Boy Bandmates Find Love and Longing on the Road

Sophie Gonzales, author of Perfect on Paper, and Cale Dietrich, author of The Friend Scheme, team up for a queer boy-band romance full of secrets, pressure, and fame in If This Gets Out.

Saturday, one of the biggest boy bands in America, goes on their first sold-out tour in Europe. Ruben Montez and Zach Knight, along with their bandmates Angel and Jon (the four members of Saturday) are best friends off camera. But they’re cracking under pressure: the pressure of fame, management’s requests, and more.

During the tour, Ruben and Zach start to confide in, and rely on, each other even more than they had in the past. What was once a friendship blooms into a romance—one they have to keep secret from their entire fan base. But when they make a different decision, they realize their management will never agree.

If This Gets Out examines coming out when there’s so much at stake, how friendship can pull you through tough times, and what happens when you crack under pressure. Goodreads contributor Arriel Vinson interviewed Gonzales and Dietrich about society’s expectations, forbidden love, and writing during a pandemic. Their conversation has been edited.

Goodreads: What was your inspiration for If This Gets Out ?

Sophie Gonzales: Cale was the one with the inspiration, and he approached me with the premise in hand! I know he particularly wanted to focus on abuses that happen within the entertainment industry, with a focus on closeting and how queer celebrities are treated behind closed doors.

Cale Dietrich: If This Gets Out was inspired by the music industry, and the way that it treats artists, especially queer artists. There are countless stories of queer musicians who have been told to hide who they are, and to act, dress or behave a certain (i.e., straighter) way in order to reach the biggest possible audience. People have been told their sexuality is alienating, or will prevent them from being mainstream, so they should keep it quiet. I wondered what it would be like to set a story in this world, and to explore these topics. It seemed like a great setting for a story, as you get to have the big, splashy, exciting spectacle that comes with writing about a world-famous boy band while also dissecting some topics that I deeply care about.

GR: If This Gets Out highlights forbidden love, and I might argue that this forbidden love has much more at stake than other romances (i.e., the entire world and fan base knowing Ruben and Zach love each other). Why was it important for the characters to navigate such a huge challenge?

SG: Forbidden love, or generally needing to hide your love from the eyes of those around you, is something that is unfortunately very real to queer people, many of whom have lived through that very experience. So, it was a fitting plot for a queer romance, we felt: with the stakes amplified up to a hundred, of course. My rule of storytelling is, take a scenario, and figure out how to make the potential consequences as devastating as possible for the characters. The challenge must be huge for the characters, whether internally or externally, for the audience to truly care whether these characters can surpass it.

CD: I wanted it to be a huge challenge because I think that coming out as a famous person would be a huge challenge. For these boys in particular, there are a lot of complicating factors—their audience is made up mostly of teenage girls, who may lose interest in them if they are not straight, and they could also lose support from less liberal fans. It was important for this to be a huge challenge because we wanted to reflect as accurately as we could what it would be like to be in a boy band and to fall for your band-mate.

GR: I love how you both explored pressure—the pressure of young fame, staying closeted, and keeping up a certain image. Tell me more about what made you want to explore this theme.

SG: Honestly, while I’m not even in the same universe of fame as the boys in Saturday, I personally find myself under pressure as an author. There’s explicit and implicit expectations online to say the right things, have the right opinions, be switched-on all the time, have plenty of energy, be kind and warm, and don’t bring negativity into public spaces. Be groomed and beautiful, be active on social media, curl your hair, buy the right clothes, find the right pose. Work 14-hour days for weeks in a row, even though no one’s asked you to, because you want to be perfect, and you’re afraid if you don’t deliver perfect, the world will move onto someone else who will. 

As you can probably tell, some of these emotions were accessed when writing If This Gets Out. But times the stakes by, oh, a thousand or so. Luckily for me, at least, my publishing houses don’t even slightly resemble the management team Saturday has to deal with!

CD: I haven’t had the experience of being in a world-famous boy band (thank goodness!), but I have experienced pressure. I think everyone has. Now more than ever people are forced to be aware of their image, and the pressure placed on teenagers these days is really intense. Being in a boy band might not be a universal experience, but I think everyone can relate to the pressures of keeping up a certain image, which is why I wanted to explore this theme–it felt very relevant.

GR: One of my favorite things about music novels is the way I feel so grounded in the space and music. How did you balance the romance while also making the band and their experiences so vivid?

SG: For me, this came naturally because of the characters! Sophie and I got a sense really early on about who our characters were, and their lives are extremely focused on their music. The romance balanced itself with this because we created the characters first, and then we tried to figure out how these two people would fall for each other, so the two fit naturally together.

CD: Definitely this. The romance came from Zach and Ruben as characters, and we knew the plot from the start. Also, we did a lot—a lot—of research. We had Google documents filled with pages and pages of notes from documentaries, videos, books about the music industry, interviews, everything we could find. By the time we wrote the book, we understood what it means to be in a boy band about as well as someone can understand it without working in the industry firsthand. That helped plant us in their minds, I think.

GR: What was it like cowriting If This Gets Out, especially during a pandemic? Were you able to meet at all, or was everything virtual?

SG: It was great! We had some time pressure put on us, but we both loved the idea and were excited to write it. We live in separate states, so the writing was done virtually, and sometimes we’d Zoom if we had something we really needed to figure out.

CD: We did meet, though! By the time we’d properly started writing, we were in lockdown, but I visited Queensland before we sold the book, and over iced coffee we had many talks about what it would look like. We even bought leather wristbands with Ruben and Zach written on them, and took photos that we said we would totally share when we sold the book! We definitely forgot to share those photos. Maybe it’s not too late… hold that thought.

GR: Who are your YA influences?

SG: There are so many! I’m a huge fan of Becky Albertalli, John Green, Adam Silvera, Lev AC Rosen, Stephen Chbosky, Julian Winters, Tom Ryan, Adib Khorram, Caleb Roehrig, Tricia Levenseller, Alex London, Adam Sass, Shaun David Hutchinson, and, of course, Sophie Gonzales.

CD: All of the above!! Also Julia Lynn Rubin and Tracy Deonn, because I wish I could write as beautifully as them. Diana Urban, because I wish I could do a plot twist like she can. Alexa Donne, for a masterclass in tension. Shaun David Hutchinson, for characters you feel like you know in person. Rebecca Schaeffer, for radical originality I would love to emulate. Jenny Han, for old-school YA that’s both original and feels like coming home. Nicola Yoon and Jenn Dugan for epic, epic romance. Cassandra Clare for humor. If I could ever be as funny as Cassie Clare, I would feel like I could stop improving.

GR: What or who are you reading right now? 

SG: I’m rereading Long Story Short by Serena Kaylor—a rom-com set at summer camp that was incredible when I first saw it years ago, and has somehow become even more amazing since.

CD: I’m reading Here’s to Us by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera, which I am loving! I’m also slowly working my way through The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan, and up next I’m going to read You’ve Reached Sam by Dustin Thao.