Gaywatch: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

There are a lot of teens — both straight and gay — who are too afraid to pick up an overt gay-themed book, but that doesn’t mean they’re not finding LGBTQ characters and content in the books they are reading. Gaywatch will be a regular feature on this blog to highlight how gay issues are being presented in books that you’d never find with the subject heading “Homosexuality — Fiction.”

Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Art by Ellen Forney. Little, Brown, 2007.

Alexie’s first novel for teens is the best YA book I’ve read in a long time, and is my favorite book of the year (so far). It’s an autobiographical story about a boy growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation who decides to attend high school in a nearby white town. He’s a smart, funny, artistic kid who believes that the only way he’ll get anywhere in life is to leave the reservation to get a good education. He’s definitely straight, but he makes some interesting observations about homophobia.

There’s a particularly noteworthy passage in which Junior talks about his grandmother as “the most amazing person in the world.”

Do you want to know the very best thing about my grandmother?

She was tolerant.

And I know that’s a hilarious thing to say about your grandmother.

I mean, when people compliment their grandmothers, especially their Indian grandmothers, they usually say things like, “My grandmother is so wise” and “My grandmother is kind” and “My grandmother has seen everything.”

And, yeah, my grandmother was smart and kind and had traveled to about 100 different Indian reservations, but that had nothing to do with her greatness.

My grandmother’s greatest gift was tolerance.

Now in the old days, Indians used to be forgiving of any kind of eccentricities. In fact, weird people were often celebrated.

Epileptics were often shamans because people just assumed that God gave seizure-visions to the lucky ones.

Gay people were seen as magical, too. I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers.

Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives!

My grandmother had no use for all the gay-bashing and homophobia in the world, especially among other Indians.

“Jeez,” she said. “Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All I want to know is who’s going to pick up all the dirty socks?”

Of course, ever since white people showed up and brought along their Christianity and their fears of eccentricity, Indians have gradually lost all of their tolerance.

Indians can be just as judgmental and hateful as any white person.

But not my grandmother.

She still hung onto that old-time Indian spirit, you know?

Later on in the novel, Rowdy and Junior have an exchange where they toss around the word “faggot.” Junior tells the reader “Now that might just sound like a series of homophobic insults, but I think it was also a little bit friendly, and it was the first time that Rowdy and I had talked since I left the rez. I was a happy faggot!”

Perhaps most poignant of all is the line drawing Junior tapes in his diary to accompany a passage in which he recounts the happiest day of his life, spent with Rowdy swimming at Turtle Lake. The drawing is captioned “Boys can hold hands until they turn nine.”

 

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• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie