The Year So Far…

2008 is shaping up to be an excellent year for LGBTQ lit for kids and teens. The books just keep pouring in. I’m half-way through an excellent new book by Brian Malloy called Twelve Long Months (watch this space for the soon-to-be posted review).

Another first novel just came across my desk this morning and I’m eager to read it, too. It’s a lesbian novel with an all-Latino cast called Down to the Bone by Mayra Lazara Dole. I’ve just added Mayra’s blog to my blogroll so stop by and welcome her to the neighborhood. And here’s hoping the book is as witty and irreverent as her blog entries.

I still have some 2007 books to review. I haven’t forgotten them and I’ll to get back to them as soon as the stream of 2008 books slows down a bit.

Review: Debbie Harry Sings in French

Brothers, Meagan. Debbie Harry Sings in French. Henry Holt, 2008.

Johnny’s path to self-destruction is diverted when his mother sends him to live with his uncle in South Carolina. At 16, he’s already been through rehab for alcoholism, and his stoner friends seem poised to pull him right back into his old habits. But Johnny’s move gives him the opportunity to re-invent himself, and to explore his secret fascination with Debbie Harry, the lead singer of the punk rock/new wave band Blondie that was popular nearly 30 years earlier.

Although he is frequently called “faggot” at school due to his small stature and the fact that he wears eye liner, Johnny is pretty sure he isn’t gay. But he’s not quite sure what it means that he wants to be Debbie Harry — to dress like her and have hair like hers. He wants to be both tough and beautiful. He finally confesses his secret desires to his girlfriend, Maria, when the two are out shopping together for vintage clothing. Maria is completely into Johnny’s interest in cross-dressing, and she remakes a silky dress Johnny buys so that it will fit him. She also teaches him to walk in stilettos.

Maria talks Johnny into driving to Atlanta to compete in a drag queen competition. Midst the Chers, Janet Jacksons and Tina Turners, Johnny is the only Debbie Harry. He is the obvious crowd-pleaser when he lip-syncs to “Heart of Glass,” and he catches the eye of the butch club owner who makes a blatant pass at Johnny, something that confuses him even more. And to further complicate his life, everyone else thinks Johnny is gay. Even Maria is beginning to question who he is when she sees him dancing with the club owner.

Meagan Brothers’ first novel is original but perhaps overly ambitious. It suffers from a few too many social problems that threaten to obscure Johnny’s identity search. I’d have preferred fewer problems and more dresses, shoes, and public drag.

At its core, however, it’s an unusual portrait of a teenage cross-dresser grappling with his sexuality. Johnny is a likable character who is refreshingly non-homophobic and open to exploration. What does it mean that he likes to wear dresses? Is he gay, straight, or somewhere in-between? What’s the difference between being transgender and being a transvestite? All are questions that have not been frequently explored in literature for teens, and this is a welcome foray into uncharted territory.

A Picture Book Mystery?

While prowling around for forthcoming LGBTQ books, I came across a picture book by Kathleen Abel called A Smile So Big, illustrated by Jane Dyer, to be published by Harcourt in 2008. The summary sounds promising: A young girl helps plan her mother’s commitment ceremony to her female partner.

Now the plot thickens…

When I went to Amazon to verify the publication date, I found a book with the same title, author, publisher, and plot summary, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman, with a publication year of 2005. But the book obviously never came out; Trina died, tragically, in November 2004.

So it looks like we came this close |–| to having a lesbian picture book illustrated by the great Trina Schart Hyman.

Levithan in PW

The February 18 issue of Publisher’s Weekly has a profile of our own David Levithan, with the odd title “The Happy Editor-Writer.” (Happy, as in gay?)

He talks, among other things, about the upcoming movie version of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, in which he and Rachel Cohn have a Hitchcockesque cameo role. I can’t wait!

Gay Literature for Young Children

The latest issue of Bookbird has an excellent article by Kay Chick entitled “Fostering an Appreciation for All Kinds of Families: Picture Books with Gay and Lesbian Themes.” The article provides an overview of most picture books published in the United States since Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Roommate.

The author makes the interesting observation that there are no siblings in any of the gay and lesbian picture books. She’s right — even Tango was an only child.

Most of the books she cites are U.S. publications, which is rather odd in a journal of international literature. I had hoped to find out about some great picture books published outside the United States. Perhaps we would even find a sibling or two with an expanded world view.

Gaywatch: After Tupac & D Foster

Woodson, Jacqueline. After Tupac & D Foster. Putnam, 2008.

Although Jacqueline Woodson is an out lesbian writer, she hasn’t written many novels for children or teens with gay or lesbian protagonists. When she does include a gay character in one of her books, it’s usually as part of the ordinary fabric of everyday life. That’s the sort of character we see in her latest novel.

Neeka and her best friend (the unnamed narrator of the story) have known each other since they’ve been babies. They’ve grown up across the street from each other in Queens, and now that they are both twelve, they’re eager to spread their wings a bit and see some of the world beyond their block. That proves to be difficult because their mothers keep such tight reins on them.

