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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
This Judy Blumesque drama is set in a fantastical, queer-friendly universe in a time period that is never specified, but might be right about now or in the very near future. Paul's school is simply called "the High School." It is the anti-Millburn, a place where the star quarterback is a drag queen, the cheerleaders ride Harleys, and the janitors are day traders. "In Paul's world," David says, "people, for the most part, are able to do what they want, and the result makes it a happier place. The boys and girls love who they want because, well, they can. It's all a part of the ideal, which is different things for different characters."
But beyond the quixotic confines of the High School, things are a bit more complicated. Tony, Paul's best friend, who lives one town away, has a family that refuses to accept that he is gay. Unlike Paul, who lives with a loving and accepting mom, dad and brother, Tony has parents who are religious zealots. Paul and his friends spirit Tony away from his household under the pretense of Bible study and give him a taste of life -- "romantic comedies, dimestore toys, diner jukeboxes" -- outside. Says Paul, "We figure Tony's parents would understand if only they weren't set on misunderstanding so many things." The system works, until one day friends of Tony's family see Paul and Tony hugging each other in the woods. It's not what it looks like, but it doesn't matter -- Tony is grounded and forbidden to see Paul. When Paul encourages Tony to run away, he refuses. "They think that being gay is going to mess up my life," Tony says. "I can't prove them right, Paul. I have to prove them wrong. And I can't prove them wrong by changing myself or by denying who I really am."
That the book is able to deal with Tony's struggle without descending into the maudlin is a triumph. Tony manages to persuade his mother to allow Paul to be his friend, to come and see him -- even if they have to keep his bedroom door open. "This is what a small victory feels like," Paul says with wonder. "It feels like a little surprise and a lot of relief. It makes the past feel lighter and the future seem even lighter than that, if only for a moment. It feels like rightness winning. It feels like possibility."
David explains that "Boy Meets Boy" didn't start out as a teen novel -- it began as a Valentine's Day story for friends and quickly turned into a full-fledged manuscript. "I wrote the book I wanted to find as an editor," he says. But he also wrote it as a way to rewrite all the unhappy endings in books and songs about gay teens. Tony is named for the eponymous Patti Griffin song, about a gay boy: "He looked in the mirror and saw/ A little faggot staring back at him/ Pulled out a gun and blew himself away," Griffin sings. "I've heard that song hundreds of times and it still clobbers me," David says. "I've never wanted to rewrite an ending so desperately, never grasped the narrator's voice so much."
David's healthy characters come partly from his own healthy childhood. While he didn't come out until college, he says that's more because he was "oblivious" to his sexuality than closeted. At Brown he came out "gradually," without any particularly painful scenes.
I ask David, what if his book, and others like it, had been around when we were growing up? "That's a tautological question," he replies. "The thing is, it couldn't have been written when we were in high school." He means the cultural moment we are in right now is unique, a product of everything from "Ellen" to "Queer as Folk" and everything in between. "It's a different mind-set," agrees Jennifer Brown, children's forecast editor at Publishers Weekly. "It wouldn't even occur to [these authors] who grew up in the late '80s, early '90s ... to see a stigma [in being gay]."
Clearly teens are hungry for books that feature gay characters. "We've seen a big change in the last five years," says Kathleen Horning, director of the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "We used to just have just one or two books a year [with gay characters], and it wasn't even every year. But in the last couple of years we've had several each year, so that's a big, big shift."
While booksellers don't have a method for tracking the sales of gay teen novels specifically, the sheer number of books that have come out in the last five years is an indicator of a sea change in the market. From 1969 until 1998, says Horning, 28 young-adult novels appeared with gay, lesbian or bisexual characters. From 1998 until today, 42 more novels have been published. The Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network's Web site lists dozens of books recommended for teen readers, nearly all of which have been published in the last few years. And, in another sign that these books are gaining mass acceptance, they are winning awards. Since 1999, four gay-themed books, or books with gay secondary characters, have picked up the Young Adult Library Services Association's Michael L. Printz Awards, which is comparable to winning the Newbery award for children's literature.
"Boy Meets Boy" has already received positive feedback, both from reviewers and readers. Booklist said it represented "a revolution in the publishing of gay-themed books for adolescents." (Booklist also chose the novel as one of its top 10 romances -- gay or straight -- this month.) The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (published by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) praised it as well: "In a genre filled with darkness, torment, and anxiety," it said, "this is a shiningly affirmative and hopeful book." David says that teens e-mail him daily at his Web site to tell him how much they can relate to "Boy Meets Boy": "I thought that the dialogue was very witty," says Tamar Sandweiss Back, a straight 13-year-old who also lives in a New Jersey suburb. "Someone who is gay can relate to it," she continues, "but if you're not gay it's still a good book. I think it's interesting to read. I'm attracted to books that are about people that I'm not."
Teens -- gay and straight -- read to find themselves, David says. "Book-inclined kids, who read to find identity in part, weren't finding anything saying it's OK, it's cool to be gay, and [the story] can be happy," he says. "It should not be such a radical thing."
