Homosexuality in Children's Literature

Presentation of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning characters and themes in children's literature.

INTRODUCTION

Within the past two decades, the rise of more open public discussions about sexuality, in particular, homosexuality, has caused the profile of sexual identity to rise as a hot button issue in both literary and societal circles. In the context of children's literature, the issue of homosexuality is even more controversial, inspiring frequent, vitriolic debates between advocacy groups-often split down political lines—alternately calling for either an increase in young adult titles that address homosexuality as a normative part of modern society or a decrease in the availability of such titles to young readers. However, despite the strong emotions that accompany this thematic subgenre, it is not a canon with broad representation within the body of children's literature. According to studies conducted by children's literature scholar Michael Cart, since the publication of Jonathan Donovan's I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip (1969)—considered by many to be the first openly gay-oriented novel for young adults—no more than 150 young adult novels featuring homosexuals in primary roles have been published, with an average of only four or five new titles with gay protagonists being published annually. Advocates for a greater presence of gay-themed juvenile works worry this sparse representation is a disservice not just to those children with direct connections to the gay community—either through exposure to a homosexual family member or through their own sexual preferences—but to all children. Campaigns to remove books that feature homosexuality from libraries and schools, under the auspices of personal offense, religious sensibilities, or concerns about their mature themes, is akin, they argue, to an organized attempt to remove the gay lifestyle from the cultural awareness of all young readers. Virginia L. Wolf has argued that such attempts to censor the availability of children's texts with homosexual themes stems from homophobia, which "still keeps most gay families hidden and accounts for the absence of information about them. It also keeps what information there is out there out of the library, especially the children's room, and makes it difficult to locate through conventional research strategies." Alternately, the opponents of homosexuality in children's literature have generally based their arguments on either personal or religious objections to same-sex relationships or concerns about the ageappropriateness of any discussion of sexuality with children, no matter how subtle or saccharine the presentation.

Within the limited spectrum of gay children's literature, the presentation of the subject material varies greatly with regards to the targeted age group, thematic message, and overall sensibility of the work. However, within the broader framework of the subgenre, the presentation of homosexuality to young readers generally manifests in one of four ways—through depictions of families with homosexual members, such as Michael Willhoite's picture book Daddy's Roommate (1991); through books featuring coming-of-age narratives about gay protagonists like M. E. Kerr's Deliver Us from Evie (1994) and David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy (2003); through works featuring homosexuals as supporting characters like Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat (1989); or through nonfiction titles that include homosexuality as a normal lifestyle, such as Eric Rofes' The Kids' Book of Divorce (1981) and Robie H. Harris' It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health (1994). The first category generally portrays families with gay parents or children living in much the same way as any other family. Although, as many of these books utilize the picture book format, they remain among the most protested, with their detractors criticizing the discussion of sexual identity in works targeted at the youngest of readers. Perhaps the most well-known of these picture books are Willhoite's Daddy's Roommate and Lesléa Newman's Heather Has Two Mommies (1989). As Patrick Finnessy has noted, "these are not books about sex but about families," yet they are still perhaps some of the most controversial of all children's texts. In a survey of the most challenged books of the 1990s, the American Library Association (ALA) ranked Daddy's Roommate second, with Heather Has Two Mommies coming in eleventh, even though both books were published by a relatively small-scale independent press, Alyson Wonderland Books. Despite the anxieties these picture books continue to produce, Cat Yampbell has suggested that both stories "explored and acknowledged the contemporary need for recognizing all types of families, not just the typical mother-father archetype," while writer Elizabeth A. Ford has argued that "it is the fear of what children might learn about their own sexual identities, not about the sexualities of adults around them, that makes these books controversial."

In the segment of young adult texts with gay protagonists, critic Nancy St. Clair divides this subgenre even further. She first acknowledges the "tragic flaw" narrative, in which homosexual encounters are often represented as either wrong—resulting in some sort of karmic backlash—or reflective of an innate inner flaw. Examples of such works include Donovan's I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip, Jane Futcher's Crush (1981), and Isabelle Holland's The Man without a Face (1972). St. Clair next identifies a second grouping of texts with gay protagonists "in which the representation of homosexuality became increasingly complex and moralistic." These stories often capture coming-out stories—in which the characters publicly admit their homosexuality—where "[s]exual identity as something to be explored and come to grips with is a prominent theme." Of this group, St. Clair cites David Rees' In the Tent (1979) and Nancy Garden's Annie on My Mind (1982) as prime examples. Though books with homosexual characters in supporting roles are much more prevalent than texts with gay protagonists, such works are not normally considered part of the homosexual children's literature canon unless the supporting characters play a prominent role in the story, as in Francesca Lia Block's "Weetzie Bat" series—which features several ubiquitous gay characters—and Gary Paulsen's The Car (1994). In these stories, the homosexual supporting characters can be either treated sympathetically, as in Marilyn Levy's Rumors and Whispers (1991), or adversely, such as in Brian Payton's Hail Mary Corner (2001), in which the announcement that the protagonist's best friend is gay triggers very strong negative reactions. Finally, there is a growing market of nonfiction titles that address homosexuality as a completely normal lifestyle, with texts like Joan Drescher's Your Family, My Family (1980) portraying families with same-sex parents as a natural part of society. Still, these nonfiction titles have their detractors as well, a fact evidenced by the presence of Robie H. Harris' It's Perfectly Normal and It's So Amazing! A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families (1999) on the ALA's list of most challenged books for 2005, ranking first and tenth respectively, both in part for their inclusion of homosexuality as topics for discussion.

While several early young adult texts—such as J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and John Knowles's A Separate Peace (1960)—have arguable elements of homoeroticism, many children's literature scholars maintain that the first open discussion of overt homosexuality targeted directly to gay teenagers came in 1969 with John Donovan's I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip. Michael Cart has asserted, "Donovan established a less than salutary model for the homosexual novel that would be faithfully replicated for the next dozen years: homosexuality is presented as both a rite of passage experience with no long-term consequences and as a matter of choice. Worse, though, is the equation Donovan makes between homosexuality and death: his protagonist Davy's beloved dog is killed by a car, an act the boy views as a kind of cosmic punishment for his having kissed and 'fooled around with' another boy." Donovan's story was part of a new wave of young adult books born from the turbulence of the 1960s, which used realism to depict the life of teenagers and featured more explicitly mature themes. Still, the few subsequent books that resulted from the era tended to be both male-oriented and peopled almost exclusively with caucasian characters. Rosa Guy's Ruby (1976) was among the first young adult novels to openly depict a loving lesbian relationship and also utilize minority characters throughout the text, although even here the relationship ends badly and the female protagonist chooses to become heterosexual by story's end. Ruby's painful struggle and eventual dismissal of her homosexuality continued a disappointing trend of depicting gay culture through a grim lens of unhappiness, offering a seeming advocacy for the belief that homosexuality was a choice. Nancy St. Clair worries that such depictions create, unintentionally or not, "the prevailing message that homosexuality is a tragic state for those who are exposed to it," a bias that may have had the potential of adversely affecting gender-confused young readers. In the 1980s, as greater public acceptance of homosexual culture began to emerge, books written specifically for gay readers and for straight children seeking exposure to the culture became more common. For example, another taboo was broken with M. E. Kerr's Night Kites (1986), which was the first young adult story to openly tackle the AIDS epidemic. With the heightened visibility of homosexuality in popular culture throughout the 1990s to the present, a more diverse blend of stories capturing increasingly broad aspects of gay culture have continued to be published, though political, social, and religious pressures have kept the number of such texts relatively small.

However, as the canon of homosexual children's literature continues to slowly grow, some critics have found fault with the thematic direction of the genre as a whole, particularly the tendency of the narratives to become either bleak tragedies, showing homosexuality as a lamentable condition, or almost propagandistic manifestos for the homosexual lifestyle. Michael Cart has also noted that, "the continuing lack of diversity remains one of the most significant deficiencies in GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender, and questioning) fiction." Further, overt threats by censors as well as more subtle forms of discrimination from publishers and booksellers—who may refuse to publish or stock gay titles—continue to limit the potential scope of the genre. Allan A. Cuseo has opined that, "[h]omosexuality, a disconcerting subject for many adults in society, presented a sensitive area for the authors of the adolescent title. The author had to write for the teenager, but the adult controlled what was published and, equally as important, what was reviewed and selected for library and school purposes." Elizabeth A. Ford cites the example of Lesléa Newman, author of Heather Has Two Mommies, suggesting that writers like Newman face a hard choice between sales and content when creating new works of homosexual children's literature: "Authors who choose gay themes and who write for children must also choose whether or not to be commercially viable. Those who want to sell books must learn, as Newman seems to have learned, to maintain a 'safe' distance between child and gay adult characters. More like a wall than a comfort zone, distance problematizes the treatment of gay themes in children's literature and may keep the genre from reflecting the growing cultural acceptance." However, some feel that society is moving towards a greater acceptance of juvenile works that portray all aspects of the homosexual experience. David Levithan, author of Boy Meets Boy, has commented that, "[a]fter many, many years of fear, threat, hesitation, self-loathing, and (in the face of all these) defiance, a crucial time has been entered where courage has the potential to win the day. Not only are writers putting LGBT voices into words, but publishers are putting them into print in unprecedented numbers. The challenge is getting these books out into the world and introducing them to the readers of all ages who want and need them."

REPRESENTATIVE WORKS

Marion Dane Bauer, editor
Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence (short stories) 1994
 
Tea Benduhn
Gravel Queen (young adult novel) 2003
 
Francesca Lia Block
Weetzie Bat (young adult novel) 1989
Witch Baby (young adult novel) 1991
Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys (young adult novel) 1992
Missing Angel Juan (young adult novel) 1993
Baby Be-Bop (young adult novel) 1995
Girl Goddess #9: Nine Stories (young adult short stories) 1996
I Was a Teenage Fairy (young adult novel) 1998
The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold (young adult fairy tales) 2000
 
Susanne Bösche
Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin [translated by Louis Mackay; photographs by Andreas Hansen] (young adult novel) 1983
 
Aidan Chambers
Dance on My Grave: A Life and a Death in Four Parts (young adult novel) 1982
Postcards from No Man's Land (young adult novel) 1999
 
John Donovan
I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip (young adult novel) 1969
 Harvey Fierstein
The Sissy Duckling [illustrations by Henry Cole] (picture book) 2002
 
Jane Futcher
Crush (young adult novel) 1981
 
Nancy Garden
Annie on My Mind (young adult novel) 1982
Lark in the Morning (young adult novel) 1991
Good Moon Rising (young adult novel) 1996
 
Rosa Guy
Ruby (young adult novel) 1976
 
Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland
King and King (picture book) 2000
King and King and Family (picture book) 2004

Robie H. Harris
It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health (nonfiction) 1994
It's So Amazing! A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families (nonfiction) 1999
 
Brent Hartinger
Geography Club (young adult novel) 2003
 
Isabelle Holland
The Man without a Face (young adult novel) 1972
 
James Howe
The Misfits (young adult novel) 2001
 
M. E. Kerr
Deliver Us from Evie (young adult novel) 1994
 
Norma Klein
Taking Sides (young adult novel) 1974
Breaking Up (young adult novel) 1980
 
David Leavitt
Equal Affections (young adult novel) 1989
 
David Levithan
Boy Meets Boy (young adult novel) 2003
 
Elizabeth Levy
Come Out Smiling (young adult novel) 1981
 
Marilyn Levy
Rumors and Whispers (young adult novel) 1991
 
Jesse Maguire
Getting it Right (young adult novel) 1991
 
Billy Merrell
Talking in the Dark (memoirs) 2003
 
Carolyn Meyer
Elliott & Win (young adult novel) 1986
 
Lesléa Newman
Heather Has Two Mommies [illustrations by Diana Souza] (picture book) 1989
Too Far Away to Touch [illustrations by Catherine Stock] (picture book) 1995
 
Todd Parr
It's Okay to be Different (picture book) 2001
The Family Book (picture book) 2003
 
Brian Payton
Hail Mary Corner (young adult novel) 2001
 
Julie Ann Peters
Luna (young adult novel) 2004
 
Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
And Tango Makes Three [illustrations by Henry Cole] (picture book) 2005
 
Alex Sanchez
Rainbow Boys (young adult novel) 2001
 
Sandra Scoppettone
Trying Hard to Hear You (young adult novel) 1974
Happy Endings are All Alike (young adult novel) 1978
 
Judith Vigna
My Two Uncles (picture book) 1995
 
Michael Wilhoite
Daddy's Roommate (picture book) 1990
Daddy's Wedding (picture book) 1996
 
Diana Wieler
Bad Boy (young adult novel) 1989

OVERVIEWS AND GENERAL STUDIES

Michael Cart (essay date winter 2004)

SOURCE: Cart, Michael. "What a Wonderful World: Notes on the Evolution of GLBTQ Literature for Young Adults." ALAN Review 31, no. 2 (winter 2004): 46-52.

[In the following essay, Cart traces the evolution of literature targeted at "GLBTQ youth (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning)," noting that while homosexuals have been largely "absent" from traditional American fiction, there have been several major advances in gay and lesbian children's literature over the past twenty years.]

In his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, T. S. Eliot offered three "permanent" reasons for reading: (1) the acquisition of wisdom, (2) the enjoyment of art, and (3) the pleasure of entertainment.

When the reading in question is that of young adult literature—the quintessential literature of the outsider—I would suggest there is a fourth reason: the lifesaving necessity of seeing one's own face reflected in the pages of a good book and the corollary comfort that derives from the knowledge that one is not alone.

And yet one group of teenage outsiders—GLBTQ youth (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning)—continues to be too nearly invisible. Since the 1969 publication of John Donovan's I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip (Harper & Row), the first young adult novel to deal with the issue of homosexuality, no more than 150 other titles¹ have followed, a woefully inadequate average of four to five per year to give faces to millions of teens (the precise number of GLBTQ teens at any given time is, of course, unknown).

As we will see, this situation is gradually beginning to change for the better, but to look first at the context of literary history, the homosexual as a character in American fiction (for both young adults AND adults) has been a largely absent figure.

Why? In part, because homosexuality was traditionally regarded, in Lord Alfred Douglas's words, as "the Love that dare not speak its name." And so, as cultural historian Charles Kaiser has noted, homosexuality did not become a public issue in American life until 1948 when the Kinsey Report on human sexuality was published. Earlier in that decade, however, World War II had brought together "the largest concentration of gay men ever found inside a single American institution. Volunteer women who joined the WAC and the WAVES experienced an even more prevalent lesbian culture" (78).

It did not take long for art to catch up to what Martin Duberman calls this "critical mass of consciousness" (76). Only three years after the end of the war, two important adult novels with gay themes appeared: Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote and The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal. They are significant for two reasons. First, they were works of serious fiction by writers who would become vital forces in American literature. Second, they were issued by mainstream publishers—Random House and E. P. Dutton, respectively. Previously, as Joseph Cady argues, while there was "frank and affirmative gay male American writing from the century's start" (most of it now forgotten except by literary historians), it was either published abroad or issued in this country by marginal publishers" (30). The same can arguably be said of lesbian literature; indeed, such writers as H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Natalie Barney were not only published abroad, but they also lived abroad as expatriates.

The new homosexual consciousness that appeared during and after World War II coincided with the first stirrings of what has come to be called young adult (YA) literature. Two of its best-known early practitioners, Maureen Daly and Madeleine L'Engle, published their first novels in the 1940s. Daly's Seventeenth Summer appeared in 1942, while L'Engle's The Small Rain was published in 1945. Both titles were published as adult novels, and as Christine Jenkins notes in her illuminating article "From Queer to Gay and Back Again" (Library Quarterly 68 [July 1998] 298-334), both also featured incidental treatments of homosexuality.

In The Small Rain a gay bar is used as a setting, while in Seventeenth Summer, the protagonist, Angie, and her boyfriend, Jack, go to a club to hear a musician who is portrayed as stereotypically gay: "With his eyes still closed, the colored man leaned back on the bench, way back, one hand limp at his side … 'Look, Jack,' I remember saying, 'He has red nail polish on! Isn't that funny—for a man?'" (193-195)

Jenkins further notes that in J. D. Salinger's 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye, another brief homosexual encounter is reported. Like Seventeenth Summer and The Small Rain, this book was also published for adults but was claimed by succeeding generations of young adults as their own. In this title the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, has a—to him—disturbing encounter with a favorite teacher when he stays overnight at the man's apartment:

What he (the teacher) was doing was, he was sitting on the floor right next to the couch, in the dark and all, and he was sort of petting me or patting me on the goddam head. Boy, I'll bet I jumped about a thousand feet. "What the hellya doing?" I said. "Nothing! I'm simply sitting here admiring"—"What're ya doing, anyway?' I said over again. I didn't know what the hell to say—I mean I was embarrassed as hell. "How 'bout keeping your voice down? I'm simply sitting here—"

"I have to go, anyway," I said—boy, was I nervous! I know more damn perverts at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they're always being perverty when I'm around."

                                          (192)

These are small moments having little lasting impact on the evolution of gay and lesbian literature published specifically for young adults; nevertheless, for their many YA readers the incidents/settings of these three novels may well have been their first exposure to homosexuality in literature.

A more important treatment of this theme, in the context of a coming-of-age novel, was James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain. Published in 1953, it dealt authentically with its fourteen-year-old protagonist's attraction to a seventeen-year-old boy. Then, in 1960, John Knowles's A Separate Peace was published. Like the Daly, L'Engle, Salinger, and Baldwin titles, this novel was aimed at an adult readership but quickly become a YA classic. Though the book did not overtly deal with homosexuality, to sophisticated readers it clearly had a gay subtext. And in a 1972 interview Knowles acknowledged that his main characters, Finny and Gene, "were in love" (Cady 37)

It would be another nine years, however, before the first young adult novel to deal with homosexuality would be published: as previously noted, it would be I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip by John Donovan. There is no cause-and-effect relationship between the publication of this book and the historic Stonewall Riots happening in the same watershed year, but it is possible that both were products of the same social/cultural climate. The 1960s, after all, were years of turbulent change, of political unrest, and of sexual revolution.

The media—always the first to observe changes in popular culture—took note, and according to Martin Duberman, "the years 1962 to 1965 saw a sharp increase in the amount of public discussion and representation of homosexuality" (97).

There was a similar increase in the publication, for adult readers, of gay and lesbian novels, including James Baldwin's Another Country (1962), Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963), John Rechy's City of Night (1963) and Numbers (1967), Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man (1964) Sanford Friedman's Totempole (1965), and Gore Vidal's Myra Breckenridge (1968).

Meanwhile, in the field of young adult literature the decade of the '60s saw the emergence of heterosexual sex as a theme for the first time (with the anomalous exception of Henry Gregor Felsen's Two and the Town, which, published in 1952, had dealt with an unmarried teen's pregnancy). In 1966, for example, Jeannette Eyerly's A Girl Like Me was published; in it an unwed teenage friend of the protagonist becomes pregnant; in 1967 it is the protagonist herself, the eponymous heroine of Zoa Sherburne's Too Bad about the Haines Girl, who becomes pregnant. The same year saw the publication of Ann Head's adult novel, Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones, in which two teenagers, July and Bo Jo, are swept away by passion; July becomes pregnant, and they elope. This novel appeared in paperback the following year and became a best-seller through teenage book clubs.

Despite the increasing treatment of teenage sexuality in fiction and the increasingly open discussion of homosexuality in American culture, Harper & Row viewed the impending publication of I'll Get There with considerable trepidation. The late William C. Morris, a Harper vice president, recalled, "Everyone was very frightened. In fact, we went to such great lengths to make it 'acceptable' to the general public that the book got more attention for the fuss we made than for anything that was in it" (Ford 24).

One of the "lengths" was the solicitation of a statement for the dust jacket from the acclaimed Dr. Frances Ilg, director of the Gesell Institute of Child Development.

In a letter dated August 8, 1968, Ursula Nordstrom, director of Harper's Department of Books for Boys and Girls, wrote, "If you like the book as a whole, we would be so glad if you could give us a quote we could use. It seems strange that a curtain has been drawn over this entire subject in fiction for young readers" (Marcus, 261-262).

Dr. Ilg complied with words of praise, the book was published, and despite Harper's pre-publication anxiety, it received almost universal praise. Indeed, both the New York Times and School Library Journal named it to their respective annual best books lists.

If that is the proverbial good news, the bad news is that, in this book, Donovan established a less than salutary model for the homosexual novel that would be faithfully replicated for the next dozen years: homosexuality is presented as both a rite of passage experience with no long-term consequences and as a matter of choice. Worse, though, is the equation Donovan makes between homosexuality and death: his protagonist Davy's beloved dog is killed by a car, an act the boy views as a kind of cosmic punishment for his having kissed and "fooled around with" another boy.

Donovan was not alone in conveying these attitudes, however. For what Joseph Cady writes of the emerging literature of homosexuality published for adults between the end of World War II and 1969 can be equally well applied to the literature for young adults that appeared through the decade of the 1970s: "In their association of homosexuality with violence, suicide, murder or other kinds of pathetic death or at best with lives of freakishness or isolation, many works in the post-World War II outpouring of published gay male writing seem to confirm Mart Crowley's famous line in The Boys in the Band, 'Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse'" (38-39).

Indeed, in the eight young adult novels that would appear in the next decade, death figures in three (The Man without a Face, Trying Hard to Hear You, and Sticks and Stones) and a violent rape, in a fourth (Happy Endings are All Alike). In the others homosexuality is presented as a passing phase, and the affected characters are vastly relieved to realize, at book's end, that they are "normal" and just like everyone else. Only one novel—I'll Love You When You're More Like Me (Harper & Row, 1977)—by the pioneering M. E. Kerr dared to feature a happy, well-adjusted gay character, Charlie Gilhooley. Though he is not the protagonist (that would be his best friend, the heterosexual Wally), Charlie is the more memorable character. Even more importantly, the tone of Kerr's novel is also innovative. It was the first to invest homosexuality with humor. All of the novels before it—and too many after—were unrelievedly turgid and lugubrious.

Two other important "firsts" of the 1970s need to be mentioned: in 1976 Rosa Guy's Ruby (Viking) became the first novel to include both an arguably lesbian character (she would choose to be heterosexual by the novel's end) and also the first to feature black characters. Incredibly, fifteen years would pass before other African Americans would appear—in Jacqueline Woodson's The Dear One (Delacorte 1991). And not until 1995 would a Latino character appear, in R. J. Hamilton's Who Framed Lorenzo Garcia? (Alyson). In fact, the continuing lack of diversity remains one of the most significant deficiencies in GLBTQ fiction.

Another continuing area of deficiency in the GLBTQ novel is its nearly universal absence of art. Perhaps this is because homosexuality has been treated, in young adult literature, as a problem that needs resolution and, as a result, the novels that have been written have taken on the form of the "problem novel," the ripped-from-the-headlines work of fiction—first appearing in the 1970s—in which the central problem becomes the tail that wags the dog of the novel. More literary considerations, such as form, structure, and setting, receive scant attention, and characters remain one-dimensional because they are defined solely by their sexuality.

In this context the British writer Aidan Chambers's novel Dance on My Grave, published in this country in 1982, becomes enormously important as the first literary novel to explore the lives of multidimensional gay characters who are presented subtly and in the framework of a structurally experimental work of fiction.

Chambers was the first English writer, who dealt with homosexuality, to be published in the United States. But another English writer, David Rees, had dealt with the subject in his 1979 novel In the Tent (Dobson); however, this book did not appear in an American edition until 1985 (Alyson).

A third English writer to deal with homosexuality, Jean Ure, made her first American appearance in her novel You Win Some, You Lose Some (Dell 1984).

The value of these books from abroad resides, in part, in their dramatic demonstration that the challenges confronting homosexual teenagers is startlingly similar the world over, a point that has since been reinforced in books from Australia (Kate Walker, Sue Hines) New Zealand (Paula Boock, William Taylor), and Canada (Diana Wieler).

Interestingly, though, only one book—Damned Strong Love by Lutz Van Dijk (Holt 1995)—has appeared in the United States in translation. The book was first published in Germany in 1991 and is the true story of a Dutch boy who fell in love with a German soldier during World War II.

In that same watershed year of 1982 another tremendously important novel appeared: Nancy Garden's Annie on My Mind (Farrar Straus & Giroux), a novel that has assumed the stature of a classic because it was the first to recognize that homosexuality embraces not only sex but also love. Even more significantly, the teenage lovers, Liza and Annie, remain together at the novel's end, despite the myriad difficulties society places in the way of their relationship.

Two other "firsts" that would become conventions of the GLBTQ novel also appeared in the 1980s. In the first year of the decade, Norma Klein's Breaking Up (Random House 1980) became the first title to feature a gay parent, and a year later, Gary Bargar's novel What Happened to Mr. Forster? (Clarion 1981) became the first to feature a gay (and typically self-sacrificing) teacher.

In 1986 M. E. Kerr's Night Kites (Harper & Row) became the first young adult novel to tackle the troubling issue of AIDS—five years after the plague made its first appearance. Though this disease would spark a major subgenre in adult publishing, only a handful of YA titles dealing with the subject would appear and only two of these—Ron Koertge's droll The Arizona Kid (Joy Street/Little, Brown 1988) and Theresa Nelson's heartfelt Earthshine (Orchard Books, 1994)—were of lasting literary significance. Since the mid-'90s the subject has all but vanished from young adult literature though the disease, sadly, continues to have a major impact on adolescent lives.

The decade of the '80s concluded with the publication of two other novels of enduring significance. A. M. Homes' Jack (Macmillan 1989) remains one of the best treatments of a teenager's confronting and dealing with a parent's homosexuality, while Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat (HarperCollins) is not only a classic of gay fiction but also one of the most memorable of all young adult novels. In its large-hearted embrace of every aspect of the workings of the human heart, it demonstrates, with art and innovation, that love is love, regardless of what society chooses to label it. Block has also dealt with homosexuality in a number of her later novels, perhaps most memorably in Baby Bebop, the 1995 prequel to Weetzie Bat (HarperCollins).

The pace of GLBTQ publishing quickened in the 1980s when a total of forty-one titles were published (compared with eight in the 1970s). In terms of annual production, the numbers ranged from a low of one in 1985 to a high of six in 1981, 1986, and 1989.

The decade of the '90s was even more productive in terms of titles published (sixty-eight), peaking in 1997 when a total of twelve titles appeared. It should be remembered, however, that many of these novels dealt with homosexuality only tangentially (e.g., homosexuals are minor characters as in Francesca Lia Block's Missing Angel Juan [HarperCollins 1993] Gary Paulsen's The Car [Harcourt Brace 1994], Chris Crutcher's Ironman [Greenwillow 1995], Adele Griffin's Split Just Right [Hyperion, 1997], etc.) or failed to break new ground in terms of theme, offering, instead, endless variations on questioning one's sexual identity and the agonies of coming out.

Several titles stand out, however: in 1994 the first collection of original short stories dealing with GLBTQ issues, Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence (HarperCollins), edited by Marion Dane Bauer, appeared. Three years earlier Christ Crutcher created a classic character in one of the stories in his collection Athletic Shorts (Greenwillow 1991). The eponymous Angus Bethune in "A Brief Moment in the Life of Angus Bethune" is not only a brilliantly memorable character but also is the first teen in GLBTQ literature to have not one but two gay parents! Other collections featuring GLBTQ stories included Francesca Lia Block's Girl Goddess #9 (HarperCollins 1996) and, in the next decade, my own anthologies Love and Sex (Simon & Schuster 2001) and Necessary Noise (Cotler/HarperCollins 2003).

Other significant titles from the '90s are M. E. Kerr's Deliver Us from Evie (HarperCollins 1994), a lesbian love story that addresses gay stereotypes with wit and insight; Jacqueline Woodson's From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun (Scholastic 1995), the affecting story of an African American boy's attempts to come to terms with his mother's homosexuality and her love affair with a white woman; Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch (Cotler/HarperCollins 1997), a collection of brilliantly reimagined fairy tales told in a lesbian context; and Nancy Garden's The Year They Burned the Books (Farrar Straus & Giroux 1999), which not only examines censorship issues but also explores the issue of community and friendship between gay and lesbian characters, something that has been too absent from GLBTQ fiction.

Earlier, in 1997, M. E. Kerr once again introduced a new topic into the field when, in "Hello," I Lied (HarperCollins), she became the first to deal with the complex issue of bisexuality.

Two years later, in 1999, Catherine Atkins's When Jeff Comes Home (Harcourt) became arguably the first GLBTQ novel to address the issue of sexual abuse, a subject that would be revisited in Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson's Target (Roaring Brook 2003). Unfortunately—and surely, inadvertently—both of these books, in their too muddled treatment of the subject, seem to reinforce the allegations of homophobes that adult gays are, by definition, sexual predators.

On a more salutary note, the decade of the '90s concluded with the publication of two of the most significant titles in all the GLBTQ canon: Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (MTV/Pocket 1999) and Ellen Wittlinger's Hard Love (Simon & Schuster 1999).

