All She Wrote and Watertown Public Library Present The Lilac People: Milo Todd in Conversation with David Valdes

WFPL welcomes author Milo Todd as he discusses his novel The Lilac People with author David Valdes. Books will be available for purchase (and signing) from All She Wrote Books, an intersectional feminist/queer bookstore in Somerville that celebrates and amplifies underrepresented voices spanning across all genres. 

About The Lilac People: 

In 1932 Berlin, Bertie, a trans man, and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin’s thriving queer community. An employee of the renowned Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexual Science, Bertie works to improve queer rights in Germany and beyond, but everything changes when Hitler rises to power. The institute is raided, the Eldorado is shuttered, and queer people are rounded up. Bertie barely escapes with his girlfriend, Sofie, to a nearby farm. There they take on the identities of an elderly couple and live for more than a decade in isolation. In the final days of the war, with their freedom in sight, Bertie and Sofie find a young trans man collapsed on their property, still dressed in Holocaust prison clothes. They vow to protect him—not from the Nazis, but from the Allied forces who are arresting queer prisoners while liberating the rest of the country. Ironically, as the Allies’ vise grip closes on Bertie and his family, their only salvation becomes fleeing to the United States.

Brimming with hope, resilience, and the enduring power of community, The Lilac People is an extraordinary historical fiction novel of World War II that recovers a little-known moment of trans history.

Milo Todd is a Massachusetts Cultural Council grantee and a Lambda Literary Fellow. His work has appeared in Slice Magazine and elsewhere. He is co–editor in chief of Foglifter and teaches creative writing to queer and trans adults. 

As a gay Cuban-American and dad in a multiethnic family, intersectionality is David Valdes’s jam. David writes books and plays for all but that especially uplift queer and BIPOC lives, with an eye toward hope and humor. David is the author of seven books and two dozen plays, which have been staged coast to coast. As an essayist, David’s written for the New York Times, Boston Globe, Huffington Post, Medium, Howlround, and more. David teaches writing at Boston Conservatory, Brown, and Tufts.

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