"The Lilac People" Shouldn't Be This Timely.

Milo Todd, the author of one of April's most anticipated historical fiction books, answers my questions about his incredible WWII trans novel.

Happy Independent Bookstore Day, wherever you celebrate!¹ Today’s featured novel’s pub date is Tuesday, so it won’t be on any shelves yet in hard copy, but you can and should pre-order it on Bookshop (because, truly, fuck Jeff Bezos). And while you wait for your copy, I hope you’ll enjoy this Q&A with Milo Todd about his incredible—and unfortunately, more urgently needed than ever—debut novel, The Lilac People.

The Lilac People is about a trans man, Bertie, who survives Nazi Germany with his partner, Sophie, only to find themselves—and the trans concentration camp survivor they’re sheltering—targeted for arrest and jail by the Allies in 1945. As the danger grows, the trio realize their best chance of survival is in the United States and cross American-occupied Germany to escape.

I was lucky to get an advanced reader copy of The Lilac People late last year, and I’ve been raving about it since to anyone who’ll listen. It’s one of the Washington Post’s Noteworthy Books of April (but still, seriously, fuck Jeff Bezos), Goodreads’s Most Anticipated Titles, and LGBTQ+ Reads’s Most Anticipated Books. Book Riot, my personal starting point for all book recs, also gave it a shout-out in its Best Historical Fiction for April.

Milo Todd, the author, is the Managing Editor of Fiction for the award-winning LGBTQ+ literary journal, Foglifter Journal, and his newsletter, The Queer Writer, is an excellent resource for LGBTQ+ writers and allies alike. He’s also extremely generous with his time in answering my questions about his brilliant, atmospheric, and moving WWII novel.

________

Amelia: This novel is obviously, and unfortunately, extremely timely in 2025. When did you start writing it and what inspired you to tell this story?

Milo: You’re right that it’s unfortunately timely. It was never intended to be, but I feel 2025 is a good example of how history risks repeating itself when we don’t educate ourselves and our society about said histories.

It was several years ago when I first came across a meme-like post on social media. It said something along the lines of, “Did you know that the Allied forces didn’t liberate queer and trans survivors from the camps, but instead sent them to jail?” My immediate reaction was to not believe it, but I looked it up, found out it was true, and that started a multi-year research endeavor that turned into The Lilac People.

Amelia: Berlin in the Weimar Republic—and its thriving trans and queer culture—come alive in your novel, as do the Institute of Sexual Science and its founder, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. How did that culture come to thrive when and where it did, and what role(s) did the Institute and Dr. Hirschfeld play in shaping it?

Milo: Queer culture thrived during the Weimar Republic through the existence of the Weimar Republic itself. This was the time right after WWI, when Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated in late 1918. This led to Germany being governed by elected representatives and by an elected leader rather than by a monarch, creating a constitutional federal republic for the first time in Germany’s history. Because of this, despite all of the poverty and hardship that post-WWI brought, art and expression thrived, which directly fed into queer culture and vice versa. The sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld got in on the ground floor, as it were, when he co-founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in 1919. It’s considered the first sexology research center in the world, and it was a big hit with the public—both within Germany and beyond—for education on a whole range of sexual matters, which included queer and trans people.

Amelia: The song Das Lila Lied plays a central role in the plot and the title of your novel. What was the history and legacy of this song?

Milo: Das Lila Lied—The Lilac Song—is the first known documented queer anthem in the history of the colonized world. It was written in 1920 by Kurt Schwabach and Mischa Spoliansky in honor of Dr. Hirschfeld. While the song was originally intended to be just an interesting piece of information in the book, it kept popping up during the rough draft. This ultimately turned it from a bit of trivia into a central theme that influenced the title of the book itself.

Amelia: Of course, even during the relatively progressive years of the Weimar Republic, there were still repressive laws in place against trans people in Germany. What were those laws and how did the trans community and allies like Dr. Hirschfeld respond?

Milo: One of the most direct was Paragraph 183, which was a sexual offense of public indecency by crossdressing. As punishment, you risked spending a year in prison. Dr. Hirschfeld recognized how important it was for trans people to live as themselves, so he talked with and educated Berlin’s police department until they agreed to “transvestite cards.” Trans people could apply for such cards, which were meant to deter the police from arresting or assaulting them if they were stopped for so-called crossdressing. These cards may sound dystopian by today’s standards, but this was a big deal at the time.

Amelia: A critical, and devastating, scene in your novel depicts the Nazi raid on the Institute in May 1933, when the Nazis confiscated and burned the books and papers inside. The footage most of us have seen of Nazi book burning came from that moment in history, and I think about it every time I read about increasing book bans in the United States. How are these moments in time similar and how are they different?

Milo: I talk about this all the time when I provide sessions on queer history in this era—the fact that many of us in the United States were taught about or are at least minimally aware of the Nazi book burning footage, and yet it’s ironically rarely mentioned what was being burned in those piles was queer and trans literature, information, and resources. There was a huge loss of queer and trans history and knowledge that night that we’re still feeling the effects of to this day. (If you’ve ever wondered why it looks like there’s so little “proof” of trans people before the 1950s, this is a part of why.)

The Nazi book burnings and the modern US book bans are both similar and different. The similarity is in the intention—the suppression of ideas, identities, and behaviors that are seen as the most immediate threats to fascist control. And as you’ve seen in the book, queer (and especially trans) people are often the first on the chopping block, as they’re viewed as the biggest barrier when it comes to trying to control a society. Controlling a society starts with controlling the body and self-expression, and trans people are one of the ultimate examples of these things. I have a whole speech about this in my book.