The latter received a Printz Honor Award as one of the most distinguished young adult novels of the year ("distinguished" being evaluated solely in literary terms). Like Aidan Chambers's Dance on My Grave, this title is distinguished by its experimental form (it is told using a variety of different narrative devices, including poetry, letters, articles, and excerpts from zines) and by its emotionally sensitive story of an alienated straight teenage boy named John who falls in love with Marisol, a self-proclaimed "Puerto Rican Cuban Yankee Lesbian."

Perks might also have been honored by the Printz committee were it not for the fact that it was technically published as an adult novel, even though it is a quintessential YA title, a kind of Catcher in the Rye for contemporary teenagers. An epistolary novel, it is the haunting story of an emotionally damaged ninthgrade boy named Charlie who discovers that his best friend, Patrick, is gay and is no more bothered by that discovery than was Weetzie Bat when she learned the affectional truth about her friend, Dirk. This casual air of acceptance remains all too rare in GLBTQ fiction, where considerations of sexual identity still seem to trigger convulsions of weeping, wailing, and noisy gnashing of teeth. And, even in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the terrors and heartbreaks of coming out remain major subjects in GLBTQ fiction.

Another, related point might be made here: publishers, in an effort to expand the market for young adult titles, began in the late 1990s to issue and market as adult books an increasingly large number of what are clearly YA titles. Aside from Perks, other examples include Brian Malloy's The Year of Ice (St. Martin's Press, 2002) and Bart Yates's Leave Myself Behind (Kensington 2003).

It is still too early to say what other trends will enrich and inform—or challenge—the field of GLBTQ fiction in the new century, though the sheer number of books that are being published is slightly greater than in the past. Following a slow start—only five titles appeared in 2000—the pace quickened, with eight titles appearing in 2001 and twelve in 2003 (on the other hand, 2002 was a slow year with only four titles).

More significantly 2003 has seen the first novel to feature a transgender character: Luna by Julie Anne Peters (Little, Brown), though some might argue that the titular character Lani Garver in Carol Plum-Ucci's melodramatic What Happened to Lani Garver (Harcourt 2002) might be perceived as transgender. The point should be made here—as Peters does in Luna—that transgendered persons are not necessarily homosexual, but given the enormous confusion surrounding their sexuality, they have arbitrarily been placed in the same category as gay, lesbians, bisexuals, and questioning teens.

Of greatest significance, however, is the increasing literary quality of GLBTQ fiction as evidenced by the fact that in 2003 a Printz Honor Award went to Garret Freymann-Weyr's novel of love and sexual identity, My Heartbeat (Houghton Mifflin 2002), and the Printz Award itself went to Aidan Chambers's Postcards from No Man's Land (Dutton 2002), which features the bisexuality of its protagonist as a major subplot.

And further evidencing the increasing acceptance of GLBTQ literature is Nancy Garden's having received the 2003 Margaret A. Edwards Award, presented annually by ALA's Young Adult Library Services Association for lifetime achievement in young adult literature.

As young Americans have become increasingly sophisticated in their knowledge of the world around them in this still new century, a few courageous authors have begun writing books about GLBTQ issues for readers in upper elementary school. Two examples are Nancy Garden's Holly's Secret (Farrar Straus & Giroux 2000) and James Howe's The Misfits (Atheneum 2001).

Meanwhile, a gratifyingly large number of brilliantly gifted young writers have begun to publish, writers like Garret Freymann-Weyr (mentioned above), Sara Ryan (Empress of the World, Viking, 2001), Alex Sanchez (Rainbow Boys, Simon & Schuster, 2001, and Rainbow High, Simon & Schuster, 2003), Brent Hartinger (Geography Club, HarperCollins, 2003), Julie Anne Peters (Keeping You a Secret, Little Brown, 2003), Lauren Myracle (Kissing Kate, Dutton, 2003), and Tea Benduhn (Gravel Queen, Simon & Schuster, 2003), among others.

One of the most gifted of the new generation of writers is David Levithan, whose novel Boy Meets Boy (Knopf, 2003) is—as I noted in my starred Booklist review—"arguably the most important gay novel since Annie on My Mind." (Cart, 2003, 1980). It is the first "feel good" gay novel for young adults (in the same way that Stephen McCauley's adult novels might be called "feel good" fiction). By that I do not mean to diminish the emotional integrity—or the literary quality—of these novels. But what is revolutionary about them—especially Levithan's—is their blithe acceptance of the condition of being gay. By turns wacky and charming, Boy Meets Boy is always original and its characters are fresh, authentic, and deeply engaging—all right, lovable. Aspects of the novel are purposely fantastic—Paul, the protagonist has known he was gay since kindergarten; the prom queen at his high school is the cross-dressing quarterback of the football team; two boys walk through town holding hands "and if anybody notices, nobody cares"—but the world it posits is a near revolution in social attitudes, and the book is an amazing step forward in the publishing of GLBTQ fiction. It is the only novel since the genre began in 1969 that has no hint of self-hatred and can believably conclude with a gay protagonist's looking about himself and thinking, "What a wonderful world" (185).

Those who believe that young adult fiction should give faces to all teens of all sexual identities and persuasions can find hope in the thread of acceptance that runs through GLBTQ novels from Annie on My Mind through Weetzie Bat and Hard Love to Boy Meets Boy and in the recent expansion of the GLBTQ field to embrace new forms. For example, Levithan, who is an editor as well as an author, recently published a gay memoir in verse: Billy Merrell's Talking in the Dark: A Poetry Memoir (Push/Scholastic 2003) and for the last several years, homosexuality as a theme has begun to appear in the creative form now known as "the graphic novel." Examples include Judd Winick's Pedro and Me (Holt 2000), Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby (Paradox Press 1995), and Ron Zimmerman's Rawhide Kid (Marvel 2003).

These increasing numbers and varieties of opportunities, now being given to teens of every sexual identity, to see their faces in the pages of good fiction and, in the process, to find the comfort and reassurance of knowing they are not alone suggests that the day may be coming when the words "what a wonderful world" will no longer carry any hint of irony.

What a wonderful thought.

Note

1. This number comes from annual lists maintained by Prof. Christine Jenkins, author Nancy Garden, and myself.

Works Cited

Cady, Joseph. "American Literature: Gay Male, 1900–1969." The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage. Ed. Claude J. Summers. New York: Holt, 1995. 30-39.

Cart, Michael. Rev. of Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan. Booklist 99 (2003): 1980.

Daly, Maureen. Seventeenth Summer. New York: Pocket Books, 1968.

Duberman, Martin. Stonewall. New York: Dutton, 1993.

Ford, Michael Thomas. "Gay Books for Young Readers." Publishers Weekly. 21 February 1994: 24.

Kaiser, Charles. "Life before Stonewall." Newsweek 4 July 1994: 78.

Marcus, Leonard S., ed. Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.

Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951.

David Levithan (essay date October 2004)

SOURCE: Levithan, David. "Supporting Gay Teen Literature." School Library Journal 50, no. 10 (October 2004): 44-5.

[In the following essay, young adult author Levithan advocates the open presentation of gay and lesbian children's literature in public libraries, arguing that, "[s]ilencing books silences the readers who need them most."]

When we talk about the books in a library, we call them a collection. But to a young reader—especially a teen reader—it's really more of a representation. Teens read books to find themselves within the pages, and they visit libraries to find themselves on the shelves—a Dewey-decimal recognition of who they are and what they might be going through. It is not only a librarian's job to make this representation as welcoming and as accurate as possible. It is a librarian's obligation to do so.

I am going to talk here about gay teen literature, because that is what I know best as an author and as an editor, although the obligation certainly holds true for many other literatures. You see, right now we are at a pivotal point for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) literature for teens. After many, many years of fear, threat, hesitation, self-loathing, and (in the face of all these) defiance, a crucial time has been entered where courage has the potential to win the day. Not only are writers putting LGBT voices into words, but publishers are putting them into print in unprecedented numbers. The challenge is getting these books out into the world and introducing them to the readers of all ages who want and need them.

The presence of these books in libraries is a statement, and it is a statement that we must make. Touring for Boy Meets Boy (Knopf, 2003), I've had librarians say to me, "People in my school don't agree with homosexuality, so it's difficult to have your book on the shelves." Here's the thing: being gay is not an issue, it is an identity. It is not something that you can agree or disagree with. It is a fact, and must be defended and represented as a fact.

To use another part of my identity as an example: if someone said to me, "I'm sorry, but we can't carry that book because it's so Jewish and some people in my school don't agree with Jewish culture," I would protest until I reached my last gasp. Prohibiting gay books is just as abhorrent. Period. Or to put it in other terms: How would you react if you were asked to avoid buying African-American books for your library, or told you could only buy one a year, because surely that would be representative of the whole African-American experience. Or if someone walked into your library, pointed to C. S. Lewis's books, and told you that it is wrong to promote "the Christian lifestyle." Or if you were informed that it was OK to have female authors in your collection, as long as they weren't openly female. You would say no. You would say that's not right. Which is exactly what you need to say when LGBT books are challenged.

Discrimination is not a legitimate point of view. Silencing books silences the readers who need them most. And silencing these readers can have dire, tragic consequences.

Never forget who these readers are. They are just as curious and anxious about life as any other teenager. I am lucky as an author, because I have a Web site and an e-mail address to which my readers can write. I know, at least partly, who they are. The gay teenager who implores me five times in a single-paragraph e-mail not to reply to the e-mail address, since he's sneaked on to his parents' computer and they would disown him if they knew he'd read my book. The 13-year-old straight girl from Texas who writes to say that she'd never realized that gay people were really people, too, and that reading the book helped her figure that out. The 70-year-old gay man who wishes he'd had a gay teen book when he was growing up, because it would have saved him decades of pain and denial. The 13-year-old boy who has already contemplated suicide, but draws away from it the more he sees that there are places in the outside world that are unlike his insular town. Hundreds of people have written to me to say that just seeing the book in their library or in their local bookstore made them feel like they belonged a little more in the world. They've seen themselves on the shelves.

It isn't just me who's getting these e-mails. It's Julie Anne Peters and Brent Hartinger and Alex Sanchez and Tea Benduhn and Billy Merrell and James Howe and Nancy Garden and Francesca Lia Block and M. E. Kerr and all the other authors who are constantly changing the face of LGBT teen lit, reaching hundreds of thousands of readers a year. And let me tell you—hearing these stories gives us more strength to write our stories. I want to pass as much of that strength as I can on to you, the librarians. We are in a golden age of teen literature right now, and a part of that is due to the fact that authors both gay and straight have found the voices to speak about the LGBT experience in honest and at times extraordinary ways. We've reached the point where you don't have to read a gay or lesbian book just because it's a gay or lesbian book. You have to read it because it's a good book in its own right, about something important. The bar has been raised higher, and we're all better for it.

I have met so many amazing librarians in the past few years, staunch and strong defenders of expression and representation. I can say without a single doubt that many young readers' lives have been helped and saved by their librarians' open-mindedness and courage. (I have the e-mails to prove it.) Many people consider librarians to be gatekeepers, usually in terms of keeping things out. I also think of librarians as gatekeepers in terms of the people they help through the gates—the librarians who don't put the magnetic strips in LGBT books so questioning or hesitant teens won't have to sign them out; the librarians who display these titles prominently in their libraries, knowing that even if not everybody will have the courage to sign them out, teens will at least know that their literature is accepted; the librarians who set up safe zones where kids can borrow books about important topics on the honor system; the openly LGBT librarians who give students strength through something as affirming as their everyday lives; and, of course, the amazing number of librarians who support and encourage their openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning students as they strive to live their lives the way they want to live them.

I will never forget the moment I first heard about David Leavitt's books. I was working in my high school library, as I did each year in high school. A new box of books had come in, and one of the librarians, Mrs. Goldsmith, showed me Equal Affections (Grove, 1989) and said that Leavitt was a very good writer. I was intrigued by his books' titles, by his name (so similar to mine), and by the fact that his books were in our suburban New Jersey library. Thirteen years later, when I revisited my high school li-brary to read from my own book, I would be sure to return to the shelves to see all of David Leavitt's spines in a row—to thank the books, to thank the library, to thank the librarians. I recognize now what I didn't have the ability to see then, at least, not fully: a gate opened. I made my way through.

Of all the passages in Boy Meets Boy that have been quoted back to me, the one that I've heard the most by far is the following, which happens after one of the characters (Tony) confronts his parents about being gay. The narrator (Paul) observes:

I find my greatest strength in wanting to be strong. I find my greatest bravery in deciding to be brave. I don't know if I've ever realized this before, and I don't know if Tony's ever realized it before, but I think we both realize it now. If there's no feeling of fear, then there's no need for courage. I think Tony has been living with his fear for all his life. I think now he's converting it to courage.

With books, courage comes on many levels. We authors have to find the courage to offer the words that will release the truth, in ways both small and large. We put our names on the cover of the book, offering those words out in the world with our lives attached. The publisher, too, offers its own reputation when it puts its name on the spine. Readers must take great courage in taking a book from a shelf, or being seen carrying it around. Librarians can—and often do—and always must find the courage to stand up to the fear that surrounds us. Yon are the gatekeepers of the representation. It's not just literature at stake; it's lives.

LGBT Titles by Authors Mentioned

Benduhn, Tea. Gravel Queen (S & S, 2003).

Block, Francesca Lia. Weetzie Bat (Harper-Collins, 1989).

Garden, Nancy. Annie on My Mind (Farrar, 1992).

Hartinger, Brent. Geography Club (Harper-Collins, 2003).

Howe, James. The Misfits (Atheneum, 2001).

Kerr, M. E. Deliver Us from Evie (HarperTrophy, 1995).

Leavitt, David. Equal Affections (Grove, 1989).

Levithan, David. Boy Meets Boy (Knopf, 2003).

Merrell, Billy. Talking in the Dark (Scholastic, 2003).

Peters, Julie Ann. Luna (Little, Brown, 2004).

Sanchez, Alex. Rainbow Boys (S & S, 2001).

Other Resources

www.glsen.org

www.teachingtolerance.org

PORTRAYALS OF GAY AND LESBIAN ADOLESCENCE

Nancy St. Clair (essay date fall 1995)

SOURCE: St. Clair, Nancy. "Outside Looking In: Representations of Gay and Lesbian Experiences in the Young Adult Novel." ALAN Review 23, no. 1 (fall 1995): 38-43.

[In the following essay, St. Clair divides the subgenre of gay and lesbian young adult literature into three main categories—those depicting homosexuality as a "tragic flaw," the "coming out" novel, and works with sympathetic homosexual characters.]

I teach a course entitled "Women's Literature/Women's Lives" at a small, midwestern Methodist-affiliated college located in the middle of Iowa. Because the course fulfills one of the students' requirements for a minority-perspective credit, I work to make sure that the literature and lives my students are exposed to are not just white and heterosexual. We regularly spend the last third of the semester reading lesbian literature, beginning with Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, continuing with Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality" and ending with Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle.

In spite of the fact that we cover these works towards the end of the semester when attention generally begins to flag, students usually cite this unit as their favorite in their end-of-the-semester evaluations. I expect there are many reasons for this, but two stand out in my mind. For the straight students, the course offers the opportunity to study a culture they are curious about, but which the homophobia, so prevalent in student life, prevents them from freely exploring. My course, then, becomes a mandate to explore that which is taboo for many of them. For lesbian students the unit offers both a validation of their experience and an arena where their voices can be heard.

A reappearing motif in the reading journals of the lesbian students began this project for me. Over and over I would hear both gratitude and appreciation that we were reading texts that spoke to their experience. But along with gratitude, there was sadness that they hadn't encountered such texts earlier in their lives. Comments like these appeared frequently:

I wish I had known about these books when I was younger, maybe junior or senior high would have been easier.

or

When I was a kid, maybe thirteen or fourteen, I spent a lot of time in the library looking, but not sure of what I was looking for. It wasn't like I was a great reader. I read Nancy Drew, but I think I must have wanted Rubyfruit Jungle.

My students are predominantly white, from rural backgrounds. Often they are the first generation in their family to attend college and they have chosen Simpson, in part, because it is small, located in the country, and so is "safe" in their minds. But sheltered as they might have been, was it possible that my students had encountered no texts as young adult readers that dealt with homosexuality? This possibility seemed unlikely considering the plethora of available realistic young adult fiction dealing with all other aspects of contemporary life.

A series of questions began to emerge for me. First, just how much realistic young adult fiction was "out there" that examined homosexuality? In answering this question, I wanted to focus on mainstream presses, books likely to be found in school or public libraries and the bookstores most likely to be frequented by adolescents. Second, in the fiction that was available, how was homosexuality represented? My questions led me first to Allan A. Cuseo's text Homosexual Characters in Young Adult Novels: A Literary Analysis, 1969–82 (Scarecrow Press, 1992). Written as a doctoral dissertation, Cuseo's book is essentially a survey of how homosexuality appears in a variety of young adult novels. Though the study is long on summary and short on analysis, two important points emerge. One is that in the mid-1960s realistic problem novels for adolescent readers start appearing in great numbers. Cuseo connects this development to a change in language arts courses in high schools. He writes:

With the increased emphasis on elective language arts courses and alternative time schedules, schools in their eagerness for relevance, began to experiment with minicourses and innovative curricula. In that environment young adult fiction became an accepted element.

                                             (p. 2)

But what I find most significant about Cuseo's study is this: though great numbers of realistic young adult novels appeared in the 1960s dealing with subjects such as sex, unplanned pregnancies, abortion, divorce, chemical abuse, and racism, far fewer appeared that explored adolescent homosexuality. Once I knew that adolescents struggling with issues of sexual identity had limited fictional resources to turn to for information, then the representation of gay and lesbian experience in these novels became increasingly important. During the last three years, I've read approximately fifty young adult novels that contain homosexual themes and characters. What I found in these books is that the representation of homosexual experience falls into one of three broad categories.

In the first category are books that depict homosexuality as a "tragic flaw" (Jenkins, p. 89) and that promote a variety of negative stereotypes. Homosexuals are predatory, for example, in Janice Kesselman's Flick, immoral in Judith St. George's Call Me Margo, doomed to lives of isolation in Isabelle Holland's The Man without a Face, and prone to violence in Larry Hulce's Just the Right Amount of Wrong. Adolescent characters who do engage in homosexual behavior in these books are often assured that their behavior is not an orientation, but simply "youthful experimentation" (Jenkins, p. 86) caused by their membership in dysfunctional families, as in Jonathan Donovan's I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip.

Madeleine L'Engle's The Small Rain illustrates the tendency of books in this category both to negatively stereotype homosexual characters and to depict homosexuality as a pathological state. Though The Small Rain was originally published in 1945, it is worth discussing for a number of reasons. The most significant of these is that I have found very few deviations from L'Engle's depiction of homosexuals in other novels published between 1945 and 1982. Second, L'Engle, as winner of the Newbery Award, is a major name in young adult fiction. Her work is emulated by less well-known authors and frequently cited in scholarship. Third, The Small Rain was reissued in 1984 and is still in many school and public libraries. Consequently, the attitudes it embodies continue to be disseminated and absorbed by teenagers who read fiction for information.

Madeleine L'Engle is probably most famous for her Newbery Award-winning A Wrinkle in Time. She has written over forty books for children and adolescents. In a field too often dominated by series books (i.e. Nancy Drew, The Babysitters Club, The Sweet Val-ley Teens), all characterized by a blandness of style and flatness of character, L'Engle's novels stand out, in part, because they are populated by quirky characters, outsiders marginalized by their giftedness and willingness to be critical of the conventional. The most famous of these characters, perhaps, is Meg Murry, the heroine of A Wrinkle in Time.

L'Engle wrote The Small Rain when she was in her twenties, while working as an actress in New York. In the preface to the 1984 edition, L'Engle describes the book as "very much a first novel" (p. vii), but nowhere in this preface does she exhibit any discomfort with the homophobia in the book. The Small Rain covers the life of a talented pianist, Katherine Forrester, from the age of ten to eighteen. It is set "in those years of precarious peace between the First and Second World War …' (p. ix). Katherine is by no means an ordinary child. Like many of the children who populate L'Engle's novels, her extraordinariness is a function of the external circumstances of her life and her talents as a musician. Katherine is the daughter of Julie Forrester, a concert pianist whose career is cut short by a car accident, and Tom Forrester, an internationally renowned composer. After Julie's accident, Katherine is reared by her mother's best friend Manya, herself an internationally acclaimed stage actress. Absorbed by his music, Katherine's father is only able to manage dinner with his daughter once a week. The rest of his free time is spent with Manya, whom he ultimately marries.

In the eight years of her life covered by the novel, Katherine experiences a lot: the death of her mother; the marriage of her father and Manya; travels to and from Europe; becoming a student at a Swiss boarding school; the loss of her virginity; worries about an unwanted pregnancy; becoming engaged, then jilted; and, from the age of fourteen on, the regular drinking of Scotch and the smoking of cigarettes with her parents. (All of this before the age of nineteen and while practicing the piano five hours a day.) What is significant, though, is that nothing Katherine experiences is seen as out-of-the-ordinary for a teenager. On the contrary, her experiences are depicted as very much in keeping with the expected lifestyle of a child of two world-famous artists, artists who not only view themselves as unconventional, but who seem to celebrate that unconventionality.

Because Katherine's upbringing is so unconventional and her attitudes so sophisticated, the reader is not prepared for her reaction to homosexuality when she is taken to a lesbian bar late in the novel:

At the bar sat what Katherine thought at first was a man. After a while Sarah nudged her and said. "That's Sighing Susan. She comes here almost every night."

Startled Katherine stared at the creature again and realized that it was indeed a woman, or perhaps once had been a woman. Now it wore a man's suit, shirt, and tie; its hair was cut short; out of a dead-white face glared a pair of despairing eyes. Feeling Katherine's gaze the creature turned and looked at her, and that look was branded into Katherine's body; it was as though it left a physical mark…. There was a jukebox opposite their table. A fat woman in a silk dress with badly dyed hair put a nickel in it, and as the music came blaring forth, she began to dance with a young blonde girl in slacks. As she danced by their table she smiled suggestively at Katherine. Katherine looked wildly about but saw nothing of comfort…. Pete looked at Katherine and saw her white face, her dark eyes huge and afraid, so he began to very quickly, very gaily, to take her hand and hold it in his…. But Katherine could not laugh with the others. She stood up. "I'm awfully sorry, but I have a headache and I don't feel very well. I think I'd better go home." The air in Washington Square was so fresh and clear that it seemed as though she had forgotten what cold clear air could smell like…. "Let's sit down for a minute," she begged.

"You won't catch cold?"

"No. I—I want to get myself cleared out of that air. Then I want to go home and take a bath."

                                     (pp. 311-313)

The above passage is significant for a number of reasons. First, Katherine's horror, her aversion to what she sees, undercuts the realism that L'Engle seems to be striving for in much of the novel. Are we actually expected to believe that Katherine, who has spent much of her childhood in concert halls and backstage at theaters, has never encountered lesbians before? And if we accept that Katherine's response is unrealistic, how do we account for L'Engle's breakdown in characterization?

The answer to this question is evident once we contextualize The Small Rain. L'Engle depicts lesbianism as pathological because it confuses Katherine's notions of gender. Note, for example, that in the above passage "Sighing Susan" is three times referred to as "it" and twice as "that creature." Susan's identity rests solely on her identification as a lesbian and as such she is viewed as both less than human and as someone who brings pain not only to herself but to others as well. Susan has "despairing eyes" and Katherine, who feels physically marked by Susan's gaze, feels compelled to retreat to the "clean air."

Limited and facile as L'Engle's depiction might be, it needs to be viewed as part of a literary tradition—one that can be traced back to Radclyffe Hall and which was alive and well, not only in mainstream literature but in lesbian as well as, for example, in Ann Bannon's novels from the 1950s. We should not be surprised then that L'Engle, who in general seems drawn to young female characters who suffer from their status as outsiders, drew in her first novel upon literary stereotypes. But in 1984 L'Engle published another novel, A House Like a Lotus, which also contains lesbian characters. Though not as blatantly homophobic as The Small Rain, this later novel still treats homosexuality as a tragic state. The lesbian characters, Max and Ursula, a couple of long standing, are sympathetic, but their lives are depicted in such a way that the prevailing message is that homosexuality is a tragic state for those who are, and a threatening one for those who are exposed to it. This message is repeated in novels like Janice Futcher's Crush, Ann Synder's and Louis Pelletier's The Truth about Alex, and Ann Rinaldi's The Good Side of My Heart.

L'Engle is only one author among many who are reluctant to use their fiction as a tool to explore adolescent homosexuality in a non-judgmental way. Cuseo believes this reluctance stems from an author's awareness that the desires of adolescent readers, publishers, and educators are often in conflict with one another. He writes:

Homosexuality, a disconcerting subject for many adults in society, presented a sensitive area for the authors of the adolescent title. The author had to write for the teenager, but the adult controlled what was published and, equally as important, what was reviewed and selected for library and school purchase. This concern is not to be taken lightly as many adolescents although interested in an examination of homosexuality, have been reluctant to purchase these titles or borrow them from libraries. As the adolescent years have traditionally been particularly homophobic, this reluctance is not surprising. Adults have been eager to have the genre moralize, to perform a social service, while the adolescent has been eager for an understanding of society and his/her emerging, if continuing sexuality.

                                             (p. 3)

Publishers often seem motivated by the desire to maximize their profits, and librarians are often restricted by limited acquisitions budgets. Neither of these factors work to support, much less create, an environment in which much literature will be produced that explores homosexuality for adolescents in any meaningful way. Still, the decade beginning with the mid-1970s and running to the mid-1980s saw the publication of a second category of novels, ones in which the representation of adolescent homosexuality became increasingly complex and decreasingly moralistic. In 1976, Rosa Guy published Ruby, a significant work for a number of reasons. First, it focuses on the lesbian relationship of two young women of color, one of very few novels to do so. Second, though the relationship between the two girls ultimately ends unhappily, the sexual aspect of their relationship is neither hidden nor accompanied by guilt. And though the relationship does end, it leaves the main character, Ruby, with a renewed sense of self-worth. Sexual identity as something to be explored and come to grips with is a prominent theme in novels in this second category. Novels like David Rees' In the Tent, Deborah Hautzig's Hey Dollface, Emily Hanlan's The Wing and the Flame, and Scott Bunn's Just Hold On depict main characters learning not only that their sexual orientation is homosexual, but also what the implications of that identity are. In Rees' novel, for example, the protagonist, Tim, not only comes to accept himself as a gay male but also to accept the fact that his friend, Aaron, will be his friend, though not his lover. Within this second category, Nancy Garden's two novels, Annie on My Mind and Lark in the Morning, are milestones for several reasons.

First, both were published initially in hardback and by a major press—ironically by the same press responsible for reissuing The Small Rain. Second, the novels are very clearly lesbian novels. The definition of lesbian novel I'm using is that coined by Bonnie Zimmerman in The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969–89.

A lesbian novel has a central, not marginal lesbian character, one who understands herself to be lesbian. In fact it has many or mostly lesbian characters, it revolves around lesbian history. A lesbian novel also places love between women, including sexual passion, at the center of the story…. Unlike heterosexual feminist literature, which also may be very woman-centered, a lesbian text places men firmly at the margins of the story.

                                            (p. 15)

Garden's Annie on My Mind very clearly meets Zimmerman's criteria and just as clearly is written for an adolescent audience. The novel opens with its narra-tor, Liza Winthrop, a freshman at MIT, in a state of emotional paralysis, haunted by her past and undecided about her future. Her confusion stems from the events of her senior year in high school, the year she met the Annie of the title. The first chapter makes clear that Liza must come to some understanding of the past if she is to have any kind of future. Her inability (or unwillingness) to understand what she has experienced with Annie, and to draw conclusions from it, has left her incapable of doing the academic work she professes to love, i.e., studying to be an architect. Liza's dilemma is clear: in order to develop one component of her identity, she needs to resolve her conflicts about another. Her struggles to understand and accept herself as a lesbian are embodied in her attempts to write a letter to her friend and lover, Annie Kenyon. As she struggles to write a letter and to understand why the writing is so difficult, Liza reviews the events of the past year, including her meeting, falling in love with, and finally being separated from Annie.

Annie on My Mind is a classic coming-out novel and as such is thematically concerned with issues of identity and role. Settings are of great importance in this novel of discovery because they are so thematically aligned with different facets of the girls' relationship. Liza and Annie's first two meetings take place in settings that contain both the past and present and the possibility of easy shifts from fantasy to reality. Liza meets Annie at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and initially mistakes her for an early American colonial girl. Their early exchanges are characterized by lapses into worlds of fantasy and pretense. During their first meeting they engage in mock joustings in the Medieval Hall at the Met. Their second meeting, at the Cloisters, begins with their playing at Knight and Lady. Liza is initially embarrassed by Annie's predilection for play-acting but learns to enjoy it, because it offers her an opportunity to try on other identities and escape from her everyday world, one she describes as "… a bit dull in that nearly everyone is white and most parents have jobs as doctors, lawyers, professors or VIPs in brokerage firms" (p. 16).

