Seventeen months into a nationwide book tour, Nico Lang has grown used to living out of a suitcase. The Los Angeles–based journalist and author has spent more than a year crisscrossing the country talking about their book American Teenager, a deeply reported portrait of transgender youth and their families navigating a turbulent political moment.
This week, the tour brings Lang to the Puget Sound region. But instead of the usual bookstore circuit, Lang has chosen a different set of venues: queer-affirming churches.
The choice is intentional.
“Faith communities have always been part of these stories,” Lang says. “A lot of the kids in the book come from religious families. And some of the most powerful support they found was in places people wouldn’t expect.”
During a recent stop, Lang stepped up to read a passage from the book — a section that begins inside St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Houston.
A sermon and a story
Lang reads from Chapter 4: “The Samaritan.”
The walls of St. Mary’s are plain and softly padded as the Rev. Marquita Hutches, wrapped in purple cloth, delivers her weekly homily. Her sermon invites the congregation to reconsider the Samaritan woman from the Gospel of John — the figure who meets Jesus at a well and shares a drink of water with him before he reveals himself as the Messiah.
For centuries, Hutches tells the church, the woman has been cast in a negative light because of her complicated marital history.
Lang pauses mid-reading to smile.
“Thank you for letting me interject,” they tell the audience. “It’s my favorite joke in the whole book.”
Biblical scholars have often described the Samaritan woman as an adulteress, a symbol of shame. But Hutches argues there is nothing in scripture that actually says that. In a world where the average life expectancy hovered around 35 years, she notes, the woman may simply have been widowed repeatedly — or doing what she needed to survive in a society where women couldn’t support themselves.
Seen through that lens, Hutches says, the Samaritan becomes something else entirely: “a striking example of a faithful woman.”
She becomes an evangelist, spreading the message of Jesus and drawing others toward faith.
For St. Mary’s — a congregation that openly welcomes LGBTQ+ people — the sermon doubles as a mission statement.
If women have often been unfairly judged in Christian history, Hutches tells her parishioners, queer people have faced similar assumptions.
Ruby’s moment
During the service, Lang writes, a toddler’s chatter cuts through the sanctuary. Eventually the child is led off to Sunday school, leaving a quiet behind.
Nearby sits Ruby Carnes, one of the people whose story appears in American Teenager.
Ruby radiates calm — porcelain skin carefully shielded from the sun, a black turtleneck and burgundy nails perfectly coordinated with the church’s pink cushions. Her outfits are always deliberate. Fashion is one of the few parts of life she feels she can fully control.
She remembers exactly what she wore the day she came out.
“A blue sundress,” Ruby tells Lang, “with green striped heels and gold wire earrings shaped like flowers.”
Two years earlier, St. Mary’s hosted Ruby’s renaming liturgy, an Episcopal ceremony marking the release of a transgender person’s birth name and the claiming of their true identity.
The church was filled with masked faces — family, friends, and parishioners gathered as sunlight streamed through the skylight.
The service followed the familiar rhythms of Episcopal worship: hymns, scripture readings, and the steady cadence of liturgy repeated countless times over generations.
But that day the ritual centered on Ruby.
The congregation read from Corinthians: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”
For Ruby, the passage meant embracing herself fully — and inviting the people around her to do the same.
Telling fuller stories
Moments like Ruby’s are why Lang wrote American Teenager in the first place.
For more than a decade, Lang has reported on LGBTQ+ issues for outlets including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Esquire. They also created the newsletter Queer News Daily.
Over years of reporting, Lang built relationships with dozens of families raising transgender children.
“I had interviewed families for years and years,” Lang tells audiences during the tour. “By the time I started writing the book, I had relationships and trust that very few journalists have.”
That trust mattered. Many families had previously been asked invasive questions by reporters — questions about their children’s bodies or medical care that felt dehumanizing.
Lang approached the work differently.
“My job was to create a space where people felt safe enough to open up,” they say. “Where they could tell their story in their own terms.”
The result is a book focused less on political battles and more on everyday humanity.
Some of the most memorable scenes aren’t legislative fights but quiet conversations — like a Florida evening Lang spent with a teenage trans girl named Jack discussing Kierkegaard on a balcony in the heat.
“There was something so quintessentially teenage about it,” Lang recalls. “Talking about philosophy and the meaning of life.”
Beyond the headlines
Lang says much of the public conversation about transgender youth focuses narrowly on legislation, court cases, or controversy.
What gets lost are the ordinary parts of adolescence.
“I sometimes complain that I never get to call a trans person and say, ‘Hey, did you see that movie?’” Lang says. “We want the same conversations everyone else has.”
That sense of shared humanity is the book’s core message.
For Lang, the meaning of life is ultimately simple.
“It’s connection,” they say. “It’s lying on your partner’s chest at night and feeling that closeness. That’s the meaning of life.”
Writing through difficult times
Lang finished the book before the 2024 election — an outcome that left them deeply discouraged.
“For months I didn’t know how to keep writing,” Lang admits during a tour stop. “I didn’t know what we were fighting for anymore.”
A friend reminded them of something important: throughout the history of LGBTQ+ rights, activists often lost again and again before finally winning.
“You can lose and lose and lose until you win,” Lang says.
Today, as they continue the tour into its seventeenth month, Lang hopes readers leave the book both moved and motivated.
“I want people to feel overwhelmed by the humanity of these kids,” they say. “But also hopeful.”
Because, Lang adds, the real ending of the story isn’t in the book.
“The ending,” they tell audiences, “is what we do next.”
