James Baldwin was an icon who advocated for issues of race, identity, and gender. Join us in celebration of 100 years of the life and legacy of this legendary Black queer author, poet, playwright, cultural critic, and activist.
Cancer season is over and Leo season arises like the sun in the east, which also means the 100th birthday of literary giant James Baldwin finally arrives. Baldwin’s pulse and analysis on civil rights and the Black identity lives on in his collection of essays Notes of a Native Son — a title that’s recently become synonymous with the nonprofit Native Son, an organization that supports the wellness, empowerment, and amplification of Black queer and gay voices, including the recent launch of Queerty’s Native Son channel.
Baldwin’s unapologetic fierceness as a Black queer man lives on in many “native sons,” including author Kosoko Jackson, who’s made a name for himself telling stories that intertwine Blackness, queerness, fantasy, and romance.
With several books under his belt, including A Dash of Salt and Pepper, and The Forest Demands its Due, Jackson is well on his way to becoming a defining Black queer literary voice for his generation. Baldwin rose achieved acclaim through staunchly critiquing the systems that denied him and many Black American rights with his eloquent words. Jackson is carving his own unique path for 21st-century audiences.
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How Kosoko Jackson’s story begins
Jackson’s knack for writing started during his childhood. While his parents watched Wheel of Fortune, a six-year-old Jackson filled commercial breaks with recitations of his short stories.
“I wrote my first short story when I was six years old,” Jackson told Queerty. “It was about these first graders who went to the forest, running away from their parents and got eaten by a bear.”
Jackson grew up with a 17- and 18-year age gap between him and his two older sisters. Additionally, not having cable TV and internet in his household during his formative years prompted Jackson to become an avid reader, diving into series like Eragon, Harry Potter, and The Bartimaeus Sequence. He formed his own worlds within his imagination and fell in love with storytelling, crafting short stories during his grade school years.
It wasn’t until his time in college when his life and his writing took a different turn.
“College was really hard for me,” Jackson said. “I ended up flunking out of college and [came back] home for about two years. My mom was like, ‘You can come back home, but you got to do something productive.’ And I was like, ‘I’m gonna write a novel.’ I worked on [the novel], while I was getting my degree, and the rest is history.”
Jackson’s first novel, the appropriately named Yesterday Is History, was released in 2021. His young adult fiction debut encapsulated his adoration of science fiction and paved the way for Jackson to focus on the idea that queer boys can be the center of a love story and experience fantastical time travel simultaneously.
Thankfully for Jackson, his first novel was just the beginning. Soon followed his second sci-fi YA novel, Survive the Dome, in 2022. But Jackson had no intention of putting himself into a literary box.
First comes sci-fi, then comes romance
While enamored with all things fantasy and sci-fi, Jackson wanted to shift into other genres, mostly because he wanted a break from young adult literature. During that respite, Jackson read Casey McQuiston’s novel-turned-Prime film darling Red, White & Royal Blue. Cupid’s queer romance arrow hit Jackson and he knew that a romantic comedy novel was in his future.
“I had loved how [Red, White & Royal Blue] dealt with love from a career perspective,” Jackson said. “And so I wanted to try and write something similar to that, but write the queer Black perspective. So, at six o’clock in the morning, I emailed my agent, and I was like, ‘I want to write something like this.’”
Jackson’s agent was reluctant to encourage the then YA author to step into uncharted territory, but gave his blessing nonetheless. A year after that conversation, his debut rom-com novel I’m (So) Not Over Year was sold. The book, also published in 2022, was a professional triumph for Jackson, gaining press from major news outlets, including USA Today, Essence, Buzzfeed, and Oprah Daily. His debut romance novel also garnered him a Lambda Literary Award in 2023.
Career milestones aside, for Jackson, I’m (So) Not Over You was also a testament to bringing Black queer joy to the forefront of literature.
Existing outside of the monolith
“There was a time when we only had queer trauma stories and coming out stories,” Jackson said. “And I’m glad to see that there’s a shift now in queer literature, and especially queer diverse literature, so that we can have stories that focus on joy. They don’t only focus on coming out because not every person’s experience is reflected in that coming out.”
But it wasn’t just about joy for Jackson. He sees the Black queer experience for what it is, wide-ranging and with room for Black queer stories to flourish outside of stereotypical paradigms that they tend to exist in at the intersection of media and literature.
“And I think frankly, it’s the idea that Black stories have to focus on poverty or drugs,” Jackson said. “We should have a wide spectrum of stories because Black people and queer people are a wide spectrum of experiences. We should never get rid of those stories, but I truly think that we need to have every single type of story.”