Annie and Liza's play-acting has thematic repercussions. It allows the girls space in which to explore their attraction for one another while introducing one of the main challenges they will face as lovers: how to create a space for themselves in a world hostile to their relationship. Though their playacting creates a space for them, a sanctuary as it were, both girls come to recognize that it can function only as a temporary retreat. Liza realizes that an important shift has occurred in their relationship when she and Annie talk "no pretending this time, no medieval improvisations, just us" (p. 62). Soon after Liza comes to this realization, Annie, too, recognizes that the pleasures of the fantasy world she so ably creates are only temporary. Riding the ferry to Staten Island, she begins an improvisation only to draw back:

"We're in Richmond," Annie said suddenly, starling me. "We're early settlers and…." Then she stopped and I could feel, rather than see, that she was shaking her head. "No," she said softly. "No, I don't want to do that with you so much any more."

"Do what?"

"You know. Unicorns. Maidens and knights. Staring at noses, even. I don't want to pretend anymore. You make me want to be real."

                                            (p. 76)

To be real. The rest of Annie on My Mind examines what reality is for two young women coming to grips with their sexuality and trying to find models around which to structure their lives.

Allan Cuseo's study ends with 1982 and Nancy Garden's novel was published in 1982—a year which is considered by some to have been the peak year for publishing of young adult novels dealing with homosexuality. When I finished reading both works, I reasoned that in the wake of multiculturalism, with its emphasis on diversity in the curriculum, both the treatment of and market for young adult fiction dealing with homosexual themes, issues, and characters might have opened up.

A few years ago I attended the National Council of Teachers of English conference in Seattle. My self-imposed task while there was to find out from publisher's representatives what, if any, titles they had forthcoming dealing with adolescent homosexuality. By the end of two days I had acquired only six titles but did have the dubious pleasure of having embarrassed a variety of publisher's representatives simply by asking my questions. More often than not my queries were met with averted eyes and lowered voices. One representative assured me that her company was seriously interested in AIDS education, but, no, they had no titles available at this time and none planned for the near future. Another representative told me that this was an area that needed to be explored, but again his company had no titles to offer. Only once was my question met with any enthusiasm and that was when I asked it of an author of just such a novel who was delighted to sell it to me for a mere $14.95, signed at no extra charge. I snapped it up, grateful as much for a title (albeit a 1988 one) as to have someone look me directly in the eyes.

Unfortunately, of the titles I found, only The Arizona Kid by Ron Korteges contains a major character who is gay, and this character is the main character's uncle. The other novels fit into what I consider a third category, one which, I think, today dominates the market. In this category, gay characters and gay issues are often depicted sympathetically. In Marilyn Levy's Rumors and Whispers, for example, the protagonist, Sarah Alexander, has to work through a series of conflicts, ranging from being the new girl in her school to having a teacher with AIDS to having a brother who disrupts her family's fragile peace with the announcement that he is gay. This brother, beset with his own difficulties, still helps Sarah work through her various problems. In Jesse Maguire's Getting It Right, the reader encounters a group of teenagers trying to accept the homosexuality of one of their peers. And in Jacqueline Woodson's The Dear One, the protagonist, an upper-middle-class young African-American girl, is nurtured by two friends of her mother, a lesbian couple of long standing. Though the positive presentation of homosexual characters and themes in novels for young adults might be viewed as a progress of sorts, it is important to note that in all the above novels the homosexual characters are very much off center stage. As a consequence, the presence of homosexual characters and the issues associated with their lives are of secondary concern in these novels. The implications of this positioning for young gay readers are twofold. First, they learn from reading these books that their issues and concerns are only of secondary importance. And second, they learn what it means to the teenager who is struggling with that identity primarily from the perspective of a heterosexual.

Lest I end this paper on too gloomy a note, I should tell you that at this same NCTE Convention several years ago, I occasionally left the exhibition hall to prowl through bookstores. At these I would again ask for young adult fiction dealing with homosexuality. At one store a woman, who looked amazingly like my mother (that is to say, disapproving) thrust a newly published hardback into my hands. It was Lark in the Morning (1991), a new Nancy Garden novel. Supporting Bonnie Zimmerman's contention that lesbian fiction has "gone beyond the coming out novel" (p. 210), Garden's new work combines detective work, adventure, and romance, all of which are engaged in by seventeen-year-old Gillian and her lover, Suzanne. Delighted to have found this book, I said, too loudly apparently, "Great—do you have any more like these?" The clerk, pursed her lips, glared, and hissed, "No—isn't that enough?" The answer to her question, of course is, no.

In our culture, one out of ten adolescents struggles with what it means to be homosexual. If we as teachers truly believe that literature helps students understand themselves and the issues they face, then we have an obligation to provide our gay students with the same resources as we do other minority students. Nancy Garden's novels, and Marion Dane Bauer's anthology of short stories, Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence (HarperCollins), are acknowledgements of this need and responsibility, and are hopeful signs, but they only begin to address a major need.

Works Cited

Bauer, Marion Dane, ed. Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence. HarperCollins, 1995.

Bunn, Scott. Just Hold On. Delacorte, 1982.

Cuseo, Allan. Homosexual Characters in Young Adult Novels: A Literary Analysis, 1969–82. The Scarecrow Press, 1992.

Donovan, John. I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip. Harper and Row, 1969.

Futcher, Jane. Crush. Little Brown, 1981.

Garden, Nancy. Annie on My Mind. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982.

―――――――. Lark in the Morning. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991.

Guy, Rosa. Ruby. Viking, 1976

Hanlon, Emily. The Wing and the Flame. Bradbury, 1981.

Hautzig, Deborah. Hey Dollface. Greenwillow Books, 1978.

Holland, Isabelle. The Man without a Face. J. B. Lippincott, 1972.

Hulse, Larry. Just the Right Amount of Wrong. Harper and Row, 1982.

Jenkins, Christine. "Heartthrobs and Heartbreaks: A Guide to Young Adult Books with Gay Themes," Out/Look: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, Fall 1988, pp. 82-92.

Kesselman, Janice. Flick. Harper and Row, 1983.

Kortege, Ron. The Arizona Kid. Little, Brown, 1988.

L'Engle, Madeleine. The Small Rain. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.

―――――――. A House Like a Lotus. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.

Levy, Marilyn. Rumors and Whispers. Fawcett Juniper, 1991.

Maguire, Jesse. Getting It Right. Ivy Books, 1991.

Rees, David. In the Tent. Alyson Press, 1979.

Rinaldi, Ann. The Good Side of My Heart. Holiday House, 1987.

Snyder, Ann, and Louis Pelletier. The Truth about Alex. New American Library, 1981.

St. George, Judith. Call Me Margo. G. P. Putnam's, 1981.

Tolan, Stephanie S. The Last of Eden. Bantam, 1980.

Woodson, Jacqueline. The Dear One. Dell, 1993.

Zimmerman, Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969–89. Beacon Press, 1991.

Roberta Seelinger Trites (essay date fall 1998)

SOURCE: Trites, Roberta Seelinger. "Queer Discourse and the Young Adult Novel: Repression and Power in Gay Male Adolescent Literature." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 23, no. 3 (fall 1998): 143-51.

[In the following essay, Trites utilizes the theories of philosopher Michel Foucault to discuss how discourse is used to maintain the uneasy balance between freedom and repression in young adult novels with gay male protagonists.]

When I teach adolescent literature at the college level, my students often assume that problem novels will have a bibliotherapeutic effect on the teenage reader. Their assumptions especially apply to books that treat controversial sexual topics. After teaching Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat (1989), which depicts two boys in a committed relationship, I often receive comments on papers such as, "This book will really help gay teenagers" or "After reading this book, maybe more people will be more tolerant of the gay community." And indeed, books about gay male teenagers superficially seem to promise the reader freedom from past constraints, freedom from continued repression, freedom from narrow-minded discourse—but simultaneously, such books often undermine that alleged liberation, as if the very existence of the genre gay YA literature depended on repression. And indeed, the existence of the genre very well may depend on this double-voicedness, for mainstream YA publishing still acts as if it were threatened by the idea of homosexuality. As a result, in gay young adult literature, homosexuality seems at once enunciated and repressed. I feel that if I can help my students identify the mixed messages in books about gay male adolescents, I can help them become more nuanced readers who are aware of the intricacies of language as it positions the reader—and, more importantly, they will learn to identify the complexities inherent in social constructions of sexuality in general and of homosexuality specifically.

Much of the problem can be defined in terms of the theories that French literary philosopher Michel Foucault espoused and for which he was in turn criticized. In contrast to "sex," which is a purely biological act, Foucault defines "sexuality" as a discursive construct (History 68-69), although his critics have decried the ways that this definition denies the pre-discursive physicality of human sexuality.¹ Such YA novels about gay males as John Donovan's I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip. (1969), Sandra Scoppet-tone's Trying Hard to Hear You (1974), Aidan Chambers's Dance on My Grave (1982), and Block's Baby Be-Bop (1995) are very Foucauldian in their tendency to privilege the discourse of homosexuality over the physical sexual acts of gay men, defining homosexuality more rhetorically than physically. Themselves entirely discursive, these novels fall prey to the same chicken and egg dilemma that plagues Foucault's work: which comes first, the body or the word? In and of itself, this paradox would not necessarily be problematic except that all too often the rhetoric these texts employ to construct gay discourse is more repressive than it is liberating.

Foucault's The History of Sexuality demonstrates that simultaneously repressing and liberating sexuality is central to the ways that Western cultures define themselves. He suggests that far from being on the verge of being liberated by discourses of sexuality, Western cultures are dependent on a definition of sexuality as repressed. Western discourses about sex are repressed, he argues, because any number of institutions from the Catholic Church to Freudian analysis have gone to ingenious lengths to create monumental rhetorical systems (such as confession as sacrament or psychoanalysis) that depend on people talking about sex. The result is a social obsession with sexuality: "What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret" (History 35).

Foucault also thinks of human sexuality in terms of two things: discourse and power. He asserts that in Western culture, sexuality depends on a power/repression dynamic: sex is so powerful that it must be but cannot be controlled. In contrast to Eastern cultures that base their attitudes toward sexuality on notions of pleasure to create an ars sexualis, Western culture has developed an entire scientia sexualis founded upon the relationship between discourse and knowledge to increase the (forbidden) pleasure of sexuality, Foucault observes, and this "regime of power-knowledge-pleasure … sustains discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world" (History 11). This relationship between power and knowledge is grounded in discourse: "Indeed, it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together" (History 100).² As a result, the specific pleasure of toying with the discourse of sexuality results in the desire to at once control and exploit sexuality:

We have at least invented a different kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing that truth, of discovering and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of captivating and capturing others by it, of confiding it in secret, of luring it out in the open—the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure.

                                     (History 71)

These two beliefs—that the power/repression dynamic surrounding sexuality has led to the creation of a discourse that pretends to cloak but actually exposes sexuality and that knowledge and pleasure are woven inextricably into the fabric of that discourse—leads Foucault to theorize that Western ideas about sexuality depend on notions of deviance to define what is allegedly mainstream or normal. Homosexuality, of course, is one of the many aspects of sexuality that Western institutions such as the church and psychoanalysis have defined as abnormal in an attempt to control the unwieldy force that is human sexuality (Foucault, History 42-44). But because power and repression are such fluid constructs, eventually "homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or 'naturality' be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified" (History 101).³ As Foucault explains discursive constructs such as sexuality, "There is not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it … there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy" (History 101-2). This, then, is what I wish to explore in this analysis: how queer discourse in young adult literature creates contradictory discourses because of the way sexuality is defined by the relationship between power, knowledge, and pleasure.⁴

The male adolescent character who has sexual contact with another male in a YA novel illustrates clearly the Foucauldian concept that sexuality is informed by the relationship between discourse and power. The pattern becomes especially clear if we trace the progression of gay YA literature using four prototypical novels, each representative of certain historical developments in queer discourse. Donovan's I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip, the first American YA novel to acknowledge homosexuality openly, reflects 1960s liberal attitudes about the cultural need to discuss topics considered taboo, such as homosexuality. Scoppettone's Trying Hard to Hear You has a clearer agenda of destigmatizing homosexuality: the book has a tone reminiscent of 1970s "I'm OK—You're OK" rhetoric. While not as seminal as I'll Get There, it is arguably the best gay male representative of the plethora of early problem novels dealing with teenage sexuality, such as Paul Zindel's My Darling, My Hamburger (1969) and Judy Blume's Forever (1975). By the 1980s, gay movements in the U.K. and the U.S. made possible a book such as Chambers's Dance on My Grave, in which the protagonist's homosexuality is self-defined as neither a choice nor a problem. This book is remarkable in both its uses of sexuality and its uses of discourse. Finally, Block's Baby Be-Bop (1995) reflects the darker rhetorical tones of post-AIDS gay culture; the sense of playfulness present in Chambers's novel is noticeably absent in Baby Be-Bop. Many more books with gay male characters were published in the 1990s than in previous decades, but Baby Be-Bop foregrounds for the reader how much of sexuality is discursively defined. Taken together, I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip, Trying Hard to Hear You, Dance on My Grave, and Baby Be-Bop provide a progression of test cases that demonstrate what has changed and what has not changed over the last thirty years in the discursive treatment of homosexuality in the YA novel.

While these novels indicate that some sort of historical progression has occurred, they still have some marked similarities in the way that each of them uses a gay character to illustrate how the pain and pleasure inherent in human sexuality are discursively formed. Together, pain and pleasure fashion a matrix of power in which each of the gay characters in these novels functions, and the degree of physical pleasure the character experiences is directly related to the contemporary social discourses of homosexuality at work in the character's culture. In other words, in the earlier works, where the discourse surrounding homosexuality is predictably negative, the gay characters are disempowered and experience little physical pleasure as a result of their orientation. In later books, where the role of discourse in fashioning sexuality is acknowledged, gay teenagers are likely to have more power, more knowledge, and more physical pleasure, although this last is still lamentably self-censored by the authors of these books. What all of these novels demonstrate, then, are the limits of queer discourse at work in adolescent literature: as a group they show how a genre can become more aware of a social issue without necessarily providing the reader with transformative experiences.

Christine Jenkins's "Heartthrobs and Heartbreaks: A Guide to Young Adult Books with Gay Themes" (1988) is an annotated bibliography of gay and lesbian novels published from 1969 to 1988. Although Jenkins does not analyze discursive tensions in these novels, she does classify the stereotypes to be found in the first twenty years of gay YA literature as she sees them: the stereotypical YA gay male is financially secure, attractive, and white; lives on one of the coasts; loves the arts; has a troubled family; and has difficulty recovering from the loss of his first love. His sex acts are rarely described with any kind of detail; that is, he is often denied physical pleasure (82-85).⁵

Jenkins cites Donovan's I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip as the first YA novel to treat gay issues. This novel certainly fulfills all of the stereotypes Jenkins identifies, plus a few more, not the least of which is that the protagonist, Davy, has an overbearing, alcoholic mother who does not understand him. In other words, his family is troubled almost entirely because of his mother's narcissism; the novel implies that Davy's mother has driven him to engage in homosexuality.

Largely negative rhetoric about homosexuality determines the discourse about Davy's sexuality in this novel. Even when Davy is describing in first-person narration the events that he has initiated with his lover, a boy named Douglas Altschuler, he seems removed from them, as if the situation is so ineffable that he cannot define it for himself. He clearly feels a pleasure that he is uncomfortable identifying because the rhetoric frightens him even more than the physical sensations do:

I look at Altschuler, and we smile, sort of. And I'm not quite sure what happens now. I think we both intend to get up and chase after [my dog], but there we are lying on the floor … not wanting to get up at all. I close my eyes. I feel unusual. Lying there. Close to Altschuler. I don't want to get up. I want to stay lying there. I feel a slight shiver and shake from it. Not cold though. Unusual. So I open my eyes. Altschuler is still lying there too. He looks at me peculiarly, and I'm sure I look at him the same way…. I think that this unusual feeling I have will end, but in a minute [we] are lying there, our heads together. I guess I kiss Altshuler and he kisses me. It isn't like that dumb kiss I gave Mary Lou Gerrity in Massachusetts before I left. It just happens. And when it stops we sit up and turn away from each other….

"Boy," I say. "What was that all about?"

"I don't know," Altschuler answers.

                                       (142-43)

The boys avoid each other's eyes; then they pretend to box to show they are "very tough. I mean a couple of guys like Altschuler and me don't have to worry about being queer or anything like that. Hell, no" (143). The only word Davy can grasp to describe his pleasure is "unusual" his refusal to identify his pleasure corresponds to his refusal to accept the knowledge that he may be and Altschuler certainly is gay. Davy chooses to identify being gay with what is to him an entirely pejorative term, "queer." He simply cannot perceive or express homosexuality in terms of physical or emotional pleasure, demonstrating Foucault's principle that Western cultures stigmatize or repress sexuality as a means of controlling it.

The boys eventually spend the night together and apparently have sexual contact that the text, refusing to give the reader any knowledge of the matter, does not describe. The only textual statement occurs in Davy's narration: "I have a new way of looking at Altschuler because of what we did together last night. Don't get me wrong, I'm not ashamed. There was nothing wrong about it, I keep telling myself" (152). Davy's reassurance to himself that he is not "queer" exemplifies this text's tendency to employ negative gay rhetoric. Moreover, that the sex act is interstitial seems significant; in refusing to give the reader any knowledge that the sex act might carry with it any type of physical excitement or emotional joy, this aporia reinforces the text's negative rhetorical utterances. To be sure, there is nothing unusual in a novel published for teenagers in the 1960s refusing to describe genital sexual contact; even heterosexual YA novels were unlikely to do so until the 1970s. What is significant here is that the refusal to give the reader knowledge of the character's pleasure demonstrates how sexuality is far more a matter of discourse than of action in the YA novel. I'll Get There represses the possibility of pleasure and substitutes negative rhetoric in a discursive construction that might de-legitimize the gay reader's orientation.

Davy clearly knows something about his own sexual pleasure, but the text communicates it only in terms of his emotional pain by having the boy describe his actions using homophobic rhetoric. For example, on another afternoon, the boys get drunk and fall asleep with their arms across each other's backs. Davy's mother finds them and keeps pressing to know what has happened:

"Nothing … unnatural … happened this afternoon with you and Douglas, did it?"

"No," I say.

"Or ever?"

"What do you mean unnatural?"

"I want the truth, Davy."

I back away from Mother. "What's so important about the truth? Why is it so important to know every little thing that happens in my life?"

Mother groans.

                          (162; ellipses Donovan's)

The rhetorical positioning of homosexuality as "unnatural" constitutes yet another example of homophobic discourse in this novel: while Davy's response to his mother indicates an awareness that "unnatural" may be a negotiable term rather than an absolute, admitting knowledge of his own sexual practices by naming them would cause him far more pain than pleasure.

Davy's father also confronts the boy about his "crush" on Altschuler, and Davy again refuses to identify himself as gay, asserting, "I'm not queer or anything, if that's what you think" (166). Like his exwife, Davy's father uses euphemisms for homosexuality, and he ducks responsibility for (and knowledge of) his homophobia by pinning it to his ex-wife's fears: "I don't want to make a big case out of this. Your mother does though. She's an emotional person. She gets upset easily. She thinks you will end up … well, I don't know what lengths her imagination will carry her to" (166; ellipsis Donovan's). The text briefly attempts to switch rhetorical strategies when Davy admits that "we only made out once," and his father laughs and tells him that boys often "play around in a lot of ways when they are growing up" (166). But the textual attempt at some sort of tolerance immediately explodes when Davy's father adds that his son should not "get involved in some special way of life which will close off other ways of life" to him (166). Not only does Davy's father blame the mother for the pressure Davy now feels, but he also propagates the rhetoric that David Bergman cites as a common discursive construct of homosexuality: the misconception that homosexuality is a "phase" that the adolescent can outgrow if he so chooses (30).⁶

The final pages of I'll Get There are as direct as the novel ever gets about homosexuality being a viable and permanent life option, with one significant problem: while Altschuler refuses to feel shame about being gay, Davy still rejects the possibility.

"Look, Altschuler … I think we have to talk about this queer business…. That was a very peculiar night, wasn't it? I don't want you to think I've done that before."

"OK," Altschuler says.

"Is that all you can say? I mean, didn't it upset you?"

"Sure it did. But it didn't feel wrong. Did it to you?… Go ahead and feel guilty if you want to. I don't."

"You don't really?"

"No," Altschuler says.

"I guess the important thing is not to do it again," I say.

"I don't care. If you think it's dirty or something like that, I wouldn't do it again. If I were you."

                                            (188)

Altschuler's words are important because he makes no promise to go straight. The text implies that he knows he could not even if he wanted to.⁷ But Davy's shame seems to outweigh the strength of Altschuler's self-acceptance, so that the final discourse affirms homophobic 1960s rhetoric. As a product of its culture, the novel demonstrates well how homosexuality is already discursively defined in the YA novel.

Scoppettone's Trying Hard to Hear You provides a similar example in the context of homophobic 1970s rhetoric when it quotes from David Reuben's Every-thing You Always Wanted to Know about Sex—But Were Afraid to Ask. Camilla Crawford, the novel's protagonist, reads Reuben's book in an attempt to understand her best friend, Jeff, when she discovers that he is gay.⁸ Camilla finds a revealing passage in Reuben's book: "Basically all homosexuals are alike … looking for love where there can be no love and looking for sexual satisfaction where there can be no lasting satisfaction" (qtd. 200). Superficially, Scop-pettone's narrative seems to reject Reuben's discourse when Camilla's mother (a practicing psychotherapist) tells her the book is "trash," written only "to make a buck" (209). Mrs. Crawford later affirms the text's explicit ideology when she says,

Homosexuality—and that includes lesbianism—has been part of life as long as there have been people and it always will be. I don't think anybody quite understands why some people are and some aren't. There are several schools of thought: some think it's environment, others think it's biological, still others think it's a choice. The uninformed and the ignorant think it's evil or even a disease…. Homosexuality and alcoholism are the two things that the medical and psychiatric professions know very little about. But I do know this … as long as you don't hurt anyone else, you have a right to be what you want to be.

                                           (252)

This discourse is a loving and supportive one, one that affirms and allows for the celebration of gay pleasure, even if it does make the mistake of equating sexual orientation with alcoholism.

Unfortunately, the rest of the novel does not participate so actively in this pro-gay discourse. Trying Hard to Hear You ostensibly condemns the fact that Jeff and his lover Phil are persecuted by all of their peers: first they are put in Coventry by their friends; then they are almost physically tortured when a crowd of Jeff's former friends tie him to stakes on the beach, beat him, and threaten to tar and feather him for committing "a crime against nature" (221). Eventually, all of this upsets Phil so much that he decides to prove his virility by having sex with a female. To work up nerve to do the deed, he gets drunk and drives into a tree, killing himself and the girl. The novel ends with Jeff's leaving town to go live in Manhattan among more understanding people. Only one paragraph in the denouement is dedicated to Jeff's new life: "He's met someone he likes a lot. He says that the boy, Richard, will never take Phil's place … but then, no one should ever take anyone's place. He thinks they'll have a nice relationship and he's planning to bring him home for Thanks-giving," even though Jeff never has come out to his parents (264).

Furthermore, Jeff does not participate in his own discourse. Virtually everything that is said about his sexuality occurs in indirect discourse. After Phil's death, Jeff tells Camilla, "It isn't fair. Phil never did anything to anybody. All he did was love me. I still don't see how that hurt anybody else" (248). But even that statement comes through the filter of Camilla's narration. The reader never gains knowledge of the pleasure of Phil and Jeff's love for each other, not least because at the point of the novel in which Camilla describes their relationship, she still doesn't understand that they are gay. In fact, they are outed at a party when they are discovered kissing in the bushes; the scene that follows is sordid and humiliating for the two gay characters, and Camilla shares the crowd's outrage, screaming, "Tell them it isn't true" (184). This novel is true to its era in trying to condemn anti-gay bias while being unable to give the reader any information that might imply anything about the pleasures of same-sex emotional intimacy.

Camilla eventually grows to accept Jeff's sexual orientation, but he has served as the object of her growth. In fact, Trying Hard to Hear You is one of the books Kirk Fuoss cites when he generalizes that "homosexuals are more often than not presented as characters in someone else's story than narrators of their own life stories" in gay YA literature (163). Jeff himself is not allowed to grow. And it is not his knowledge that matters in this book, it is Camilla's. That Jeff is an object for other people's pleasure becomes most apparent when he decides after Phil's death that he will still participate in the summer musical even though the teenagers in the show are largely responsible for his lover's death. The text characterizes Jeff's most noble action as his ability to forgive his friends because, no matter what, the show must go on. Neither Camilla nor the text she narrates ever recognize the nobility in Jeff's willingness to love someone, even though that love marks him as Other within his culture. And as a result, the text denies the possibility of queer pleasure, even though it purportedly tries to uphold it. Jeff's sexuality is both discursively defined and discursively denied.

Chambers's Dance on My Grave, in contrast, uses discourse that celebrates gay pleasure to a certain degree. But as its title indicates, the book is more about death than about homosexuality, despite its Library of Congress designation, "[1. Homosexuality—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction]." Being gay is not Hal Robinson's problem (in the sense of the typical problem novel, which this book most emphatically is not); grief over the death of Barry Gorman, his lover, is. Nevertheless, the pain and pleasure of sexuality are discursive issues in this novel because Hal is a character fascinated with language.

The starting point of Dance on My Grave is Hal's explanation to a court-appointed social worker in his hometown, a British seaside resort named Southend, about why he was arrested for desecrating Barry's grave. Hal and his lover made an oath before Barry's death that whoever survived would dance on the other's grave. Hal writes the story both as an explanation to his social worker and to mitigate his grief. Several passages demonstrate his awareness that he—and everyone—is discursively formed: he discusses with one of his friends that "we invent the people we know…. Perhaps we even invent ourselves" (246). The epigraph from the first chapter is a quotation from Slaughterhouse-Five that focuses the reader's attention on this point: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." Moreover, Hal tells his social worker that the process of writing his story has been more important than actually living it: "I have become my own character…. Writing the story is what has changed me; not having lived through the story" (221).

Hal knows that discourse is power. And he also knows that discourse and knowledge are inseparable. As Fuoss notes, Hal is Foucauldian in recognizing that "desire … not only precedes but also exceeds language" (171). Hal is frustrated by his inability to put his knowledge of his desire for Barry into words. In the early stage of his romance with Barry, Hal comments that verbalizing their feelings reifies their relationship; it only becomes real once they have discussed it: "knowledge is power. Once somebody knows that about you—knows how you really feel about them—once you've declared yourself, then they know about you, have power over you. Can make claims on you" (83). It is the act of enuncia-tion—not the act of sex—that gives the relationship ontological status.

Sex with Barry does bring Hal physical and emotional pleasure, however, and the discourse of the novel is direct in communicating that fact. Falling in love with Barry satisfies the "desire for a bosom buddy" Hal has felt since he was seven years old (44). Chambers does not shy away from describing the boys' first kiss or their frequent caresses, although in keeping with the unwritten publishing codes that dominate the production of YA literature, the adolescents' genital sex acts are described as interstitially here as in I'll Get There. But at least Hal's euphemisms are humorous; when they finally have genital contact, Hal quips, "[Barry] gave me a present from Southend. Wish you were here?" (149). Even so, Hal implies that the emotional pleasure he takes in their relationship is far more important to him than are the sex acts. He lovingly describes their conversations and their activities:

All I knew for certain was that I couldn't get enough of him. I wanted to be with him all the time. And yet when I was with him that wasn't enough either. I wanted to look at him and touch him and have him touch me and hear him talk and tell him things and do things together with him. All the time. Day and night.

                                        (155)

But eventually Barry reacts to Hal's obsessive pleasure in their relationship, telling Hal: "It's not what we do together that you want. It's me. All of me. All for yourself. And that's too heavy for me, Hal. I don't want to be owned, and I don't want to be sucked dry. Not by anyone. Ever" (179). They are Barry's last words to his lover; within an hour Barry dies in a motorcycle accident. Hal's pleasure has been Barry's pain; now that pleasure is transformed into Hal's own pain.

One major purpose of this book is to communicate that obsessive love is not healthy, regardless of one's sexual orientation. But Chambers also communicates both that sexuality is inseparable from a pleasure/pain dynamic and that discourse is power. It seems to me that Chambers knows his Foucault well. Nevertheless, Dance on My Grave contains an almost Calvinistic series of messages about homosexuality. For example, Hal spends more time describing his first lover as "cactal and overpowering" than he does describing his own physical or emotional pleasure. And even though Hal never expresses remorse, shame, or even confusion about being gay, he is still forced to dress as a girl and claim to be Barry's girlfriend if he wants to see Barry's body in the morgue; he is still denied a photograph of his lover by Barry's mother, who—not incidentally—has an "overactive Id" (35); he is still arrested for fulfilling his oath to his lover when he dances on Barry's grave. And worst of all, his father almost certainly perceives his sexual orientation as pathological: "I can hear in the tone of [my father's] voice: he was saying, 'What I think you need the doctor can't do anything about'" (240). Perhaps these situations reflect what it meant to be gay in the 1980s, but it does seem to me unfortunate that despite Chambers's affirmative rhetoric about being gay, he still focuses more on Hal's pain than on his pleasure. But at least Hal denies neither the reader nor himself knowledge about how central his orientation is to his identity.

