Casey McQuiston Wants to Teach You About Queer Sex
On one of the warmest days of the year, Casey McQuiston has selected an un-air-conditioned Long Island City brewery for our interview. Both of us, already drenched in sweat, sit down at a picnic table, where McQuiston first comments on my outfit. “You look so European,” they say of my billowing parachute pants and open button-down. I chuckle, admitting I planned the outfit in honor of the author’s new book, The Pairing, out August 6.
Now that they mention clothing, I realize McQuiston and I could be mistaken for cosplayers, mimicking the two main characters in their fourth novel. McQuiston—with their brown shoulder-length hair, short overalls, and T-shirt—looks akin to Theo Flowerday, The Pairing’s headstrong sommelier-in-training, who accidentally finds themself on a European food-and-wine tour with their ex-boyfriend, Kit Fairfield. A charming pastry chef with a boyish look, Kit is a character who McQuiston describes as a “love letter to the fairy prince.” Kit wears the finest silks and has “this problem of accidentally making people fall in love with him everywhere he goes.”
The Pairing follows One Last Stop, I Kissed Shara Wheeler, and their barn-burning success, Red, White, & Royal Blue. (The third has since been adapted into a Prime Video movie, with a sequel on the horizon.) The Pairing, McQuiston tells me, was a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic and McQuiston’s craving to travel the world. Self-described as the horniest book in their catalog, The Pairing depicts Theo and Kit making their way through London, Paris, Cinque Terre, Rome, Chianti, Palermo, and more, all while engaging in an international hookup competition. It’s a bit of an enemies-to-lovers tale—Theo and Kit “hate each other a lot more than Henry and Alex [the two leads in Red, White, and Royal Blue] ever did,” McQuiston says—but with a side serving of another popular trope: second-chance romance. The Pairing asks if the perfume of true love ever fades, and incorporates some ravenous sex scenes in the process. “Pegging representation,” McQuiston jokes, referencing a particularly spicy scene with a farmhand named Florian.
It seems almost if The Pairing has been McQuiston’s destiny. After growing up in a conservative environment, the book is a celebration of queer sex—minus the shame—and a joyous bisexual romp.
McQuiston grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Their mother had McQuiston when she was 23 years old. That was “quite spinsterly for her generation,” McQuiston says, noting their mother was a “proto-feminist.”
The author grew up Catholic but attended a small Southern Baptist school for 13 years before attending Louisiana State University. McQuiston now lives in New York City after a brief stint in Colorado. “Fourth grade was the first time we had a sermon about why Halloween, specifically, is Satanic,” McQuiston says. “When you marinate [in that culture], everything about you that’s ‘other’ feels like a huge liability. It’s sexuality, it’s gender, but for me, it was also being neurodivergent, having ADHD.”
They continue, “Shame was such an integral emotion of my existence growing up. I was super depressed, and I remember feeling so much gratitude that I was not gay. I don’t think that’s a typical thought that most people who are straight are having all the time. Surprise: I was bi, and then millions of hours of contemplation later, [there was] a whole gender layer under that.”
McQuiston’s third book, I Kissed Shara Wheeler, published in 2022, found inspiration from their upbringing. The only young-adult book in the author’s catalog, the book served as a cathartic release for the pain McQuiston endured as a young person. Set in a Southern Baptist high school in Alabama, the novel centers on Chloe Green’s rivalry with Shara Wheeler as both girls compete to be valedictorian—and traces the convergence of religion and sexuality. “I always felt because I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid that it hadn’t hurt me,” McQuiston says. “It doesn’t make those feelings of otherness and wrongness and shame that are given to you by being rejected by the people around you go away, even if you don’t believe that it’s right.”
After taking on a young-adult title, McQuiston was excited to get back to the smut and sex only an adult romance allows; however, this time, they wanted to explore bisexuality and gender too. “Is the world ready to read at least 50,000 words of a they/them love interest?” McQuiston wondered aloud. “I have been so hungry for romance that is weird and not completely monogamous and messy and super horny and slutty and gender-fucky. I was like, ‘Okay, well, I will write it.’ If nothing else, I will read my own book.”
McQuiston began planning The Pairing in 2021, and finally pitched it to their publisher in 2022. The book is meant to give readers a tasting menu of Europe, gender identity, and queer sex, exploring the Italian countryside alongside the human body. It falls in line with McQuiston’s personal journey. The author, who identifies as nonbinary, had their first “gender epiphany” at 27 years old. “It took me a long time to understand that gender, for me, was not a subtraction of anything as much as it was an addition to everything,” McQuiston says. “My gender is camp; my gender is maximalism; my gender is yes.”
