An author, an influencer, and a fresh voice in the queer literature scene, 22-year-old Spencer Thomas isn’t doing things by the book. Last year, he self-published his debut collection of short stories, titled Goodbye to Boyhood, bringing his unique perspective to the coming-of-age genre — and his literary career is only just getting started.
Thomas grew up on a nature preserve in rural Connecticut. He credits his love for literature and all things creative to his late grandmother, who he’d often read books with as a child. “A lot of the books we read were actually Mark Twain, because he lived in my hometown. That’s my fun fact for you of the day: Redding, Connecticut is the home of Mark Twain!” he says. “I was just so immersed in this idea that you can kind of create anything you want from nothing.”
He started creating his own stories around age 10, but it wasn’t until his late teenage years that Thomas realized he wanted writing to be his career.
“For the entirety of my life, I was trying to fulfill this straight man’s fantasy of being a businessman,” he recalls. “When I was a kid, people would be like, ‘What do you want to do for a living?’ And I would say, ‘Entrepreneur.’ But like, why? Like, what does that really mean? I think guys would say it just to say it.”
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Instead, Thomas leaned into what he loved: creative writing. At 16 years old, he completed a summer writing program at Harvard, and after high school, he went on to study English with a creative writing concentration at New York University.
“I always knew I was going to write a collection of short stories,” Thomas says. “Like, that was never in question for me, because what I love about short stories is you can kind of put them together like a puzzle.”
The only question, then, was what puzzle Thomas would assemble. At NYU, he quickly found his answer, courtesy of the delayed adolescence queer folks know all too well.
“I believe that queer people in general kind of have this stunted experience of romance, because of the fact that they may not have a chance to express it in their small hometowns,” he says. “And so a lot of our firsts aren’t necessarily at 15, but they’re at 18, or they’re at 19. And for me, that was the case. I came to college with little experience of understanding my own gayness, and I jumped right into college, and it’s like, ‘Oh, wow, what a switch-up from being in the woods with the bears. Now I’m literally in the middle of New York City. I’m 19 years old, and I don’t know how to date, because I never had those introductory periods when I was in high school like everybody else.’”
“So, I wrote a short story called ‘Boy’ about that experience and not understanding the emotional turbulence of how to date and how that works with hookups,” Thomas continues. “And from there, I just felt I unlocked something where I couldn’t stop rewriting stories from the past that were part my own, part fictional.”
Writing “Boy” sent Thomas down the path to penning the other nine short stories that make up Goodbye to Boyhood, which present key snapshots of queer coming-of-age: discovering you’re different from your cishet peers in “Birthday Party” and “BOOBIES”; disillusionment with your parents in “Fathers” and “My Mom’s Boyfriends”; and failed and fleeting romances in “Goodbye to Boyhood” and “Boyfriends For The Night.” Even Thomas’ grandmother, who inspired his love for writing in the first place, is immortalized in the book’s final chapter, “The TV Says the Moon Is Going to Be Red.”
“Goodbye to Boyhood is this hodgepodge of 10 short stories where I examine what it is like to say goodbye to something that was never truly yours to begin with, which is this quintessential idea of boyhood,” Thomas explains. “Because for my entire life, and I’m sure many people feel this way as well, I never felt attached to my own boyhood, to my sense of identity as a guy, because of my status as a gay guy. I felt like it was stunted or somehow wrong, and I felt that I wasn’t truly getting the full experience of boyhood.”
“When I finally hit 19 years old, I looked back at my childhood and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I just grew up. I can’t ever really relive these moments,’” he continues. “I question if I ever truly felt like I was whole in my own skin. And so what does that look like to say goodbye to that and to step into an entirely new territory? How do you make sense of the fact that you never felt like you were enough of a boy?”
“I never felt attached to my own boyhood, to my sense of identity as a guy, because of my status as a gay guy.”
– Spencer Thomas
Though the book is largely about queer men and boys’ unique coming-of-age experiences, Thomas says he never set out to write a Gay Book™. That’s not to say his book isn’t gay: it absolutely is, and Thomas is proud to champion LGBTQ+ themes in his writing. Rather, Thomas simply wanted Goodbye to Boyhood to offer more than a surface-level take on gayness.
“The word ‘gay’ might be used in this book all of seven times,” he points out. “I didn’t want it in there, because I wanted to describe what gayness is without actually using the word.”