Like Dance on My Grave, Block's Baby Be-Bop constructs sexuality as a complicated discursive process, but then, given how metafictional all of Block's novels are, this is no real surprise. The story is a prequel to Weetzie Bat; in it, Weetzie's friend Dirk comes to understand and accept his sexuality. Dirk and his best friend, Pup, love each other deeply, but Pup homophobically rejects his obvious feelings for Dirk and abandons their friendship. Dirk—like so many gay YA protagonists—feels far more pain than pleasure in this novel, although he never denies his knowledge of the pleasure he takes in his orientation.

After Pup's rejection, Dirk falls into a tailspin that culminates in a painful near-death experience; as he lies ill, the genie in his grandmother's lamp (who later grants Weetzie her three wishes in Weetzie Bat) shows Dirk his forebears' stories. He learns that his great-grandmother had his grandmother Fifi out of wedlock; he learns about Fifi's love for her husband, and of his own parents' consuming passion for each other. Each of these three embedded narratives is a symphony of the relationship between pain and pleasure for those who love: Fifi's husband, for example, knows he is dying, so he directs all of his love to her and ignores their son, who subsequently grows up not knowing how to love his son until after his own death. The ghost of Dirk's father urges the boy to be different, not to give up on life (or his sexuality) when it causes him pain:

"I want you to fight. I love you, buddy. I want you not to be afraid."

"But I'm gay," Dirk said. "Dad, I'm gay."

"I know you are, buddy," Dirby said. And his lullaby eyes sang with love. "Do you know about the Greek Gods, probably Walt Whitman—first beat father, Oscar Wilde, Ginsberg, even, maybe, your number one hero? You can't be afraid."

                                          (86)

Dirk is the only character in any of these novels able to come out to his parents without shame, an important discursive act of enunciation, but the power of his father's acceptance is somewhat weakened by the fact that Dirk can come out to his father only after the man is dead.

Despite this anomaly, the novel promises Dirk happiness: the genie shows him the future and the hope of his relationship with Duck. Dirk's pleasure with Duck may be deferred, but at least he will ostensibly have it eventually: "When they first kiss, there on the beach, they will kneel at the edge of the Pacific and say a prayer of thanks, sending all the stories of love inside them out in a fleet of bottles all across the oceans of the world" (103-4). Dirk and Duck's love—and their sexual pleasure—is treated as sacred in this text.

In the most metafictional passage of the text, Dirk asks the genie why he appeared. The genie answers:

Think about the word destroy…. Do you know what it is? De-story. Destroy. Destory. You see. And restore. That's re-story. Do you know that only two things have been proven to help survivors of the Holocaust? Massage is one. Telling their story is another. Being touched and touching. Telling your story is touching. It sets you free.

                                          (104)

The ye-shall-know-the-truth-and-the-truth-shall-set-you-free theme is blatant, but in a genre that tends to suppress positive homosexual discourses, this openness is refreshing.

Nevertheless, the pain-pleasure matrix surrounding being gay is still complex in this narrative. Dirk's father, for instance, has characterized homosexuality in terms of fear, in terms of repression, not in terms of passion or pleasure or freedom. The most important message he has for Dirk is not to fear. While that may be a message all adolescents—and especially gay/lesbian ones—need to hear, it is not exactly a joyous proclamation or even very positive rhetoric. Moreover, although the text spends much time affirming Dirk's orientation, Baby Be-Bop never does show him engaged in a loving relationship; readers have to refer back to Weetzie Bat before they can read about Dirk and Duck's relationship. The only gay male sex acts enacted in this novel occur in Dirk's vision of his future with Duck; before Duck meets Dirk, "he never talked to the men he touched in bathrooms and parks and cars. Is this what it means to be gay? Duck wondered. He missed the clean, quiet beaches of Santa Cruz," even though he has left Santa Cruz because it is such a homophobic community (100-1). Block sends a clear message that gay sex is not acceptable unless it is accompanied by love; she seems to be condoning what Foucault refers to as the institution of "Sexuality" having been devised to regulate the physical act of "Sex" in West-ern culture (Power/Knowledge 190; History 106). Human sexuality explored within a relationship is far more acceptable in this novel than the simple act of sex by itself is. But since sexual love can be painful and pleasurable whether it is homosexual or heterosexual, perhaps Block is simply being realistic.

The rhetoric begins to seem ominous, however, when the genie compares homosexuality to the Holocaust, a moment reminiscent of Mrs. Crawford's comparing homosexuality to alcoholism in Trying Hard to Hear You and Hal's father implying that his son needs to be "cured" in Dance on My Grave. Block, Scoppettone, and Chambers have fallen into the language of pathology: alcoholism is a disease; Holocaust survivors are victims of the largest-scale sadism ever perpetrated. Bergman notes that "all three of the ways in which patriarchy has conceived of homosexual-ity—as sin, crime, and disease—place it within frameworks that deny it permanence since sins may be overcome, crimes avoided, and diseases cured" (37). Chambers's, Scoppettone's, and Block's rhetorical choices imply the perpetuation of such patriarchal notions even while all three of them try to communicate to readers that being homosexual is not a disease, not a simple matter of choice, not a matter of victimization.

Gay YA literature implies to readers like my students that it has a bibliotherapeutic intent: readers—gay or not—should feel a sense of catharsis or validation or acceptance of homosexuality after reading the novel. But the genre has a well-entrenched tradition of delegitimizing its own agenda. All too often, gay YA literature parallels the cultural traditions of repression that have long stigmatized homosexuality. But in an ironic twist, in being unable to avoid the duality of repression and liberation, gay YA novels do consistently normalize gay sexuality in at least one way. Foucault claims that our culture is unable to separate sexuality from discourses of pain and pleasure. In that sense, then, I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip, Trying Hard to Hear You, Dance on My Grave, and Baby Be-Bop do in some way affirm gay sexuality, for all four books depict it in the discursive matrix of pleasure and pain typical of any description of human sexuality.

What needs restor(y)ing here, then, is how we look at queer discourse in these novels. As Fuoss points out, "Because YA texts dealing with homosexuality are embedded in a complex network of power relations, no single agent of power is exclusively responsible for the deployment of strategies" that YA authors use in developing the genre (171). But the discourse in these novels does determine the issues of power surrounding homosexuality; discourse all too often is power here: "Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it" (Foucault, History 101). It is not so much the affirmation of homosexuality that matters in these novels, or even the incipient delegitimization. Rather, it is the fluid discourse between these two poles, the way knowledge of homosexuality produces both pain and pleasure, that needs investigation; it is the power of discourse to determine these characters' sense of sexuality and even sense of self that is most likely to affect the adolescent reader.

The four characters who are exploring their sexuality in these novels do so discursively. That is, the conversations and the word choices they use to define their orientation matter far more than their actions do. Sex, after all, is largely implied in these novels.⁹ Given that literary characters are always already and only discursive constructs, the discursive nature of homosexuality in these novels may be unavoidable. But it is important to note that these novels parallel Foucault's flawed conception of sexuality as primarily discursive. One problem with defining an orientation discursively is that it may imply that individuals can choose a different set of discourses and become straight. Denying the corporality of homosexuality divorces it from pleasure, thus disempowering gay sexuality.

All four of these gay YA novels rely on discourse as a form of power; the two more influenced by postmodernism—Dance on My Grave and Baby Be-Bop—directly communicate to the reader that power is defined by discourse. Indeed, these books all assume at some level a premise central to AIDS awareness: silence equals death. Words equal empowerment. As a genre, then, gay YA literature necessitates the study of discourse because it is frequently predicated on the notion that human sexuality is determined by discourse and that discourse is power. In other words, Foucault's work is most useful to us in the study of gay YA literature if we use his theories to understand the ways in which the discourse of sexuality in Western tradition has influenced the depiction of gay sexuality. Even if the genre has developed a sense of self-awareness, its largely negative rhetoric still denies the validation one might wish to find in YA novels about being gay.

Notes

I gratefully acknowledge my students Vanessa Wayne Lee and Tim Ballard, who brought to my attention matters of bibliography and readings of gay character as object. I also extend my thanks to Kenneth Kidd, whose thoughtful comments helped me to strengthen this essay.

1. As Kate Soper notes: "It is one thing to argue that we do not have experience of the body other than as symbolically and culturally mediated; it is quite another to suggest that bodies are 'constructed' out of cultural forces in the same manner that, say, telephones are put together" (32). She points out two important differences: bodies exist physically before any cultural act has shaped them, and unlike telephones, bodies are never completely constructed. They continue to change and grow throughout time, which is where Foucault's point about cultural influences becomes, of course, most important (32). See also Bailey 116; Bartky 64; Ramazanoglu 4-8; McKay 3, 11-47; Weeks 223.

2. In Foucault's later works, he defines all power as enabling in the sense that it is a social imperative and that it invariably produces something: "By power, I do not mean 'Power' as a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state. By power, I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domination exerted by one group over another, a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body…. It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another … and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies" (History 92-93). Foucault, moreover, identifies power as ubiquitous: "Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere" (History 93).

3. Although Judith Butler has criticized Foucault for minimizing the importance of sexual difference (xxii, 31), queer theorist Jonathan Dollimore notes that at least Foucault's identification of homosexuality as a discursive construct was one of the factors that helped Euro-American culture move beyond thinking of being gay only in terms of binaries like "normal" and "deviant" (179).

4. Although discourse about sexuality in adolescent literature often deconstructs itself in shifting depictions of the power/knowledge/pleasure triad, I focus here on gay male YA literature because it provides a clear-cut example of discursively defined sexuality being at once repressed and enunciated. Moreover, the discursive construction of power/knowledge/pleasure in lesbian and heterosexual YA novels would require independent studies, largely because of how differently "choice" is handled in those novels. Heterosexual YA novels such as Judy Blume's Forever (1975) assume that the only choice surrounding sex is whether to have it; lesbian novels foreground the relationship between identity and sexual choice even more than gay male YA novels do (see Vanessa Wayne Lee's article in this issue).

5. I might add that he is often an only child: none of the four principal gay characters in the novels under discussion here has brothers or sisters, which reinforces the depiction of their isolation.

6. While many people regard sexual experience on a continuum that acknowledges the possibility that a gay crush in adolescence does not necessarily define one's orientation permanently, Bergman laments how often the construct of temporary homosexuality is used to delegitimize gay culture: the assumption is that if teenagers can "get over" their adolescent crushes, then gay men should "just get over it," too.

7. Bergman cites four concepts that structure how gay people refer to themselves: "otherness, genuineness, permanence, and equality" (19). In other words, gay people often affirm that they are not Other, that their relationships are genuine, that their gayness is permanent, and that they should be treated with equality. In I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip, Altschuler seems to accept these four principles, although Davy denies them.

8. Jeff too fits all of the stereotypes that Jenkins defines, and like Davy in I'll Get There, Jeff is an only child with an overbearing, narcissistic mother. The reader is again left to assume that her behavior causes her son to be gay.

9. While genital sexual contact is still more likely to be depicted interstitially than not in heterosexual YA novels, any gay YA novel as sexually explicit as, say, Blume's Forever would likely be labeled pornography: "This time Michael made it last much, much longer and I got so carried away I grabbed his backside with both hands, trying to push him deeper and deeper into me—and I spread my legs as far apart as I could—and I raised my hips off the bed—and I moved with him, again and again and again—and at last I came. I came right before Michael and as I did I made noises, just like my mother. Michael did too" (149-50). Chambers is also far more direct in his novel about adolescent heterosexuality, Breaktime (1978), than he is in Dance on My Grave.

Works Cited

Bailey, M. E. "Foucauldian Feminism: Contesting Bodies, Sexuality and Identity." Up against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism. Ed. Caroline Ramazanoglu. New York: Routledge, 1993. 99-122.

Bartky, Sandra Lee. "Foucault, Femininity and the Modernisation of Patriarchal Power." Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988. 61-86.

Bergman, David. Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991.

Block, Francesca Lia. Baby Be-Bop. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

―――――――. Weetzie Bat. New York: HarperCollins, 1989.

Blume, Judy. Forever. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990.

Chambers, Aidan. Breaktime. New York: Harper & Row, 1978.

―――――――. Dance on My Grave. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.

Dollimore, Jonathan. "The Dominant and the Deviant: A Violent Dialectic." Critical Quarterly 28 (1986): 179-92. Rpt. in Homosexual Themes in Literary Studies. Ed. Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson. New York: Garland, 1992. 87-100.

Donovan, John. I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I. Trans. Robert Hurley. 1978. New York: Vintage, 1990.

―――――――. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980.

Fuoss, Kirk. "A Portrait of the Adolescent as a Young Gay: The Politics of Male Homosexuality in Young Adult Fiction." Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality. Ed. R. Jeffrey Ringer. New York: New York UP, 1994. 159-74.

Jenkins, Christine. "Heartthrobs and Heartbreaks: A Guide to Young Adult Books with Gay Themes." Out/Look (1988): 82-92. Rpt. in Homosexual Themes in Literary Studies. Ed. Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson. New York: Garland, 1992. 180-91.

McNay, Lois. Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender, and the Self. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1992.

Ramazanoglu, Caroline. Introduction. Up against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1993. 1-25.

Scoppettone, Sandra. Trying Hard to Hear You. 1974. Los Angeles: Alyson, 1996.

Soper, Kate. "Productive Contradictions." Up against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism. Ed. Caroline Ramazanoglu. New York: Routledge, 1993. 99-122.

Weeks, Jeffrey. Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

Vanessa Wayne Lee (essay date fall 1998)

SOURCE: Lee, Vanessa Wayne. "'Unshelter Me': The Emerging Fictional Adolescent Lesbian." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 23, no. 3 (fall 1998): 152-59.

[In the following essay, Lee explores how several young adult novels represent lesbian sexual identities, dividing adolescent lesbian texts into three major subgroups—those that view lesbianism as a threat or problem, those that focus on the "formation of lesbian identities," and those that "interrogate received wisdom about lesbianism and lesbian identity."]

Terry Castle opens the fourth chapter of The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture with a discussion of how fictional representations of lesbianism have progressed from inconceivability to undertheorized reality (67). The point of contention for theorists, according to Castle, is determining what "lesbian fiction" is: who or what is represented and by whom? (67). Castle's theory of lesbian counterplotting offers a means for recognizing and evaluating adolescent lesbian fiction. This counterplot is an inversion of what Eve Kosofsky Sedg-wick sees as a triangle of male homosocial desire that connects male-female-male: "the bonding 'between' two men through, around, or over the body and soul of a woman" (68). According to Castle, the lesbian counterplot successfully subverts this triangle to depict "a female-male-female triangle, in which one of the male terms from the original triangle now occupies the in between or subjugated position of the mediator" (72, 74). The state of the counterplotting at the end of a novel determines whether it can be categorized as euphoric or dysphoric. If the female subversion maintains dominance through the end of a novel, Castle describes the counterplot as euphoric, but if the traditional male plot takes over, the novel is dysphoric.

The lesbian novel of adolescence is part of Castle's dichotomy of probable lesbian plots, the other category being "novels of postmarital experience" (85). She claims that "the lesbian novel of adolescence is almost always dysphoric in tendency" (85). The texts that she specifies are texts written for and read primarily by adults: Dorothy Strachey's Olivia (1949), Jeanette Winterson's Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Antonia White's Frost in May (1933), and Christa Winsloe's The Child Manuela (1933). But while a close look at texts on lesbian themes written both about and for adolescents reveals plenty of dysphoric counterplots—such as Rosa Guy's Ruby (1976), which "depicts female homosexual desire as a finite phenomenon … a temporary phase in a larger pattern of heterosexual Bildung" (Castle 85)—it also reveals several euphoric counterplots that defy Castle's classification of the lesbian novel of adolescence.¹

My analysis makes use of Castle's theories but requires a change in focus from viewing the "lesbian novel of adolescence" to viewing the adolescent novel of lesbianism. Of critical importance is how adolescent lesbian sexuality is articulated by adults for adolescents in popular literature and culture, because whether the adolescent reads for truth, experience, identification, or pleasure, she reads what the dominant culture deems publishable.² I propose here a critical account of how authors have textually constructed specifically adolescent lesbian sexual identities. Although Castle sees two types of counterplots in adult lesbian fiction, when the focus is shifted to adolescent lesbian fiction I find three provisional groups, in which both dysphoric and euphoric plots surface. First are texts that position lesbianism as a threat or problem. As such, they do not attend to the formation of a lesbian identity but are designed to educate audiences unfamiliar or uncomfortable with lesbianism and/or to eroticize the lesbian as a facet of male heterosexual pleasure. Texts of this sort include Deborah Hautzig's teen novel Hey, Dollface (1978), Elizabeth Levy's preteen novel Come Out Smiling (1981), and Juan Jose Campanella's made-for-cable family special More Than Friends: The Coming Out of Heidi Lieter (1995).

The second type of text focuses on the formation of lesbian identities.³ The lesbian identities represented in each text vary in depth, endurance, and scope. The texts best representing this category are Sandra Scop-pettone's Happy Endings are All Alike (1978), Nancy Garden's Annie on My Mind (1982) and Good Moon Rising (1996), and Maria Maggenti's film The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995).

Texts in the third category interrogate received wisdom about lesbianism and lesbian identity. Whereas texts in the first and second categories isolate and magnify the issue of lesbianism in their plots, the texts in the final category represent lesbianism with less clarity. Stacey Donovan's book Dive (1996) portrays adolescence as complicated and does not presume that this state is knowable or honestly representable. And in the film Heavenly Creatures (1994), writer/director Peter Jackson's interpretation of two adolescent girls' psyches turns a fact-based tale into an unnerving spectacle of adolescent lesbians whose libidos are frighteningly powerful, even murderous. Both works are less focused on sexuality than on age; they show lesbianism as part of a larger cultural landscape.

This essay's ordering of these three categories, neither definitive nor chronological, begins with texts that presuppose that their readers have something to learn from lesbian characters. Such texts can appropriately be categorized as a particular brand of "after-school-special" problem novels. Hautzig's Hey, Dollface reads more like an informational book than like an entertaining novel. Narrator Valerie Hoffman tells the story of her intimate friendship with Chloe Fox, a classmate at New York's Garfield School for Girls. Their friendship is cemented by their exclusion from Garfield's debutante crowd and from American society's standards of normal behavior and beauty in females. Hautzig's agenda includes an acceptance of romantic friendships between adolescent girls, and her characters stand as testimony that lesbian feelings are natural and that society's reactions cause undue stress, worry, and shame. In the end, her characters turn out fine in terms of hegemonic expectations because ultimately they opt for heterosexual relationships.

Valerie's idea of homosexuality develops alongside an exaggerated notion of heterosexuality, which she associates with the threat of rape in the city streets and unwelcome advances from older men. She describes the feeling she has toward Chloe as not a "bit thing, because it wasn't, not then" (76). She further explains, "I don't think I thought of it as being sexual attraction until later, or if I did I wouldn't admit it to myself. I guess I thought I wasn't capable of really having that sort of feeling" (89). As these passages indicate, Valerie assumes the distance of retrospective evaluation. She links her daydreaming to the retelling of the past. She does not think that her feelings for Chloe were a big deal "then," and she does not realize the sexual element of her daydreams "until later." With these techniques the narrator removes herself from the immediate story. Since these shifts occur when homoeroticism becomes more of a focus, Hautzig gives her readers the opportunity to back away from identifying with a demonstrably lesbian narrative voice, which may be uncomfortable for them.⁴

Nevertheless, although she gives them a way out, Hautzig invites readers to participate in the construction of meaning through narrative gaps, sophisticated metaphors, and intertextuality. For instance, the most sexual scene between the girls takes place at Chloe's house while Chloe's mother is out for the evening. Valerie comforts Chloe after a nightmare and unwittingly touches her breast, and Chloe does not make her move her hand. Val says to herself, "This isn't sick at all…. Everything I'm doing I'm doing because it's what my instinct says to do…. Is it wrong to feel good about doing this?" (127). When Mrs. Fox returns and witnesses the physical closeness, Val decides that she has done something wrong and leaves before anyone wakes up. But it is significant that Valerie and Chloe are uncertain what, if any, implications their feelings or actions have for their identity. These two young adults are dissatisfied with the strict dichotomy that their society offers them: "We do something like—what we did once…. And then there's a choice; either I'm a lesbian forever or I stop being myself with you. When I don't want either one" (146). Hey, Dollface directly challenges the dichotomy of heterosexuality/homosexuality, demanding that young adults be allowed the agency to lay their own linguistic and behavioral boundaries. The third position in Valerie and Chloe's counterplot is filled by heterosexuality, which takes the form of their families, perverted older men, male peers, and the expectation that both girls want to attract, and be attractive to, boys. Heterosexuality is the "subjugated mediator" (Castle 74) between the girls as they define sexuality for themselves. The girls gain an empowering understanding that they do not have to fit themselves into labels that are not comfortable, but the new freedom forces them to renounce a fulfilling form of closeness and stretches the counterplot to accommodate a friendship, without sex, between Valerie and Chloe and between Valerie and Chloe and their respective heterosexual partners.

Despite the narrative's dysphoric attributes, this insistence is markedly more positive than the message communicated by the next novel, Levy's Come Out Smiling, which narrates the story of Jenny Mandel, a confused teenager who has a crush on her riding instructor at summer camp, Peggy. Halfway through the summer, she observes Peggy and her new assistant, Ann, kissing. Putting together this open display of sexuality between females with her own attraction for Peggy, Jenny begins to think of herself as a developing sexual being. Come Out Smiling offers a subject position grounded in a fear of lesbianism, a position likely familiar to many pre-adolescent readers. The novel is ultimately about Jenny's transition from safe all-girl relationships to a desirable asexuality, because males are no more attractive to her than females. The crushes that the girls have on each other at camp are normalized by the text (50). Jenny's age places her in the liminal space between when these crushes are acceptable and when maturing heterosexually should dominate a girl's thoughts (51). Acting as what John Stephens terms a narrative and ideological "focalizer" (68), Jenny directs readers to both homosocial crushes and homophobia, which situates the text tensely between lesbian and heterosexual discourses.

Come Out Smiling's subject matter, tone, vocabulary, and sentence structure identify the target audience of this novel as early adolescent. The text closes itself off from reader involvement by constructing meaning through a staccato, choppy pace that mirrors the didactic narration and reinforces the text's control over meaning. The primary sources of tension are between the sexual changes of puberty and the narrator's desire to be asexual and between the innocent first-person narration and the novel's didactic agenda. In addition, one may locate coded references to normalized lesbianism in tension with heavy-handed messages of compulsory heterosexuality. The title of the book, Come Out Smiling, refers both to the process of homosexual "coming out" and to Jenny's parents' method of punishment. When Jenny acts up, she is sent to her room and told not to emerge until she can "come out smiling" (140). This double entendre denies agency both for Jenny and for lesbian readings: to come out smiling from your room involves a swallowing of personal pride, a willingness to suppress feelings, and a lack of dialogue between the figures of authority and the perceived transgressor. At the closing ceremonies of the summer camp, the girls kneel down and pray to Sacajawea, the bird woman after whom their camp is named. Jenny prays, "Please, Sacajawea, don't make me turn out to be a lesbian," and "Please give me the courage to come out smiling" (186).

The text thus ends linguistically conflicted, with Jenny determined to do away with the all-female triangle of her story but also to "come out" smiling and begrudgingly accept her fate. Jenny knows that her father expects her to marry a rich man, but, after kissing a boy at the coed dance, she thinks, "I had liked dancing with Chris, but I had loved dancing with Peggy. Maybe I was queer. Chris had kissed me. If I were normal, I'd be feeling so high" (121). Jenny's father figures most prominently as the male in her counterplot with Peggy. Her father is not subjugated by the text, however, as he strongly influences Jenny and controls Peggy by labeling her a lesbian after a moment's glance. His linguistic ownership of both female elements of the triangle suggest a dysphoric counterplot, but if Jenny had her way she would separate herself from all triangles, dysphoric or euphoric.

Levy uses the metaphor of performance and masquerade to reify the concept of homosexuality in Jenny's budding sexual existence. The most influential performance, that of Peggy and Ann, is not intended to be a performance, but Jenny, arriving early for riding practice, "spies" on them "holding hands" (122). Jenny knows that "after you're ten years old, girls who hold hands are queer" (123). As she continues to watch Peggy and Ann, they kiss "lightly on the lips, not like friends—like lovers…. Peggy and Ann were lesbians" (123). For the rest of the book, Jenny feels "creepy" about this unwelcome sexual knowledge. Peggy and Ann represent a larger—and threatening—lesbian community (126). Levy's narrator, in short, is fearful and distrustful of lesbianism but simultaneously loves two lesbians. In the novel, sexuality is an uncontrollable, unstoppable, and unknowable force that occupies the place that should be taken by Jenny's subjectivity and agency. Performance and masquerade are an essential part of Jenny because she does not delve beneath the surface of the issues confronting her.

In contrast to Levy's novel, one of many repressive and voyeuristic representations of adolescent lesbianism, More Than Friends: The Coming Out of Heidi Lieter offers didacticism from a different perspective. In the two novels I have already discussed, lesbianism is the problem. More Than Friends turns the tables to position society's violence against homosexuality as the cause of conflict and primes mainstream cable viewers for this developing plot structure, which, as we will see, was already in bookstores on the young adult shelves. This short film portrays two adolescent girls whose lesbian identities are developed for the most part offscreen. The story is about their demand that their community accept their relationship as equal to heterosexual relationships. As part of HBO's series Lifestories: Families in Crisis, More Than Friends makes adolescent lesbianism visible, but by the series title also pronounces it a "crisis" that families need help resolving. Even so, the film itself resists the crisis label and maintains a euphoric plot. Heidi's girlfriend, Missy, is violently attacked by a homophobic male student who does not want her to go to the prom with Heidi. The girls make a milestone of the event and move beyond it to attend the prom and tell about it on a television talk show.

After the film's completion, the real Heidi Lieter appears on the screen to tell the HBO audience why she opted for visibility. She tells proponents and opponents alike, "You may think it's strange that I've been so public about a part of my life that's private. But I didn't do it for attention…. This is who I am. This is who I've always been. Being gay is not a choice I made, it's not something I just decided to be. The only choice I made is not to lie about it." These comments suggest that the film's intended audience is not lesbian teenagers or even supportive adults, but families who are opposed to such visibility and pride. Nonetheless, More Than Friends gives adolescent lesbian viewers a central and affirmative subject position, even if it assumes the task of educating others.

The educational plots discussed above inform their audiences that lesbianism exists, whether the reader/viewer likes it or not. The "coming-out" plots I next address centralize the formation of lesbian identities in an adolescent narrator. In telling their stories, the narrators demonstrate that lesbianism does not just exist but is a valid, livable existence. Contrary to what we might expect, such texts do not represent a chronological development from the first category; in fact, the coming-out story has evolved alongside the educational stories from 1978 onward.

The coming-out plot involves movement through four steps, the middle two closely related temporally. First, one of the female protagonists experiences a feeling for another female protagonist, usually a feeling that is difficult for her to describe. Second, the feeling is shared with the other female character. Third, the feeling is manifested in physical intimacy between the girls. Fourth, there is a forced public articulation of the girls' relationship. The relationship does not always survive this public "outing" with a euphoric triangle.

Most of the female characters in these texts discover their homosexuality beginning with a "queer," un-nameable feeling. As the main character, Liza, explains in Annie on My Mind, "I felt as if I were about to burst with I didn't quite know what" (65). Annie is the love story of two seventeen-year-old girls, Liza and Annie. Liza attends an exclusive private academy in Brooklyn Heights and Annie attends a crime-ridden public school in Manhattan, which results in a class tension that is also highlighted in Heavenly Creatures (1994). Despite their economic and ethnic differences, however, the increasing sexual awareness in the characters motivates them to identify the nature of their feelings—feelings that come as a shock to Liza if not to Annie. In Happy Endings are All Alike, Peggy "had a flash of lying in Jaret's arms and realized it made her happy, warm, content. Was that love? Sexual love? Would she want to kiss Jaret on the mouth?" (31). The relationship that develops between Peggy and Jaret in Happy Endings is occasionally joyful, but predominantly torturous as the girls deal with judgmental family members and a violent community. Mid, the boy who rapes Jaret and threatens to tell the town about her relations with Peggy, is the male element in this counterplot and, as such, plays the role of subjugated mediator when Jaret decides that coming out about her sexuality will heal more than the scars of rape. The sexual nature of love often brings about feelings of fear and guilt, about sex in general and about the public condemnation of homosexuality in particular (see Garden, Annie 13 and Moon 76).

Next, the girls in these novels begin to resolve the tension of identifying their queer feelings by articulating their feelings for each other, to each other. The sheer intensity of those emotions leads to verbal articulation for most of the characters discussed here (see Garden, Annie 85 and Moon 75; Scoppettone 35). In contrast, the rapport between Evie and Randy in the film The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love is narrated primarily through tense and silent cinematography ("Synopsis" 1). One example is an awkward moment in the school bathroom with sexy backlighting as Evie silently lights her cigarette off of Randy's. Their closeness is accentuated by the way that director Maggenti positions them: each girl faces inward with her back creating the left and right edges of the frame so that what passes between their bodies is emphasized—the mock-kiss of their cigarettes. This framing technique is used throughout the film to focus on the silences and words that pass between them. During a verbal exchange, Randy explains to Evie that when two women hold hands and have feelings for each other, it is not always accepted. Evie is too caught up in the rapture of her feelings for Randy to consider the political consequences, but in fact the action of holding hands in public invites and accepts spectatorship of their love. Holding hands is used so often in lesbian fiction, specifically adolescent lesbian fiction, that it can be considered a trope of the genre.⁵ Randy exclaims, "God, Evie, you are so sheltered." Evie responds, "Unshelter me."