The difference between Nazi Germany and the modern United States, however, is how this suppression is being carried out through books. It used to be just burning them was enough, as often such books had few copies in print and sometimes were the only known copies. Now, however, we have new technologies that make simple burning of material nothing more than symbolic. (Which remains a powerful statement of hate, but is otherwise useless.) With such material easily surviving beyond physical destruction, the updated tactic is to keep that material from getting into people’s hands. The first target is children for two reasons. First, children are easiest to control, suppress, and/or influence. Second, because of the vulnerability, starting with children makes it easier to climb the ladder. You may have noticed that book ban agendas are already attempting to scale up from classroom materials in individual classrooms to school libraries to public libraries in general, meaning it goes from kids in certain places to adults everywhere. You’ll notice this is happening with things such as healthcare access, too, and more recently has scaled upward to government data and studies that include the US trans community, as well as simple government acknowledgement of the trans community itself.

Ultimately, the activities of both eras equal the same intentions: the erasure of a people and the suppression of public knowledge. Because again, such intentions make it easier to control a population.

Amelia: WWII fiction is such a huge genre, so one of the most important questions I ask myself any time I read a WWII novel is whether it’s teaching me something about this historical moment that I didn’t already know. Yours shocked me from the very first page, which tells us that when the Allies liberated the concentration camps in 1945, trans survivors weren’t permitted to go home—instead, after everything they’d suffered, they were sent to jail to serve sentences under the “new” criminal laws. Why did the occupying forces continue to impose and enforce anti-trans laws in post-WWII Germany?

Milo: Simply put, there are only two things the United States hates more than Nazis: communists and queer people. It’s what the US and the Nazis have historically agreed upon. I’d say more about this, but the book does it better than I can (and it’s somewhat spoilers). It’s surreal to think about in our current times, especially the continuing trend of otherwise opposing groups uniting under the banner of transphobia.

Amelia: The villain of the 1945 chapters, the American Captain Ward, was the most chilling character in the novel for me, for two reasons. One, while I certainly felt fear and dread for Bertie during the 1930s chapters, knowing from the beginning that he survived the war in hiding lessened that a bit—whereas with Ward, anytime he appeared on the scene I genuinely had no idea what would happen to Bertie, Sofie, and Karl. Two, I’m so used to books and movies about WWII ending with the triumphant scene of Americans rolling up their tanks, and that’s still a powerful thing I cling to in thinking about fighting fascism, to try to feel some hope for this country.

But as your novel shows, the history is more complicated. How did the United States not only fail to eradicate Nazi ideals, but actually help spread them, after the war?

Milo: I can’t speak too directly to your question since that goes into the mild spoilers I suggested earlier, but Allied forces such as the United States cherrypicked which Nazi laws to eradicate from Germany and which to uphold. For example, survivors such as murderers and thieves were liberated from the concentration camps because it was believed they’d suffered enough and had paid their dues, but queer and trans survivors were instead sent to jail for their German/Nazi crimes of being queer and trans. Often, their time in the camps wasn’t grandfathered into their prison time, so the clock reset. Further, the Nazis extended the prison sentence for such laws as Paragraph 175, which was the ongoing German law against homosexuality/sodomy, from six months to five years. The Allied forces enforced the Nazi five years sentence rather than the original German six months sentence. This was a choice.

Amelia: Because my TBR isn’t big enough, what are some of your favorite WWII novels?

Milo: To be honest, I’ve not read many WWII novels, for no particular reason other than I just hadn’t gotten around to it. I didn’t truly get into the subject until I started researching my book. When I started reading up on it, I stuck mainly to nonfiction and primary sources, plucking out the tiny pieces of queer and trans existence as I found them. It was difficult work, and there unfortunately aren’t any direct, book-length sources I can lead you to that focus on trans existence of the time. The best I can think of is the nonfiction book Gay Berlin by Robert Beachy, the documentary Paragraph 175, and the fictionalized TV shows Charité at War and Babylon Berlin. As a side interest, there’s the newer nonfiction book The Other Olympians by Michael Waters, which is about the 1936 Summer Olympics hosted in Nazi Germany, and how this led to the policing of trans and intersex bodies in sports. It’s a great read and isn’t getting nearly enough attention, especially given our current times.

Amelia: Are there other trans stories in historical fiction that you’ve found inspiring?

Milo: I feel trans stories in historical fiction are still mostly lacking quantity-wise, and what little we do get is often speculative and incorporates elements of fantasy, sci-fi, time travel, alternative timelines, etc., and mostly in the YA category. I have mixed feelings about this. Not because there’s anything wrong with having such books out there, but because they’re often the only such books about trans history that get traditionally published. This further distorts trans history and topics into something unreal and/or just for kids, negatively interpreted as something simply new, trendy, and/or supposedly childish. Over my past 10+ years struggling to get one of my trans historical novels published, I’ve learned the hard way that the majority of traditional publishing just doesn’t know what to do with us as authentic representations of history. Some of the rejection reasons I’ve received have been wild. The situation is also frustratingly cyclical: authentic portrayals aren’t getting published because publishing doesn’t know what to do with them because most folks haven’t been educated on trans history because so few books are getting published about it because publishing doesn’t know what to do with such books when they come in because…

Anyway, thank you for your questions and for wanting to interview me! It means a lot that you read the book and that it had an impact on you. That’s all I’ve really wanted from this book, for the trans community of Weimar Berlin and the Holocaust to be remembered. As I say in my acknowledgements, I hope I’ve done right by them. I sincerely appreciate you giving them space in your newsletter.

1. Some of my favorites in D.C., East City Bookshop and Loyalty Bookstores, are doing promos I’m hoping to check out (….even though I’ve been traveling a lot of weekends in April and already spent way too much at Porter Square Books and Lovestruck Books in Cambridge two weeks ago and at McNally Jackson in Soho last weekend).