Blog

Ethan Poe is an outlier. He doesn’t feel he fits in with any groups at his school, partly because of his Goth appearance (inspired by his distant relative Edgar Allan), partly because he’s gay. The only person that knows the latter though is his friend Jorja, a fellow outlier, and one who is constantly praying that Ethan will stop being gay. As Jorja becomes even more intense about her religion, Ethan’s brother Kyle too seems caught up in a religious fever, and in his case, it is becoming disturbing indeed.

If that’s not complicated enough for a sixteen-year-old whose parents are recently separated, life takes an interesting turn in the person of Max Modine, beautiful and mysterious, and apparently as attracted to Ethan as Ethan is to him.

Ethan, his family, his friends, and Max soon find themselves caught up in a turmoil that is dividing their small town: the debate over whether or not to include Intelligent Design into science classrooms. Although Ethan doesn’t want to become involved, preferring instead to keep his outlier status, he finds that he has to make some choices and take a stand. After all, the religious groups using blind biblical faith to justify their ID are the same groups who would condemn being gay, and as his relationship with Max intensifies, Ethan knows that there’s nothing unnatural about what they are feeling.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love this Robin Reardon book as much as all the rest, but as a character, Ethan gets under my skin. He’s a teenager, I know, so his centre-of-the-world oblivious-to-everyone-else my-feelings-matter-more-than-anyone-else attitude shouldn’t frustrate me like it does. As in life though, that self-centeredness is tempered by the experiences he undergoes, as he grows and begins to realize that other people have their own thoughts, their own feelings, and their own pain.

It’s a rich book, filled with flawed characters that fail and succeed, and it forces you to look at some big issues: the pros and cons of the pack mentality, what it means to have religious freedom, and where lines must be drawn to protect it, the importance of not being so caught up in our own “stuff” that we become blind to what’s going on around us.

All in all, another hit from Robin Reardon!

This review was originally published on homorazzi

Coming out is hard enough. Coming out when you’re family is conservative and Christian is even harder. When Taylor Adams’ parents find out their son is gay, they ship him off for a six-week stay at “Straight to God” in the hopes that he can be saved.

Now Taylor had had no problems with balancing out his sexuality and his faith. His love for God was in no way affected by his love for his boyfriend Will. Still, to please his family, he is willing to endure this separation from the boy of his dreams. At “Straight to God”, Taylor is forced to try to put away all former images of his sinful life, easier said than done. The other kids in the program, whether there for drugs, violence, disobedience, or inappropriate lust, are a mixed bag. There’s some Taylor feels a connection with, some he doesn’t. First impressions aren’t always right though, and that’s only the first lesson Taylor learns at S2G.

As Taylor interacts with his roommate Charles, with the sexy Sean, with the secretive and confusing Nate, as well as the other boys and girls and the facilitators and pastor, he is forced to really look at himself. Not to question his sexuality or his faith, but to better understand the balance between them, and what it means to be both gay and Christian.

This book admirably deals with some timely issues. How do we deal with those who misinterpret Scripture to condemn and to hate? How do we balance pride with humility? How do we stay strong in the face of almost overpowering rejection and condemnation, and how do we help others to do the same? Does the definition of sin change over time?

Through Taylor’s eyes, we see what real sin is: the absence of love.

This review was originally published on homorazzi

This is the story of three people who make a life together. Three friends who become a family. This is the story of Jonathan and Bobby, friends, brothers, lovers, and Clare, the woman who shares their hearts, their bed, and bears their baby.

When Jonathan and Bobby become friends in middle school, it is to the chagrin of Jonathan’s mother, who sees Bobby’s hand in Jonathan’s pulling away from her. Jonathan’s father sees this simply as natural adolescence, and although he is right, he is not as intimate with the boys’ lives as is Alice, the mother. She has spent hours in Jonathan’s room, listenting to albums, smoking pot, dancing. She bonds with Bobby almost against her will, and their home becomes a second home for him, an oasis away from the tragedy and dysfunction of his own.

In the meantime, boys will be boys, and Jonathan, gay, and Bobby, not gay but not straight, have experimented and explored their budding sexuality. Alice catches them with their pants down, and this event, traumatizing for all of them, ends the friendship between mother and son and surrogate son.

After the boys graduate, Jonathan moves from Cleveland to New York for college while Bobby stays. When he loses father and home to a fire, he moves in with Jonathan’s parents. When Jonathan’s dad’s declining health causes them to move to Arizona, Bobby heads to New York moves in with Jonathan and his roommate Clare. There, they all find a sort of love, Jonathan with a man named Erich, and Clare and Bobby with each other. Jonathan’s dad’s death and Clare’s pregnancy leads them to leave New York City behind and move upstate, where they open a small restaurant and raise little Rebecca together the three of them, in their home at the end of the world.

