When he started his career in writing and came to terms with his identity as a Gay man in the 1990s, author Benjamin Saenz was already well into his adult life and had had many experiences as a professor and Catholic priest.
"It was a different world. It was almost as if it was the beginning of a transition into what we have today," Saenz said, reflecting on those times.
While the culture seemed to be at the precipice of change, novels about experiences other than white, cis, heterosexual characters were still exotic. "They were trying what they called 'multicultural literature' — that was the category they put us in," he said.
Despite having his early work categorized as "multicultural," Saenz saw hope in the way both the literature and education spheres were trying to prioritize authors of color, though there was still a long way to go. "I'm not sure if they would [have included] the LGBTQ+ community as much as they would now," he said.
"It was an odd place to begin writing in that era. I was publishing with small presses," he said. Saenz persevered and continued to develop and learn, not only about the craft of writing but about his worldview. His presence in the writing community in the early '90s paved the way for him to become an even more influential figure as society continued to shift and demand more stories about BIPOC and LGBTQ+ experiences.
"Because of [Flowers for the Broken, a 1992 short story collection], I was able to get an agent who could sell my first novel, Carry Me like Water, which launched my career."
Embracing his sexuality at 50
Saenz's life changed in his fifties. Not only did he begin to write, but he also began to accept himself and embrace all his identities. "Until my early fifties, I hadn't 'come out,'" he said.
His journey to self-acceptance was difficult. He had both process societal prejudices and work through past trauma. "I had been abused as a boy," he said. "The thought of letting a man touch me was not very appealing. It took me a long time to come to terms with that, but once I did, I wanted to write something Gay."
When he finally sat down to write "something Gay," Saenz realized he was not capable of writing a Gay story. His stories are not about identities but about humanity. Instead, he wrote a text about a full human who possessed many identities and was made complete by all of them.
"I don't know what a Gay novel is," he explained, "but I do know what it is to write a novel with Gay characters in it. It's not about being Gay, it's about being human."
Eventually, self-acceptance led him to write his most popular novel, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. Through Ari and Dante, Saenz was able to explore his identity. Writing their coming-of-age stories gave him the opportunity to live his own and create the world he wished he'd grown up in.
"In that novel, being Gay, discovering one is Gay, is normal. It's not a big thing. And being Latino is normal. I normalized those experiences."
Writing those identities into his characters allowed Saenz to stay true to himself.
"I don't perform my ethnicity on the page," he said. "I refuse to do that. I'm not a zoo. I don't perform my sexuality on the page. It's not a performance. It's just these characters that happen to be Gay and happen to be Latino. Not that that isn't important, because it is, but they're human beings. We experience them as human beings...
"What do you know about someone if [they tell you] 'I'm Gay'? People think they know something about them if they say 'I'm Gay' ...but they don't know shit about me. If they tell me, 'Oh, I'm a heterosexual,' what do I know about them? Not a damn thing. It's funny how we think we know something about someone because we know they're Gay. We don't do that to straight people. We don't know anything about people by knowing those things. I'm not saying those things aren't important; I'm just saying that we don't know or understand anything by saying that."
History of pain
Living through some of the most painful parts of LGBTQ+ history made coming out even harder for Saenz.
"Back then, they did not like Gay men," he said. "In particular Gay men, because of AIDS, people were afraid of them. There was a second reason they hated Gay men, and the LGBTQ community in general. When they hit the streets, people said, 'Oh my God, there are so many of them!' Yeah, there are a lot of us. Guess what? We are your sons and daughters. Straight people freaked out... they couldn't handle all of that. I thought that the Gay community was very brave."
While acceptance may be more common for young people today, he feels that there is still a uniting factor of self-doubt that all Queer people experience on some level.
"In terms of accepting my Gay identity, I struggled so hard with that. I think we all do in some ways. The LGBTQ+ community carries this weight inside us. We don't even know it, because we've become used to always adjusting in society," he said.
Despite the history of pain the Queer community carries, Saenz is proud of its endurance and strength as well.
He also embraces his identity. "I struggled so a long to accept my sexuality, even though our sexual orientations are not a choice," he said.
"Right now, if someone were to tell me, even after this long struggle to embrace myself, ...'You know what? We've discovered this pill, and you can take it every day, and you'll be straight,' I would say, 'Fuck you, keep it.' I like who I am, finally. I don't need to adjust to the dominant white culture or the dominant straight culture. I don't need to do that. I'm Ben, and at 68, I finally have arrived at that, and I finally know who I am."
Seeing the world without judgment
His identity has informed Saenz's philosophy on compassion. Instead of focusing time and energy on the identities people cannot change, such as their race or sexuality, he believes they should be spent shaping the parts of us that are malleable.
"That's our job in this life, to at least know who you are," he said, "to be honest with who you are and say to yourself, 'I do get to decide what kind of person I want to be.' That is a decision. It's not just that I am like this. No. Do you want to be a good person? Then be a good person. Do you want to be a decent person? Then you can be a decent person. Do you want to be a generous person? Then you can be a generous person. We can do this by intent."
In 2012 Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe first hit the shelves. It became an instant classic, one of the earliest Queer YA novels to show acceptance and love those often forgotten. Ari and Dante helped many Queer kids to accept their identities and see themselves as worthy of love.
The book was also a milestone for Saenz. The characters were a way of finally letting go of his fears. "I spent my life too much in fear. When you let go of your fears and you become fearless, your world changes immensely. You feel incredibly powerful."
"Aristotle and Dante is an important book for me... because it's the first time I've written about Gay characters. I outed myself," he added.
"I wrote this so I could say, 'I'm one of you, I'm a member of our community.' As a writer, I have a responsibility, whether I like it or not, to be a spokesperson for that community, because I represent [it] on the page.
