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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
More and more young-adult novels are featuring well-adjusted characters who are "out" -- and aren't tortured about it.
Nov 11, 2003 | When I first met David Levithan, he was the editor of my suburban New Jersey high school newspaper. I was a sophomore and he was a senior. He was one of those nerdy-cool kids. He read Anne Tyler novels and was in love with Anna Quindlen. He wrote long loopy notes to friends and passed them off in the hallways, lines upon lines of erudition written in a tiny but consistent hand. He made mix-tapes with music you might not yet know. He would cut out designs from construction paper and frame the song titles, making art that enhanced the 10,000 Maniacs or Julia Fordham tape you had just received. He was smart and funny in a meticulous and offbeat way. Today, in the era of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," and "Will & Grace," you might say that David had a queer aesthetic -- good taste, an eye for new trends. But you certainly wouldn't have said so back then. Because at Millburn High School in 1989, "queer" was far from a friendly epithet.
As far as we knew, there were no gay kids at Millburn High School. It was a small school. A wealthy school. A Republican school, with George H.W. Bush winning straw polls and Jim Florio considered by a majority to be a liberal, evildoer governor. This was the 1980s, and there was nary a gay role model on the horizon: Melissa Etheridge and K.D. Lang weren't even out, for God's sake. Even the Indigo Girls were a mere rumor. The only literature for teens with gay characters was terrifying: Sandra Scoppettone books from the 1970s that ended in brutality, or the early 1980s classic "Annie on My Mind," by Nancy Garden, in which two girls fall in love but everything falls apart in the end when they're busted by a morality squad.
I lost touch with David not long after he went to Brown University in the fall of 1990. I heard, vaguely, that he'd come out, and that after college he had become an editor at Scholastic Books. And then, a few weeks ago, and years after I'd last heard his name, I discovered David's new young-adult novel, "Boy Meets Boy." As I read it, I heard David's voice again. More refined, but with echoes of his high school self, a strong, engaging and intellectual stream of consciousness.
"I tell Noah about Kyle -- how could I not? -- and about some of the other disastrous dates I've had," says the book's protagonist, Paul, who is on a first date with a boy named Noah. "More the funny stories than the pained ones. The blind date with the boy in seventh grade who tucked his shirt into his underwear, and his pants into his socks, just to be 'more secure.' The boy at sleep-away camp who giggled whenever I used an adverb. The Finnish exchange student who wanted me to pretend to be Molly Ringwald whenever we went out. There is an unspoken recognition as we share these stories -- we can talk about the bad dates and the bad boyfriends, because this is not a bad date, and we will not be bad boyfriends. We forget the fact that many of our earlier relationships ... started in the same way. We pencil-sketch our previous life so we can contrast it to the Technicolor of the moment."
"Boy Meets Boy" is a utopian gem of a novel, marketed to teens but so layered and wry, it's bound to attract an adult audience too. It's a queer romance, a coming-of-age tale, and it takes place in a high school that would make conservatives shudder. It's the book I wish we had all had growing up, gay or straight.
In the past three years, literature for gay teens has had its own coming out. Books like "Rainbow Boys," by Alex Sanchez, took a hard look at the issues of coming out, HIV and violence against gay teens. "Geography Club," by Brent Hartinger, is about five gay kids who decide to form an underground gay-straight alliance. "Keeping You a Secret," by Julie Anne Peters, features a popular, athletic girl (with a boyfriend) who falls in love with another girl and realizes she is a lesbian -- with tragic familial consequences. But even these books, while commendable for featuring gay characters, are mini morality tales. The gay characters are scared to talk about being gay, or are tossed from their homes when they do.
"Boy Meets Boy" is notable for having none of that underlying anguish and for having a main character who isn't keeping any secrets. When I recently sat down with David in his parents' backyard in Short Hills, N.J., we talked about how his book transcends the heavy genre of Gay Teen Literature, with a queer main character who isn't worried about being kicked out of his house, beat up at school, or ostracized from his family. He isn't coming out. He barely even knows where his closet is. Like everyone around him, he's just worried about finding love and keeping it. "Paul knows exactly who he is," David says. "It's not an attribute gay teens are normally given."
Paul, a high school sophomore, has known since kindergarten that he's gay. ("I had just assumed this man-woman arrangement," he says, upon learning that not everyone is gay, "was yet another adult quirk, like flossing.") He's had boyfriends. He's been class president. And all the while he, his friends, his family, his community -- an unnamed New Jersey town that closely resembles Short Hills -- has always known who he was. "There isn't really a gay or a straight scene in our town," Paul says, early on. "They all got mixed up a while back, which I think is for the best." Paul's story has all the ingredients of a typical teen romance -- angst, rejection, redemption -- but the characters happen to be boys. Paul and Noah fall hard for each other. Paul totally screws up the nascent romance by letting his ex-boyfriend Kyle kiss him. Word gets around that something is up between Kyle and Paul. Noah finds out and Paul has to do everything he can to win him back.