The sex scenes in The Pairing are often jaw-dropping. There are moments that experiment with multiple partners, sex toys, and, at one point, a Call Me By Your Name-esque peach. “For me and a lot of nonbinary, trans people I am close to, sex is actually one of the first places where it’s safe to push boundaries of expression,” McQuiston says. “It can be this really cool, affirming, and transformative place. I wanted to bring that to those scenes. I put a ton of thought behind every sexual interaction.”
Beyond the sex scenes, the intentionality in McQuiston’s new work seeps through the pages. Hours of research into French pastry and their own European bus tour route were all necessary for McQuiston to feel prepared to write the story. McQuiston read countless wine books; spent hours finding shops and sheds (yes, that shed in the book really does exist) on Google Maps; and watched hundreds of YouTube travel videos, a pastime that has now become something of an addiction in their free time. To cap it all off, they took a research trip to London, Paris, Barcelona, Florence, and Chianti. Some of the characters in their book are based upon people McQuiston met along the way. “My ankles were swollen to twice their normal size by the end of it,” they say. “I don’t know if it was the walking or the sodium, or both.”
McQuiston also joined SommSelect, a delivered-to-your-door wine club. (After a few months, the author learned four bottles of wine a month is a bit too much; they have 36 reds and whites sitting in their apartment as we speak.) McQuiston also hired a sommelier to read over the more intricate wine moments in The Pairing. “I had to change a lot,” McQuiston admits. “It was very much a [serving of] humble pie, but honestly, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.”
After hours and hours of this research, it stands to reason that McQuiston might want to do it again. Their upcoming fifth novel is another queer adult romantic comedy set in the same world as (and with two characters from) The Pairing. The author has now been on two research trips for the book, one to the United Kingdom and one to Belize.
They’re also co-writing the film sequel to Red, White, & Royal Blue with playwright, director, and screenwriter Matthew Lopez. McQuiston wasn’t interested in writing and publishing a sequel to the book, but a movie script felt manageable—and right for Alex Claremont-Diaz, played by Taylor Zakar-Perez (“born to be a screwball-comedy, rom-com leading man,” McQuiston says) and Prince Henry, played by Nicholas Galitzine (who “has the soul in him that is really hard to take your eyes off of”).
The actors didn’t get to promote the film as much as McQuiston would have liked due to the 2023 actors’ and writers’ strikes. “All of the people who were in it and didn’t get to have their moment…I want to repay that love, and this was the way that made sense for me to do it creatively,” McQuiston says. “I won’t say never to writing more on the page for Henry and Alex, but I already know the next three or four things I want to do in books.”
McQuiston is tight-lipped on plot details for the film sequel, but I point out that it’s a different, more fraught time politically than when the book originally came out. McQuiston has since become even more progressive after first writing their debut novel, and notes it’s been interesting to revisit this story. “As a writer, things that I’m considering as we’re talking about [the movie] is something that’s a huge point of interest for Alex in the book, which is disenfranchised voters in red states,” McQuiston says. “I have people in my family who are felons who cannot vote because they are felons, and the fact that a felon is on the ballot in some states he couldn’t even vote in is disgusting. People have been disenfranchised for absolutely bullshit reasons, so that’s something I’m thinking about a lot when I’m thinking about where Alex’s life is going to go.”
As the sweat continues to dribble down our backs in Queens, McQuiston begins to look out for me, too. “Do you need to go? When do you need to get back to the office?” McQuiston asks as we enter hour three of our interview. It makes sense, as we’ve gone off on tangents about tattoos, Cher’s Moonstruck, and how good the arancini McQuiston brought as a treat tastes. I laugh, never having experienced an interview where the subject is worried about the interviewer’s time. I mention I have a meeting in about an hour, but I have time for a few more questions. As we dive back in and McQuiston continues to give full, prose-like responses, it becomes clear why the author has the career they do. Their ability to care for and relate to others is evident, and has allowed them to change what mainstream romance might look like.
“I think I was able to demonstrate that there are audiences out there that publishers haven’t thought about, and that a really good fun romance will transcend any barriers they imagine might be there in finding an audience,” McQuiston says. “It was to my benefit that my first book was underestimated coming out of the gate, because now I get to just be like, ‘Just trust me. Remember how you just need to trust me?’ I’m not worried about being told ‘no’ about how gay it is or how trans [my writing] is. I’m always curious about seeing where I can push it. That’s our job as writers, to push it.”
Samuel is the Associate Editor at ELLE Magazine. He covers theater, music, and culture. Sam famously broke both his arms at the same time in fourth grade and was formerly the Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief.
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