https://washingtonian.com/2025/10/07/dc-punk-explored-in-three-new-history-books/For two decades, Benny Peterson has written fiction almost every day—sometimes before the kids got up, sometimes between freelance gigs—but none of it ever seemed to go anywhere. A decade ago, they were coming to terms with the fact that maybe they’d never publish a novel, that maybe their fiction was only for them, when a character, Jamie Cain, crept into a draft. Jamie was a DC native who’d been on the cusp of making it as a musician when her band collapsed. Writing about Jamie, Peterson told me, meant sitting with the somewhat personal question of artistic failure, of “What happens when you perfect a skill—when you are working at something very, very hard—and no one cares?”
Ironically, the story of Jamie’s failure has become Peterson’s success. It’s the backbone of their first published novel, The Maidenheads. Set largely in DC’s early-2000s music scene, it follows Jamie’s relationship with Mari, a charismatic and sometimes manipulative immigrant from Tbilisi whom she meets in gym class at a lightly fictionalized version of Jackson-Reed High School. They fall in love, start a band called the Maidenheads, get some attention, and then break up. The novel chronicles their precarious reunion—romantic and musical—a decade later.
I met Peterson to discuss The Maidenheads at an outdoor table on the fringe of Adams Morgan’s Walter Pierce Park, across from an apartment building where Jamie lives in the novel. Peterson once lived there, too—but otherwise, Jamie doesn’t much resemble Peterson, who grew up outside Boston and has spent 20 years in DC working as a journalist. (They’re a Washingtonian contributing writer.) Peter-son is in their mid-forties, transgender with salt-and-pepper hair, and is notably not musical. “I am completely tone-deaf,” they told me.
Since Peterson isn’t from DC and doesn’t play music, they labored over the details in The Maidenheads. Their understanding of the music scene, they said, came mostly from conversations with friends who frequented DC punk shows. Some of the novel’s settings are mined from Peterson’s life—the cafe Tryst, the karaoke bar Muzette—and others are extrapolated from research. The 9:30 Club, for instance, allowed Peterson to take a backstage tour.
Since writing the book, Peterson has finished another novel (largely set in Loudoun County) and is in the process of drafting a third. It now seems possible that all will be published, that Peterson will finally enjoy artistic success—but it’s almost beside the point. After decades of not publishing, they find writing to be fulfilling in itself. It’s a “psychic gift,” they said, to have “something that’s burbling away at the back of my head for years and years, this other plane of my life on which things are moving very, very slowly and calmly, and I have total control.”
This article appears in the June 2026 issue of Washingtonian.
