By Lily Jensen
Fighting for a Fascist Free Future needs to be full of Pleasure, Connection, and Joy—we will only be able to imagine and create a world as strong as our relationships with each other. Keya Chatterjee was determined to write a story where we won. Winning is nothing though, without a team to celebrate alongside.
Our world thrives in a sea of over-simplified binaries, particularly as a woman in my 20’s coming of age in 2026, I often feel as if by choosing one path towards some vision of “success” I’m leaving behind other dreams. This singular and individual can be a dangerous part of the American ethos. This is not the kind of thinking that leads to being a part of a winning team, on every scale.
In a challenge to this mindset, Chatterjee teaches us that we can, and we must, hold many passions, and many people. Through her brilliant fiction she exemplifies that steamy sex life and mobilizing to fight injustice aren’t mutually exclusive. We aren’t taught that gratifying relationships are actually the key, not a distraction from winning.
Resistance is not sustainable if it’s joyless– and nothing is more pleasure-filled and timely than her debut novel The Revolution Will Not Be Rated G, published by Green Writers Press this past October.
Despite our conversation being held over Zoom, Chatterjee’s vibrancy bled infectiously through the screen. Articulate while cursing occasionally and constantly smiling while also deeply serious about the work, she was utterly human and genuine. The first thing I noticed about her though, when she popped on my screen, were her earrings that would s
ometimes get caught in her blurred out background. They were huge and metallic with “Free DC”, the community organizing non-profit she recently co-founded, logo.
She exemplifies a life of multitude off the page, where she is both a scientist and artist of the future. After college, Chatterjee spent 3 years living under dictators: first in Slovakia after the wall came down and second in Morocco as a Peace Corps volunteer. This period was formative in her learning that life under a dictator isn’t as different as you’d think, but it becomes increasingly difficult when you challenge the dictator.
After that, Chatterjee earned her Masters and went on to work at NASA where she saw horrifying projections and climate realities. She was committed to using this expertise as a Climate Change specialist for USAID, WWF, and then the Director of the US Climate Action Network for a decade, while also serving two terms as neighborhood commissioner for Ward 6 in D.C. In addition, she held an important voice in the Paris Climate Accords and the Inflation Reduction Act. During this time she wrote her first book, The Zero Footprint Baby. Nothing like her recent work, this book chronicles the research she did during pregnancy about life cycle analyses of different modern “necessities” for child rearing. “You don’t have to have a baby shower… move to an enormous house in the suburbs and buy a car. We still don’t have a car,” Chatterjee said. The goal was to promote the fact that having a sustainable lifestyle and a family can coexist. According to a video produced by the Atlantic in 2016, Chatterjee and her family were an early adopter of solar panels in 2009 and went completely off of Pepco due to their extreme frustrations with the cost of their electricity bill and climate concerns. Now, they supply the D.C. electric grid instead of using it. Since then, their electricity costs have come down by 80%.
Aria, the protagonist of Chaterjee’s The Revolution Will Not Be Rated G, is among many young people who struggle with concerns about having children. Many common concerns are: the morality of bringing a new generation into this broken world, the energy and impact of raising a child, and the cost and resources it takes. Chatterjee does not deny that fear, as having kids is a very personal decision, but she does exemplify that there isn’t a set script for being a parent.
After moving on from the US Climate Action Network, Chatterjee took a beat to write The Revolution Will Not Be Rated G, before co-founding Free DC. Despite her previous book, Chatterjee never considered herself a writer. As much as she enjoyed reading (some age inappropriate fiction) and writing growing up, she was told by teachers that she wasn’t good at it, which steered her career toward a more STEM oriented path. “I got old enough not to care…This is something I enjoy doing. So why does it matter if I’m good at it or not good at it?” Chatterjee explained. Embracing this joy led her to write The Revolution Will Not Be Rated G.
During her time at the US Climate Action Network Chatterjee identified a common problem: there were so few stories of us winning. “I felt like the artists of our time were failing at their jobs,” Chatterjee expressed; failing to tell stories not just about what is horrible and broken, but also about how we might change these systems, imagining every detail of a world we wish to see. “Saving the world is going to take many tools, from solar panels to…sweaty, taut torsos and supple, seductive curves,” said Bill McKibben, early climate activist and renowned author of Here Comes the Sun. In imagining the new world and making it real, we must deploy every storytelling tool we have— for Chatterjee that was through her favorite genre: Romance.
At first, she wanted to write a book set in a “solar punk” world where we already won, but she had so many questions about how we did it that the backstory became the story that was eventually published. The title of this backstory was born from a reference to Gil Scott Heron’s song “The Revolution Will not Be Televised,” one of the many chants placed at the start of each chapter. The ever important “not rated G” prepares readers for the graphic sex scenes. It was first a working title, but then it just stuck.
