Pulled in Opposite Directions: David Levithan's TWO BOYS KISSING

Have you ever read a book and found yourself feeling both incredibly moved and incredibly unsettled by it? For me, reading almost anything by Rudyard Kipling evokes this powerful mixed response. I'm in awe of Kipling's facility with language, the joy of it as his words dance and fly from the page to my eyes. But I'm equally appalled by the "white man's burden" and "the female of the species is more deadly than the male" ideologies that undergird much of his writing. Reading Kipling is a double-edged sword, on one edge the pleasurable sting of a language jubilee, on the other the painful hack of dehumanizing ideologies that undercut values I hold close to my heart.

I'm having a similarly ambivalent response to David Levithan's latest YA novel, Two Boys Kissing, but for reasons less clear-cut than the language/ideology split I see in Kipling. I hope you'll excuse me as I use this blog post to try and tease out the whys and wherefores of my ambivalence to this emotional, fascinating novel.

At first, Two Boys Kissing seems something other than a novel—a eulogy? A celebration? A defiant shout of affirmation in the face of a world that would deny the right of gay and transgendered boys to exist? The narrator is a most unconventional "we," a we readers soon are told is the voice of "the ghosts of the remaining older generation" (3), the gay men who died of AIDS. "We" alternates between offering advice to plural second person "you," the boys attracted to other boys growing up in the age of the Internet, and relating brief snippets from two days during the lives of eight adolescent boys in the present.

Matty Daley and Bobby Canciello, the world-record-
breaking college students who inspired Levithan's novel

Providing the framework for the novel is the quest being undertaken by Harry and Craig, former lovers but still friends who respond to the gay-bashing of Tariq, a fellow student, by deciding to publicly attempt to break the world record for the world's longest kiss. Harry's parents are completely supportive of their son and his sexual identity; Craig's family is unaware of his. Similarly, another couple, Neil and Peter, who have been dating for more than a year, interact with one supportive family and one in which the boy's identity is an "open secret," something everyone knows but everyone silently agrees not to mention. In contrast, Ryan and Avery are just beginning a relationship, which may be derailed by Ryan's angry response at being verbally gay-bashed in front of Avery. Finally, we have Cooper, filled with disgust both for his own sexual desires and for the those of the men he can't seem to stop interacting with on Internet chat boards, deeply disturbed and deeply depressed by how distanced he feels from everyone around him, as well as from his own self.

Like Levithan's Boy Meets Boy, Two Boys Kissing is in many ways a deeply affirmative book. The Greek Chorus "we" narrator sings the body electric, offering hymns of praise to the wonder that is gay boy life in the early 21st century:

Things are not magical because they've been conjured for us by some outside force. They are magical because we create them, and then deem them so. Ryan and Avery will say the first moment the spoke, the first moment they danced, was magical. But they were the ones—no one else, nothing else—who gave it the magic. We know. We were there. Ryan opened himself to it. Avery opened himself to it. And the act of opening was all they needed. That is the magic. (8)

Boys looking for positive role models for how to navigate gay or transgendered identity will find a welcome variety of possibilities in Levithan's collage. And they will find a plethora of advice and wisdom from the chorus, guidance backed by the authority both of past experience and current all-seeing observation. For example, on the lighter end, "We often believe the truest measure of a relationship is the ability to lay ourselves bare. But there's something to be said for parading your plumage as well, finding truth as much as in the silly as in the severe" (40); on the darker,

    You think there is no point.

     You think you will never find a place.

     You think your pain is the only emotion you will ever feel. You think nothing else will ever come close to being as strong as that pain.

     You are certain of this.

     In this minute—in this, the most important minute of your life—you are certain that you must die.

     You see no other option.

     You need to wake up, we cry.

     Listen to us. (188)

At the same time, the book clearly acknowledges the difficulties that still remain for gay youth, despite the many changes that have occurred since the AIDS generation fought its battles: "We know that some of you are still scared. We know that some of you are still silent. Just because its better now doesn't mean that it's always good" (6). Before the book opens, Tariq is senselessly beaten; Ryan's classmate Skylar torments Ryan in small ways almost daily to make himself feel bigger, as tossing the taunt "faggot" is still the easiest, and most popular way for straight boys to assert their masculinity. Cooper's father reacts with anger and disgust when he discovers his son's Internet life; Craig's father refuses to allow his family to offer support for his son's record-breaking quest after he discover's Craig's sexual orientation. Sexual identity is only intermittently a problem for some contemporary gay youth, but for others, as it was for many of the AIDS generation, it continues to be a rock-strewn road to travel.