It naturally follows that the girls in these texts begin to question their identity because the feelings they have are for another female. Experimentation with the language of sexual identity and gender, which we saw as far back as Hey, Dollface, appears frequently in these coming-out novels. Kerry in Good Moon Rising concludes, "A lover…. That's what we both really wanted, isn't it? Only since boys somehow didn't fit, we thought what we wanted was a friend" (96). Usually, the girls find that they have "always" had these feelings for females instead of males (see Garden, Annie 94; Scoppettone 29). Sexual and gender definition are intertwined in these novels as the girls come to terms with their love for another female. In Happy Endings, Peggy explains that "sometimes I wish one of us was a guy," and Jaret responds, "Then we wouldn't be us. If you were a guy, I wouldn't be interested" (102). These young women do not always find empowerment in labeling themselves as gay or even in love; they avoid fitting themselves into prescribed roles and argue that labels of sexuality must be flexible, if they are to be useful at all (see Garden, Moon 152).

The girls usually engage in physical intimacy for the first time by kissing. In Good Moon Rising and The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, the narrators describe the girls' meeting, mutual attraction, and physical contact, from touching and kissing to genital sex. Happy Endings are All Alike and Annie on My Mind, on the other hand, are framed texts, in the sense that one of the girls finds a reason to tell the story of meeting her lover. Roberta Seelinger Trites argues that the embedded narrative, specifically in Annie on My Mind, "situate[s] the text within the genre of the romance novel … in an act that is at once revisionary and reconciliatory," and allows the form to accent the content, since "the telling of the tale is critical to Liza's healing" (93).

The language of sexuality here is as explicit as teenage romance typically allows but tends to focus on non-genital contact (see Garden, Moon 75). Annie on My Mind moves from "before either of us knew what was happening, our arms were around each other and Annie's soft and gentle mouth was kissing mine," to "I remember so much about that first time with Annie that I am numb with it, and breathless" (146). In the gap between these two descriptions, the inevitable question arises: did they do it? Did they have genital sex? Precisely what Liza experienced with Annie is not shared with the reader, but as is the case in each of these coming-out stories, sexual contact is explicitly acknowledged. In Happy Endings are All Alike, that Peggy and Jaret have sex is taken for granted; instead, more narrative weight is given to the various characters' reactions to the sex. And when the camera depicts Randy and Evie making love in The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, it does not eroticize their bodies for the viewer. Their bodies are shown naked, but the close-up angle of the camera emphasizes their connection rather than what one body is doing to the other.

The sex, however, is not the source of the tension in these coming-out stories. Rather, the girls' verbal and physical articulations become meaningful with the threat of public knowledge. When Jaret and Peggy's relationship in Happy Endings are All Alike is forced into the public eye, it is because Mid threatens to "out" them if she tells anyone what he did to her (121). When Jaret decides to risk the public knowledge of her sexual orientation and relationship with Peggy, they break up because Peggy cannot handle it. Peggy returns to Jaret in the end to explain how much she cares for Jaret, but she stresses that this does not necessarily mean that she wants to be in a sexual relationship with her. This ending offers a pointedly pessimistic conclusion about the future of lesbian relationships: "so what if happy endings didn't exist? Happy moments did" (202). Peggy and Jaret repair their friendship but sever the triangle as each leaves for a different college with only the memory of their "happy moment." Liza and Annie's sexual relationship in Annie on My Mind is discovered by a woman, Ms. Baxter, who forces Liza to make a public declaration about her sexuality. This counterplot is euphoric because there is no notable male component and because of Liza's final decision. In the expulsion hearing at her conservative school, Liza opts to lie, and she leaves for college apparently having broken off her relationship with Annie. But by the end of the novel, as an MIT freshman, Liza calls Annie to apologize and to tell her that she loves her; Annie responds that she will take the next flight to visit Liza in Boston.

Good Moon and The Incredibly True Adventure brave the same public outing but present endings that are more clearly optimistic than Happy Endings are All Alike. In Good Moon, Jan and Kerry are found out because they play hooky together and rumors begin to circulate. At the cast party for their senior play, Jan plays heterosexual with Raphael, her gay male friend from summer theater stock.⁶ Kent, the instigator of the rumors, publicly challenges them to admit their homosexuality. An interesting arrangement arises as heterosexual Kent and homosexual Raphael share the role of subjugated mediator when Kent makes his challenge. Jan, with Kerry's whispered approval, interrupts Raphael as he defends her hetero-sexuality and faces Kent, the male who threatens to offset the triangle, saying, "'You were right … I am gay.' With the words came a sense of relief and liberation so great that she felt she never wanted to hide again, even though she knew at the same time that she might have to. 'And so am I,' came Kerry's clear voice" (221). They find pride in admitting their sexuality of their own agency in public and in a highly theatrical context. They are allowed to stay together, to represent a euphoric potential for lasting lesbian relationships and euphoric plots. This poten-tial is also suggested in The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love when Randy and Evie run away together. Randy's gay male friend, Frank, completes their triangle and mediates between the runaways and their parents, but he finally succumbs and leads the parents to the hideout. When Evie and Randy decide to leave their hotel room and face their angry parents and peers, they stand in an open doorway facing and touching each other with the noisy crowd behind them. The camera shot is from inside the hotel room, so the dynamic framing has the effect of placing the viewer on the side of the girls and supporting their pledge to love each other forever.

Tellingly, the girls in each of these texts are punished once they reach a level of sexual activity. These narratives insist that the teen balance sexual identity with the rest of her identity. The ultimate punishment for transgressors is a forced coming out. Good and bad and right and wrong are knowable. In the third category of texts, however, things are not so clear for the (lesbian) characters. The works that have been discussed so far combine hetero-normative adolescence and lesbianism, sharing information and representing lesbian identity through fairly static characters. Some contemporary texts do not offer such easy centerings, but instead represent fractured and less identity-bound versions of both adolescence and lesbianism. In Heavenly Creatures and Dive the lesbian characters function less as characters and more as points of narrative negotiation.

Dive narrates a few months out of the life of Virginia, including the relationship she develops with Jane, a new girl at school. The novel's narrative structure is fragmented and often abruptly stream-of-consciousness. While the book is concerned with Virginia's quest for identity, the first half is dedicated to her father's terminal illness and the hit-and-run accident that injured her dog. Virginia's self-awareness is heightened by her relationship with Jane, which helps prepare her for the loss of her father and induction of her sexuality. Lesbianism is not the central element of this text, and intimacy between adolescent girls is articulated as a negotiation, rather than a definition, of sexual identities; Virginia and Jane never identify themselves or their relationship as lesbian, but Virginia recognizes how her feelings for Jane are different from her feelings for other people. No one except the reader discovers Virginia and Jane's sexual relationship or their love for each other. Dive frames the process of adolescent identity formation within the complexity of social and sexual existence in general. Virginia feels a sense of urgency to find meaningful words for her feelings for Jane because "If I can't make somebody understand what I feel, I'll disintegrate into the air" (188-89). Her frustration is the same as that of most of the other adolescent lesbians we have discussed and is indicative of the lesbian invisibility that results from a lack of appropriate language to signify women's desire for women (Zimmerman 96). Virginia's language centers on the existence of love and the need to express that love verbally without relying on labels. Expressing it physically, "how simple it is, how natural," is not as difficult as expressing emotion with effective words, "Do I love her? I mean, do I love her?" (219, 196).

In her literary analysis of twentieth-century adult lesbian fiction, Bonnie Zimmerman identifies the heart of the lesbian novel as the search for a lesbian self (31). Dive constructs a complex and mature narrative in which a female who is sexually attracted to another female does not assume a lesbian identification process, not just because of lesbianism's negative connotations in our society but because she does not give credence to a unified identity. According to Jackie Stacey, our theoretical inquiries need to "consider questions of lesbian identity and desire within the models of fragmented subjectivity" (qtd. in Vicinus 468). True to this dogma, the book as a whole looks fragmented. Donovan does not indent her paragraphs; instead she writes them as blocks of thought and dialogue separated by a line of space. Virginia's thoughts, too, are fragmented, but in the course of the novel the fragments are held together by threads of thought, or repeating phrases. For example, "I am a stone" and "Let the wind in" appear numerous times to clarify and extend her contradictory feelings of stability and disintegration. Virginia works with all of these fragments to gain a poetic sense of self, and, as such, notions of self and meaning constantly perform a dialogic dance, folding back on themselves as time moves forward.⁷

Virginia makes clear that a unified self is not possible as she becomes aware that many questions in life go unanswered (231), but as soon as she sees Jane, she is able to center her attention on herself, so that the questions are no longer frayed and sensitive, but "in place" (102). Virginia is preoccupied with all that she does not understand about her life. Her confusion grows as her father's health worsens, and she realizes: "But now I need somebody. Now the world seems full of everything but magic. Except for Jane. There's Jane. But with her, there's also confusion" (225). The death of Virginia's father sends her reel-ing, forcing her to view a home movie in her mind of memories and experiences she does not understand, but when she sees Jane walking up to the funeral home with a bouquet of flowers, she is made "unbelievably dreamy with hopes" without having all the answers (240). Although the connection between Jane and Virginia waxes and wanes, the final image of Jane arriving at the funeral home keeps Virginia's father in the male position of the triangle even in his death and portends reconciliation and longevity for the homosocial relationship.

Dive offers an ambitious postmodern portrayal of adolescent lesbianism. Virginia opens before us on the pages of Dive as an incomplete yet abundant persona. Donovan does not attempt to represent Virginia in any totality, possibly because no such totality exists. She represents complex adolescent sexuality and how it cannot be cleanly extracted from the rest of a person's identity in order to be examined or depicted. To do it right, in a postmodern sense, you have to show the whole messy picture, and it will not always fit into a nice narrative form. This may be why there are no films that succeed as well as Dive. Film may not be able to avoid creating a spectacle out of the observed figure on the screen.

Take, for example, Heavenly Creatures, a fictionalized account of the 1954 New Zealand case of the murder of Honora Parker by her sixteen-year-old daughter, Pauline, and Pauline's fifteen-year-old friend and lover, Juliet Hulme. In the well-publicized case, the judgment of the New Zealand public seemed to be that Parker came between the girls and that their unnatural lust drove them to murder her.⁸ The issues raised in the film, which is told from Pauline's perspective and includes voiceovers from her diary entries, are mature and complex, and the advanced style and focus seem to target adult viewers more than adolescent viewers. Unlike the creators of the other texts discussed here, Jackson does not participate in the rhetoric of informational or identity-formation texts. To tell an informational tale about the homosocial connection between the girls would closely parallel the rhetoric of the court case, especially because it would require interrogation and invasion as motivating forces in the plot; to present a text that honored the girls' formation of lesbian identities would go against the facts, since the girls did not identify themselves as lesbian.

Jackson tries to avoid taking an explicit stance on whether the girls were "lesbian" or whether it matters to the story. For example, he stylizes their love-making to the point of ambiguity. At first they enact "how each saint [male actors they like] would make love in bed," with the black and white torsos of the men superimposed over each girl, but in the end Jackson brings the two girls into the frame to kiss as themselves. Eventually, almost every adult in the film is preoccupied with classifying and pathologizing the girls' relationship. While a diary entry makes clear that the girls had sex with one another, the film professes that their bond is more complicated than that. Jackson, who has stated in interviews that he believes the question of the girls' sexual orientations is a "red herring" (Porter 3.1.11.1), implies that viewers are misled, as were the people of New Zealand, if they attempt to label the girls' sexuality. But in fact, the question is pivotal to the story. To problematize sexuality, Jackson must highlight it; lesbianism cannot function as a red herring in a plot that depends upon it elementally. For example, the most blatantly sexual scene between Pauline and Juliet occurs immediately prior to their decision to commit murder. This proximity underscores the film's association of adolescent lesbianism, family revolt, adolescent angst, and matricide.

Jackson also includes several lesbian references that substantiate a lesbian reading by the informed viewer. In French class Juliet is required to choose a French name, and since the scene takes place before the girls become friends or start writing about each other in their diaries, that Jackson has Juliet choose the name "Antoinette" suggests that Jackson believes she may already have some sort of lesbian identity. As Castle points out, "That Marie Antoinette was herself a lover of women had been rumored at least since the 1770s"; a spectator aware of this fact may identify the doomed queen, as many nineteenth-century women did, as a "secret heroine—an underground symbol of passionate love between women" (126).⁹ The association of Juliet Hulme with Marie Antoinette is suggestive, since the queen's "'crime' of homosexuality was … made part of the Revolutionary Tribunal's death-dealing case against her" (Castle 131), just as Juliet's will be. The viewer who picks up on the Antoinette reference can superimpose one lesbian martyrdom onto the other.

In short, Heavenly Creatures is postmodern in its subversion of "lesbian identity." Subversion is also the function that Castle gives to the essence of the lesbian counterplot. The postmodern adolescent lesbian counterplot, therefore, is right at home in a postmodern film context; with all its disturbing elements, Heavenly Creatures maintains a euphoric counterplot. Juliet and Pauline attend an all-girls' school and do not develop lasting male friendships. It is the all-female triangle of Pauline, Juliet, and Mrs. Parker that dominates our attention. The film, however, makes identification with the protagonists uncomfortable, problematizing not only lesbianism but even feminism; as reviewer Luisa F. Ribeiro observes, "The horror of the story lies in the unaccustomed positioning of desire and determination in the hands of two adolescent females" (33).

As Heavenly Creatures appears to concede, patriarchy and heterosexuality are antithetical to a woman-centered community with agency. To be sure, none of the works studied here discusses the larger lesbian community as a support network or as a possible destination. Yet the homosexual community enters many of the texts intertextually: Jaret and Peggy are initially drawn together by their common affection for Edna St. Vincent Millay, Virginia and Jane discover agency in the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, a character in The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love refers to The Coming Out of Heidi Lieter, Annie lends a "battered" copy of Isabel Miller's Patience and Sarah to Liza. These intertextual references suggest that reading lesbian texts is political because it offers a point of lesbian identification and community.¹⁰ Indeed, readers have found identification and community in even the most negative and conflicted lesbian texts by reading against dysphoric plots and making heroes out of unfortunate characters. Kay Vandergrift, for one, claims that "engagement with story is life-affirming; it puts us in touch with the world, with one another, and with our essential selves…. Story helps us to shape and reshape life, to give it importance and to reflect on who we are and who we might become" (ix). Similarly, Sorrel, a young lesbian interviewed in Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia, explains that "I wanted stories about girls like me that were okay. There was nothing like that…. I need to know that I'm not the only one. I want to read more about girls like me" (110-11).

Cultural representations of adolescent lesbianism in literature and film require the critical attention of future scholars, because such texts are part of "the process of coming out—a movement into a metaphysics of presence, speech, and cultural visibility…. Or, put another way, to be out is really to be in—inside the realm of the visible, the speakable, the culturally intelligible" (Fuss 4). But the strength and potential of these texts has been weakened by their isolation from each other. Extending Castle's examination of the lesbian counterplot to include adolescent lesbian texts has revealed a large body of fiction that employs the dysphoric lesbian counterplot, as Castle notes, but we may also see that adolescent lesbian texts have progressed to include euphoric lesbian counterplots and postmodern plots that de-center, while problematizing, issues of information and identity. The power of these texts is in the changes they have made to the way stories are told and in the possibilities they continue to create for readers like Sorrel.

Notes

1. Guy's Ruby (1976) is one of the earliest adolescent novels to include lesbianism. It is the story of a high school girl, Ruby, whose homosexual relationship with her friend Daphne is a desperate attempt to distance herself from dealing with the heterosocial world of males, dominated by her father and her ex-boyfriend, Orlando. Guy's plot thoroughly demonstrates the dysphoric counterplot because even though the female homosocial triangle represented by Ruby, her father, and Daphne dominates most of the plot, the male homosocial triangle of Ruby's father, Ruby, and Orlando is restored by the end of the novel.

2. Control by censors and publishing houses is complicated by written works "published" on the Internet.

3. In using the word "lesbian" to refer to something applicable to adolescence, I do not wholly agree with Judith Butler's quasi-nihilistic theories of gender and sexuality (21) or with Adrienne Rich's continuum of lesbian identity as including non-sexual friendship (648). Rather, I borrow from Castle's definition of "lesbian" as "a woman [or, better, 'a female' so as to include young adults] whose primary emotional and erotic allegiance … is to other females" (15). Castle's definition is appropriate to a study of young adult literature because it focuses on both the emotional and the physical aspects of sexual desire. Sex is a definitive element of the adolescent lesbian text. Most literature and films for and about adolescent girls focus on girls' close friendships with other girls, a theme that began to flourish in nineteenth-century school-girl stories and continues in current series fiction such as The Babysitters' Club or Sweet Valley High; contemporary lesbian texts for and about adolescents distinguish themselves from this pervasive genre by depicting varying degrees of sexual conduct between female characters.

4. John Stephens argues that "part of the socialization of the child is that she learns to operate as a subject within various discourse types, each of which establishes its particular set of subject positions, which in turn act as constraints upon those who occupy them" (55). Subjectivity and agency are presented through elements of narration, such as point of view—which "has the function of constructing subject positions and inscribing ideological assumptions"—and character positions that determine sympathy (56). In other words, texts attempt to control how the actual reader, through accepting the subject position of the implied reader, responds to and sympathizes with certain characters and their actions.

5. Consider this powerful moment from Violette Leduc's landmark adult lesbian text, Thérèse and Isabelle (1966), "[I] slipped my arm under hers: our intertwining fingers made love to one another" (55). The trope of political hand-holding appears most evidently in Come Out Smiling, Hey, Dollface, The Coming Out of Heidi Lieter, and Higher Learning (1995).

6. Randy's gay friend, Frank, and Raphael of Good Moon Rising function to complete Sedgwick's female homosocial triangle.

7. This style is very similar to that of Jeanette Winterson, author of the "coming-of-age/coming-out" novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, which critics deem "postmodern." Winter-son's and Donovan's broken narratives emphasize the way that communicating our own lives through storytelling demands many separate stories, which are never linear and always interwoven in our minds with other stories, thoughts, and experiences. These techniques work to involve the reader in the developing subject position of the narrator as it develops in the course of the novel. It may also function to exclude readers who are not ready or willing to participate in piecing together the fragments.

8. Jackson chose to glorify and revive a story involving murderous lesbians, but he is not alone. Wendy Kesselman wrote and produced the film version, Sister My Sister (1994), of her play, My Sister in This House (1983). She retells the story of the young sisters Christine and Lea, who, in France in 1932, were convicted of killing their employer and her daughter, who supposedly walked in on the sisters having sex. Kesselman is also the author of Flick (1983), the story of two girls' summer riding-camp relationship. Christine Jenkins reports in her review of the book that "this is a rehash of the same evil-and-crazy-lesbian-temptress theme" (188).

9. Marie Antoinette has also appeared as a lesbian icon in other lesbian texts. See Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928), Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show (1936), and Winterson's The Passion (1987).

10. This fear of texts as cultural forces drives Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour (1934). A lesbian text, Mademoiselle de Maupin by Theophile Gautier (1834, trans. 1890), is located as a possible cause for a young girl's devious behavior.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. "Imitation and Gender Insubordination." Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 13-31.

Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.

Donovan, Stacey. Dive. New York: Puffin, 1996.

Fuss, Diana, ed. Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Garden, Nancy. Annie on My Mind. New York: Ariel, 1982.

―――――――. Good Moon Rising. New York: Farrar, 1996.

Guy, Rosa. Ruby. New York: Viking, 1976.

Hautzig, Deborah. Hey, Dollface, New York: Green-willow, 1978.

Heavenly Creatures. Dir. Peter Jackson. Perf. Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey. Miramax, 1995.

The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love. Dir. Maria Maggenti. Perf. Laura Hollman and Nicole Parker. Fineline Features, 1996.

Leduc, Violette. Thérèse and Isabelle. 1966. Trans. Derek Coltman. New York: Dell, 1967.

Levy, Elizabeth. Come Out Smiling. New York: Delacorte, 1981.

More Than Friends: The Coming Out of Heidi Lieter. Dir. Juan Jose Campanella. Perf. Sabrina Lloyd and Kate Anthony. HBO, 1995.

Pipher, Mary. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. New York: Ballantine, 1994.

Porter, John Douglas. "Heavenly Creatures." FAQ. Online. 10 April 1995.

Ribeiro, Luisa F. "Movie Review: Heavenly Creatures." Film Quarterly 49.1 (Fall 1995): 33-38.

Rich, Adrienne. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Signs 5 (1980): 631-60.

Scoppettone, Sandra. Happy Endings are All Alike. Boston: Alyson, 1978.

Stephens, John. Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction. New York: Longman, 1992.

"Synopsis: The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love." Fine Line Features 28 June 1995. 〈http://www.flf.com/twogirls/tgsynops.htm〉 Online. (10 April 1996).

Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997.

Vandergrift, Kay E., ed. Mosaics of Meaning: Enhancing the Intellectual Life of Young Adults through Story. Lanham: Scarecrow, 1996.

Vicinus, Martha. "'They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong': The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity." Feminist Studies 18 (1992): 467-97.

Zimmerman, Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969–1989. Boston: Beacon, 1990.

Benjamin Lefebvre (essay date fall 2005)

SOURCE: Lefebvre, Benjamin. "From Bad Boy to Dead Boy: Homophobia, Adolescent Problem Fiction, and Male Bodies that Matter." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 30, no. 3 (fall 2005): 288-313.

[In the following essay, Lefebvre studies the role gay supporting characters play in the development of the heterosexual lead protagonists of two Canadian young adult novels, Diana Wieler's Bad Boy and Brian Payton's Hail Mary Corner.]

Oh, Tul. If you could just get over it. Back on track. You've gotten out of other things. One mistake doesn't have to screw up your whole life. I'd never bring it up. I swear to God. And I'd be the friend I'm supposed to be. If you could just get over it.

      —Diana Wieler, Bad Boy (113; emphasis added)

In her contribution to a special issue of Canadian Children's Literature on "Transgressing Gender Norms in Canadian Young Adult Fiction" (2002), Paulette Rothbauer offers an insightful overview of Canadian young adult novels that feature gay and lesbian characters as part of the issue's overall goal to examine the range of "imaginative possibilities for gendered behaviour" (Findon 6) available in the larger group of books. This overview becomes more revealing when read alongside Kenneth Kidd's introduction to his guest-edited issue of Children's Literature Association Quarterly on "Lesbian/Gay Literature for Children and Young Adults" (1998): noting the strong compatibility between coming out and the conventions of young adult fiction, Kidd notes that "close to one hundred" young adult titles (114) with gay and lesbian characters had been published in the U.S. and in Britain since John Donovan's groundbreaking novel I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip (1969).¹ But Rothbauer's list of such novels published in Canada totals only 15 titles, all published between 1989 and 2001, with a total of 26 central or supporting gay and lesbian characters (either adolescents or adults).² Reminding us that "the presence and the absence of homosexuality in fiction for young people have political implications" surrounding the challenge to or reinforcement of heteronormativity (13), her investigation of the range of "possibilities" depicted by these characters leads to discouraging results: although these texts include a few strong female protagonists, young gay male characters—when they exist at all—are largely confined to secondary roles that rely on clichés of effeminacy, passivity, and self-hatred (15-19). Most noticeably, in sharp contrast to the wide range of American and British titles discussed by Kidd, Rothbauer cannot find a single example of a gay male adolescent character in Canadian young adult fiction who tells his own story.³

Troubled by both the absence of a strong gay male protagonist and the presence of these problematic supporting characters in Canadian young adult fiction, I examine in this paper two novels that depict a gay male secondary character as a figure who represents an anxiety or an obstacle in the development of a heterosexual central character. Both narratives prevent the gay character from describing his sexuality through language by concentrating on a protagonist whose automatic reaction to the discovery of his friend's sexuality is homophobic. The first, Diana Wieler's Bad Boy (1989), has received a fair amount of critical attention in Canada and was the recipient of a Governor General's Literary Award for Children's Literature (Text); the second, Brian Payton's Hail Mary Corner (2001), is so recent that it does not appear in Rothbauer's overview. Throughout both novels, a hyper-masculine sixteen-year-old protago-nist negotiates several subplots in which his masculinity is challenged or tested. In Bad Boy, A. J. Bran-diosa's obsession with proving his worth on his hockey team prompts him to become a goon on the ice. His homophobic reaction to the discovery that his best friend is gay reaches a somewhat ambiguous resolution: although there is some suggestion that the narrator wishes readers to see A. J.'s homophobia as part of what makes him a "bad boy," and although A. J. ultimately recognizes Tully's courage in coming out, the final scene does not depict them finding a way to reconfigure their friendship. Published a dozen years later but set earlier than Bad Boy, Hail Mary Corner revisits this theme in a story archetypically similar to a number of American private-school narratives that result in deadly consequences to non-normative boy behavior:⁴ Bill MacAvoy continually rebels against his surrounding environment and never expresses any repentance as his activities lead him closer and closer to expulsion. Although he enjoys a particularly close relationship with his best friend Jon, he automatically rejects his friend after finding out Jon is gay. In both novels, the heterosexual protagonist reads the discovery of his friend's sexual orientation both as a personal betrayal and as a reflection on himself. Although the texts are narrated differently, the homophobic attitudes of their protagonists are not directly challenged or problematized, and no alternative to categorical rejection is put forth. Instead, both protagonists take for granted that rejecting their gay friend is their prerogative. Most disturbing is how, particularly in Payton's book, this rejection extends beyond the protagonist's unexamined homophobia and potentially becomes a dire lesson for real adolescent readers: at the end of Hail Mary Corner, Jon dies.

In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993), Judith Butler extends Michel Fou-cault's claim that "sex" is a "regulatory ideal" to add that "'sex' not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs" (1), leading to "a process whereby regulatory norms materialize 'sex' and achieve this materialization through a forcible reiteration of those norms" (2). I will draw on this framework to examine how these two novels participate in the ongoing reiteration of norms that distinguish between "heterosexual" and "homosexual" as mutually exclusive identity categories, and to use speech-act theory to explore the presence of a discourse of homophobia whereby the ritualized rejection of the gay male body becomes a regulatory practice. As Butler suggests in her final chapter,

Performative acts are forms of authoritative speech: most performatives, for instance, are statements that, in the uttering, also perform a certain action and exercise a binding power…. If the power of discourse to produce that which it names is linked with the question of performativity, then the performative is one domain in which power acts as discourse.

                                            (225)

In this context, Butler sees the term "queer" as a "linguistic practice whose purpose has been the shaming of the subject it names or, rather, the producing of a subject through that shaming interpellation" (226). By drawing on Butler's reworking of Althusserian terminology, I am particularly keen to investigate how speech-act theory can illuminate the production of the heterosexual male subject, who in these two novels is created only after the queer body is identified and demonized as an object of homophobic discourse, but without using the terms "heterosexual" or "straight." Thus, this paper will address the following questions: How does "straight" become defined oppositionally to mean "not gay" in two narratives that include very few female characters? How to theorize about homophobia when the identity categories "heterosexual" and "homosexual" are inconsistently linked to actual sex and specific desire? Moreover, given the ultimate fate of the queer friends who are severely reprimanded as the result of homophobic discourse (while the heterosexual protagonists earn forgiveness and growth), how can we consider this effect within the larger body of Canadian young adult fiction, in which there is not yet a single gay-identified male adolescent character who breaks this "ritualized repetition of norms" (Butler x)? If the insult "queer" produces a subject "through that shaming interpellation," then what effect can these two novels have on gay or otherwise non-heterosexual adolescent male readers? How do the generic conventions of the problem novel link this shaming interpellation with other forms of cultural power?

Although the focus of this paper is on two novels as representative of the range of "imaginative possibilities" surrounding male gender and sexuality in a national literature, I am not trying to suggest that real Canadian adolescents are limited by Canadian young adult fiction in their exposure to texts that will help shape their attitudes about gender, sexuality, and power; after all, given that Canadian bookstores remain overwhelmed with books published in the United States, adolescent readers across Canada seeking young adult texts with gay characters are more likely to come across Brent Hartinger's Geography Club (2003) than Payton's Hail Mary Corner. But if we consider a national literature to be a body of work that simultaneously reflects and shapes reality and cultural values for its citizens (even if this generalization is more ideological than realistic), I believe it important to consider the role of these two texts as representative of the attitudes of a nation that has included gay and lesbian people under its Charter of Rights and Freedoms far more readily than the Constitution of the United States. Certainly, the disproportion of Canadian and American adolescent novels featuring gay and lesbian characters coincides with the disproportion of both the number of actual adolescents in these two countries and the amount of fiction published for them. At the same time, however, these numbers clash with recent initiatives to eliminate homophobic double standards in Canadian and American legal policies. Since 2003, changes in provincial legislation have granted same-sex couples the right to be legally married in eight of the thirteen provinces and territories, with similar changes in federal legislation expected to pass sometime this year. These ongoing changes have prompted a heated debate surrounding a possible similar change in legalization in the United States, including a proposed constitutional amendment that would clarify marriage as the union between one man and one woman. Even if, as W. H. New suggests in Borderlands: How We Talk about Canada (1998), "boundaries seem … to be metaphors more than fixed edges" (4), and even if the national boundary between "American" and "Canadian" texts is in many ways metaphorical, texts featuring a wider range of gay adolescent characters have not yet managed to cross it.