In the beginning, Chatterjee was mostly writing the novel for fun and not for publication. But when she got the call from Dede Cummings, founder and publisher of Green Writers Press, that she wanted to publish the manuscript Chatterjee submitted; it was just after Trump was re-elected, and she knew that people needed this story now more than ever. “People are gonna need some escapism and need to believe that you can get out from under fascism. So yeah, let’s do this thing,” Chatterjee said.
Keya Chatterjee was well positioned to write this book between her experience reading and viewing the genre, her informed sense of the climate impacts already happening (like the water walls in 17th Street in D.C.), and her deep study of projections while working at NASA. It was like she had spent her life researching to write a world of complete climate catastrophe under an authoritarian regime, where the book begins. “For the moment it was being written, it was harder for a reader to understand how things could get so bad,” reflected Chatterjee. If she was writing it today, there would be a lot less explaining to do, as a lot of the plot has become increasingly real in the past year and a half under Trump.
While Chatterjee’s knowledge base was ideal for this book, she doesn’t want to be the only person writing activist romance novels. “My hope is that there will be as many at least as many books about how movements win in the romance genre as there are about hockey,” remarks the “Heated Rivalry” fan. Chatterjee describes the cross-section as “having vegetables with your dessert,” for example “the happily ever after and happy for now is a necessary conclusion. I think that actually opens up a little bit of space to talk about things that otherwise might be hard to talk about if people didn’t know how it was going to end,” Chatterjee added.
Even though the novel has a unique setting and sub plots, Chatterjee’s work wasn’t that different from a typical romance novelist – choreographing sex scenes through acting them out with her hands, writing the classic happily ever after, and utilizing her favorite tropes of the genre: forced proximity, fake engagement, enemies to lovers, second chance, the list goes on. There were some things though, that she wanted to do differently. “I read them all to be clear, but a thing that I don’t like in the genre is how many rich men are the thing people are aspiring to be…I was very excited to create a protagonist who actually had to give up his wealth in order to redeem himself. In order to find love, he had to reject everything he had,” Chatterjee said. In the book, Neil, Aria’s love interest, commits to move permanently from Upland to Lowland, in a future harshly divided by class, and reject his mother’s wealth and power to be with Aria— by which Chatterjee accomplishes the subversion she was aiming to create.
Romance novels have tropes, and so does authoritarianism, these tropes are referred to as the authoritarian playbook. It’s this playbook that Chatterjee trains people in at her current job with Free DC. If you can learn the playbook, you can identify injustice yourself. Chatterjee aims to teach some of those lessons in The Revolution Will Not Be Rated G. Authoritarianism is the consolidation of power and taking away people’s rights to have a say in their future, which is exactly what is happening in the book. But the regime isn’t the main character of the book– the movement, Expectus, is, which is very similar to the movement that Chatterjee and her team at Free DC are building now. Both the fictional and real movements are “localized movements that have very detailed relationships. There’s a lot of training in the novel, which is like a lot of the core of what a movement has to do,” Chatterjee explained. Balancing discipline and organization with joy and meeting people’s needs is fundamental to this vision of the movement and is reflected in movements happening right now.
The world in the novel is not exactly the same as reality. It’s still fiction at its core. “We are way further along in this pathway…we’re heading there a lot faster than 2042…the racist, anti-trans, fascist movement has consolidated faster,” said Chatterjee. In addition, a lot of climate vectors have come much faster in real life than the book imagines. That being said, amidst terrible wildfires and hundred year floods every few years, Chatterjee has not lost hope. Her book is primarily a playbook for how we might win. “It’s just like people coming together and deciding with some discipline we are not going to participate in this…the authoritarians don’t know how to grow food, don’t know how to cook food, don’t know how to deliver food, don’t know how to take care of kids, don’t know how to teach kids…They cannot survive when people refuse to go along with them,” Chatterjee described.
All of these necessities for a healthy society – making food, teaching kids, and many more that she mentions – are made possible by a community comprised of strong relationships. So it makes sense that Chatterjee argues that not paying attention to relationships is why our country is currently on the brink of facism – by “not knowing our neighbors… allowing ourselves to be in a place where it was possible to even demonize other people.” These relationships, intimate or not, are what tie together a successful movement and a successful romance novel.
