Linguists describe a first language as the one a speaker never remembers learning. Its grammar sits below conscious thought, and its speakers can produce it tired, frightened or half asleep. Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato applies the idea to a language with no words in it.
Speaking to YASS Magazine in April 2026, the American novelist, who has lived in Paris since 2019, put the thought in a sentence with two halves.
“Silence is one of the first languages many queer people learn. Not just what not to say, but how to listen for what’s missing.”
The second half carries the weight. A language has a speaking side and a listening side, and his version of silence has both. Someone learns to hold back a fact about themselves, and learns at the same moment to read a room for the subject everyone is stepping around. The first skill protects the speaker; the second trains the ear. Both arrive early, and people practise them for years before anyone thinks to give them a name.
That framing moves silence out of the vocabulary of shame. Shame comes from outside: someone else rules a subject unspeakable and the person concerned absorbs the ruling. The silence Bradley-Silverio Donato describes is something people acquire for their own use, because it keeps them safe or lets them belong. In his account, there can be a period in a queer life when withholding something about yourself turns instinctive.
Instinct is the right word for a first language. Native speakers do not conjugate their mother tongue before they speak it. A person fluent in silence does not plan to change the subject as a certain question approaches; the reflex fires, the talk moves on, and the moment passes without any visible decision. Fluency of that kind costs nothing to use, which is what makes it hard to notice and harder to drop.
Habits formed for good reasons tend to outlive them, and Bradley-Silverio Donato’s sharper claim concerns the point at which the reason is supposed to end. He has also put the image another way, with a harder edge. “Silence is often the first language queer people learn, and sometimes the hardest one to unlearn,” he says. Then he goes further: “Coming out doesn’t automatically teach you how to tell the truth.”
The pair separates two things that are easy to run together. Coming out answers one question about a person. It leaves the habits of the years before it in place, and those habits go on working in families, in relationships and in the way people talk to themselves. A person can be open about who they love and still edit much of the rest, out of a reflex older than the reason for it.
The last of those settings is the hardest to see. Someone can keep a subject off the agenda of their own thoughts with the same ease they once kept it out of conversation, and nobody else will notice, because the omission makes no sound.
He gives silence its due. It can protect people, and for a time it may be the sensible choice. Over a longer stretch it can bend the relationships it was meant to keep safe, because the people inside them end up loving versions of one another with pieces missing.
Bradley-Silverio Donato set out to avoid reducing queer experience to trauma. The question he finds more interesting is what people do with the habits they developed to survive. That moves the drama from injury to choice. A wound is something that happened to a person; a habit is something they still carry and use, and might, with effort, put down. The second makes for better fiction, because a character with a habit has decisions left to make.
The listening half of the YASS line suggests the habit leaves something useful behind as well. Someone trained early to hear what a room is leaving out develops an ear for subtext, for the distance between what people say and what they mean. Nothing obliges that person to unlearn the ear along with the reflex. A fluency acquired under pressure can, in other hands, become a form of attention.
Three Days Grace, published by Indigo River Publishing on 12 May 2026 and distributed by Simon & Schuster, puts these questions under a deadline. Five people gather in a Paris hotel for 72 hours. The novel reads their family through an LGBTQ+ lens without confining its questions to one community, and it sets its silences between people who love one another. Three days leave no room to put the habit aside for later.
The book takes that fluency as given and asks what its speakers can do next, including whether anyone can pick up a second language late in life and come to speak it with the ease of the first.
Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato is an American novelist living in Paris. His novel Three Days Grace is published by Indigo River Publishing and distributed by Simon & Schuster.
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