Emily M. Danforth, author of the award-winning novel The Miseducation of Cameron Post, sits down with Ali Velshi to talk about the growing genre of sapphic American literature and the struggles that LGBTQ+ teens have trying to find themselves and see themselves in the literary canon.
The teenage protagonist of The Miseducation of Cameron Post experiences all the universal milestones of teenage summers from the point of view of a lesbian, a largely unrepresented population in literature. The calls to ban one of the few novels that give young adult lesbian women a voice to relate to are often claimed by school districts and parents as based on “inappropriate language” in the book. However, other teen novels with the same language but lacking gay themes are not the subject of such bans.
The coming-of-age story chronicles the gray area between childhood and adulthood: first love and heartbreak, family obligations, and the fight for self-acceptance, but against the backdrop of the harrowing experience of being forced into a “gay conversion” camp.
“I loved a story like Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. I was not a young fly-fisher person, I certainly don’t have that kind of a background, but I felt incredibly inspired by these often American narratives of a young character kind of finding their footing in a challenging world,” says Danforth. “And those were the books that I looked to and I read as a young reader, and I’d never read one about a character that resembled my own life, like Cameron.”
Listen to Velshi and Danforth on the universal experiences of Cameron Post:
Watch Velshi and Danforth talk about teens and coming of age:
Velshi on banned books on MSNBC:
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