The Problem of Problem Novels

In the first edition of The Pleasures of Children's Literature (1992), Perry Nodelman argues that the structure of the problem novel, a subgenre of young adult realistic fiction in which character development and plot become secondary to a social problem being debated, "involves [the protagonist's] struggle with and eventual solution of the problem"; suggesting links between the problem novel and the fable and between didacticism and wish-fulfillment fantasy, Nodelman claims that these novels "are really about how their readers will think and act after finishing the book" (200). Roberta Seelinger Trites agrees with this analysis in her book-length discussion of adolescent literature and power, noting that the subversive potential of this genre is often overshadowed by the inclusion of didactic intrusions that tend to "manipulat[e] the adolescent reader" (x). Given the absence of Canadian young adult novels in which a gay character is not dependent on the heterosexual protagonist's homophobia, a central concern is how these two novels manipulate readers with their messages about alternative masculinities, homophobia, and the range of "imaginative possibilities for gendered behaviour" explored in the overall genre. In this respect, young adult problem novels are especially complex, even when their didactic messages are obvious. They are designed so that the values and attitudes within them—those assumed as much as those stated explic-itly—will be offered to real adolescents on their journey toward adulthood.

Nodelman adds that the structure of the problem novel leads to an isolation of the protagonist's viewpoint as a form of truth, which "allows characters absolute confirmation of their opinions and values" (201). This point has added implications when applied to Bad Boy and Hail Mary Corner: not only do both narratives follow the perspective and character development of a heterosexual protagonist, but this protagonist actually prevents his gay best friend from speaking about his own trauma and internalized homophobia, preventions that the narratives refuse or are unable to redress. The third-person omniscient narrator of Bad Boy does offer several scenes from Tully's viewpoint, but these exceptions serve to contrast with A. J.'s predominant version of events (Rothbauer 15); moreover, crucial details pertaining to Tully's sex life—including the gender of his partners—are revealed only gradually throughout the novel, so despite earlier scenes from Tully's perspective, we only "discover" Tully is gay when A. J. does. Although Kidd notes that "homophobia has replaced homosexuality as the designated social problem addressed in such novels" published in the United States (114), the same cannot be said for these two books from Canada: the social problem to be resolved in these novels is not the straight protagonist's homophobia but what he should do with a friend who is discovered to be gay—who suddenly becomes seen as an "inappropriate" (perhaps even threatening) male. Both protagonists are depicted making destructive choices in their interpretations of normative masculinity, and perhaps adolescent readers are meant to see beyond their point of view and conclude that their rejection of their gay friends is misguided. However, given the conventions of adolescent problem fic-tion—a genre that requires straightforward, explicit lessons for its readers—perhaps such ambiguity in the distancing of the protagonist remains the biggest problem of all.

Indeed, the existing critical reception of these two novels centers on the development of the heterosexual protagonist and on the respective optimistic endings, which signal lessons learned, forgiveness for the protagonist, growth, and bittersweet coming of age. And, indeed, both novels provide closure for the heterosexual protagonist (and thus for the heterosexual reader) in what appear to be satisfying conclusions. But shifting the focus toward the resolution of the two gay friends in these novels—the former friendless, the latter dead—problematizes that optimism. In an early review of Bad Boy, Jennifer Charles claims that A. J.'s rejection of Tully is a reaction "that many teenaged boys will relate to" (148). Robert J. Wiersma echoes this stance in his review of Hail Mary Corner: "That [Bill's] search for understanding results in his being cruel to his closest friend is unfortunate, but it certainly rings true" (C12). I agree with these statements to a point, since most adolescent male readers have likely been in contact with a discourse of homophobia before reading either of these two novels and have already learned that being perceived as gay is as much a source of anxiety as actually being gay, as have the heterosexual protagonists of these two books. And while texts' mirroring of "real" responses of actual boys is part of what constitutes realistic fiction, I prefer to reverse the chicken and the egg in order to investigate how these two novels participate in the circulation of that discourse of homophobia: since problem novels are chiefly concerned with shaping the attitudes of real adolescent readers, it seems paramount to resist limiting the discussion to the assumption that the books confirm reactions that adolescent boys supposedly already have.⁵

A. J., Tully, Bill, and Jon: Male Bodies That Matter

As mentioned earlier, both texts under discussion here center on the conflict between two categories of male bodies, one taken for granted as straight and one "discovered" to be gay. And yet, it is necessary to contextualize this conflict within the larger patterns of domination, hierarchy, and negotiation of hegemonic practices that these novels both describe and proscribe, since the wider range of male-male interactions and boy-only spaces described in the texts complicates the straightforwardness of this homophobic rejection. More specifically, both Bad Boy and Hail Mary Corner initially include detailed mentions of the male characters' awareness of each other's bodies in ways that are shown to remain safely within the boundaries of normative, appropriate same-sex heterosexuality. For instance, when A. J. and Tully lift weights together, it is entirely acceptable for A. J. to monitor and to be aware of Tully's body—even to envy it—as long as Tully's body is presumed to be heterosexual. Once the body that is looked at is labeled queer, this awareness becomes overwhelmed with paranoia thanks to a discourse of homophobia that is automatically enacted. These looks must be repressed so that the protagonist's heterosexuality remains beyond question. What was once taken for granted as safely non-gay (and therefore non-problematic) becomes a symptom of homosexual panic. Until this happens, however, the boys' awareness of each other's body is not considered queer.

Wieler's narrative dismantles these "safe" looks with a series of narrated encounters that call into question A. J.'s stability in both same-sex and opposite-sex relationships. Mieke Bal's concept of "focalization," the particular set of eyes through which a narrative is "objectively" written, is important for this part of the discussion. In focusing primarily on A. J.'s point of view while occasionally disrupting the reliability of that perspective, the narration of Bad Boy both confirms and troubles Nodelman's reminder that the perspective of the protagonist becomes presented as a form of truth to readers of adolescent problem fiction, supported by Bal's suggestion that "the image we receive of the object is determined by the focali-zor" (106). The third-person omniscient narrator of Bad Boy occasionally merges the focalizors' thoughts directly into the narration and withholds crucial details about each character's emerging sexual awareness in order to delay the resolution of the suspense. By beginning and ending at a wedding, a public ritual of heterosexual union (until 2003), the narrative emphasizes its concern with A. J.'s social and emotional development, given that he is initially shown feeling shy and nervous around girls but has grown confident with the girl he likes by the end of the book. In the first scene, A. J. is still getting used to his thinner, more muscular body, the result of several months of excessive weight training. Tully, described as "an illusion" who wears sunglasses indoors and too much cologne (9), has no trouble talking to girls. The narrator hints that A. J.'s nervousness in this scene is due to a residue of the poor body image that led to the weight training in the first place (8). In a flashback that interrupts the events of this first chapter, we learn that A. J.'s body training was motivated by an insatiable desire to become a Triple A hockey player, that Tully trained with him, and that they got accepted together. Although A. J. is happy to have his friend on the hockey team with him, he often feels "a small tug of envy" (27) at Tully's natural talent, whereas he knows he has to keep working hard to stay on the team. We also learn that A. J. has devel-oped a crush on Tully's younger sister, Summer, who "made him feel awkward, whether she noticed him or ignored him" (13).

Tully and A. J. initially share what Mary J. Harker calls "a close, sympathetic friendship" (25). They bond together over weightlifting and hockey, enjoy cruising in Tully's car, joke about people's reaction if they danced together at the wedding of the first scene in the book (10), and engage in a spontaneous game of "foam fight" with their teammates in the locker room (29-30). But while they can communicate about almost anything, they understand that certain topics cannot be broached, such as the dissolution of A. J.'s parents' marriage and the strange presence of a fellow hockey player named Derek Lavalle, who is described as a threat the moment he is introduced in the text (30-32) and who appears to have a strange effect on Tully. Despite his curiosity, A. J. decides not to bring up this topic, confident that "[h]e'll tell me when he's ready" (34). As it turns out, however, A. J. will refuse to listen when Tully finally attempts to speak.

Worried about Tully's erratic behavior, Summer asks A. J. to pinpoint Tully's activities and report back to her. A. J. agrees reluctantly, uncomfortable with the idea of spying on his friend but mindful of Tully's past problem with drugs. Discovering Tully's red Mustang parked outside a coffee bar he's never been to before in an "unfamiliar" part of downtown (68), A. J. goes inside to investigate. Initially, nothing in the coffee bar appears to be out of the ordinary; as A. J. looks around, he sees that the place "looked like most pool rooms" (68). Then A. J. notices two male bodies at the other end of the counter, who "were so close that their shoulders touched, in the familiar way of people who knew each other, very well" (69). He immediately understands: "They're queer, A. J. thought suddenly" (69). It is worth recalling Butler's articulation of speech-act theory and its relationship with homophobia: "Where there is an 'I' who utters or speaks and thereby produces an effect in discourse, there is first a discourse which precedes and enables that 'I' and forms in language the constraining trajectory of its will" (225). A. J.'s focalized thought prompts a series of reactions that appear to be instinctual but are in fact caused by a discourse of homophobia that preexists the two male bodies at the other end of the counter. A. J.'s reaction is immediately described:

As the information registered in his brain, a pulse of electricity ran through his body, bursting painfully in his fingertips. Slowly, he eased his chair around and looked back at the pool room.

The room was the same, but his vision had changed. It seemed to him that the atmosphere was different from other pool rooms he'd been in. There wasn't the standoffishness, the usual coolness of a group of men. The pool players seemed to kid each other more, touch each other more. And against the far wall in a darkened corner, he could make out two figures, pressed tightly together.

A. J. whirled back to his coffee, his fists clenched. I'm in a freaking queer joint—me!—in a queer joint! Anybody comes over, I'll deck him, A. J. thought savagely, even though no one had moved towards him or really looked his way.

                                (69; emphasis added)

Notice the several shifts from before the term "queer" is uttered to after: although A. J. initially sees no difference between this pool room and a whole pattern of pool rooms that preceded it, the utterance of the term "queer" prompts him to reevaluate both the room and its participants, which are no longer not different, but inherently and irredeemably different; in other words, as a result of the term "queer" (which Butler sees as always abject), "his vision had changed." The narrator intervenes only briefly in this extract, which relies mostly on what Bal calls "[c]haracter-bound focalization," but pulls back to an "external focalization" (105) in an attempt to amend A. J.'s paranoia, as demonstrated in the phrase beginning with "even though." But despite the fact that no one does approach him, A. J.'s automatic response to this discovery of difference is violence. As if on cue, Tully and Derek Lavalle enter the room with Derek's arm around Tully's shoulder, a form of bodily contact that makes A. J. go into shock. "There were no words connected to the picture he saw" (70), the narrator suggests, but the word associated with this image has already been uttered: that word is "queer."

The "me" part of that focalized thought foreshadows what happens next: the narrative follows A. J.'s abrupt exit from the coffee shop, silencing the supporting character who has now been interpolated into homophobic discourse as a result of A. J.'s use of the word "queer." Although the narrator will return to the coffeehouse to capture Tully's reaction to A. J.'s unexpected discovery, the scene in question is more concerned with establishing Derek as a villain than giving Tully the opportunity to express his homophobic trauma through language.⁶ The "me" is also revealing of A. J.'s character, since his negotiation of the discovery that Tully is gay ignores Tully's trauma and centers entirely on his own. In privileging A. J.'s trauma over Tully's, the narrative arguably makes a set of assumptions about the readers it targets: if the "problem" of this problem novel is not coming out per se, but negotiating non-normative male sexuality, then Bad Boy ostensibly takes for granted that male adolescent readers are straight, since A. J.'s status as focalizor-protagonist clearly makes him the character with whom to identify, even as the narrator intervenes to point out crucial gaps in his paranoid version of events. And if some readers of Bad Boy are gay or potentially gay, then they must learn to see Tully—and, by extension, themselves—through A. J.'s homophobic eyes. Rather than learn what coming out means for Tully, adolescent male readers of any sexuality experience A. J.'s several stages: denial ("It isn't because it can't be" [78]), avoidance ("Don't tell me anything, Tul. I don't want to know" [82]), social panic ("the day somebody else found out about Tulsa Brown and the dirt flew that A. J. Brandiosa had been friends with a queer" [102-03]), sexual panic ("In his house. In his car. But he never touched me. I swear it" [84]), rejection ("Cut him loose, the queer bastard! He's lucky I don't kill him" [84]), and finally, perhaps surprisingly, betrayal ("For three years I told him everything, and he didn't tell me this" [86]). This reaction builds toward a climatic scene that alternates between A. J. and Tully as focalizors. Here, Tully intervenes in A. J.'s claim that "I'll never forgive you" with the reminder that "[t]here's nothing to forgive" (174). But given that Tully's trauma of coming to terms with his sexuality and facing hostile rejection from his best friend has been erased from the narrative, it is debatable how adolescent readers are expected to discover ways to see past A. J.'s reactions and sympathize with Tully's responses. Although Rothbauer claims that, even with Tully's history of drug abuse, A. J. appears "immature, confused, and unstable" by comparison (15), the conventions of the problem novel require readers to identify with the protagonist's dominant version of events. I wonder, then, whether these interventions are sufficient in discouraging real adolescent read-ers—whether gay or straight or anywhere in be-tween—from following A. J.'s decision to never forgive Tully for his transgression of normative male heterosexuality.

The complex interrelationship between protagonist, antagonist, trauma, and silence takes on significantly different proportions in Hail Mary Corner, a story told by a first-person retrospective narrator in a confessional mode. Foucault's discussion of the "obligation to confess" (60) is particularly useful here, not only in terms of the adult narrator confessing the trauma of his youth, but in light of the setting of the novel—the Benedictine Seminary of St. John the Divine in British Columbia, an all-male Roman Catholic environment isolated from the remaining world of 1982 and operated according to "a specific agenda: to help young men find their Calling and to aid in their Priestly Formation" (3-4). The school is run by monks, who "didn't allow jeans, gum, girls—any-thing that made life worth living" (115), and is an environment where "[p]rivacy was for people with something to hide" (9) and "sex and education were mutually exclusive terms" (160). Like Bad Boy, Hail Mary Corner relies on a number of dual oppositions: powerful and powerless, orthodoxy and heresy, and, in the case of Bill and Jon at the end of the novel, alive and dead. Because the narrative is focalized solely through the adult retrospective narrator-protagonist, his impressions and remembrances of the past—including his mistakes and destructive decisions—are all presented as truth. When Foucault suggests that the production of confession "is thoroughly imbued with relations of power" (60), he places the bulk of that power in the hands of the one who must respond to the confession. But as the retrospective narrator, it is the adult Bill who has the power to choose what to confess and what to elide—both in telling the story and in acts of confession within that story—so that, as with Bad Boy, adolescent readers of any sexuality must read Jon's trauma of coming to terms with his sexuality through Bill's narratological choices. Regardless of any amount of regret expressed by the adult protagonist, Bill's decision to prevent Jon from confessing about his trauma within a larger narrative of confession is a very glaring silence. Foucault's comments on the necessity to confess are important in light of this silencing:

The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile;… and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation.

                                         (61-62)

Thus, adolescent readers of Hail Mary Corner are both the implied audience of this confession and the agents who are required to dispense judgment, pun-ishment, and forgiveness to the character who confesses. In light of Nodelman's and Trites's comments about the straightforward conventions of the problem novel in its manipulation of its readers, the demands made on its audience make it difficult to predict how these adolescent readers will "judge" Bill's confession and his treatment of Jon.

In a story centering on four sixteen-year-old male troublemakers at boarding school, Hail Mary Corner shares with Bad Boy the depiction of activities that rely on ritual and hierarchy, with scenes focusing on politics among the boys in the dormitory, theological lessons learned in the classroom, sports and initiations, and Bill's growing sexual intimacy with a local girl named Mary O'Brien. In all their activities, the boys continually push the boundaries between the acceptable and the unacceptable within the hierarchy in which they participate, and although most of their antics are in good fun, Bill seems particularly keen to overthrow the hierarchical system entirely.

The particularly close bond between Bill and Jon is also reminiscent of Bad Boy. Similar to those of A. J. and the pre-gay Tully, Bill and Jon's interactions initially remain within the boundaries of "appropriate" male-male behavior: they wrestle on Bill's bed (55), go skinny-dipping with classmates (6), wear each other's clothes (53-54), exchange secrets (41-42, 66-67), whisper in each other's ears (12), admit that neither of them can help masturbating despite the fact that they are taught to consider it a sin (42), and even occasionally express physical affection within certain limits (65)—after a hug between them, Bill "almost felt free" (43). For most of the narrative, none of these activities cause any anxiety about normative masculinity. Their two close friends, the stuttering Connor and the pious Eric, can even joke repeatedly that Bill and Jon act like a married couple.

The novel begins with the adolescent Bill entering the abbey church and being aware of Jon's body: "Bowing my head and closing my eyes, I felt the presence of God. I could also feel the warmth of Jon kneeling next to me: a familiar whiff of soap and evaporating Aqua Velva" (1). In a later scene in which they sneak off together to sleep in a bell tower (which of course they are not allowed to do), they enjoy an intimate discussion about life, religion, and their friendship, during which Bill confides that "I've never had a friend like you before. It feels like we're … the same" (68; ellipsis in original). And because they are both freezing, they snuggle down together, making Bill feel "warm and important" as he drifts off to sleep (68).⁷ But, unlike the sexually inexperienced A. J., Bill suffers from inner turmoil about his sexual feelings for Mary and his desire for self-gratification, both of which he is taught are mortal sins. In fact, the first two chapters both end with Bill's hands clenched in prayer to prevent him from masturbating (9, 23). Later in the novel, following the brief euphoria of having sex with Mary for the first time, the adult Bill confesses that he heard a "little voice" reminding him that "I wasn't alone in my sin anymore. I had brought someone else in, and that was a whole lot worse" (113). In this way, the narrative becomes a confession of heterosexual trauma.

Bill's guilt coincides with the Catholic values of sexual repression that he struggles to obey while contemplating whether he wants to eventually join the priesthood. And yet the narrator confesses that his childhood motivations for considering this path were less connected with an actual faith but with a desire for "that limitless spiritual power" over others that comes from doing "God's Work" (3). The adolescent Bill wants it both ways—to possess this power but also to rebel against the hierarchical system in which he must participate in order to acquire that power. But the adult narrator does not express an awareness of this irony. During an early scene with Father Gregory about his rebellious past and his uncertain future, the adult Bill confesses that this "was my chance to suck it up, to submit. But something inside me wouldn't let it happen" (20). Although Brother Thomas later explains that Bill must learn obedience before earning "the responsibilities of freedom" (62), Bill remains, throughout the narrative, unwilling (or unable) to "submit" to either the hierarchy of the seminary or the rules of Catholic orthodoxy.⁸ He does not confess any regret or hesitation in persuading his friends that they investigate the attic of the school (an area off limits to all students) after Jon reveals that he has been given a key to that room by an unnamed former student. When they come across files on the school's key personnel, the four friends discover that Brother Thomas has undergone extensive psychiatric and psychological consultation for reasons that are undocumented (Connor's speculation that "M-maybe he's just a h-h-homo" receives no response) and has been given prescriptions for lithium carbonate (89). Next, they come across a secret room in the abbey, but Bill refuses to express remorse or come forward after the monks threaten the unknown culprits with excommunication (165). Instead, Bill ponders how he can use the knowledge of lithium carbonate to his advantage.

As with A. J. and Tully in Wieler's novel, Bill's discovery of Jon's sexual orientation occurs accidentally. After Brother Thomas accuses Bill of "[s]hagging a girl in the equipment room," Bill confesses no remorse, either to Brother Thomas or to his readers, and instead resolves to write Mary a letter, only to realize he has taken Jon's binder by mistake (118). Upon opening it, he discovers an image of Michelangelo's David, the "perfect boy/man who slew Goli-ath—without so much as a jock strap." Again, the narrator's interpretation of this image is presented as fact within the narrative: "Hidden away in the intimacy of Jon's homework, it wasn't art. It was porn" (119). He also discovers the photograph of a classmate's exposed erection, an image of rebellion mentioned earlier in the narrative but with added connotations in this new context. After finding Jon in the chapel, in the middle of anguished prayer, Bill ponders several possible responses, all of which recall A. J.'s self-centered paranoia: "'Have you been staring at my dick in the shower all these years?' 'Why are you always around when I'm changing?' 'Why were you sleeping so close to me on the Autumn Trek?'" And, finally, "'If this gets out, what will people think about me?'" (120).

Jon begins by making clear the urgency to confess which, according to Foucault, would involve making himself the subject of a freeing discourse ("I've got to talk to someone about this") at the same time as it would place Bill in a power position as interlocutor and judge of the confession ("you're the best friend I've ever had"). Although Jon claims to be "so confused" (120) and "interested in things … people … I'm not supposed to be" (121; ellipses in original), Bill disrupts Jon's attempt to confess his trauma: "You're not queer, Jon. And don't psych yourself into thinking it…. You're confused, that's all. Don't make it something it's not" (121). When Jon persists, Bill interrupts him again by invoking the heterosexual privilege that A. J. took for granted in Bad Boy, both as the protagonist and as the focalizor. "You're just lucky I'm not taking this the wrong way. If you know what's good for you, you won't talk about this ever again" (121-22). Even in denying the term "queer"—a term that Jon himself does not use—Bill's utterance enacts a discourse of homophobia that leads to Jon's rejection: although he hopes they can "go back to the way things were and forget this" (121), everything between them changes irrevocably. In the very next scene, Jon refuses to go skinny-dipping with the rest of the group (124-25). Later, after Bill proves incapable of attempting to mend the rift between them (133), the kind of physical affection that had once been taken for granted as safe and appropriate is now overwhelmed with paranoia: "Jon gave me a friendly shove on the shoulder…. I wanted to put my arm around him. But then we both remembered, and everything was ruined" (130). A few chapters later, when Bill attempts to console Jon after a friend from home drowns, Jon confronts Bill about his inconsistent friendship. Bill forces Jon to hug him in an attempt to prove that their friendship is intact, but when he notices two men in a pickup truck watching them, his homophobic paranoia that he will be perceived as gay intervenes and he lets go (153).

Absent in the adult narrator's confession is an expression of Bill's awareness that the rift between them is directly caused by his refusal to hear Jon confess his trauma of homophobia, or what Jon calls "the truth" (122). Instead, in the very next scene, Bill and Connor have a conversation in which "the secret slipped out, like a joke or a comment about the weather." Moreover, Bill's confession of Jon's aborted attempt to confess is a significant misrepresentation of the scene as depicted earlier:

"Jon's a homo," I announced. "I grabbed his binder by accident. It had the photo of Tom's dink and a picture of a naked statue. There was nothing he could say."

"Are you s-s-sure?"

"Positive. You think you know a guy and then—shit, it's so weird."

"So you th-think he's a t-tail gunner?"

"Yeah … I don't know. Maybe he's just confused or something. It kinda makes you go back and think about everything he's said and done. You never expect someone close to you to …"

                      (158-59; ellipses in original)

After speculating whether Travis, the friend who drowned, committed suicide because he too was gay, Bill continues:

"It's not right. He's been lying to us all these years. We're in here together, stuck like sardines. He broke a trust. A sacred trust…. It's like he's been one of us all this time, then bam! He's not what he seems to be. Think about it. How are we ever going to feel safe again?" I paused for effect. "I'm sorry for him, but I still can't help the way I feel."

"You're his best friend. Has he ever … you know, t-tried anything on you?"

"Of course not. But he's probably thinking about it." My betrayal was complete.

                   (159; second ellipsis in original)

As with A. J. in Bad Boy, Bill's homophobic assessment of Jon's sexuality and his retroactive analysis of their friendship becomes presented as truth for adolescent readers, as per the conventions of the young adult problem novel, even though readers can clearly see for themselves that this "truth" grossly misrepresents Jon's earlier attempt to confess. Although earlier Bill confessed to Jon that he saw them as "the same," this revision of their friendship positions Jon as irredeemably different. Bill's assumption that Jon has been in love with him this whole time likewise revises their earlier conversation. From Bill's perspective, however, Jon does not need to have sex or to express desire for a specific male person to be labeled a pervert and a traitor. In light of the Foucauldian concept of confession, it is debatable how this novel intends readers to interpret the adult Bill's narrative of his adolescent homophobia. Perhaps these omissions invite adolescent readers to see through Bill's self-centeredness and to consequently view his actions and reactions as irrational and misguided. But the narrator's intervention in this dialogue is limited to the phrase "My betrayal was complete," thus bypassing the opportunity to confess remorse and guilt and to manipulate adolescent readers into feeling remorse and guilt for blindly sympathizing with a homophobic protagonist.

If You Could Just Get Over It": Rebellion and Its Reprimand

So far in this paper I have tried to examine a thematic of homophobia present throughout these two Canadian novels for young adults. In their utterance of the term "queer," both heterosexual protagonists enact a dominant discourse of homophobia that interpolates both them and the best friends they have discovered are gay. As protagonists, the figures through whom each text is primarily focalized, A. J. and Bill take away their gay friends' agency to self-identify as queer and to attempt to configure the term for their own subjectivity: in doing so, the protagonists force Tully and Jon to become objectified by the homophobic discourse. By focusing on the reactions of heterosexual protagonists who feel horrified and betrayed in part due to their certainty that they have unknowingly been the object of unwanted queer desire, both texts privilege these homophobic reactions even as they attempt, in differing degrees, to distance readers from them. What I turn to now is the question of whether these interventions are sufficient in countering a larger homophobic discourse and, if not, whether these texts end up reinforcing the homophobic system they are ostensibly attempting to dismantle.

As we have seen, A. J.'s and Bill's homophobic responses are nearly identical, suggesting that they both reference a dominant pattern of homophobia that preexists their labeling of their friends as queer. Complicating this binary in both texts are the ways that "heterosexual" and "homosexual" are unevenly linked to actual experience and desire. Although readers learn of past and present same-sex partners after Tully's sexual orientation is revealed, Jon remains sexually inexperienced both before and after Bill's analysis of the images in Jon's binder, and thus his homosexuality is defined "more rhetorically than physically," to borrow from Trites's lexicon (103). Not only is Jon denied the opportunity to provide his own explanation for those images, but his "confusion" is not linked to specific acts or specific feelings until the final scene, in which he finally confesses that he has feelings for Bill that he never expected to be returned (171). And so, although both A. J. and Bill consciously attempt to identify themselves against their gay friends—as not gay, but without using the terms "straight" or "heterosexual"—and against the possibility of being perceived as gay, they are in fact distancing themselves from two distinct versions of "queer"—one physical and one rhetorical. It is perhaps for this reason that A. J. and Bill are likewise differently heterosexual: Bill's sexual act with Mary O'Brien contrasts with A. J.'s limited sexual experience with girls, making A. J.'s heterosexuality more rhetorical than physical, similar to Tully's heterosexual masquerade with a girl in his class to keep up appearances within the larger social group.

Still, this disjunction between "gay" and "not gay" as differently oppositional categories leads to further complexities. In Bad Boy, Bill's homophobia exists in tandem with additional moments of more "appropriate" male-male physical contact and—for lack of a better term—heterophobia, complicating the singular "problem" of this problem novel. Shortly after deciding to terminate his friendship with Tully, A. J. meets his father's new girlfriend, a young woman named June whom he estimates is in her mid-twenties. Traumatized by the idea of his father as a sexual being (particularly with someone much younger) and simultaneously disgusted and titillated by this new female presence in their all-male household, A. J. is initially hostile. Later, when he discovers that June has spent the night, his response is remarkably similar to the one evoked by the sight of Tully and Derek, making the parallels between his homophobia and his heterophobia quite glaring: "This was vile. They were both vile" (150). For much of the rest of the novel, A. J. throws himself into hockey, participating in a male-only sport in which aggression, agility, and determination are the key ingredients in the sport's sole purpose—to win. As a result of this environment, A. J. learns to feel good when he wins and to feel bad when he doesn't, which leads to adopting whatever means necessary—including becoming a goon on the ice, earning the nickname "Bad Boy"—to ensure that he feels good. The narration, focalized through A. J. with no intervention from the omniscient narrator, makes it clear how much he depends on the rules of the game: "What mattered to [Coach] Landau, to everybody, was results, right?… That's how the league worked. And anyone who said different was a liar, or worse" (123). Not only does this hyper-masculinity earn the esteem of his male peers—quenched only by the disapproval of Summer, one of the few women present in the text—but it also earns him validation from his rather brutish coach:

As A. J. passed, [Coach Landau] reached out and patted the boy's shoulder, just below the bulky pad. It was fatherly, forgiving. It was a gift.

A. J. didn't pause, didn't even raise his eyes, but the feeling rippled through him. Here in this place, with these guys, he was part of something. It was the first time he'd felt human in twenty-four hours.