“I think it is underrated in our society to write love stories, which gets back to my core assertion that relationships are at the heart of what saves us…it’s easy to make fun of romance if you don’t actually value relationships,” Chatterjee said. On the back cover of the book, Julia Angwin, New York Times contributing opinion writer and co-author of On Courage: How to be a Dissident in an Age of Fear, understands this core assertion. She sees, “a vision of a future where humans prioritize taking care of each other over oppressing each other.”
Put simply, Chatterjee’s advice for herself at twenty years old is almost the same advice she gave to me (also twenty)during our Tuesday afternoon Zoom conversation, and advice she wants to extend to other young people: “Pay attention to these relationships, they may last longer than you think.” I took this advice seriously. It was as if a cool aunt or lifelong mentor had told me this, not as if we had met just an hour ago through a screen. I thought of all of the important relationships in my life.I thought about the impact even just a few lasting relationships can have on a person. This stuck with me, because it’s deeply aligned with Chatterjee’s theory of how we win.
Chatterjee has had other philosophies that have followed her and developed within her throughout her life. For example: “Organize where you are, that is the real work…you must do something that brings your neighbors together.” Winning is not just about investing in people, but also about investing in place. For Chatterjee that has manifested in many ways throughout her life: working as neighborhood commissioner, joining local activism groups, and living in a housing co-op for 16 years. After writing her novel, place-based organizing has become her main focus through co-founding and currently directing Free DC.
Washington D.C., still lacking state status and rights, has a story unlike any other in the country. “It’s always been a story of oppression. It’s always been a story specifically of racial oppression,” Chatterjee remarked. This context was essential to Chatterjee’s choice to set the book in a radically race and class divided future version of D.C. The district had state rights, but they were revoked in 1874, as black men were gaining political power even in a majority white community. About 100 years later in 1974, D.C. got very limited rights back through the Home Rule Act. Still to this day the nation’s capitol has no representation in the legislature, no control of their guard, and hardly any fiscal investment from outside funders. Additionally, the U.S. Congress gets 30 days to overturn any law the district passes locally. I was shocked by this fact in particular and just how much inequity residents of the D.C. community face. “We understood this was a fascist regime probably a year before the rest of the country did, because we can see with our eyes,” Chatterjee explained. The D.C. community has incredible strength and discipline constantly having to deal with these inequities. Growing up in the D.C. suburbs it was this cultural richness and togetherness that made Chatterjee know she wanted to live in D.C. “The energy of the place is so tangible…it’s such a beautiful community that is like buzzing with life, but also kind of buzzing with rage…some of that rage also comes from people refer to Washington D.C. all the time as shorthand for the morons that they elect to Congress…don’t call that D.C. we don’t even get one vote in that body,” Chatterjee said. It is this rage and love for her community that drove Chatterjee to co-found Free DC, which aims to fight for D.C.’s rights and also for climate and racial justice everywhere through localized action, anti-authoritarian trainings, cultural community events, and coalition building across movements.
One final lesson from Chatterjee: “People need joy, and authoritarians thrive on fear.” She and her team intentionally incorporate joy into their events and organizing from spirit soccer games to go-go bands. Songs, dance, stories, sport, and more are common tactics and trademarks of oppressed people over time and successful movements, radical joy resists the fear. Fear, reality, and loss are important too, but it needs to be balanced. “I get a lot of joy out of reading romance novels. But frankly, I get even more joy out of chatting with people about said romance novels,” Chatterjee said. Communal joy is the core of all of this work, real and imagined. We are told that escapism is bad, but what if there was a book that allowed us to escape into a state of bliss–but not a state of ignorant bliss – a pleasure-filled novel that provides humor and solace in a turbulent time, but also a novel that is laden with lessons for overcoming the oppressor. Chatterjee holds both and mixes them together to create a book that taught me so much (in a lot of different realms ;)). Chatterjee brings a fresh energy, perspective, and genre to the climate justice movement, and there is nothing quite like what she’s created in the pages of The Revolution Will Not Be Rated G.
So you know this is a story about how we won, and that Aria and Neil have a trope-filled steamy relationship, but there are a lot more twists and turns throughout, yet to be uncovered. To answer all your burning questions you can buy Chatterjee’s hot off the eco-friendly press debut novel The Revolution Will Not Be Rated G with Green Writers Press on bookshop.org, a local bookstore near you, or most places you typically buy your books. To see how you can get more involved with Free DC (you don’t need to be a D.C. resident) check out this link to their website for more information.
About the interviewer: Lily Jensen is a rising Junior at Middlebury College studying Environmental Literature with a minor in Spanish. Originally from Philadelphia, she enjoys public speaking, trail running, working with kids, and trying new recipes. Lily is passionate about the power of storytelling and the humanities in advocacy for environmental justice.