Levithan's choice of the first person plural narrator clearly gives the book much of its power. To have an entire group of men, men lost through to the plague of AIDS but able through Levithan's words to return and both observe and comment on the lives of boys in the present, serving as one's narrator gives said narrator a degree of authority uncommon in the YA genre. Yet I think it is just that authority that is giving me pause, causing me to draw back a bit from the strong emotional reaction Levithan's novel evokes in me, urging me to for just a minute to think a bit more about what's at stake in evoking such narrative authority. The benefits seem all too clear; what, though, are the drawbacks to such a narrative choice?

The most obvious is the line the narrative walks between welcome advice and overbearing preachiness. For the most part, the litany of narrative "can'ts" and "shoulds" feels supportive, affirming: "You should never feel doomed" (5); "you can't always expect your partner's love alone to fill you" (181). But at times, the "we" can feel overly admonishing, even dictatorial: "We know that gratitude is the last thing on your mind. But you should be grateful. You've made it to another day" (22). Something about this authority makes me want to resist, to wriggle free of such heavy-handed manipulation, despite the guilt I feel at rejecting the authority of the tragically deceased speaking voice Levithan adopts.

On the one hand, giving voice to one's dead ancestors, whether figurative or literal, especially ones who have died so tragically, is a deeply respectful act of veneration. But at the same time, it's a choice with disturbingly coercive implications for a reader. How do I avoid being plagued by guilt if I want to disagree with the authoritative assertions of men who died in large part due to the homophobia of the society of which I am a part?

I'm also disturbed by the homogenizing effect of the "we" voice. The narrator tries to acknowledge that within his "we" lies a multiplicity of voices, of opinions, of values: "We are rarely unanimous about anything," he notes early on (8). But that narrative "we" works in opposition to such an assertion, because "we" speaks far more often in one voice here, expressing one point of view, one way of looking at the world, than "we" speaks of differences. Can "we" have the narrative cake and eat it, too? Or even if "we" are aware, as Levithan surely is, that we is multiple, does the very usage of the first person plural function to urge readers to forget such multiplicity?

Hints of homonormativity in the novel also give me pause. The one boy out of the seven who is portrayed as deeply unhappy is Cooper, who, along with Tariq, are the only two boys not currently in, formerly in, or about to be in, a monogamous romantic relationship. We are given little idea of Tariq's former or present love life, but we are shown Cooper exploring his sexuality in online chat rooms. The narrator frame's Cooper's search not as positive exploration, but as a desperate attempt to find something genuine amidst a sea of artificiality. But when Cooper actually hooks up with a rather nice young man he meets online, his own self-loathing prevents him from finding the genuine, from taking that leap into the vulnerability of "opening" oneself Levithan praises Avery and Ryan for making. Casual hook-up sex, and the Internet culture that enables it, is thus connected to despair, to self-loathing: "All of these men and boys trying out this new form of gratification. All of these men and boys still lonely when the rush is over, and the devices are off, and they are alone with themselves again" (65). In contrast, monogamous pairing is presented in a far more positive light. Now, I am far from an expert on the AIDS generation, but wasn't it true that for many of those men, casual sex was part of the appeal, rather than a negative aspect, of their sexual identities? What's at stake in erasing that aspect of gay culture?

Levithan's book is chock-full of lines I want to paste upon the wall so I won't forget them. One of my favorites:

     People like to say being gay isn't like skin color, isn't anything physical. They tell us we always have the option of hiding.

     But if that's true, why do they always find us? (36)

But even in the midst of my admiration, I can't help but find myself a resistant reader at other points in the novel. Is it because as a straight-identified woman I am not part of the "you" the book addresses? Is it because of my own homophobia, or my fear of confronting head-on the horrors of the men who died from AIDS? Or is it because the use of the narrative "we" has both amazingly positive and disturbingly negative aspects? Or all of the above?

I'd love to hear from other readers of Levithan's book, to see if you had similar or different responses to this innovative, powerful, and deeply thought-provoking book.

Are there other romance novels you've been moved by, have admired, but have felt ambivalent about, as well? Why?

Photo credits:

Daley and Canciello: Metro Weekly

The Aids Generation: The Human Rights Campaign

Queers Questioning Gay Marriage: To the Exclusion of All Others web site

David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

Knopf, 2013

The power and limits of labels: Bill Konigsberg's OPENLY STRAIGHT

When I was in the tenth grade, my family moved from a small suburban Connecticut town to an even smaller city in Vermont. Such a move gave me the opportunity many teens long for—a chance to reinvent myself, unburdened by friends and classmates' prior assumptions about who I was or what I could be or do. In Connecticut, I'd always been labeled one of the "smart" kids; in our progressive, but tracked-by-ability school system, everyone knew which students had scored high on standardized tests, and which ones didn't (classes were numbered; those ending in 9 or 7 were for the bright kids, those ending in 1 or 3 for the not so academically-attuned). I took Orchestra, which meant I couldn't take Acting (the two classes were scheduled opposite each other). Our school was also too large for the uncoordinated and unskilled such as myself to participate in competitive sports. But when I moved to Vermont, I got the chance to strut my stuff on stage, to play Varsity basketball (I scored 2 points all season, but had a lot of fun in spite of my lack of production), and to experiment with other identities that my previous reputation as a brainiac had made it far more difficult to try on while I lived in Connecticut.

