment industry are restructured, with these bindings done away with altogether.
To Moe Ferrara and the team at Bookends, and Molly Ker Hawn and the team at the Bent Agency: thank you so much for supporting us and believing in us and this book, and working tirelessly to make it the best it could be! We couldn’t have done it without you.
Thank you to Sylvan Creekmore, editor extraordinaire, who will always jump on a video chat at odd times to hash out a particularly tricky plot tangle with us, and for letting us take the story where we hoped to.
Thank you so much to the team at Wednesday Books, for believing in this book, and for making it such a special experience. Special thanks to Rivka Holler, DJ DeSmyter, Alexis Neuville, Dana Aprigliano, Jessica Preeg, Sarah Schoof, Sara Goodman, Eileen Rothschild, and NaNá V. Stoelzle!
Thank you to Olga Grlic for the amazing jacket design, and for supporting Sophie so very patiently during her first scary foray into jacket illustration!