Sara Youngblood Gregory: When Realism Is Not Enough

Sara Youngblood Gregory is an award-winning lesbian journalist, editor, and author. She is the author of the speculative poetry collection DEAD BOYS IN SPACE (YesYes Books, May 2026.) She writes about power, identity, health, and culture. Sara is currently a Contributing Writer and Editing Fellow for Yes! Magazine, covering LGBTQ equity, politics, and culture. Formerly, she was a wellness staff writer for PS. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, the New Republic, Vice, New York magazine, Teen Vogue, Cosmopolitan, The Guardian, them and many others.

1. Throughout the book, the motif of birds is used to evoke the memory of the narrator’s brother, and the through-line of queerness. When and how did the image first emerge? And when did you realize it was going to be so central?

Yes, birds are a fundamental image of the collection — their coloring, their songs, their cages, and their flight. I follow birds throughout DEAD BOYS IN SPACE, leading up to the final poem in the collection “O and the wind truly does catch” where I weave together my main symbols, which are birds, cages, quilts and, of course, space travel. The bird functions, as you say, as the fundamental image of my narrator’s brother, a young man who died of AIDS, shortly before the narrator was born, and whose memory she chases and claims throughout the collection.

There are any number of ways I could answer this, but I think the most honest is to say a bird is the shape of my own loss. It came to me early, choosing itself, and would accept no other name or image or creature.

2. Is there a form of poetry you haven’t tried yet but would like to?

Well, I primarily write free verse, so while I pay attention to sound and rhythm, I very rarely write with a fixed meter. I’ve been lucky enough to take a few workshops with the poet David Baker, first at Kenyon and then through the Hudson Valley Writers Center. He said something that always stuck with me — craft often emerges from constraint. The example he used, if I recall correctly, was an early sonnet of Adrienne Rich’s which surprised me. It sounded so unlike the voice I was familiar with, having visited and re-visited Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems over the years. The development of Rich’s voice was meant to show the benefits of studying fixed verse. In other words, by studying form and structure and meter, I could strengthen my writing and develop my voice.

This sentiment is also echoed in Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft: A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, where she emphasizes learning the fundamental tools of writing and language: grammar, sentence length and syntax, verbs, point of view and so on.

In short, I have learned that one neglects the fundamentals at great risk. Despite these valuable lessons, I have continued to neglect the fundamentals. I have yet to devote myself to the sonnet. This is the form I hope to try next — wish me luck!

3. Your wife, Salomé, is referenced within the work (and she also did the cover!). Do you often see each other’s work when it’s in-progress?

Yes, good eye! When I met my wife, I wasn’t familiar with the biblical story of Salomé — for those who haven’t heard it before, I really do recommend a deep dive. There’s also some very arresting historical and contemporary visual art depicting the story as well.

Salomé is a princess and her story is from the New Testament. At her stepfather King Herod’s birthday feast, Salomé is asked to perform a dance. She agrees, but only if the king will grant her a request. King Herod agrees to give her anything she wants, including “up to half of his kingdom.” Salomé dances, and she asks for the head of John the Baptist — served to her on a platter.

Salomé’s story was made much more famous by the 1893 Oscar Wilde play. This is where the dance of seven veils comes from, which is highly eroticized and subject to much controversy. I saw a rendition of Strauss’ Salomé opera — which itself was adapted from Wilde’s play— livestreamed at the movies once. I can’t even begin to tell you how violent and disturbing this dance was. From my vantage point, the entire play is so bizarre and mean-spirited.

Since then, Salomé has been an enduring symbol of the femme fatale, of misguided feminine anger, and of a hysterical, snubbed temptress. I was fascinated with her anger, and I saw her as a source of strength, political anger and erotic becoming for my speaker. So I reimagined her as a butch lesbian. In my version, her anger is fruitful and her desire for justice isn’t vilified. Her dance is different, too. No veils and lechers, just bandages and gay bars. This is the Salomé of DEAD BOYS IN SPACE; she’s not my wife. She is her own entity entirely. In her company, you may also notice Lot’s wife and Patroclus, two others wronged by history that have continued to fascinate me and make regular appearances in my work. It’s my corrective desire that brings these people together, and it is that same desire led so many gay men to the moon.

4. Following up with a reverse-interview question: If you could interview Oscar Wilde, what’s one question you would ask him?

Hah! Good question, given that I’ve just bad-mouthed his play, I wouldn’t ask Wilde a question. Instead, I’d give an assignment — write a play where Salomé is the hero, and John the Baptist the villian.

5. Your afterword mentions a wealth of sources and inspirations – queer poets, histories, zines – that inspired you. How do you go about cataloguing, or compiling, works you’ve read or want to read?

I’m a journalist by day, so I am often very methodical in my research. But DEAD BOYS IN SPACE, it was just the opposite. I read widely across genres, and often just happened by works I encountered purely through chance, and that deeply moved me. Often, this meant starting with a book or essay, reading a reference or mention to another work, then following that path down and down and down, or up and up and up.

Eventually, I made room on my bookshelf for just HIV/AIDS related works — some of the books were gifts or galleys, others I found out in the wild, and many were works or authors that came up again and again in various sources. For out of print or harder to find books, eBay was a lifeline. And, after a while, I was lucky enough to meet some brilliant and supportive people, especially Bryan Borland of Assaracus: A Journal of Gay and Queer Poetry, who would point me towards other writers and works. Just this week Natalie Adler, the author of the wonderfully moving and propulsive Waiting on a Friend, sent me this resource list from the What Would an HIV Doula Do? collective. Already, I am discovering new works.

I wrote about a range of contemporary HIV/AIDS-related works at some length in a recent essay for LitHub, with a particular eye to speculative and intergenerational works. I also discussed some mutual influences and inspirations with the poet Steven Reigns, whose book Outliving Michael I can’t recommend enough.

I recently finished My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson, and I’m currently reading Randy Boy’s The Unfrozen Few, which is a stirring science fiction and mystery novel. Next on my list is Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s anthology Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis.

6. You reference Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing advice here and in your interview at The Poetry Shop. What would be your own writing advice for pairing science fiction/science history with difficult real-life subjects?

That’s the thing about me — I am always referencing Ursula Le Guin.

Here is another for you: In The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, Le Guin wrote, “At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence.”

I think about this idea all the time. I was born in the late 90s, so I did not witness a world before effective and revolutionary HIV/AIDS medicines became available. But before, and certainly even after 1996, HIV/AIDS was an apocalyptic, dystopic, and fundamentally unreal force on the lives of queer and trans people, and many other communities. So how else might we recount, wrangle with, or remember these times without the language of the apocalyptic, dystopic, and the fundamentally unreal?

The world I live in, the world we live in, has been profoundly and devastatingly affected by HIV/AIDS, on all levels of society — the individual, the family, our schools and cities and gay bars, doctor’s offices and financial institutions, the pharmaceutical industry, criminality and law, international funding and policy.

If I wanted to write about the AIDS crisis and the many ways it rearranged the world, I had to also rearrange the universe — if only to make it proportional to the anger and grief and work of so many others.

I’m not sure if I have advice on how to actually do this, the blending of science fiction with real-life. But I would, perhaps, say this: If something is unreal, its telling must not always be constrained to reality.