This novel takes on our definitions of friendship and of family, of gay and straight and what it really means to love another person. It is the story of escaping from “our convoluted, neurotic lives” and finding those places, quiet, simple, and perfect, where we can learn life’s little secrets. How some things end, how some endure. How we think we’ll have more time, how we don’t. Things move along at a comfortable pace, tragedy strikes, illness befalls, and things move along at a different pace, one you still must become comfortable with.

The world is filled with cities that are themselves filled with hustle and bustle and chaos, but there are also pockets of peace and affection and truth. Likewise, your bookshelf might be filled with books that are themselves filled with action or humor or romance, but there are also pages of beauty and reality and truth. This is one of those.

This review was originally published by homorazzi

It’s been a while since I came across a book that pulled me in and kept me hooked. Jeffrey Luscombe’s SHIRTS AND SKINS did though.

The book is written as a series of individual stories, seen through the eyes of Josh Moore, a young boy who grows up with his family in the poorer part of Hamilton. The first couple stories, when Josh is just learning how to process the world around him, are filled with past tragedy and scandal, but we only perceive as much of them as the very young Josh does. Already he begins to learn how to mimic the other people in his life.

As times goes on, Josh becomes even more of a human chameleon, observing, adapting, becoming what he needs to be to survive. The world around him is filled with artificial divisions. His family has them, between those who are already saved by Christ and those who aren’t. Sunday school has them, between God’s chosen people and everyone else. School has them, especially in gym class, between shirts and skins. Society has them, between gay and straight.

Although this novel is about Josh’s coming out, it’s about a lot more. It’s about what it means to be a man. Josh looks for someone to model his behavior after, and of course, a young boy looks first to his father. Josh’s father, however, suffers from emotional problems that get worse as time goes on. Josh then starts looking around at school, but the boys looking back at him see something else in Josh, something that Josh can barely sense beneath the surface. This climaxes with a powerful scene in junior high.

There is a strong connection between the fag and his bully, a connection.. and an attraction. What is about bullying that can cause us to either turn inward and find comfort within ourselves or, as Josh did, strive to emulate our tormentors? With an increasingly broken father, Josh takes as male role models the very boys that bullied him. This hyper-masculinity Josh develops doesn’t gain him friends, but only pushes him into a bigger isolation. The walls he has raised are thick, and he is protected behind them, through school, into the workforce, and eventually into marriage.

Some of the scenes of this book deeply resonated with me: the dividing lines between families at an event like a funeral, where the black sheep of the family gather together, bound in unity against the separations forced upon them; that one day the son who has always feared being a disappointment TO his father realizes how he is disappointed IN his father; the magnetic way a closeted gay man is pulled towards other men, how he notices their look, their smell, and the lengths to which he will go to deny those feelings to anyone, including himself; the simple happiness that comes from becoming who one is meant to be.

This review was originallu published on homorazzi

This isn’t a novel. This is a collection of letters, written by some of the greatest queer authors of the day, to their younger selves. As such, I don’t recommend sitting down and reading it from cover to cover. Keep it tucked away in your backpack or purse or briefcase, and pull it out when you need a warm fuzzy or a pep talk or simply a few moments of enjoyment.

Each letter is unique. Some even take the form of comics. They tackle all the issues you’d expect: bullying, coming out, sex, and all the emotions that go with them: shame, fear, anger, and eventually pride and contentment.

Some of the authors include Tales of the City’s Armistead Maupin, Wicked’s Gregory Maguire, A Density of Souls’ Christopher Rice, and Love! Valour! Compassion’s Terrence McNally. I will admit I gravitated more to the male writers, but every voice has its own remarkable story. Plus, the variety of writers opens up windows of time over the last 50 years, so that underneath their letters of support and advice, there’s a story of the evolution of the gay rights movement.

These stories aren’t only for kids who are coming out in high school. There are always lessons we can learn, there are always journeys our mind can take. Visiting our old selves can sometimes help put our current problems in perspective. Everything that was so end-of-the-world at the time, turned out not to be. The world kept turning, we got wiser, we got stronger. It got better.

One of the stories that resonated with me most was, of course, Christopher Rice, maybe because we’re the same age, maybe because we both love writing. Maybe because his warning about “the endless party that is the gay nightlife, that always moving train of music, dancing, and drugs that will promise you everything and deliver nothing” is something I wish I had understood better. More than a year into my sobriety, as I have begun to “build a life that feeds [my] soul instead of devouring it”, there are a few lessons I would go back and tell that old me too.

What’s more, half of the royalties from the sale of this book will go towards supporting the Trevor Project’s mission of reaching LGBT and Questioning youth in crisis. So not only is it a series of good reads, it’s for a good cause. And it delivers nuggets of wisdom and truth that are as important for teens struggling with their sexuality, with bullying, with their parents, with themselves, as they are for all us. A wisdom as simple as treating others how you want to be treated. A truth as simple as the fact that it does get better, slowly maybe, and not without bumps along the way, but constantly and consistently better.

This review was originally published by homorazzi