These days, Medina, 25, works as a children’s book copy editor and makes his home in Manhattan with his poet boyfriend Billy Merrell, their roommate Nick Eliopoulos and their pug. We talked to Medina before he embarked on a reading tour, which made a stop at Orlando’s Urban Think Bookstore on July 6.

WATERMARK: What made you decide to set the book in Orlando?

Nico Medina: It’s really easy to write what you already know, and I know Orlando like the back of my hand. I spent the first 18 years of my life there, so that’s to be expected. The other side of it is that I wanted to introduce Orlando as almost its own character. Only the people who grew up in Orlando can really understand its weirdness and quirks and the fact that it is its own city, apart from all the theme parks. Jonathan and Orlando seem to complement each other well with their mix of glitziness, classiness and tackiness.

How much of Jonathan’s story is your own?

     I wasn’t out in high school and wasn’t out until freshman year of college. I hate to admit it, but being an out 17-year-old in Orlando is something I didn’t quite know. I wish I had been out, but it seemed harder to me back then, even though it was only seven years ago.

Your book offers a twist on the gay teen experience when Jonathan ends up having sex with a close female friend.

     I don’t know from experience, but you know it is all very physically possible. I thought that was kind of a fun way to start the book. I wanted to do two things from the get-go, and one of them was that, and the other was that I wanted it to be set in Orlando

In the book, Jonathan strikes a deal that sends him back into the closet in exchange for the chance to go to London to see his idol Kylie Minogue, something you have also done—I mean, the trip abroad to see Kylie, not going back into the closet. What was that trip like?

     It was great four-day weekend. She already had six shows scheduled in London, and I was sad because none of them were here in the U.S. When I saw that she added a seventh show, I thought I’d see what kind of seats I could get, and I came up with floor seats. I called my friend in D.C.—another Kylie devotee—and I told him I had floor seats, and should we just go to London? He said, “Buy it!”

So you weren’t kidding when you said that you started writing this book to get out of credit card debt. That could not have been a cheap trip.

I was partially kidding, but it was pretty fresh in my mind. I think I bought the Kylie tickets in December, and I started writing the book in January. The other reason I started writing the book is because my boyfriend, our roommate and another friend started up a novel-writing group. I hadn’t written anything in, like, 10 years, and I had the itch after copyediting so many young-adult novels. I went into the office and wrote the first chapter in an evening and joined their group. But definitely the credit card debt was looming.

Though Orlando has occasional big-city moments, it isn’t Manhattan. Did it take some time to get used to life in the Big Apple?

I guess you could say that I’ve adjusted. Not only to a new city, but it’s also adjusting to adulthood and having a 9-to-5 and doing all your drinking at happy hour [laughs] instead of like in college, when it was all the time. I think I have adjusted pretty well, though it requires getting used to living on a budget. And no one up here knows how to air-condition properly; that’s one thing that Orlando has over the Yankees.

Will your next book be a sequel?

I  have a two-book deal with Pulse, so I already have a first draft of the next book, which I am trying really hard to revise. It is not a sequel, but I guess it can be considered sort of a companion. It has a very light crossover with characters, but it is somebody else’s story.

How important is it for today’s queer youth to have resources like your book?

It’s funny, because when I wrote this book, I wrote it for fun and I wrote it “real,” never thinking of it as becoming a resource for GLBT teens. But I guess that in doing that, I’ve made it sort of a resource in itself. I think teens should have a variety of books to choose from—the more serious and sometimes dark side of things should be depicted, but it is also important to illustrate the happy and fun side of life, too, in an honest way and one that can be related to.