Since 2011, McKenna has been documenting his life — including leaving a strict religious household, coming out twice, and going on and off HRT — to an audience of roughly 1.2 million subscribers. With every new video, that audience tunes in to see his familiar shock of curly hair, blue eyes, and sleeve full of black and white tattoos; his sunny, irreverent attitude to the many traumas of transition is a major part of why they keep coming back. He’s now written a book full of such jolts. But don’t be scared: you don’t have to read it like a regular book. It’s meant to be flipped through, read out of order, played with. Most of all, it’s meant to be fun: quite a first for a book about coming out.
That “fun” aspect is right there on the cover. Envisioned partly as a teen/tween-style yearbook (the kind that everyone signs at the end of the year), a self-help book, and a resource for all things trans, Out! takes a colorful approach to some of the most painful conversations that accompany being transgender. For instance, a rainbow-colored list expressing the “dos” and “don’ts” of coming out. Not sure what to expect when you’re expecting to come out? Here’s a list of potential pitfalls. Don’t know how to explain “trans” to your grandparents? Out! has you covered. Sections titled “How to Come Out to Yourself” and “How to Discover Your Gender Expression,” provide thoughtful guidance for anyone struggling with the more internal aspects of transitioning. Text bubbles and short call-out sections about queer and trans people from history (like Pakistani poet Ifti Nasim and Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin) likewise paint a picture of a trans person in love with the diverse history of queerness.
It’s not all fun, of course. McKenna came out twice, first as gay in 2015, and as trans two years later. Both involved tense conversations with family members and friends. There’s a lot of candid pain in Out! as well as pleasure. When McKenna came out the first time, he was ousted from his family. “My parents began to recite Bible verses and I completely sank into myself,” he writes. Since leaving home, McKenna has resumed speaking to one parent, but not the other. If Out! doesn’t exactly linger on the natural, traumatic byproducts of a trans adolescence, it doesn’t elide it either.
“Writing it brought up a lot of feelings, and it kind of created this time capsule of the person I used to be, a person who’s still dealing with these things,” McKenna told them. “I was writing about my parents at one point, and in one of the sidebars I wrote to my publisher ‘this is really hard!’ They were like, ‘you should put that in there, because it’s probably hard for the reader as well.’”
Hard, but familiar. Before anything else, the book is a resource for trans and queer kids who are stuck in an intolerant or unsafe household, unable to freely access the internet or find a community center. During quarantine, McKenna has had another challenge: helping queer kids find safe spaces both on and off the Internet. “You can find ways to cope with living in a household that doesn’t see you,” he says. “When I was a teenager, I was always out of the house, I was with my friends. I was in my own safe spaces, even if they weren’t an LGBT Center. You find your own spaces that are inherently queer and that accept you. And with COVID it’s like, oh those are all gone.”