“It’s not tokenization,” Thomas says of his depiction of queerness. “It’s not ‘yay, gay!’ and confetti. Goodbye to Boyhood is the nuances of the gray space of sexuality.”
Though he received two offers to publish Goodbye to Boyhood from small presses, Thomas ultimately chose to self-publish the book as a junior in college when he was just 21 years old. “It was just these really bad contracts, which unfortunately a lot of writers get stuck in, because they’re told and they’re fed this kind of lie that in order to be a writer, you have to go through the main big five [publishing houses],” he says. “But that’s just not true, because there’s plenty of artists who are independent, who are able to put their work out on their own, on their own merit.”
“My best advice to any writer or person who wants to share their work is to not be so scared of standing on your own two feet, even if that means you’re standing alone,” Thomas continues. “I feel like there’s so much pretentiousness within writing, and ultimately, what’s the point of sharing stories at all? It’s not to have a big five, or to be number one, or to achieve some sort of superficial milestone. The point of writing is to get out your story and to have people read it and resonate with it.”
“My best advice to any writer or person who wants to share their work is to not be so scared of standing on your own two feet, even if that means you’re standing alone.”
– Spencer Thomas
Goodbye to Boyhood released in April of 2024. Now, more than a year later, Thomas has things he wishes he could go back and change — but at the same time, he appreciates the book for what it represents in his life and career.
“Every time I reread the book, I’m like, ‘I could have made an edit here, I could have made an edit here,’ but I think that’s the life of a writer, is like, you’re constantly going to want to criticize your own work,” he explains. “But Goodbye to Boyhood is a time capsule for me when I read it, because a year out since writing it, my life has changed so much. I feel so much more confident and understanding of myself that I reread this book, and I’m like, ‘This captures who I was for a certain point in my life. The beautiful thing about writing is this is no longer who I am, but it’s a reflection of who I once was.’”
“I think it’s really beautiful that I can have access to that whenever I want, to see where my head was at when I was writing these stories in my college dorm room at 19 and 20 and I was really going through it,” Thomas continues. “And now I just kind of feel for him in a way that you feel for your younger self after you’ve healed in a way, because I don’t feel this pain anymore that I did for such a long time.”
In May, Thomas completed his degree at NYU, leaving him with the same question facing every recent graduate: what’s next?
Thomas is already hard at work on his next project as an author, this time a novel rather than a short story collection. It takes inspiration from his short story “Boyfriends For The Night,” which follows a spontaneous romance with a built-in expiration date.
“It’s about growing up. It’s about emotional attachment. It’s about romance,” Thomas says of his in-progress debut novel. “It’s a lot different, because I feel like Goodbye to Boyhood had to be written for myself more than anyone else, because it was just my own reality. Goodbye to Boyhood is very much a reflection of my own understanding of my own childhood, a reflection of understanding who I was and who I am now. And for those reasons, I feel like all the stories kind of have this cohesive arc to them. It’s putting your heart on your sleeve — but that’s writing, I guess.”
Of course, taking a novel from an initial idea to sitting on bookstore shelves is a long and complicated process. In the meantime, Thomas still has a few key items on his to-do list.
“My immediate goal is to fix my pink eye,” Thomas admits. (Did I forget to mention his eye was nearly swollen shut for this entire interview?)
“That’s goal number one,” he reaffirms. “Goal number two, besides finishing this book and packaging it and getting it out there in the world, is to continue to create content online, to continue to grow my platform, because I love having the ability to relate with people online, and I just would like to keep doing that. And my other main goal is to have a good summer. Those are my three goals: write a book, fix my pink eye, have a great summer. HAGS!”
That platform Thomas mentions is a major part of his story: He has more than 228,000 followers on TikTok, with whom he shares his writing, his pop culture hot takes, and the day-to-day goings-on of his life in New York City. He joined the app back in 2020 when he was 17, and both his content and his following have matured alongside him.
“I don’t think Goodbye to Boyhood would be out in the world the way it is if it wasn’t for my social media platform,” Thomas reflects. “It’s fulfilling, especially when it’s my writing that I can share online, because that is my bread and butter. That is what I want to do with my life. That was kind of everything that I would ever hope for as a kid, was just to have people to read my stuff. So social media kind of gave me the legs to do that, and it gave me the confidence to do it. And I love the gays! That’s the moral of the story. I love the gays.” ♦
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