                                             (90)

The scene leads to multiple reading possibilities. On the one hand, by making obvious parallels between A. J.'s horrific reactions to the discovery of Tully as a sexual being in ways he disapproves of and the discovery of his father as a sexual being in ways he disapproves of, perhaps the narrative is implicitly attempting to normalize homosexuality as a reality: if adolescent readers are better able to see A. J.'s reactions to his father's relationship as immature or exaggerated, then perhaps this perception will extend to his reaction to his best friend's relationship with Derek Lavalle. Indeed, since the narrative suggests that A. J.'s internalization of the rules of the game is destructive, perhaps adolescent readers are meant to assume that all of A. J.'s perceptions and reactions are "bad." Nevertheless, since A. J. is rewarded for his violence on the ice (at least temporarily) with newfound popularity, the social sanction given to him within the text competes with the narrator's extratextual disapproval.

Because A. J. equates being human with being platonic with other men, requiring him to reject the images of Tully and Derek and of his father and June in sexual situations, he concludes that his friendship with Tully can never be resumed. Although he genuinely misses what they once had, it does not occur to him that a post-coming-out friendship could be redefined and reworked; more than anything, as the epigraph to this paper suggests, it becomes clear that he blames Tully for the disintegration of their friendship. Part of A. J.'s homophobia stems from public perception: although he enjoys new popularity and self-confidence thanks to his "bad boy" image, he knows that, just as he is still a probationary member of the hockey team, he is also a probationary part of the high school elite. His eagerness to make new male friends during a "round-robin of boasting" about past sexual experience with girls leads him to lie about his former girlfriend Jacquie (126), described earlier in the book in the two-dimensional terms "funny and nice" (40) and as someone who "could be so quiet and acquiescent that there was no mistaking what she didn't say" (41). Because they didn't sleep together, despite a clear (although unspoken) invitation, A. J.'s experience of heterosexuality is actually limited to descriptions of invented encounters through language and to gestures that imply that his friendship with Summer has been more than platonic, but this claim to experience is solely for the benefit of impressing male friends (126).

Ruining this platonic good time is A. J.'s growing realization that he is in fact attracted to Tully, an attraction that he attempts to repress and that the narrator succeeds in repressing temporarily by once again offering only selective disclosures: drunk in the bathroom of a bar, "For the first time all night [A. J.] knew exactly what he was feeling and who he was feeling it about, and it scared him to death…. [A]lone in the cubicle, with no one to judge him, he couldn't fight the rush of memory, and sensation, and loss" (131). In the novel's climatic scene, A. J. attempts to date-rape Summer at a party, less because of his actual desire for her than as a way to prove to his male friends that his heterosexuality is not solely rhetorical and to offset his feelings for Tully. Although the narrator sympathizes that "[t]his was how it was supposed to be," part of A. J.'s motivation is to somehow prove to Tully (telepathically, I suppose) that he is not gay: "Do you get the message, Tulsa Brown? his heart cried" (170). After Tully and A. J. pummel each other over what happened with Summer, A. J. reveals that he has feelings for Tully. Naturally, Tully immediately responds that "I've always wanted you" (176). When A. J. asks what they should do, Tully draws a line between them, reinforcing the boundary between gay and not gay: "there's a big difference between having a crush and being gay…. This is me, but it isn't you" (177). A. J. accepts this logic, but adds that the only way they can guarantee that A. J. remain within the realm of not gay is for them to never be friends again: "I can't risk it. I can't ever have the chance to know, for sure" (179). In the months that follow, A. J. rebuffs all invitations to remain friends with Tully, except when lured by a mention of Summer, who has never forgiven him for his earlier assault but is apparently still moping about him. Part of A. J. enjoys being in Tully's company once again, but this isn't sufficient to counter his resolve to end the friendship. The narrator then relates what appears to be A. J.'s final goodbye to his former friend: "Nothing personal, Tul, he thought. Live your life however you want. But don't expect me to be part of it" (184).

The novel comes full-circle by ending at another wedding, with most of the plot threads tied up: A. J. becomes reinstated on the hockey team (albeit on probation), bonds with his father, and resolves to be nicer to June. Tully is also present, once again wearing sunglasses but now sporting "a periwinkle-blue suit jacket, probably the only one in Moose Jaw" (187), no doubt to emphasize his difference. When Tully asks A. J. to join them at their table, A. J. shrugs and accepts, surprised that Tully "still wants to be my friend" (187). But what A. J. wants remains unexpressed. When Summer sees him and protests about the presence of "Attila the Hun," A. J. cuts her off with a line that makes her cheeks turn pink: "I know you love it, but try and control yourself, all right?" (188). And so another plot thread is tied up: this time, the narrator does not intervene in the way A. J. has learned is the appropriate way to talk to girls. As for Tully, A. J. begins to see the error of his ways when an older relative makes a series of derogatory comments about his father and June and about "gol-darned pansy coaches" (189) that remind him too clearly of his own past responses. Thus, his internalized homophobia is not punctured by a desire to resume his friendship with Tully but by a sudden fear that he may someday turn into his "narrow, obnoxious" Uncle Mike (190). In the novel's final moments, A. J. realizes that Tully should be admired for having the courage to come out, that for Tully to "dance with joy" in a room full of "people like me, A. J. thought with a pang … took an especially resiliant [sic] human being" (191). But this "satisfying" resolution is incomplete, since this oblique challenge to A. J.'s homophobia links this scene to the episode in the gay coffeehouse by once again making everything about "me." Moreover, this self-realization does not provide him with any feasible options for reprogramming his friendship with Tully without encountering the permanent threat that A. J.'s attraction to Tully will lead him to one day drift away from the safe realm of not gay. Nodelman claims that, "[a]t the end of the novel, A. J., the heterosexual hero, becomes admirable by learning to change and by maturing, becoming an adult" ("Bad Boys" 36), and indeed, as far as his attitudes toward hockey and his father's relationship with June are concerned, A. J. does change and mature. But while A. J. continues to use Summer in part to rechannel his secret desire for Tully, the problem of the boys' friendship remains unresolved. A. J.'s past assault on Summer is overlooked in this resolution, and the novel ends with Tully—now described as a "siren"—dancing by himself again, a spectacle of difference and otherness at this site of heterosexual union, while all in attendance, including A. J. and Summer, fix their collective gaze upon him (191).

Because Wieler uses A. J. as a vehicle for exploring the theory that homophobia has less to do with a rejection of the homosexual other than a rejection of a potentially homosexual self, the fact that A. J. is implicitly forgiven by Summer but makes no concrete move to make amends with Tully, even as he begins to realize his own homophobia, may be a persistent homophobic undercurrent in what appears to be a satisfying resolution. But a resolution that replaces a same-sex threat with a "safe" opposite-sex substitute must be played out differently in Hail Mary Corner, set in a religious environment in which no women are allowed to appear. If defined as sexual behavior toward, or activity with, the opposite sex, hetero-sexuality is literally banned from the Benedictine Seminary of St. John the Divine, and so Bill's recurring "liaison" with Mary O'Brien, despite being an expression of "normal" heterosexuality, is explicitly against the rules. Bill struggles with the sin of premarital (heterosexual) sex on religious grounds, but homosexual sex—or, in Jon's case, rhetorical same-sex desire—is never discussed in their theology classes. Bill's decision to reprimand Jon by demoting him from best friend to antagonist is not motivated by religious dogma the way that his desire to express his heterosexuality physically clashes with the Catholic values he is expected to embrace.

Toward the end of the novel, after Jon confronts Bill about sharing his secret with Connor while he was away for Travis's funeral, he concludes that he has successfully overcome his trauma: "Then it dawned on me. God isn't punishing me. He's just showing me I'm strong enough to make it on my own…. I didn't need you to feel the same way about me. I just needed you to be my friend. Now I don't need anybody" (171). Similar to A. J.'s goodbye to Tully in the penultimate chapter of Bad Boy, the retrospective narrator then waxes philosophical in a crude foreshadowing of the events to come: "I knew this was goodbye, not a mean or vindictive or even sad one, just goodbye, final and complete" (172). Indeed, this is a final goodbye for Jon; although the four friends have one final band practice, Jon will never speak again. He will never have the chance to "make it on [his] own."

In a chapter titled "Crimes of Passion," a term that my dictionary defines as crimes committed as a result of sexual jealousy, a series of events snowballs into Bill's complete overhaul of the system that surrounds him, his friends' and Mary's rejection, and Jon's death. After Brother Thomas catches Bill trying to force himself on Mary and subsequently drives her home, the confrontation between the two men is mostly dialogue: as in the scene in which Bill betrays a revised version of Jon's secret to Connor, the confessing narrator does not intervene in his younger self's non-response to Brother Thomas's comments on selfishness, respect, deceit, and immorality. Only when he is advised to leave school does he react by blackmailing Brother Thomas with his knowledge of the lithium carbonate needed to alleviate manic depression, making nasty insinuations about the older man's sanity and attempting to buy off Brother Thomas's silence with his own. After Brother Thomas throws him out of the school van in a rage and speeds away in the darkness, Bill continues to withhold any expression of remorse, even when Eric and Connor express disgust with his actions. As if on cue, a fellow student runs in and announces that Jon has been hurt: "Someone ran him off Hail Mary Corner" (184).

If the focus is on Bill as protagonist-confessor, Hail Mary Corner can be linked to a number of texts that reminisce on the mistakes and anxieties of youth, and indeed, the rest of the novel leads to a resolution of Bill's trauma stemming from this "tragedy." But while Payton's novel repeats many of the themes of rejection and "intolerance" explored in Bad Boy, it rewrites Wieler's ending by introducing a resolution that borrows a pattern from American novels of the early 1970s that featured gay male characters. As Michael Cart reports, these novels "seemed to decree that if you were gay, all you could look forward to was a life of despair or an untimely death, though usually in a car crash instead of by suicide" (198; see also Rothbauer 16).⁹ In other words, by substituting a freak car accident for suicide or a fatal queer-bashing, Hail Mary Corner opts out of having to own up to its blatantly homophobic "resolution" of a novel that is much more problematic as a product of 2001 than Bad Boy is as a product of 1989. By focusing on the heterosexual "me," the subject of the confession, other questions and perspectives are avoided.¹⁰ The adolescent Bill finally admits his wrongdoing in confession—about the scenes with Mary, breaking into and entering the monks' secret room, as well as his betrayal of "the trust of a friend" and his responsibility "for Brother Thomas's breakdown and Jon's coma" (196)—and finally concludes that he's "evil" (197). But Father Albert admits that he is unable to punish Bill for any of this because of the sanctity of the confessional: "If we were outside the confessional, you know you'd be expelled" (197). As with previous scenes, Bill's motivations and strategies are omitted from the confession, so what also remains unsaid is that Bill would have known this before making the decision to confess; the sanctity of the confessional guarantees forgiveness and absolves him of legal culpability. What also remains unspoken is "this other trust you broke," which Bill refuses to confess. And so, the explicit resolution of this chapter is that Bill has learned a lesson in selflessness and that "God's forgiven you. Now it's time to try to forgive yourself" (197). What remains implicit in this scene is that, in refusing to discuss his betrayal of Jon, Bill avoids having to confront and confess his homophobia in the Foucauldian sense, in order to be judged, punished, and forgiven, either extratextually by the adolescent audience of the confession or by Father Albert within the text itself. And so, if the novel seems to focus on the tragedy of intolerance, this intolerance remains unarticulated. By focusing entirely on Bill's recovery from the freak accident that caused Jon's coma, Jon's unexpressed (and inexpressible) trauma of being gay and Bill's homophobic rejection of his friend fade away from the rest of the narrative. Bill is advised by Father Albert not to "carry all that guilt around with you. Make it right, then leave it behind" (198). What remains unsaid is that, by deliberately driving Brother Thomas into a rage, Bill's destructive actions are in fact indirectly responsible for Jon's death. What also remains unsaid is that their friendship does not end at Jon's death but in the earlier scene in which Bill rejected his friend because he was gay. At the end of this penultimate chapter, Bill makes the mature decision to leave the school and return home, and Jon's fate remains undisclosed by the adult confessor.

In an epilogue set nearly 20 years later, an adult Bill, now married and teaching high school, has received a package from Jon's mother containing an audiotape letter Bill sent Jon during the summer preceding the start of the novel; on Side B is Jon's reply, which Bill has never heard. Once again, Jon's confession is filtered through Bill's dominant perspective: "Jon says he thinks about me all the time. No one else understands him. There are a million things to tell me when we get together. Just hearing my voice makes him feel better, not so alone" (202). The adult Bill declines the opportunity to comment on these words. Instead, he decides to visit the school for the first time since leaving it in 1982, where he learns what has become of some of his boyhood friends and indulges in a nostalgic commentary that seems rather cruel given what has happened: "no matter what they've become, I knew them in the becoming. That makes us kin forever" (205). No attempt is made to link this comment to the circumstances that led to Jon's death. Bill's main purpose in returning to the school—to finally enact Father Albert's advice to "[m]ake it right, then leave it behind" by apologizing to Brother Thomas for prompting the accident that caused Jon's death—also stalemates when he learns that Brother Thomas has never had any recollection of the events of that night. Brother Thomas refuses to assume the powerful position of the judge of the confession by calling into question the very need for Bill to confess. After claiming he cannot forgive Bill for a conversation he cannot recall, Brother Thomas offers a rather disturbing lesson in light of the narrative's avoidances: "Memory's a tricky thing, William. Sometimes what we remember as being so important—the things we can't forget—really aren't such a big deal, after all" (208). After a final confession—"I loved Jon, you know…. But he never knew it" (208)—the novel ends with Bill's regrets being replaced by peace (209).

Concluding Remarks

I have focused much of this paper on the ways in which these novels attempt to resolve the "problem" of the gay male best friend. In uttering the term "queer" and attaching it to their respective friends, Bill and A. J. enact a discourse of homophobic rejection that persists beyond each novel's resolution. As long as our attention is directed to the story arc of the narrator or dominant focalizor, who is rewarded with change, growth, and forgiveness, both narratives offer endings that appear to resolve the several "problems" of these problem novels, a genre in which reader identification with the protagonist is necessary for the book to transmit ideology to that reader. As mentioned earlier, this focus on heterosexual protagonists suggests that the targeted reader of these two novels is assumed to likewise be heterosexual.

But these resolutions are incomplete, since change, growth, and forgiveness are not accorded to each protagonist's gay friend, despite hints in both narratives that some of the decisions made by the straight hero are destructive. In Hail Mary Corner, the adult Bill needs to confess his adolescent trauma if he is to "leave it behind," but within this confession he actively prohibits Jon from confessing in turn, forcing his former friend to take his secret to the grave.¹¹ In the final pages of Bad Boy, A. J. begins to reconsider his own homophobia, not out of a sudden wish to reinstate his friendship with Tully but out of fear of one day becoming another version of an offensive uncle. Even if both novels dwell on the tragedy of "intolerance" as a lesson to real adolescent readers—which, as indicated earlier, past critical responses to both novels have largely implied—resolving that tragedy does not actually free the gay best friend from the discourse of homophobia invoked in both narratives. Focusing on the fact that everything works out for the heterosexual protagonist distracts from the final placement of the gay friend, which, particularly in the case of Hail Mary Corner, may be inflexibly homophobic even as it appears inevitable. Given the absence of a wider range of gay male characters in Canadian young adult fiction, there are no additional texts in this larger genre to disrupt this series of "shaming interpellations" for gay or otherwise non-heterosexual adolescent readers seeking validation through forms of representation and imaginative models with whom they can identify; instead, these readers are once again interpolated into this homophobic ideology, learning to silence their own confessions of trauma out of fear of being severely reprimanded. As a result, readers of any gender or sexual orientation are discouraged from developing the imaginative capacity to understand and embrace a wider range of possibilities for male subjectivity.

As well, in light of the rigid structures of the problem novel, I question whether these real adolescent readers are equipped with the tools necessary to maneuver around these interventions and avoidances—to read the unsaid as well as the said—if the genre of the problem novel requires them to take for granted the supremacy of the protagonist. As a retrospective first-person narrator, the adult Bill knows exactly what will happen to all the characters before the narrative begins, but he must pace his selective disclosures in order to create a sense of suspense for adolescent readers; moreover, this adult narrator also exhibits an awareness of how to manipulate his own feelings of guilt, particularly during the confession within the confession. In a way, the resolution manipulates adolescent readers into mimicking Bill's avoidance of his homophobia. Moreover, Bill's distortion of Jon's secret to Connor calls into question whether there are additional gaps and misrepresentations in the larger confession of the narrative—whether memory is, as Brother Thomas tells the adult Bill, "a tricky thing." Given Trites's point about the "authority of the author over the reader" (xii) in young adult fiction, it is also worth pondering whether Jon's death is simply an unfortunate accident within the text or a "crime of passion" validated by the text.

Perhaps I am making too much of the unsaid in these two novels. Perhaps I am underestimating the ability of adolescent readers to identify the blind spots of each novel's protagonist and to challenge his viewpoints. Perhaps adolescent readers are meant to persist in seeing A. J. as a "bad boy," even though he is not permanently reprimanded for any of his bad behavior. And perhaps adolescent readers are supposed to conclude that Bill's homophobia is the actual tragedy mourned at the end of the novel, even as that homophobia is not confessed. But although both novels are ostensibly about the exploration of alternate social codes of masculinity, they continue to privilege the resolution of the heterosexual protagonist. At the end of Bad Boy, A. J. admits his own homophobia and is rewarded by the implied forgiveness of a young woman to whom he has been sexually violent while Tully dances by himself in defiance of the heterosexual gaze. And in Hail Mary Corner, the "callous homophobe" gets to forgive himself and be forgiven by God for what everyone persists in seeing as an unfortunate accident, but the dead boy remains dead.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Children's Literature Association annual conference in 2003. For their detailed feedback and discussion, I thank Kenneth Kidd, Perry Nodelman, Mavis Reimer, Sina Rahmani, Eric L. Tribunella, and the two anonymous referees who responded so generously to an earlier draft of this paper. I gratefully acknowledge doctoral fellowships from the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which helped make this research possible.

1. For a range of American novels with gay male adolescent protagonists, see titles by Bauer, Block, Cart (My Father's Scar), Chambers, Hartinger, A. M. Jenkins, Kerr, Levithan, Mastbaum, and Sanchez. The coming-out process of gay male adolescents has also been explored in American novels not intended specifically for young adult readers by Brown, Reed, Vilmure, and White. See also Day; Christine Jenkins; Trites 102-16.

2. Rothbauer's list focuses specifically on Canadian titles published in English. Tony Esposito expresses similar concerns about the dearth of gay and lesbian characters in French-language texts published in Québec, although Guillaume Bourgault's recent coming-out novel, Philippe avec un grand H (2003), has helped fill that void.

3. A partial exception is Glen Huser's excellent novel Stitches (2003): although its first-person adolescent narrator doesn't self-identify as gay, he is conscious of his crush on one of his male friends and is subject to homophobic slurs and violence. Contrary to the gay characters in the two novels under discussion here, this hero refuses to be objectified by homophobic discourse and actively pursues his dream to become a professional puppeteer in defiance of the negative comments of his classmates and of two adult male authority figures. Stitches won the 2003 Governor General's Award for Best Children's Book (Text), fourteen years after Wieler's win for Bad Boy.

4. Thematically and structurally, Hail Mary Corner has much in common with John Knowles's A Separate Peace (1959). This American novel begins with the adult protagonist returning to his former boarding school and waxing philosophical about the good old days and the tragedy of his youth, whereas Payton's book ends in precisely this way. Consider, too, the novel by Fuhrman and the film Dead Poets Society. The classification of Payton's book is debatable, given that it does not appear under Beach Holme Publishing's young adult imprint. However, I include it in this study because it very closely fits the parameters of the young adult problem novel and because the copy I use was sent as a review copy to Canadian Children's Literature, indicating that the publishers hoped to at least include young adults in their targeted audience.

5. Harker, studying the larger genre of "bad boy" narratives, claims that Bad Boy is Wieler's attempt as a woman to "confront consciously or unconsciously the problem of how to subvert the male-dominated literary forms" (29). To her, the introduction of an explicitly homosexual component to a text belonging to a genre presumed to be heterosexual (even with the presence of homoerotic subtext) destabilizes that assumption about the genre. Nodelman discusses the book's reliance on a series of rigid binary oppositions between homosexuality and hetero-sexuality ("Bad Boys" 40), leading him to ask whether its resolution involves the acceptance of the gay friend or the reiteration of "tired clichés" ("Making" 12). See also Charles; Easun. Reviews of Payton's novel in the popular press do not problematize the death of the gay character, even when acknowledging the protagonist's homophobia. Responding to Payton's "frank and touching first novel," Jim Bartley suggests that, "[a]mong coming-out stories, Payton's tale seems to me unique. Narrated by a callow homophobe, it moves through prejudice, betrayal and violence to a conclusion of equal parts redemption and regret. Bill's wisdom comes too late for Jon. But … come it does, packing a cathartic wallop" (D27). Robert J. Wiersma's review in the Vancouver Sun includes a photo of Payton and the following caption: "Brian Payton: He treats sexuality in a refreshing manner" (C12). Needless to say, I don't share this enthusiasm.

6. This study does not adequately discuss Derek, in part because I am unsure what to make of a character Nodelman calls "a rather nasty sadist" ("Bad Boys" 36) who "expresses his disdain for convention in terms of despicable treatment of others" (37). After Derek threatens to reveal the details of Tully's past sexual encounter to the rest of the hockey team, Tully and Derek "come to terms" (59) and start dating each other in exchange for Derek's silence, a solution that seems to me very illogical and shortsighted. Throughout the rest of the book, Derek continually threatens to drag A. J. out of the closet, purely out of maliciousness. He even calls A. J. a "[l]ying faggot" (161) to get a rise out of him, and the brawl that ensues causes A. J. to be suspended from the hockey team and leads him to force himself on Summer. It is not clear why Derek would want to humiliate A. J. by forcing him out of the closet when he would likely receive the same reception from his teammates. Given the series of binary oppositions at work throughout the novel, perhaps Wieler's strategy is to make Tully seem less threatening and horrible by contrasting him with someone who is literally threatening and horrible.

7. Bartley suggests that "it becomes clear that [Bill's] deepest feelings, though he can hardly acknowledge them, are for his classmate Jon," given the "charged intimacy that's erotic without ever evolving to the overtly sexual" (D27). I don't interpret Bill's feelings the same way, although a subtext of repressed sexual desire could help account for his homophobia and would be among the many silences of Bill's narrative of confession.

8. While several scenes in the novel are devoted to theological discussions in the classroom, Bill learns an alternative worldview from an older gentleman while doing volunteer work at a center for senior citizens: "Freethinkers think freely—about everything" (46). Although the boys learn in class that freethinking is incompatible with Catholic dogma (77-78), Bill continues to ponder this school of thought even after the gentleman has a stroke and lingers in a coma. In fact, when his friends respond to Bill's insistence that "It's just a stroke," Jon replies in a strange prediction of his own demise, "He won't recover…. His brain is gone. His body won't last long" (194).

9. Nodelman reads the ending of Bad Boy as a "variation" on the dominant pattern in homophobic young adult novels in which "a character discovered to be gay must die before the novel ends," with Isabelle Holland's The Man without a Face (1972) as a prime example ("Bad Boys" 40).

10. There is also the slight possibility that Jon's death was a suicide, given that "Connor's old bike had gone over the edge [of the cliff] and was hanging in a tree" (185). This would in part explain why he was out biking in the dark in the first place, but despite the presence of a policeman taking notes after the accident (186), the details surrounding the circumstances of Jon's accident are remarkably sparse.

11. As with the strange link between the freethinker's lingering coma and Jon's identical ultimate fate, consider one of Bill's minor traumas throughout the book: he is the only one in his family who knows about his father's affair with another woman, a "secret" that he confesses to Jon (41). Later, after his betrayal of Jon, Bill daydreams about his own funeral and imagines his father, "upset but relieved that I was going to take his dirty little secret to the grave with me" (168). By refusing to confess the details of his betrayal of his gay friend, Bill remains the only one alive to remember that betrayal and, except for Connor, to know that Jon was gay. The use of the name Mary to designate both Bill's girlfriend and the site of Jon's accident (reflected in the title of the novel) is likewise not coincidental, and the image of Mary O'Brien also merges with the literal Virgin Mary in Bill's prayers (16).

Works Cited

Bartley, Jim. "Coming of Age and Coming Out." Rev. of Hail Mary Corner, by Brian Payton. Globe and Mail 8 Dec. 2001: D27.

Bauer, Marion Dane, ed. Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence. 1994. New York: HarperTrophy, 1995.

Block, Francesca Lia. Baby Be-Bop. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

Bourgault, Guillaume. Philippe avec un grand H. Hull, QC: Vents d'Ouest, 2003.

Brown, Todd D. Entries from a Hot Pink Notebook. New York: Washington Square, 1995.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993.

Cart, Michael. From Romance to Realism: 50 Years of Growth and Change in Young Adult Literature. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

―――――――. My Father's Scar. 1996. New York: St. Martin's, 1998.

Chambers, Aidan. Dance on My Grave. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.

Charles, Jennifer. "For the Teen Readers." Rev. of Bad Boy, by Diana Wieler; Paddy Martel Is Missing, by Beverley Spencer. Canadian Children's Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 57-58 (1990): 147-49.

Day, Frances Ann. Lesbian and Gay Voices: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Literature for Children and Young Adults. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000.

Dead Poets Society. Dir. Peter Weir. Writ. Tom Schulman. Touchstone, 1989.

Donovan, John. I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

Easun, Sue. "'The Ice Is Its Own Argument': A Canadian Critic Takes a Second Look at Bad Boy and Her Own Modest Ambitions." Canadian Children's Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 87 (1997): 5-14.

Esposito, Tony. "Présence de l'absence: l'homosexualité dans la littérature de jeunesse québécoise." Lurelu 18.3 (1996): 53-54.

Findon, Joanne. Editorial. "Transgressing Gender Norms in Canadian Young Adult Fiction." Canadian Children's Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 108 (2002): 6-7.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. 1978. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Fuhrman, Chris. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. 1994. New York: Washington Square, 1996.

Harker, Mary J. "Tweaking the Canon: Diana Wiel-er's Bad Boys." Canadian Children's Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 76 (1994): 22-30.

Hartinger, Brent. Geography Club. New York: Harp-erTempest, 2003.

―――――――. The Order of the Poison Oak. New York: HarperTempest, 2005.

Holland, Isabelle. The Man without a Face. New York: Bantam, 1972.

Jenkins, A. M. Breaking Boxes. New York: Delacorte, 1997.

Jenkins, Christine. "Young Adult Novels with Gay/Lesbian Characters and Themes, 1969–92: A Historical Reading of Content, Gender, and Narrative Distance." Journal of Youth Services in Libraries 7.1 (1993): 43-55.

Kerr, M. E. "Hello," I Lied. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.

Kidd, Kenneth. Introduction. "Lesbian/Gay Literature for Children and Young Adults." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 23 (1998): 114-19.

Knowles, John. A Separate Peace. 1959. New York: Bantam, 1975.

Levithan, David. Boy Meets Boy. New York: Knopf, 2003.

Mastbaum, Blair. Clay's Way. Los Angeles: Alyson, 2004.

New, W. H. Borderlands: How We Talk about Canada. Vancouver: UBC, 1998.

Nodelman, Perry. "Bad Boys and Binaries: Mary Harker on Diana Wieler's Bad Boy." Canadian Children's Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 80 (1995): 34-40.

―――――――. "Making Boys Appear: The Masculinity of Children's Fiction." Ways of Being Male: Representing Masculinities in Children's Literature and Film. Ed. John Stephens. New York: Routledge, 2002. 1-14.

―――――――. The Pleasures of Children's Literature. New York: Longman, 1992.

Payton, Brian. Hail Mary Corner. Vancouver: Beach Holme, 2001.

Reed, Gary. Pryor Rendering. 1996. New York: Plume, 1997.

Rothbauer, Paulette. "Reading Mainstream Possibilities: Canadian Young Adult Fiction with Lesbian and Gay Characters." Canadian Children's Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 108 (2002): 10-26.

Sanchez, Alex. Rainbow Boys. New York: Simon Pulse, 2003.

―――――――. Rainbow High. New York: Simon Pulse, 2003.

―――――――. So Hard to Say. New York: Simon Pulse, 2004.

Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2000.

Vilmure, Daniel. Toby's Lie. 1995. New York: HarperPerennial, 1996.

White, Edmund. A Boy's Own Story. 1982. New York: Plume, 1983.

Wieler, Diana. Bad Boy. Toronto: Groundwood, 1989.

Wiersema, Robert J. "Coming of Age: Brian Payton's First Novel Rises Above Its Genre." Rev. of Hail Mary Corner, by Brian Payton. Vancouver Sun 22 Dec. 2001: C12.

PRESENTATIONS OF GAY AND LESBIAN FAMILIES IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

Virginia L. Wolf (essay date March 1989)

SOURCE: Wolf, Virginia L. "The Gay Family in Literature for Young People." Children's Literature in Education 20, no. 1 (March 1989): 51-8.

