TWO MEN announce their engagement in
The Times, and the Royal Navy advertises in the pink press for gay recruits. It seems an appropriate moment to launch a novel aimed at the teenage market, called
Boy Meets Boy. Its 32-year-old author, David Levithan, came to London last week, ready to defend his book by declaring: “Nobody ever became gay by reading a book.”
Levithan, a publisher in New York, felt it was high time that the romantic attraction between boys was given a better press. “I’ve always known I was gay, but it wasn’t confirmed until I was in kindergarten,” writes the narrator in Boy Meets Boy. “It was right there on my report card. ‘Paul is definitely gay and has a very good sense of self’.” This turns out to be authentically autobiographical. Levithan was indeed just five years old when his teacher pointed out to his parents (lawyer father, newspaper president mother) that David played more with girls than with boys, and that this might be significant.
“I was lucky,” Levithan says, “because my father’s younger brother, my uncle, is gay and came out in the 1960s, so in my family it was not controversial in the least.”
In his story, Paul meets Noah in a bookshop. Both are intelligent, well-adjusted 15-year-old boys with loving, companionable parents. So this teenage novel is — unusually — not about social dysfunction. As in any heterosexual crush, the relief when they find the feeling is mutual is ecstatic. Their conversation moves “as if on tracks”; they like the same books (David Levitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes); and Paul admires the way Noah has arranged his room — music collection suspended from the ceiling, walls decorated with Matchbox cars and bubblegum wrappers.
It’s wittily written and fundamentally innocent. There is no sex and no offensive language. Paul and Noah share nothing more than a kiss. “I set out to write a romantic comedy, and romantic comedies work because they end with kissing and holding hands,” Levithan says. “You don’t want to see Cary Grant having sex with anyone — or Meg Ryan.” Also, he reasoned, having no element of sex or bad language, if librarians banned the novel he would know that the bone of contention was its homosexual theme. “They would have to come right out and say: ‘We do not want a gay romance for teenagers’.”
The question of whether your teenage son should read a novel called Boy Meets Boy seems to me otiose. In my experience of the teenage boy, you have to let him read anything he wants; by far the greater danger is that he won’t read at all. Gay men are usually keen and sensitive readers in youth: it’s one of the things girls like about them. And only a homosexual boy would pick up a book called Boy Meets Boy anyway. But there have been grumblings from Christian Voice campaigners, and the Catholic Church in Scotland, over the marketing of Levithan’s book in schools with postcards saying: “Whoever you fancy, have a fabulous Valentine’s Day.” But surely anything that helps young gay people not to feel isolated is a force for good.
In the US, booksellers no longer place teen books in the children’s section. “A 14-year-old,” says Levithan, “doesn’t want to walk past his kid brother or sister reading Flipper the Big Red Dog.”
Levithan (a Russian-Jewish name) comes from a New Jersey town called Short Hills, which has a world famous shopping mall. “I’m told it’s one of the top ten attractions for Japanese tourists visiting New York,” says Levithan. Now he commutes to his Broadway office from Hoboken, home of the Italian community from which Frank Sinatra sprang.
At co-ed Millburn High, there was very little homophobia: it was an academic, cultured school. “In three years our football team lost every game except one.” He didn’t get involved with any boys then. “My female friends from school tell me the reason I wasn’t attracted to the boys in our year was the same reason they weren’t: the boys weren’t very attractive. Nobody to have a crush on.” He hung out with a mixed gang and danced with girls. To dance with a boy would have been scandalous.
Today, Millburn High includes among its school clubs a Gay-Straight Alliance. “It’s about acceptance and tolerance. It’s for everyone — gay and lesbian and bisexual and straight — to talk about issues, about coming out, and to provide a safe space. I think it’s the cooler kids, the cutting-edge trendsetters, who join such a club. There was some resistance to forming it but the administration backed the kids.” There are 2,800 such clubs across America. “I’m told it hasn’t yet happened in Britain because of Section 28, and a general skittishness.” When he recently went back to Millburn High, a girl asked him what it was like to be there in the 1990s. “And I had to admit I was there in the 1980s, which made me palaeolithic to them.”
It wasn’t until he went to Brown, the Ivy League college, that Levithan found like-minded boys. But there is no Noah in Levithan’s life. “I’ve made up this fantasy boy it would be hard for a real boy to match. That streak of romantic idealism I share with Paul.”
Levithan has been an editor at Scholastic Books, the US children’s imprint, for 10 years, launching several series of books, including sub-teenage romances for girls, and action adventure books for boys.
“In the history of teen literature, gay characters were at first ignored. In the 1970s, at the time Judy Blume was tackling real topics for teenagers, gays tended to end up dead: a mortality rate of about one in three. In 1992 there was Annie On My Mind, about girls falling in love, again with a sad ending, but at least it showed the attraction was valid. In the 1990s, gays were still problematic outsiders; the best they got was to find other unhappy outsiders. But there was Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat, set in LA, a contemporary fairytale about a girl growing up in Beverly Hills among crazy bohemians, with two gay fathers, one a punk rocker, and that inspired a lot of people, including me.”
As an editor, he longed to find a book in which being gay would be no big deal, just part of the mainstream of life in an accepting world. So he found himself writing “this happy book” in which the gays and straights in school are all friends together. “It still amazes me that it’s regarded as so radical a departure.”
When Levithan, in his publishing hat, asked teenage focus groups what they wanted from a book, the word that kept cropping up was “real”. “They didn’t mean non-fiction; they just wanted to relate to it, connect with it. Even Harry Potter was ‘real’to them, because emotionally they understood.” Readers find Levithan’s characters convincing. Paul organises a high-school dance and says: “I always secretly believe that putting together a party is more fun than actually attending.” And when a boy called Chuck declines a smoothie with the words: “I don’t like fruit. No offence,” Paul writes: “Only his ‘no offence’ offends me.” “Chuck is finished as soon as he says that,” Levithan says. “Poor Chuck, he’s so awful.”
But Boy Meets Boy has its fairytale or at least idealised element. “Is it realistic? Not in the least bit. It is fantastical. It shows the world the way it should be, not the way it currently is. But I’ve had hundreds of e-mails about its relatability. E-mail is one of the beautiful technological advances for authors: kids who would never have written you a letter can rush to the keyboard the moment they put down a book. And my favourite e-mail came from a 70-year-old reader who said, ‘Things sure have changed since the 1940s’.”
Boy Meets Boy started as a Valentine story written for Levithan’s friends: he started 18 years ago during a science lesson, writes a new story every year, and now sends out 70 copies.
His next book contains a story called My Girlfriend is in Love with Holden Caulfield. Catcher in the Rye remains the perennial No1 global favourite teen read (“although when Salinger wrote there was no teen fiction except things such as Sue Barton: Nurse”) because Salinger caught the voice of the teenager, confiding in the reader, against the adult world. In Boy Meets Boy, the adult world hardly impinges. “Because when you’re at school, what really matters is the other kids, who’s seeing who in the hallways, and the notes you pass each other in class.”
- Boy Meets Boy is published by HarperCollins, priced £10.99