So the world must come to them, and it does so in two ways: through the music of Tupac Shakur, and through D Foster, a girl who literally wanders into their world and becomes their friend. D is a foster child from outside their neighborhood who has been allowed to roam. To her, Neeka and her friend have a perfect life: a nice house, friendly neighborhood, parents who care. And to the other girls, D has the sort of freedom they’d like to have. All three girls love Tupac and identify with his music on different levels.

The one area where the girls are critical of Tupac is with his occasional homophobic lyrics. Deeka’s oldest brother, Tash, is gay.

Tash was a true-blue sissy and wasn’t afraid to let the world know it. Look at me, he always used to say. I can walk in heels better than any of these real girls out here, so if somebody wants to holler about it, I ain’t gonna deny. Even though he didn’t really wear heels, everything about him said Queen–from his whispery way of talking to his swishy walk to his beautifully shaped eyebrows.

The entire family is very protective of Tash, ready to take on anyone who talks trash about him. Tash is doing time in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. One of the most moving scenes in the book is when the whole family takes the three-hour bus ride to visit him in prison. Delicate, caring and witty, Tash strikes us as a beautiful bird in a cage. When his mother warns him not to “act sissyish” around his younger brothers, he tells her: “Mama. I’m in jail. Give me a little bit of joy. I ain’t hurting nobody. I ain’t never tried to hurt nobody who wasn’t hurting me first. I know who I am and you know who I am and every one of these kids knows who I am, Ain’t that good enough?”

Equally moving is the scene several month later when Tash returns from prison.

I saw Tash walking up the street. When he got to the men’s table, he stopped and said hi to a few of them. I could see one of them get up and give him a hug. Two of the other men made faces at each other. As he walked away, I heard one of them say Glad you home, Tash. The two men who had made the face leaned into each other, said something, and then laughed. And something about their laughter, the hollow way it echoed down the block, the way Tash tried to walk a little straighter and taller away from it, made me take some small breaths and press my fingernails into my hands to keep from feeling the sadness that filled me up.

While there is much more going on this novel than the relationship between Tash and his family and friends, the poignant portrayal of this queenly older brother is significant in the context of children’s literature. Characters such as Tash are most frequently stereotyped and ridiculed in popular media, and are all together absent in children’s books. It’s refreshing to see such a well-developed secondary gay character.

Tupac’s views of the world are frequently quoted and dissected by the young African-American girls in the story who are struggling to figure out their own places in a world that’s hostile to them and to those they love. Woodson directly confronts rap’s notorious homophobia by putting some words of wisdom into her own characters’ mouths: “Sometimes when the rappers started going on and on about how much they hated homos, me and Neeka would turn the TV off. We didn’t really talk about why — just both of us knew that crap was hard on the ear when the homos they were hating on was your own family.”

Review: Black Rabbit Summer

Brooks, Kevin. Black Rabbit Summer. Chicken House/Scholastic, 2008.

Kevin Brooks is without a doubt one of the most interesting new YA authors to come out of the U.K. in the past several years. So when I saw that his new book included Homosexuality–Fiction in the CIP on the title page verso, I moved it right to the top of my “To Read” pile.

Like his earlier books, this one reflects his interest in detective novels and deals with the fall-out from actions based on poor judgment on the part of teens who lack experience and perspective. Sixteen-year-old Pete, the narrator, and his childhood friends Eric, Nicole, Pauly, and Raymond have grown up and grown apart since they built secret hide-outs together when they were in primary school. Twins Eric and Nicole are about to move to France with their family and, before they leave, Nicole wants to get the original group of friends to gather in the hide-out and then attend a local carnival together, just for old times sake.

The fact that they really have nothing in common any longer becomes painfully obvious when they gather in the hide-out to drink and smoke pot before the carnival. Their interactions are awkward, their class differences more sharply defined. Eric came out as gay early in adolescence but that hasn’t been a problem for him or for his classmates. It’s just a fact of life. Pete finds himself feeling very protective of Raymond, a smart kid lacking in social skills, who has become the butt of adolescent jokes, even among the former friends.

At the carnival, they all go their separate ways. Except for Raymond, each one is drunk and high. And each one later becomes implicated in the disappearance of a local teen celebrity who never returned from the carnival. Since Raymond has disappeared, too, he becomes the chief suspect. Pete is certain that Raymond is innocent and is angry that the police are putting all their resources into looking for the celebrity and are unconcerned about his missing friend, that he begins to retrace everyone’s steps to find out what happened.

So where does the gay theme come in? I wondered the same thing myself as I was reading. Eric appears to be a relatively minor secondary character who certainly doesn’t merit his own subject heading. I began to suspect that Pete might be gay after he rebuffed Nicole’s drunken advances in the hide-out, especially as he becomes so obsessed with Raymond’s well-being. Or could it be Pauly, who is extraordinarily jealous of Eric’s new friendship with Wes, the thuggish leader of a gang of tough kids that Pauly so wants to be a part of.

