The Second Edition of Zack, Not Kelly Arrives May 31
Some books get edited.
This one got unmasked.
On May 31, the second edition of Zack, Not Kelly officially arrives on Amazon—and this version is the one that finally sounds like me.
Not the softened version.
Not the publisher-polished version.
Not the “let’s make the gay memoir a little easier for suburban book clubs” version.
This one.
Rawer.
Sharper.
Funnier.
More honest.
More Jersey.
More Catholic guilt.
More locker rooms.
More AOL chaos.
More late-80s and 90s suburban masculinity panic.
More truth.
The first edition mattered deeply to me because I wrote it during a period of enormous personal reinvention. I was grieving. Rebuilding. Relearning myself in public. And honestly? I was still trying to write in a way that felt acceptable.
This edition stops asking permission.
Because somewhere between 2022 and 2026, I realized something important:
The story was never just about being gay.
It was about performance.
The performance of masculinity.
The performance of heterosexuality.
The performance of suburban success.
The performance of “normal.”
The exhausting art of surviving by becoming whatever kept people comfortable.
And if you grew up in the straight-coded suburbs of the late ’80s and ’90s?
You know exactly what I mean.
This second edition restores entire pieces of the original emotional architecture:
the awkwardness
the fear
the humor
the contradictions
the camp stories
the locker room politics
the internet awakening years
the grief
the sexuality confusion
the reality that human beings do not fit neatly into categories no matter how desperately society wants them to
It’s still nostalgic.
Still funny.
Still uncomfortable in all the right ways.
But now it’s honest in a way the earlier version wasn’t fully allowed to be.
And honestly?
That feels like the entire point of AQ-Books.
AQ was never built to publish books that whisper.
It was built for stories that refuse to.
So on May 31:Zack, Not Kelly — Second Edition
goes live on Amazon.
Still loud.
Still queer.
Still August Quinn.
And probably still making at least three people from Catholic school nervous.