One of the first of the wide spectrum of queer experiences Jackson got his hands on was from Baldwin. Jackson, who stated that he was “always out” and “didn’t struggle to find his identity,” read Baldwin’s famed Giovanni’s Room for a high school book report, as he was in constant search of three-dimensional, queer literature.
Interestingly, Baldwin ran into the plight of holding space for his Blackness and queerness within his work, something he discussed in an 1980 interview. While a prominent public figure in the fight for Civil Rights for Black Americans, he opted for two white protagonists in his queer novel Giovanni’s Room. Jackson may not have experienced that tension within his personal life, but the publishing industry’s restraints on Black storytelling impacted his work.
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Changing the face of fiction
Before I’m (So) Not Over You evolved into the story of Black queer characters Kian Andrews and Hudson Rivers, it actually consisted of a different pairing. In the novel’s first draft, one character was a Black American and the other, British Indian. Jackson scrapped the idea, as it was too similar to Red, White & Royal Blue’s American-U.K. theme.
Jackson altered the characters to a Black and white couple, concerned that the general public wouldn’t accept a rom-com led by two Black queer men. He also faced an uphill battle with publishing’s historic focus on appealing to white audiences. In 2020, the New York Times shed light on the disparity between white and BIPOC authors, revealing that 95 percent of fiction books published in the U.S. between 1950 and 2018 were written by white authors.
“Unfortunately, a lot of publishing still operates under the idea that a book should appeal to ‘Middle America,’” Jackson said. “And Middle America is a code word for basically white people. And how does my book and my desire to be a successful author come in combat with that when I know that if I wrote a queer white character my books would sell better?”
Jackson wrestled with this notion. But with encouragement from his editor, he brought Kian and Hudson’s Black queer love story to life.
Jackson obviously isn’t alone in navigating a flawed publishing system. His contemporaries have also found success writing queer BIPOC stories, and are a testament to the need for diverse representation in publishing. For Jackson, writers such as Julian Winters, Leah Johnson, and Aiden Thomas, are just a few queer BIPOC voices who inspire him. With Winters’ focus on Black queer joy in rom coms, Johnson writing empowering, Black, sapphic fiction, and Thomas highlighting complex, trans, Latine narratives, Jackson and his contemporaries are changing the way that trans, queer, and cishet readers alike engage with LGBTQ+ stories.
Art and activism
But diverse literature alone can’t change a broken system. Like Baldwin, Jackson has found a way to move the needle in the fight for equity and representation within his writing and his role as the senior public relations director for the racial justice organization Color of Change. Jackson finds time to accomplish his writing goals, while simultaneously spearheading a press and social media strategy that grows the nonprofit’s footprint in the digital advocacy space.
“I think all art is, in itself, political, even in a very obvious political bent,” Jackson said. “And even my work, as Black and queer. is triple political. So I tried to influence the things that I learned from all of my jobs and ideas of activism, and how activism can take form in the major and minor rings in my writing. Because my identity as a Black, queer man is political, [it] means that I cannot separate art in the political aspect of existing and write authentic characters without at least mentioning that in some way, shape, or form in my stories.”
And Jackson has every intention of continuously incorporating this into his writing career. His current aspirations include venturing into thrillers, particularly a spy thriller, a la Jack Reacher, or a Big Little Lies-esque, suburban thriller. Until inspiration takes hold of him, he’ll continue putting the finishing touches on his upcoming book, The Macabre.
“It’s an adult horror book, which follows a prophetic painter who gets invited by the British Museum to an art exhibit focusing on artists from colonized nations,” Jackson said. “But it turns out that it’s a ruse. Because of his ancestry connecting him to this post-impressionist painter who made these ten paintings called ‘The Macabre,’ each with their own deadly power, the British Museum wants him to help them find and neutralize [them]. At the same time, a nefarious individual is hunting the paintings for her own reasons connected to the main character.”
The Macabre is slated for a summer 2025 release. At the same time, Jackson continues his work at Color of Change, hoping to prevent a real-life macabre future as the general election nears—a balancing act that will hopefully prove fruitful as an author and activist.
Featured photo: Kosoko Jackson (Photo: Sarah Lemon), James Baldwin (Photo: Sophie Bassouls/Sygma via Getty Images.)
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Pupity Pancey
Love this article! Kosovo’s next book, Macabre, sounds really good! Congrats!