In the early 1980's, a do-over of my sexuality was not an experiment I considered. But it's precisely the possibility of such a do-over that draws Seamus Raphael Goldberg, the first-person narrator of the truly funny YA novel Openly Straight, to transfer for his junior year, from a liberal co-ed public Boulder high school to a small private all-boys Massachusetts prep school. Back in Colorado, Rafe leaves behind his ultra-liberal parents, his gal pal Claire Olivia, and, best of all, he thinks, his identity as openly gay. Out since eighth grade, Rafe is tired of being seen only as "gay," frustrated that other aspects of who he is get swallowed up by a label that only captures one part of his identity. He can't partake of the easy male camaraderie other boys take for granted; he's frustrated by the way his mom takes on queerness as her own personal cause (joining and becoming president of the local PFLAG chapter, bringing home stacks of books about homosexuality for him to read); he's angry that he always stands out, always has "different" metaphorically pasted across his back, a "kick-me" sign he's supposed to be proud of but instead just finds a deadening burden.

The above list may make Rafe sound like an ungrateful whiner, but Konigsburg's gifts as a writer create a narrator who is anything but. Between Rafe's narration of his present-day life at Natick and his creative writing assignments detailing "A History of Rafe," short pieces narrating events from his Boulder days that made him long for a less openly-gay public identity, Rafe comes alive as funny and thoughtful, confused and willfully ignorant, self-reflective and self-absorbed by turns, the perfect guide to this exploration about what really constitutes a person's sense of self.

After instituting his own "don't ask, don't tell" policy at Natick, Rafe gets to experience the thrill of being "mainstream," "acceptable," not automatically lumped in with the geeks and dorks and other clearly "different" kids as he was back in Colorado. The day he arrives, Rafe takes part in a pick-up football game and gets to experience the euphoria of group sports competition; later, he joins the soccer team and becomes part of the jock crowd; he even gets to sit with the "top of the food chain" at lunch, and enjoys cracking them up with his jokes. Not everything is about his sexuality, Rafe asserts:

...knowing a person is about more than knowing whom they fantasize about. That's the small stuff, actually. The big stuff is lying next to a guy on the floor and locking eyes and having deep conversations about philosophy. The big stuff is letting a friend know your hopes and your fears and not having to make a joke about it. That's what matters. (180-81)

Yet as the term progresses, Rafe finds himself drawn as much, if not more, toward the awkward and disaffected at Natick as toward the typical jock boys in the sporty crowd: his "ironic survivalist" roommate, Albie; Albie's openly gay best friend, Toby; and his fellow jock, quiet, kind, but guarded Ben. As Rafe's feelings for Ben grow beyond casual friendship, and Ben's for Rafe seem to, as well, Rafe becomes increasingly reluctant to face the truth that his sexuality may just be one of the "big things" about which a real friend has a right to know.

Teachers of my generation, those with a commitment to social justice, can often find the reluctance of younger students to acknowledge the racism, sexism, and heterosexism that still surrounds us frustrating, even bewildering. Reading Openly Straight helped me to understand a bit better where this reluctance stems from, and how my own attempts to counter it might just be compounding the problem. For example, after Rafe tells his parents about his sexuality:

   Suddenly there were six books I had to read about what it's like to be gay. I said to her, "Mom, can't I just be gay, and not read about it?" But she explained—and Dad backed her up—that we need to know history. Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it, blah blah blah.

     You know how you get the urge to clean your room, and it's no big deal? But when your mom tells you that you have to clean your room, you don't want to? That's me, anyway. So maybe if I had found all this stuff on my own, I would have really enjoyed learning about it. But instead, I got a pile of books from Mom, and now it was like I had gay homework from my mother. I was like, Thanks for making this exciting new thing a chore, Mom. Awesome.

I think I'll still be offering the books (including Openly Straight), Rafe's frustrations notwithstanding. But I will have a little more patience when my offer is met with a groan or a grimace, keeping in mind Rafe and the time and space he needed to come to terms with the more difficult, even painful, aspects of embracing and accepting a "different" identity. And perhaps, after reading Rafe's story, teen readers will cut us older ones a bit of slack when we jump on the "let's celebrate difference" bandwagon, calling embarrassing attention to aspects of their identities that they're still learning to wear with pride.