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Elizabeth A. Ford (essay date fall 1998)

SOURCE: Ford, Elizabeth A. "H/Z: Why Lesléa Newman Makes Heather into Zoe." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 23, no. 3 (fall 1998): 128-33.

[In the following essay, Ford proposes that authors who create "safe distances" between children and gay adults may actually be limiting gay children's literature rather than abetting its evolution, citing Lesléa Newman's Too Far Away to Touch and Heather Has Two Mommies as examples.]

Few changes in American mores over the past 50 years have been as dramatic or as salutary as the nation's increased acceptance of homosexuals.

          s                   —Phillip Lopate, 1997

Consider Lopate's assertion as you read these three fragments trapped in the time capsule of a hot month in a recent summer:

20 August 1995: Denis Donoghue concludes his review of Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality with a personal comment. He says that his interest in Andrew Sullivan's work, which assesses the current politics of homosexuality, is catalyzed by his affection for his lesbian daughter, "the writer Emma Donoghue," whose homosexuality "does not darken [his] love for her, or qualify the joy [he] takes in her personality, her immense gifts" (26).¹ The opening sentence of that paragraph slightly diminishes the power of his declaration: "I am not, in my own person," Donoghue makes clear, "directly caught in this dispute" (26).

25 August 1995: A shopping trip to a split-down-the-middle Carter's outlet leaves me bemused. Although department stores have always separated boys' apparel from girls', surely baby clothing has never been so irrevocably divided, so aggressively gendered. Marooned between two poles of certainty, the layette counter offers the only gender-neutral option, bland infant garments sporting amorphous patterns (not flower shapes, but not airplanes either).² I imagine the Carter's design team heaving sighs of relief and trashing these insincere either/or ensembles, now that almost all prospective parents choose to know their babies' gender. The word layette (way too feminine) will vanish.

27 August 1995: A pretty little girl grins fetchingly from the Children's Books page of the New York Times Book Review. Catherine Stock's frontispiece accompanies Roger Sutton's review of Too Far Away to Touch, by Lesléa Newman.³ Stock's watercolor still-life shows a gold-framed photo of two faces: a smiling blonde child, eyes closed, being hugged by a tousle-haired young man whose own closed eyes are slightly shadowed. Dark background tones in this illustration foreshadow the content of Newman's text, in which the child tells about her visits with a favorite uncle, who, Sutton explains, is dying of AIDS. The descriptive phrase that Sutton applies to Newman's text could also refer to the watercolor—"poignant, but not sticky." His generally positive review of Newman's book and a similar picture book by Judith Vigna concludes with a contemplative paragraph about purpose: "What are these books for?" he asks. "Will children want to read them or hear them again?" (27).

These salvaged fragments may sound like gleanings from an Internet search generated by the terms gay/lesbian, children, literature, and clothing. But I hope to reveal the codes—Barthian and other—that connect these fragments and to use them to explore a central, unspoken anxiety that haunts the conjunction of gay/lesbian issues and children's literature. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls "the experience and identity of gay or protogay children" a "fraught space of life-or-death struggle that has been more or less abandoned by constructivist gay theory" (42). Books that present gay or lesbian themes to children may be seen as opening up that "fraught space" to their readers. Ultimately, it is the fear of what children might learn about their own sexual identities, not about the sexuality of adults around them, that makes these books controversial.

"Unsubtle, Overly Didactic"

Authors who chose gay themes and who write for children must also choose whether or not to be commercially viable. Those who want to sell books must learn, as Newman seems to have learned, to maintain a "safe" distance between child and gay adult characters. More like a wall than a comfort zone, distance problematizes the treatment of gay themes in children's literature and may keep the genre from reflecting the growing cultural acceptance that Lopate identifies as a contemporary reality.

Writers who hope to promote cultural acceptance would be unusual if they did not hope for readers and sales as well. The New York Times Book Review, itself a commodity, affects the transaction between writer and reader by dealing out praise or blame. Most importantly, it identifies writers and works worthy of review space and, consequently, of public notice. Although Sutton comments on works by both Vigna and Newman in the review I have cited, I focus here on Newman because she also created Heather Has Two Mommies (1989), which Sutton describes as "one of the first picture books to deal with a gay theme"—a book not reviewed in the Times.⁴ Sutton's Times review of Newman's latest work for children provokes an important question. What makes Too Far Away to Touch an acceptable text for this prestigious reviewing venue, when Heather clearly was not? Sutton implies an answer when he labels Heather "unsubtle, overly didactic" (27), suggesting that Newman's current book is less so.

Newman has noticed and reacted to the lack of attention from important reviewing journals. In a 1989 interview, she comments: "my books … don't get reviewed in the New York Times or even lesser places. I assume it's because of the lesbian content" (Koplow 7a). Assuming that Newman's naive sounding comment—Gee whiz! The lesbianism? Really?—accurately represents her understanding of the literary market would parallel the naiveté of asserting that the Times stamp of approval is the single factor determining the presence of a children's book on the shelves at Barnes and Noble. Other answers from the same interview with Newman yield glimpses of a savvy young writer who is comfortable in her lesbianism but who "wonder[s] about money" (8a).

The generally favorable Times review certainly helped Too Far Away to Touch (both mass-market bookstores in my suburban neighborhood could produce copies, while neither had Heather),⁵ but it was first "helped" by its creator. A chasm separates the presentations and concepts of Newman's two picture books for children; a chasm separates their implied audiences.

A Newsweek blurb about Heather Has Two Mommies proclaims that the book is "for and about children of gays" ("Daddy" 60). As loud as the discussion it provoked, the cover of Heather Has Two Mommies asks for attention coming and going. The bright red title on an equally bright yellow ground trumpets the book's content. On the back cover, Heather and her mommies, who resemble composites assembled from a butch/femme stereotype clip-art file, pose happily. As do these cover illustrations, the rest of illustrator Diana Souza's drawings exude a crude energy. Although the faces of her characters morph alarmingly from page to page, the vitality of her work, with its frenetic textures and decoration, almost makes up for lapses of technique. The same could be said of Newman's brash text.

Verbal and visual images hug each other, their shared goal to represent an indisputably happy family. Mommies Jane and Kate do what married people who are "very much in love" do: talk together, kiss, and play with their child. I agree with Newsweek that "tykes are unlikely to understand the pages in which a lesbian gets pregnant through artificial insemination" ("Daddy" 60), but I think children will notice that Mama Jane has "a baby growing inside of [her] womb" (Heather), and see that only a sheet separates them from Heather's delivery. Surely the third-person narrator's relentless sequential description of Jane's pregnancy, from the union of "sperm and egg" to "tender" breasts and expanding "belly," triggered some of the negative reactions to Heather. Must we have lesbianism, artificial insemination, and anatomical detail too?

Moreover, Newman's flexible definition of family would make Dan Quayle weep. To underscore the range of possibilities, Souza incorporates drawings by real children that illustrate other "special" families with different components: a single mother and two children; two fathers and a child; a mother, a father, and four adopted children—one of them in a wheelchair. But Heather Has Two Mommies may have another, less obvious reason than its in-your-face ideology or its lack of technical sophistication for attracting negative attention.

As the product of a "special" family, Heather must provide proof that having two mommies might be a good deal. Her image bears the weight of Newman's heavy purpose. How should she look? Although curly-headed, blonde, brown-eyed Heather looks happy, active, expressive, interested, and thoughtful, she would never be chosen as an advertisement for the "girls'" half of the Carter's store. Her clothing bears little overt gender coding; neither she nor her mommies ever sports dresses, ruffles, or bows. In most of the illustrations, Heather and her mommies are fashion anachronisms. Mama Kate's "No Nukes" T-shirt recalls the 1970s, as do Kate's and Jane's shag haircuts and occasional folksy ensemble, while much of the aggressively textured and oddly shaped clothing they wear seems not to belong to any specific time or place.⁶ Yet Heather's image problematizes the tale. She appears once bare-chested, and usually wears shorts, pants, and high-tops, her ensembles cut from the same dizzily patterned, highly textured cloth that garbs all Souza's characters. She also suffers from the shape shifting endemic to the work. But in Heather's case ambiguity entails more than anachronism, more than inconsistent representation. Heather provokes the fear that gay or lesbian parents will produce gay or lesbian children because her clothing, her features, her body, signal androgynous child, not boy or girl.⁷

Nowhere is Heather's androgyny more apparent than on the cover. Newman's "unsubtle, overly didactic" title brashly trumpets lesbian love—the subject matter least treated in young adult novels that feature gay/lesbian characters (Jenkins 46)—yet Heather herself, not the title or content, may be the most controversial component of this often banned book. The image that "fronts" Newman's text, the image an adult purchaser would first see, amply demonstrates Heather's danger and her dangerousness.

Here smiling—or grimacing—Heather runs, arms upraised, through spiky, flowered grass with, or from, a dog or wolf who mimics her. Her pose recalls Max's mad dance in Where the Wild Things Are, and the "monster" dancing behind her may or may not be under her control. Neither the situation nor the animal's classification nor the child's gender is static. Her flowery, feminine name (which contains, by the way, an intersection of male and female: he at her) leads the title, but Heather's image leads the imagination. Her loose-fitting garb looks archaic, rough, male in the manner that Alison Lurie describes as typical: made of "bulky material and [designed] to emphasize angularity with rectangular shapes and sharp points" (215). Odd bends of sleeve and trouser might even mask misshapen limbs. Her hair and face resemble stylized renderings of gender-neutral putti (now reigning at mall framing shops). The book's title is a statement, but the illustration reads like a visual enactment of Roland Barthes's hermeneutic code, which encompasses "the various formal terms by which an enigma can be distinguished, suggested, formulated, held in suspense, and finally disclosed" (19). In the case of Heather's image, there is no disclosure, no coming out, only questions. Who is Heather? What is Heather? The title page of the text compounds the questioning. A black-and-white rendering of the same illustration opens the story, and here the child's shape and face are altered but still androgynous.

The Carter's Syndrome

Neither cover nor interior of Too Far Away to Touch, a book aimed at a wider audience, provokes questions of this sort, for Newman and illustrator Stock avoid any such flip-flop of imagery. As she moves away from Heather, Newman performs a transformation more telling than Souza's visual morphing. When Newman turns Heather into a new child protagonist, Zoe, she abandons danger for relative safety.

The only "unsubtle, overly didactic" thing in Too Far Away to Touch is Zoe's gender. The book is slicker, a more sophisticated, more marketable product. Its title evokes distance but not a specific subject, and Stock's cover, rendered more skillfully than Souza's, nicely suggests which distance. A young man in a baseball cap lifts Zoe high, her arms raised, against a background of starry sky and ocean. Subtle, coherent, and as appealing as the cover, Stock's illustrations present consistent, attractive characters in its amplification of Newman's narrative.

If you "read" by examining the pictures, the story unfolds this way: a pretty, white, blonde female child goes to a planetarium accompanied by a nice-looking young man with a shadowed, troubled face. At lunch, he lifts his baseball cap to reveal his balding head. The child appears to be worried and later talks to her mother. The man buys the child a present—glow-in-the-dark stars—and sticks them to the ceiling of her room; he then falls asleep. Later the child lunches with him and his male friend. The three walk on the beach. The child and the young man lie on a blanket, looking up at the stars. They hug; they look sad. After they see a shooting star together, the little girl closes her eyes and raises her hands toward the heavens.

Newman's text clarifies relations, and verbal nuances explain the darkness in Stock's illustrations. Zoe tells the tale in this text, and her first-person narration solves some problems introduced in Heather while simultaneously avoiding threatening elements. A child narrator can only offer what she sees, knows, thinks, and is told (unlike Heather's narrator, who can explicate artificial insemination). Zoe identifies the young man, her Uncle Leonard. A warning from Zoe's mother that she should not "tire [her] uncle out" introduces his illness (Too Far 8). Zoe further defines it by observing that Uncle Leonard closes his eyes in the taxi (10), that he is losing his hair (19), that his voice sounds "soft and fuzzy" on the phone (24), and that his smile is sad (28). Uncle Leonard speaks the word "AIDS" to Zoe near the end of the book and says that he "may die soon" (28).

Sutton found Newman's book moving. So did I, yet troubling implications lurk not far beneath the tender surface. The difference between this text and Heather depends on shifted focus as well as increased sophistication. Paradoxical though it may seem, disease and death—even death caused by AIDS—are safer territory for authors of children's fiction that the theme of lesbian love and commitment Newman explores in Heather. Here Newman does not enter new territory. Children's books that examine death or separation are an accepted genre, so Too Far Away to Touch has a standard generic context.⁸

Newman means the book to raise money as well as consciousness; "a portion of the proceeds," the publication page announces, will go to "AIDS organizations." Yet, like advertising campaigns that link a charitable contribution to every charge on a certain credit card, this appeal seems designed first to massage the consumer and next to elevate the product. Credit-card ads blatantly seek to transform purchase into participation in a higher good, to conflate getting and giving. The announcement in To o Far Away to Touch, while less blatant, leaves much to interpretation. What percentage is donated per book? Which organizations will benefit? I wonder, also, how Newman would answer questions about the way her text might help cement the truism that AIDS presents a problem for the gay community only. My focus here, however, is not on the com-modification of empathy or the market value of AIDS, but on the most troubling element in the tale, Zoe's representation.

Zoe, the central character, signals stereotypical femininity in every way that Heather does not; she could be an ad for Carter's clothing coded "girl," or a concrete example of Barthes's cultural code, which depends on a culture's "body of knowledge" for its reading context (21). In the illustration facing the first page of text, Zoe sits, waiting for her uncle, and readers absorb her head-to-toe ensemble with this first image of her. Zoe wears a jaunty rose-colored beret trimmed with little pins. Her muffler matches her hat, and a lavender warm-up jacket covers a ribbed white turtleneck. Her short, flippy green-and-rose patterned skirt tops green ribbed tights worn with rolled-down green bobby socks and saddle shoes (her limbs are neatly formed; they suggest no Heatherian vagaries). Her blonde hair, a shiny shoulder-length pageboy, and her brown eyes recall Heather's, but she is Heather turned Skipper—Barbie's little sister. Her ensemble indicates one of her functions in the book, perhaps her primary function. She will be cute. Her cuteness will fit the accepted formula. Read her as "girl."

Of course no inherent evil resides in a little girl wearing little girls' clothing. Yet Zoe's unmistakable gender marking, the first thing the first illustration signals, recalls our drive to gender code everything that surrounds a small child—wallpaper, sheets, towels, clothing, playthings. Taking no chances that gender might be hard-wired, we opt for every chance to eliminate ambivalence, to signify "feminine" or "masculine." Thus Zoe's gender announces itself instantly, and if her clothing does not provide ample evidence, her passivity underscores her stereotypical femininity. Except for three illustrations that show her moving, Zoe is static. She waits, she sits, she looks, she listens, and she strikes these attitudes decoratively. She lacks Heather's expressiveness and motion. Stock places the child in her color-coordinated environments—on the sofa, on the bed—as if she is accessorizing a room. When Uncle Leonard hints at his predicament, Zoe sits before a complementary vase of flowers, eyes cutely wide with concern, her hair picking up the cheery yellow of the wall behind her. The warmth and coherence of the composition and the lovable quality of her reaction, not Uncle Leonard's anxiety, are the foci. Leonard wears cool colors, deep greens and blues; he is a shadow superimposed upon the brightness of the page.

Zoe's carefully presented image updates a package that adult readers will recognize. She recalls famous little-girl literary precursors after they have been processed by popular culture to emerge as pretty hair, cute face, nice dress: Alice Liddell post-Disney, Mary Lennox via Madame Alexander. Newman's text confirms Zoe's blandness. Her voice lacks the originality that raised Alice and Mary into icons of popular culture. She tries one lame joke, and she asks questions, as any child of six or seven does. There is little evidence until the last page that she synthesizes information and experience. Zoe does realize then that her uncle, like the shooting star she has just seen, will be "too far away to touch, but close enough to see." Aside from this evocative phrase, little stamps her as an individual. She is Alice without the wit, Mary Lennox without the edge. Zoe is cute, and she is average.

Mine sounds like a remicrowaved feminist drone, a ritual rejection of the traditional trappings of female childhood, and a protest that a female child is yet again dull. But the rigid construction of a female child elevated—literally elevated on the cover—in this text, by this author, worries me beyond feminism.

"I am Not, in My Own Person, Directly Caught in This Dispute"

Denis Donoghue prefaces his paean to his daughter with that distancing sentence, and his review of Virtually Normal begins with a comment that Sullivan has not included "much of [his] own story" in Virtually Normal. Donoghue notes that Sullivan edited out a section about his childhood, where "[Sullivan] spoke of growing up in a Catholic family … and of coming to realize that he was emotionally and sexually different than most of the boys in his school. That essay [in an earlier version of the book] dealt with the anxiety and pain of that difference" (3). In any examination of the intersection between gay and lesbian themes and literature for children, the relevance of early glimmerings of difference must sooner or later surface. By editing out material that deals directly with this experience in a text for adults, Sullivan suggests that "virtual" normality may dictate narrative distance from and actual, not virtual, silence about early differences, about that "fraught space."

Narrative and visual distance help sanitize Too Far Away to Touch into a text that qualifies for the children's book shelves at Barnes and Noble. Newman performs a triple remove. The lesbian couple has been replaced by gay lovers, a less threatening pair.⁹ Zoe's life is safely separate from that of Uncle Leonard, who is, after all, not a brother or a father. Most importantly, Zoe's culturally coded femininity places her beyond any possible contamination of the discussion of gay lovers or of AIDS. Zoe's position on the cover, where Uncle Leonard lifts her high above him, parallels her position throughout the narrative. The image of a child so traditionally feminine, so "normal," provides adult readers with a comforting, gendered little hand to hold in a slippery space—a text that includes a positive if low-key portrait of gay lovers, one an AIDS sufferer. Zoe sweetens those subjects. Remember that the New York Times Book Review chose to reproduce the illustration of Zoe in her uncle's embrace, not the one in which Uncle Leonard lifts his hat to reveal those telltale tufts of hair.

In her post-Heather life as a lesbian writer, Newman may be trying out this postulate: you may skirt, but not approach a gay/lesbian theme in literature for children and sell your book if, and only if, the gender identity of your young protagonist is unambiguous. Nothing about a central child character must suggest less than a stereotypically complete construction of gender, for the child reader must always be kept too far away to touch gay/lesbian themes. Newman could have looked to young adult novels for a confirmation of this approach: "the trend within this body of literature has been away from homosexuality-as-main-issue and toward treating gay issues as a subplot or a fact about a secondary character," writes Christine Jenkins (50). I recast Jenkins's observation about YA fiction to fit the two texts I have examined: the reviewable, marketable presentation of gay/lesbian themes in books for children rests on the narrative and visual distance between theme and child. Nothing should disturb the notion that gays or lesbians discover their sexual orientation at eighteen—or older. Consumers prefer products with recognizable logos. In children's literature the equivalent of the Carter's label is the representation of the "perfectly" male or female child for whom such clothes were designed.

The fear of leakage, of influence, appears obliquely stated in the following comment by Robert Williams, which introduces a list of "approved" young adult books presenting gay/lesbian characters: "teachers should not fear that these books advocate a gay lifestyle" (13). Newman and Stock's creation of Zoe indicates that the perceived danger of identification increases as the age of the projected audience decreases. The younger the reader, the greater the risk.

I am not advocating the creation of didactic texts in which potentially gay and lesbian children play same-sex doctor games and loudly voice their recognition of early sexual preference, and I hope that I am not attacking Newman, whose increased visibility increases her chances of writing what she wants to write, if for adults only. Rather, by linking these fragments, I am trying to recognize pressures affecting children's literature.

"What are These Books For?"

Among other questions relevant to this project, we might ask, "Who are Sutton's and Donoghue's reviews for?" Both of them arrive in a vehicle that, despite Lopate's optimism about acceptance, often clarifies the cultural recoil against the gay and lesbian community. A front-page story on 27 August 1995, the same day Sutton's review of Too Far Away to Touch appeared, details Bob Dole's scramble to return campaign funds from a Republican gay/lesbian group. Richard Berke sees Dole's action as proof that he is "intensifying his yearlong drive to court conservative Republican groups." I would interpret Dole's desperate rush more personally. A war hero who carefully cultivates his manliness, Dole would surely want to shed an affiliation that did not match his persona. Although neither Sutton nor Donoghue could ever be accused of self-promoting ruthlessness, or of overtly homophobic behavior, both men do conclude their reviews by bobbing, by qualifying, by stepping back. Donoghue denies "direct" involvement in gay politics, but I wonder how much more directly one could be involved in the politics of homosexuality than to have a gay or lesbian child. Does "direct involvement" equal involvement of the "person" alone?

Sutton questions the literary quality, but also the purpose of the works he reviews: "What are these books for?" He wonders who will read them. He imagines an audience composed either of children who know someone dying of AIDS or of children who are "targets" of well-meaning adults who prescribe these texts. In the process of questioning purpose and audience, Sutton distances himself from the books he has examined by suggesting that gay books are for gay readers only. Both reviewers conclude, finally, that these works—and all such works?—are only for those directly (physically?) involved in the issues.

Carter's capitalizes on fear that distances difference by suggesting that coding a child unambiguously, even before birth, can pay off with the big prize later. Velcroing that bow on little Tiffany's bald head, pulling on those lacy socks, that flowered romper, might protect against the need to create anything like the garment of prose Donoghue crafts for his daughter. Newman too must clothe her child correctly, turning Heather into Zoe—imagine an H smashed sideways, compressed into a Z—to avoid the disruption of the text. Zoe is a normal child, just one of the multiple stories surrounding us, composed of "so many fragments of something that has already been done, seen, experienced" (Barthes 5).¹⁰

Although the positive cultural shift that Lopate identifies may be real, the acceptance of homosexuality he describes applies to adults thinking about adults, not to children. As rude as it is, Heather Has Two Mommies thrusts itself into a void. As polished as it is, Too Far Away to Touch stands away from the edge, defining the void nevertheless. The circle of love, fear, and commerce that connects the fragments I have assembled excludes the "fraught space" of protogay childhood sexual glimmerings. As Sedgwick says, "advice on how to make sure your kids turn out gay … is less ubiquitous than you might think" (42).

Notes

1. Critic, novelist, and playwright Emma Dono-ghue's first novel, Stir Fry, was a 1995 Lambda Literary Award finalist.

2. One pattern adorning the non-gender specific collection I saw at the Carter's outlet resembled those overlapping pastel boomerang shapes that appeared on formica in the 1950s. This choice seems less odd only when one tries to identify other patterns/shapes that might be gender-neutral.

3. Sutton has authored a young adult nonfiction book about alternative lifestyles: Hearing Us Out: Voices from the Gay and Lesbian Community (Little Brown 1994).

4. Heather got a boxed paragraph—it is showcased as an example of outré texts for kids—in Newsweek, and a brief mention in Ms. It was reviewed in Belles Lettres, Bloom Review, Childhood Education, and Lambda Book Report. In contrast, Too Far Away to Touch was reviewed in Lambda Book Report, but also in The Advocate, Booklist, Children's Book Review Series, Horn Book, Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and The New York Times.

5. My local (Ohio, suburban) Barnes and Noble and Little Professor also had copies of Sullivan's Virtually Normal and Donoghue's Stir-Fry.

6. Newman's comic piece "Out of the Closet and Nothing to Wear: A Femme Shops Till Her Butch Drops," confirms her interest in dress. She describes a mall quest, a determined and joyful search for black shoes of every heel height and strap variation to complement long and short skirts and pant suits, a paean to variety and acquisition. Newman seems to agree with Alison Lurie that "to choose clothes, either in a store or at home, is to define and describe ourselves" (5). Obviously alive to fashion's nuances, Newman must have had ideas about the mommies' appearances and especially Heather's. She chose Souza to illustrate Heather, a choice that implies the possibility of discussion (Leuzzi).

7. In most illustrations for My Two Uncles, Vi-gna's child character Elly (not too far from "elle") looks gender-neutral, but two crucial illustrations code her femininity. Vigna describes Elly's sadness and mystification when her grandfather refuses to invite his gay son's lover (Elly's "uncle") to a golden wedding anniversary party. For the party, Elly, who has been dressed in shorts, tee shirts, and tennis shoes, and who resembles her gay uncle more than any other character, appears in a dress and a little wreath of flowers, unequivocal signifiers of her gender orientation.

8. "Death is shown as a part of life in an increasing number of books, even for younger children," claims Zena Sutherland in the ninth edition of Children and Books (7-8). In the last ten years, violent death has become a staple of YA literature.

9. Jenkins explains that "roughly one quarter" of the sixty YA novels she surveyed depicted lesbian characters while "three-quarters" had gay male characters. "Beautiful lesbians," Jenkins points out, "tend to be associated with pain" (46).

10. Newman even dresses herself differently for her representations on the back covers of the two texts. In her photo for Too Far Away to Touch, she looks professionally coifed and garbed; in contrast, she wears jeans and lots of jewelry for the casual shot that is included with her bio in Heather Has Two Mommies. The Heather bio insists on the cute and the personal, including cat names and the information that Newman "lives … with a woman she loves named Mary." Nothing cute or personal appears in the biographical note that follows Too Far Away.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.

Berke, Richard L. "Dole, in a New Bow to Right, Returns Gay Group's Money." New York Times 27 August 1995: A1.

"Daddy Is Out of the Closet." Newsweek 7 January 1991: 60-61.

Donoghue, Denis. "The Politics of Homosexuality." New York Times Book Review 20 August 1995: 3, 26.

Jenkins, Christine A. "Young Adult Novels with Gay/Lesbian Characters and Themes, 1969–92: A Historical Reading of Content, Gender, and Narrative Distance." Journal of Youth Services in Libraries (Fall 1993): 43-55.

Koplow, Gail. "Lesléa Newman: Writing from the Heart." Sojourner: The Women's Forum 27 August 1995: 7a, 8a.

Lopate, Phillip. "Rapid Transit: How 'America's Most Despised Minority' Gained Acceptance in Record Time." New York Times Book Review 9 November 1997: 12.

Lurie, Alison. The Language of Clothes. New York: Random House, 1981.

Newman, Lesléa. Heather Has Two Mommies. Illus. Diana Souza. Boston: Alyson, 1989.

―――――――. Too Far Away to Touch. Illus. Catherine Stock. New York: Clarion, 1995.

―――――――. "Out of the Closet and Nothing to Wear." The Texas Triangle: The State's Gay News Source. n.pag. Internet.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

Sutherland, Zena. Children and Books. 9th ed. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1997.

Sutton, Roger. Review of Lesléa Newman, Too Far Away to Touch, But Close Enough to See, and Judith Vigna, My Two Uncles. New York Times Book Review 27 August 1995: 27.

Vigna, Judith. My Two Uncles. Illinois: Whitman, 1995.

Williams, Robert F. "Gay and Lesbian Teenagers: A Reading Ladder for Students, Media Specialists and Parents." The ALAN Review 20.3 (1993): 12-17.

Patrick Finnessy (essay date 2002)

SOURCE: Finnessy, Patrick. "Defending Children's Schooltime Reading: Daddy's Roommate and Heather's Mommies." In Censored Books II: Critical Viewpoints, 1985–2000, edited by Nicholas J. Karolides, pp. 144-51. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2002.

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FURTHER READING

Criticism

Flanagan, Victoria. "Me, Myself, and Him—The Changing Face of Female Cross-Dressing in Contemporary Children's Literature." In Change and Renewal in Children's Literature, pp. 59-66. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004.

Examines cross-dressing and transgendered figures in children's literature.

Garden, Nancy. "Banned: Lesbian and Gay Books Under Fire." Lambda Book Report 4, no. 7 (November 1994): 11-13.

Surveys the state of censorship of gay-themed children's books.

Huskey, Melynda. "Queering the Picture Book." Lion and the Unicorn 26, no. 1 (January 2002): 66-77.

Discusses how gay and lesbian families have developed more prevalent representations in modern children's literature.

Inness, Sherrie A. "Is Nancy Drew Queer? Popular Reading Strategies for the Lesbian Reader." Women's Studies 26, nos. 3-4 (May 1997): 343-72.

Highlights aspects of the Nancy Drew novels that appeal to lesbian readers, asserting that, when reading Nancy Drew mysteries, "one finds a textual universe that is filled with lesbian interpretations and lesbian meanings."

Taketani, Etsuko. "Spectacular Child Bodies: The Sexual Politics of Cross-Dressing and Calisthenics in the Writings of Eliza Leslie and Catharine Beecher." Lion and the Unicorn 23, no. 2 (April 1999): 355-72.

Explores how the role of cross-dressing has impacted gender views and sexuality in several works of children's literature.

Williams, Karen. "Weetzie Bat, by Francesca Lia Block." In Rationales for Teaching Young Adult Literature, edited by Louann Reid and Jamie Hayes Neufeld, pp. 20-6. Portland, Maine: Calendar Islands Publishers, 1999.

Discusses how Block's gay-themed young adult novel Weetzie Bat holds a particular appeal for teens unable to connect to normative young adult literature.

Yampell, Cat. "Alyson Wonderland Publishing." Bookbird 37, no. 3 (1999): 31-3.

Profile of independent publisher Alyson Wonderland, which specializes in gay-themed children's books.