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When I meet author Mattie Lubchansky for quesadillas and cold-brew horchatas at Los Angeles’s beloved Guisados, it doesn’t take long for us to start comparing tattoos (or as I like to call it, “the queer handshake”). Lubchansky shows me a freshly inked one on their arm in the shape of a horseshoe, which is all too fitting: The protagonist of their new graphic novel, Boys Weekend—Sammie, a newly out transfemme artist’s assistant who takes a not entirely relished trip back to the Land of Bro Bonding for their best guy friend’s bachelor party—has the last name Kowalski, which means “blacksmith” in Polish.
Boys Weekend is a book about gender, to be sure, but it’s also about friendship, community, compassion, capitalism, cults, and ritual dismemberment (yes, you read that right). Watching Sammie move through a cishet-male world that never really served them is painful at times, but Lubchansky’s razor-sharp satire, eerie sci-fi sensibility, and distinctive illustration style make Boys Weekend the perfect mix of darkness and light. I spoke with them about coming out of what they called their “little hole” of writing to go on a book tour, building a full and rewarding life in fiction and IRL, and writing the kind of character that might have made them feel seen decades ago.
Vogue: First off, how has your book tour been?
Mattie Lubchansky: It’s been going great. Cartooning is weird because it’s so solitary and so much of it is auteur-ish—although I hate to use that word—especially in the tradition of cartooning I come from, where one person just does everything. It’s just sort of like, Well, I go in my little hole and make the book. My editor was great, but besides getting her notes, which happened earlier on at the scripting stage, I’m just getting up and doing my little pages every day.
Do you have a page count you try to hit per day or some other organizing system for writing?
I’ve got a spreadsheet that is basically my boss. I made it, and it’s automated, so it’s sort of like I built an AI boss for myself.
It’s hard watching Sammie in this world of cishet bros where they don’t really fit in, but something I loved was seeing them talk to their friends and partner back home and be reminded of the new life they’ve built for themselves. Were you tempted to make that even more of the book?
Honestly, it was like pulling teeth to get that in the book in the first place. Every early reader, including my editor, was like: “You need more of the good stuff in Sammie’s life,” whereas left to my own, unedited devices, I would just be making everyone miserable all the time. Being gay and having a nice time...it happens! We certainly need it, because you can’t just do misery porn, which is why the book has a semi-happy ending. I think that ending was the most personal thing in the book, because the germ of the idea of going a bachelor party has very little to do with the actual circumstances of the book and the people in the book. The part that’s really, intensely personal to me is all this stuff about acceptance. It’s kind of a necessity as a living trans person to have a life around you that is affirming and comforting and uplifts you, but like Sammie, I did kind of do it by accident. And then one day I was like, Oh, shit, look at this house that I’ve almost built in my sleep. But it’s a nice house to live in. I’m very happy with it.
It was so fun meeting one of your friends who was at the bachelor party that inspired Boys Weekend at your recent reading at North Figueroa Bookshop. Not to get too personal, but did you have to sort of break it to that friend group that you were writing this book loosely based on your trip?
You know, I was having such an existential time on that trip, and it wasn’t necessarily due to the people around me or even the circumstances of the trip. I don’t think my friends knew exactly how bad of a time I was having, which was mostly self-inflicted. My friend had asked me to be his best man before I came out, and I’m still in a group chat with “the boys,” where I was basically like: “By the way, I sold this book that’s about someone who looks a lot like me going on a trip that looks a lot like the hotel we stayed in.” I came to them and explained that I had a pretty hard time on that trip, and reading a book I wrote is a very roundabout way to understand what I was going through, but people have come out in weirder ways. [Laughs.]
I know there are a lot of parallels between you and Sammie. Did that boundary of fiction ever feel blurry?
Well, I added a lot of stuff; like, Sammie’s gender got a little more firm as mine was firming up. I had been out for a long time before I started the comic, but the last few years really solidified some stuff for me, and thus Sammie’s gender comes off a little more settled than it was in the original idea, where it was this very freshly out person. As I got further into the book, I was more like, No, this is a person who knows who they are for the most part. Obviously, visibility is kind of a classic trap, but I do think I might have come out earlier in my life had I known that you could be a trans dyke, basically. When I was a kid, the only trans women you saw, if you saw them at all, were straight, so it was important to me to show someone in a gender situation that is not necessarily the most mainstream.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