Photo credits:
Gay Candy poster: Zazzle.com
Rainbow books: Salon.com

Bill Konigsberg

Openly Straight

Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic, 2013

Ways of Being Gay... Ann Herendeen's PHYLLIDA AND THE BROTHERHOOD OF PHILANDER

For today's post, I had planned to write about the character arc of the hero in Ann Herendeen's Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander. But when I checked out the most recent edition of Journal of Popular Romance Studies, I discovered that Herendeen had already beat me to it by writing an article that analyzes her own book. So instead, I'm going to write instead about another aspect of the book that I admire for feminist reasons: Phyllida's depiction of the multiplicity of ways that one can enact homosexuality.

Herendeen's lighthearted Regency tells the story of Andrew Carrington, heir to an earldom, who considers himself a "sodomite" but decides to marry in order to father an heir. To his surprise, after his marriage of convenience to Gothic novel writer Phyllida Lewis he discovers that bedding his wife has more than its share of charms. But this isn't a "bad man gone straight" story; Andrew doesn't give up his sexual interest in men when he realizes his growing attraction to, and love for, his wife. In fact, Andrew becomes sexually and emotionally involved with another man after his marriage, a man for whom he comes to care as deeply as he does for Phyllida. He has discovered "a new kind of love, in the strangest place" with Phyllida, but he won't give his old love up in exchange for the new  (48).

And Phyllida does not ask him to. She agrees to the marriage knowing that Andrew, like the man who introduced them, her neighbor and his friend Sir Frederick Verney, prefers the sexual company of men. She also knows Andrew's reasons for marrying,  that sex with him is part of the agreement. But the chance to better her mother and sisters' lives through canny negotiation of the marriage, as well as her own attraction to Andrew ("when he smiled, he looked like the fascinating villains in her books, whom she always ended up falling in love with, try though she might to make them wicked beyond redemption")  makes it worth her while (23). She's more than willing to allow Andrew to explore his own sexual proclivities, and even discovers the added benefit that watching her husband with another man is almost as exciting as being with him herself.

Thus the male/female coupling privileged in most romance—Andrew and Phyllida—is transformed into something far from normative—Phyllida and Andrew/Andrew and Matthew. Their relationship does not only challenge heteronormativity (the belief that the only normal sexual relationship is one between a man and a woman), but homonormativity (the adoption of key components of heteronormative belief, such as binary gender norms and monogamous romantic relationships, by LBGTQ individuals and communities*).

Phyllida and Andrew/Andrew and Matthew are not the only challenge to homonormativity in the novel. The founders of "The Brotherhood of Philander," a club for gentlemen sodomites to which Andrew belongs, are part of another tripartite relationship. In this case, however, it was the wife, Lady Isabella Isham, originally the daughter of a tradesman, who "purchased" her man,  Lord Isham. The third partner in their relationship, Lord Rupert Archbold, is the linchpin in their relationship, as Lady Isham explains to Phyllida: Marc—Isham that is—and I would roll the dice many an evening. Winner to enjoy the favors of our mutual friend, Rupert. Loser to wait his turn, or hers, although I tried very hard not to lose" (362).

Andrew's other friends, all members of the Brotherhood, construct their sexual relationships in still different ways. Sir Frederick Verney has relationships with different partners at different times (when Andrew asks him if he has a "friend," Verney replies "Not the marrying kind.... Not even with men." [21]). The Honorable Sylvester Monkton, a dandy of the highest order, asserts the same: "The day I take on a partner until death does us part, man or woman, is the day you can lock me up in Bedlam" (513). Sir David Pierce and Mr. George Witherspoon begin the novel as a monogamous couple, devoted to each other for years. Their partnership turns into a trio, however, as David becomes attracted to George's sister, the rather masculine Agatha, and she to him. We even get glimpses of traditional heterosexual relationships: Lord Isham's son, though he has great affection for his father, has a wife and children; Charlotte Swain, a friend of Phyllida's, longs after the very male, very beautiful Alex Bellingham.

As Andrew tells Phyllida after the two are reconciled and admit their love in one ending in a book that has several, "But I do not have to be a gentleman in this bed, just as you do not have to be a lady. So long as we treat each other with kindness, that is all that is required" (481). Protesting the unkindness of heteronormativity and its insistence that there is only one correct way to love others, Herendeen's novel is its own gift of kindness, a gift that blesses multiple ways of loving and being loved.




Photo/illustration credits:
Anti-heteronormativity card: someeecards.com
Homonormative card: urbandictionary.com

Ann Herendeen, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander. New York: Harper, 2008.












Next time on RNFF: Rape in the romance novel