[Spoiler alert: Do not read any further if you plan to read this book yourself]

And then it happens. The gay theme emerges as soon as Pete began to unravel the mystery. It involves blackmail and a secret love affair between Eric and Wes. Cue ominous music with homophobic undertones. Suddenly I felt like I was reading pulp fiction from the 1950s. Their illicit love led them to a life of crime!

But wait a sec… Eric is out and proud and everyone is okay with that. So what’s going on? As it turns out, it’s Wes who’s been keeping his sexuality a secret, afraid it will damage his tough-guy image. And Eric, young and in love, has been foolish enough to sneak around for his sake, making them both vulnerable to blackmail and to getting in over their heads in a criminal act. So it’s not being gay that’s the problem here — it’s being in the closet. That’s an interesting message for teen readers.

There’s another small twist here with the jacket art. The ARC I read shows a photograph of four kids whom I took to be Pete’s old friends. But the finished jacket shows just two of the boys in the foreground, and the lone girl, slightly out of focus, in the background. Is it just me or does the second jacket seem to play up the book’s queer subtext and subplot?

Interview with Nel Ward

School Library Journal’s latest online edition includes a great interview with Nel Ward, chair of the Rainbow List committee. She discusses some of the changes we’ve seen over the past two decades or so in LGBTQ literature for children and teens, as well as her observations about the books on the very first Rainbow List. And don’t miss the sly product placement in the accompanying photo of Nel.

Review: Uncle Bobby’s Wedding

Brannen, Sarah S. Uncle Bobby’s Wedding. Putnam, 2008.

There’s been a buzz about this new picture book for several months, which must be an indication of just how hungry we are for queer books for younger kids. And this one is clearly aimed at the youngest audience yet. The cast is sweet, furry, and non-threatening, and the text is easy enough that it could be read aloud to any two year old with a reasonably good attention span.

As a picture-book species, guinea pigs might just be more open-minded than mice, rabbits, bears, and — most certainly — humans. No one bats a beady eye at the prospect of Chloe’s Uncle Bobby marrying his boyfriend, Jamie. Instead, songs are sung, dances are danced, and tears of joy are shed at their garden wedding, attended by a small group of family and close friends. The wedding guests are as conventional-looking as guinea pigs dressed in clothes can be. The newlyweds are the only same-sex couple we see at the wedding, unless you count the cake-topper on their wedding cake. There may be just a hint of counter culture coming from the three rabbit band members who entertain at the reception after the wedding, all dressed in brightly colored Hawaiian shirts with their ears slightly askew, but that’s it.

Chloe injects the only bit of conflict into the story by saying to her mother: “I don’t understand! How can Uncle Bobby get married?” Her mother replies, simply: “Bobby and Jamie love each other. When grown-up people love each other that much, they want to be married.” It turns out that Chloe is merely concerned about losing Uncle Bobby’s attention and affection, a reasonable worry for someone her age, and one that’s soon put to rest by Uncle Bobby and Jamie taking her to the ballet, the soda shop, on a sail boat ride, and spending a quiet evening at home together, playing board games and roasting marshmallows. Uncle Bobby assures her that now she’ll have two special uncles, and he invites her to serve as the flower girl at their wedding.

I can’t imagine a more innocuous picture book about family diversity and yet this one is likely to raise the ire of would-be censors, just as And Tango Makes Three, Heather Has Two Mommies, and Daddy’s Roommate have in the past — even more so, perhaps, because of the story’s over-all sweetness and lack of conflict. Bobby and Jamie’s love for each other and their wedding is presented as the most ordinary thing in the world. Perhaps we have something to learn from guinea pigs.

Jack and Jill, Sittin’ in a Tree….

I’ve just returned from a trip to Knoxville, Tennessee, where no one I met was anything like their knuckle-headed legislator who wants to ban all references to homosexuality in the public schools. He strikes me as a garden-variety narrow-minded public official who could live in just about any part of our country. (And, fellas, he’s 39 and single — just sayin’)

What stuck out to me from this story was his odd reference to a popular nursery rhyme: “‘Jack and Jill went up the hill’ - some organizations say you can’t teach that because it pushes a heterosexual agenda.”

Huh?

First of all, whoever said Jack and Jill were heterosexual? I had always assumed they were a brother and sister doing the family chores together. Didn’t they go home in a subsequent verse to have their mother fix Jack’s crown with vinegar and brown paper?

Second, if you have “Jack and Jill” as part of your K-8 curriculum, you’ve got bigger problems than an occasional reference to homosexuality in the classroom. And if you’re a state representative who’s so out of touch with public education in your district that “Jack and Jill” is the only heterosexual literary reference you can come up with to make your argument, then maybe it’s time to consider a career change.

Update: Cooler heads prevailed in Nashville and this bill died in committee on February 19.