"...I can't just say, 'Oh, I represent this entire community completely.' That's crazy. But I do have to contribute so people can see us. I can't avoid that.
"I hope that when people see us, they see us differently. That they see us as fellow human beings and realize that Aristotle and Dante are our children, our sons. They belong to all of us."
Blending styles and coming alive
While the characters alone are endearing enough to make Aristotle and Dante a classic, Saenz's writing style is what gives the novel life. Using both the classic lyrical nature of Faulkner and the directness of Hemingway, Saenz's way of writing has kept readers hooked for nearly a decade.
"I had this idea that to be a lyrical writer, you had to write more like Faulkner, or you had to write more like Gabriel García Márquez, to have more sentences that were rich and this music to it," he said. "I think I went more in the way of Hemingway, who lacked music in his writing but had a direct style that was more interesting to me. So, I've tried to combine the two."
Saenz likes to listen to his writing out loud, to connect with the rhythm of the English language. "It has inherent music. English is inherently iambic, so you can write a perfect iambic pentameter line. You internalize that as you read. I try to do that, really be careful with the words that I use.
"The only way that you experience a book is through writing. All I have is words as my tool, and I think I'm more careful. I was always careful, but I've become more careful. The writing matters. The story matters, but you only get the story through the writing. So, I think that's what I pay attention to now."
Saenz was born to write, it seems. The skill comes as naturally to him as speaking. "I've always been a good writer, ever since I started school," he said. "Writing is very difficult for a lot of people, but it never really was for me. But then when you become an artist at it, it is difficult. It's difficult because you have to figure things out, and my process is very difficult to describe because of this. I don't know what will happen."
A once-dormant part of Saenz comes alive when he puts pen to paper, he says. "It just happens. I feel so incredibly alive when I'm writing. It's unbelievable. It's like a drug; I get endorphins. It's wonderful. My process hasn't changed. Some people need to be inspired, I don't. When it's time to write, I sit down and write. It happens."
Writing humans and withholding judgment
The most important part of Saenz's writing is building characters. He has never written a one-dimensional character, because he understands that each human being exists in a multitude of complexities.
"One thing that I think has strengthened my writing is that I like people," he said. "I like my characters, even if they're all fucked up. And some of my characters can be fucked up, but I don't judge them either. I can be fucked up — I've had issues, like everybody else. I don't want to judge them."
Before becoming an author, Saenz spent his life as a priest working with some of the most impoverished people in London. This experience shaped his willingness to look beyond appearances.
Saenz has also been a teacher and a professor. If he has taught nothing else, he hopes that he has influenced both his readers and his students to not be quick to judge.
"I'm not afraid of poverty. I'm not afraid of people who are down and out of their luck. I think that culture teaches us to get away. We want to help people, but not the guy who's begging for a nickel outside of Circle K. But we got to see the beauty in that guy somehow," he said.
"We look at something and we immediately make a judgment of it. I see that in books. You shouldn't judge a book until you finish it. From the very beginning, people are making assessments of it, we're judging it, instead of reading and experiencing it. We don't open ourselves up to the text, which is what we should do with people."
Saenz's philosophy on reading — to withhold judgment — mirrors his philosophy on life. "I want people to experience books how they experience life. That's what I write about. As Faulkner would have it, 'The struggle of the human heart against itself.' It's how we can be our worst enemies and sabotage ourselves, but we have to love ourselves, and it's so difficult. That's really what I want to write about.
"So for me, I think one of the most important parts of my writing is that I don't judge my characters, even the ones who are not nice people. I just want to see them."
Saenz embeds this philosophy in all of his work. It can be seen in the growth of some of his most beloved characters, like Ari.
"It's about how Ari embraced his humanity by accepting his love for Dante. He not only fell in love with Dante, but he fell in love with his parents and their love for him. I wanted to write a novel that had Gay characters in it, but I didn't know how to do that, but I can write characters. I wanted to normalize it."
Diving into the Waters of the World
Nearly ten years after the Stonewall Book Award—winning novel first hit shelves, Saenz returned with a sequel. For some, Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World betrayed the intimacy of the first book, but for Sanez, opening the story up to include the greater context of life as a young Gay person in the '80s was essential to the story.
"In Ari and Dante, their community in the first book was so small, but it gets a lot bigger in the second one," he said. "One thing I did not like about the first book was that I didn't represent what was happening in that era with AIDS."
It's a time Saenz remembers all too well, a time of tragedy he felt a duty to represent.
"I lost my mentor, my brother, and one of my best friends. I wanted to include the world that they lived in — the context — in the second novel, and that was important to me," he said.
Saenz also used the backdrop of the 1980s to explore new characters and pay homage to the unity of the LGBTQ+ community during the epidemic.
"I especially think that a lot of the heroes from that era were in the Lesbian community. They joined in that fight. They weren't getting AIDS, but they joined that fight. A lot of Gay men ignored the Lesbian community, but [the women] didn't care. They said, 'This is our fight, too.' They were such fierce warriors in that era.
"Now I look back and I think we should bow down and thank the women ...for fighting for us, because they were wonderful, they were so great and brave. I wrote the second novel because it included that, which was so important for me."
Expanding the context of the novel was also Saenz's way of showing Ari and Dante maturing. "When we grow up, our worlds are smaller and intimate, but as we grow up, we realize there is a bigger world out there that helps define us," he said.
In the end, Aristotle and Dante is not about being Gay or Latino, it's about being human.
"Ari and Dante are Gay, but how do we experience them? We experience them as boys. They're boys, and they're beautiful, and that matters," Saenz said.
"If you think that Ari and Dante are beautiful, it's because you are beautiful. It's because you see yourself in them, and you are sensing your beauty. Embrace it. Don't be afraid of it."