To continue the on-going
discussion of diversity in books, here are 5 young adult titles featuring gay
main characters. Luckily, there are many more I could add to this list.
A great starting point for
younger readers is Totally Joe, by James Howe. 7th grader Joe
Bunch has the sweetest coming out story of any. He knows for sure he is gay, he
remains cheerful and optimistic as he tells his family, they in turn are loving
and supportive – the process is almost too easy. But the book does raise
questions of gender expectations and traditional roles, bullying and stereotypes,
and the cut-throat nature of the teenage quest for popularity. Joe is given the
assignment to write an “alphabiography," and the book takes the form of his
journal as he describes his year with alphabetically ordered headings, such as
“C is for Colin." It is funny, it is short, and you will want to follow the
characters further in the rest of Howe’s “The Misfits” series.
Absolutely deserving of every
single award this book has received (including the 2015 Stonewall Honor award),
I’ll Give you the Sun, by Jandy Nelson is vivid and multi-layered, bursting
with images, ideas and heartbreak. Twins Jude and Noah tell the story in
alternating chapters; Jude tells of the recent events (when they are 16), Noah
the ones describing what happened when they were 13. They both are artists; she
sculpts, he paints. She jumps off cliffs, has a bad experience with a boy and
almost shuts down completely. He meets the boy next door who has stars in his
eyes and a science on his brain and they fall in love. There are so many good things
to mention about this book but one of the best is how the author captures the
heady, awkward feeling of falling in love, how you think about it all the time
but can’t find the words to say it out loud. Here is Noah watching Brian at a
party:
Brian’s reading the titles on the spines of books on the shelves like
he’s going to be tested on it.
“I
love you,” I say to him, only it comes out, “Hey.”
“So
damn much,” he says back, only it comes out, “Dude.” (p. 131)
Things do
not go easily for the pair but that tension helps makes the novel all the more
moving. Read it and marvel at what this author can do.
Taking a different approach to
this theme is Openly Straight, by Bill Konigsberg. Here the main
character Rafe Goldberg has a safe and secure life in Boulder, with
understanding parents, tolerant soccer team, even a respected volunteer
position as motivational speaker for the local PFLAG organization. He thinks about
labels and what it means to be gay, about the difference between tolerance and
acceptance, and how nice it would be to “just be” himself. So, when he
transfers to an all-boy’s school in New England, he resolves to be entirely
label free. He doesn’t exactly lie about his preference, but he doesn’t
announce it either. This leads to a lot of complicated pretending.
Lies piles on lies. Rafe texts
and calls his best friend at home, a girl named Claire Olivia. She doesn’t get
what Rafe is trying to do. When Rafe comes home for Christmas, he asks Claire
Olivia to pretend to be his ex-girlfriend. When Rafe’s parents visit New
England for a school tour, he begs them not to reveal that in Boulder he was
openly gay. But only when Rafe starts having feeling for cute Ben, does he
admit what a crazy idea his whole experiment turned out to be. While the set-up
of this book feels contrived, it does provide a good starting point for
discussions on what it means to live honestly.
Everything about Aristotle
and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, by Benjamin Alire Saenz is
beautiful. Dante Quintana and Angel Aristotle Mendoza meet at a pool and become
friends. They are nice 15 year old Hispanic boys. They live with nice parents.
Dante teaches Ari how to swim. They swim and read comics and argue about them.
Dante reads poetry and sketches. They talk about words and art and the meaning
of life. Time passes and they get part time jobs, and learn to drive. Ari gets
a truck and adopts a dog. They experiment with kissing girls. They drive into
the desert, lie on the back of the truck, smoke pot and watch the stars. They
have a few beers, go to parties, laugh, talk, laugh some more. They experiment
with kissing each other. Ari claims it doesn’t work for him.
El Paso must be a hot dry place,
but the key events take place in the rain. Near the beginning of the book, the
boys watch the rain and then walk outside, barefoot. Dante stops to pick up a
bird with a broken wing. Without warning, a car comes around the corner.
Without thinking, Ari leaps in front of his friend, shoving him out of the way
and saving Dante’s life, but breaking his own two legs and an arm in the
process. Ari claims he was just saving
his friend. He doesn’t talk about it.
By the end of the book, Ari
learns to trust his feelings. Instead of trying to figure out the secrets of
the universe, he figures of the secrets of his heart. And the answers are not
in the stars, but right in front of him.
And finally, a title about a
girl. The Miseducation of Cameron Post, by Emily M. Danforth is leisurely
paced, beautifully evocative and written in – get this – complete sentences and
full paragraphs. Set in the early 1990’s, and also features gay teens who smoke
a lot of pot and hang out in swimming pools. Readers are immersed in the heat
of the Montana summers, as well as the stifling small town attitudes and the
conservative church preaching. Left to her own devices, Cameron would spend the
day decorating her dollhouse, exploring the hospital, swimming in the pool.
Boring! No. She decorates the dollhouse with airplane-sized vodka bottles (they
make a perfect floor lamp), Nixon buttons, gum-wrappers and stamps. The
hospital she and friends explore is ancient, dark and abandoned. The Spanish-style architecture is crumbling,
there is a weathered stone cross on top and miles and miles of creepy,
nun-haunted hallways to explore. As for the pool, it is really a lake, full of
weeds and algae-slimed lane markers, and starting blocks covered in slippery
puke-green carpet. Cameron spends much of her time there, first on the swim
team, then as a life guard. She swims well, wins her events, and afterwards,
makes out with other girls behind the changing sheds and under the docks.
This is not a coming out story.
Cameron knows she likes girls. The day her parents die in a car accident, she
is shoplifting with Irene, and kissing her (all soft and tasting of gum and
root beer). Despite her grief over her parents, Cameron also can’t help feeling
relief that she and Irene were not caught together. Ultra-religious Aunt Ruth
comes to live with her, taking her to Gates of Praise church and signing her up
for the youth group “Firepower." Gates of Praise, no surprise, equates
“homo-sesh-oo-ality” with sin. None of this stops Cameron from falling in love
with Coley Taylor, beautiful cow-girl, whose hair smells of peony and sweet
grass. She has a boyfriend, with the “jaunty good looks of an ad for astronaut
recruitment,” but the summer he is away at soccer camp, things really heat up.
They make out and mess around. A lot. Right until the moment Coley balks. After
that, Coley tell her mother how Cameron “corrupted her." Her mother tells their
Pastor; the pastor tells Aunt Ruth. And Cameron is sent away to God’s Promise
Christian School and Center for Healing. As Cam’s grandmother innocently puts
it, “I don’t know as Ruth’s way is right, but I know you need some
straightening out.”
The second half of the novel
covers Cameron’s time at camp, in the beautiful mountains of Montana. Never
mocking the process of “being cured," but always questioning it, Cameron really
comes into her own strength in this part of the book as with perfect control the
author guides the book to its surprising final scene. This is a book to savor slowly
and an author to watch.
What books would you add to this
list?
