Books: Boys club

By Mike Prevatt

In today's culturally divisive climate, you'd expect anything under the banner of queer teen fiction to be the last thing staring you in the face at your local chain bookstore. Surely, getting such literature onto bookstore shelves must be as covert an operation as that of the five closeted students of Brent Hartinger's Geography Club forming a gay-themed extracurricular organization (tactically named after a certain, much-disliked school subject to avoid controversy and ridicule). And yet, in chains like Borders, there sits Geography Club in plain-sight wall displays within the children's books sections, along with teen best sellers like Holes and the Princess Diaries series.

Either the booksellers have a sense of humor, or we can chalk up such promotion to the success of Boy Meets Boy, the inspired debut of Scholastic editor David Levithan, already considered a landmark of gay teen lit due to its farsighted idealism. Like Geography Club, most novels dealing with gay youth subtexts--including the nearly exhausted coming-of-age gay fiction subgenre--reflect the outcast and disillusioned reality of teenage homosexuals. There are the requisite fag/dyke shout-outs, the bathroom bashings, the fire-and-brimstone parents, etc. Boy Meets Boy is an exception--so much so that one wonders if its relative buzz stems less from its artistic merits and more from its utopian atmosphere.

On the one hand, Levithan's assimilated world is one to behold. His normalization of gay youth and its natural acceptance is at once fantastical and refreshing (most of the queer kids are dating by middle school, and, in a tribute to Dykes on Bikes, the local high school's cheerleaders kick off the homecoming rally on Harleys). On the other, you can't help but read some of the details as irreverence. The second chapter alone--chronicling main character Paul's rather fabulous childhood--will reduce you to audible giggle fits, even if you're still rolling your eyes at the football quarterback/drag queen Infinite Darlene--admittedly deserving of her own spin-off novel--and the "Simpsons"-esque reference to elementary school gay/straight alliances. Still, Levithan's magical realism makes sense.

It helps that Paul, also the narrator, has one of the sharpest and sincerest voices among the Holden Caulfield constituency. Levithan gives him a wit, insight and confidence that, more than Paul's story of love found, lost and sought again, drive this book. Like Charley from Stephen Chbosky's 1999 cult fave The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Paul's voice is lucid, reflective, self-aware, culturally informed and ultimately endearing. There are many emotional layers to Boy Meets Boy, mostly because Paul's quest for love, and the way his feelings are returned by the introverted young artist Noah, makes for a genuinely romantic story.

To pick up Geography Club after such a satisfying read is a disappointment to say the least; Hartinger's debut is nearly everything Boy Meets Boy is not. His hero, Russel, also falls in love with another queer youth--jock stud Kevin--but their romance is restrained in so many ways it cannot be celebrated. Part of the problem is that everything in the otherwise cleverly devised story is tritely represented and literally expressed, from the intolerant students to Russel himself, a textbook case of adolescent uncertainty, sadly lacking the imagination to seize the moment ("So, here we are," he says at every awkward silence). Whatever irony slips through has to be explained. The reader is distrusted, and any vitality the book strives for is sapped.

This highlights another difference between the two books. Geography Club has a specific purpose, a lesson of acceptance to teach, which it does, if insipidly. In Boy Meets Boy, nothing is rejected. Its reader is trusted to understand and even encouraged to feel liberated by that. And it's the latter, anything-goes attitude that will ensure this burgeoning literary movement not only thrives, but keeps finding exposure in the unlikeliest of places.