Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

Among my responsibilities here at the high school (besides inspiring the young people of America and enforcing a strict No Ninja-Kicking policy) is serving as the advisor-elect of the under-construction GSA (a.k.a. Gay Straight Alliance). I don't know what my responsibilities are besides signing off on purchase order for rainbow t-shirts and making the library available for after-school meetings, but it's an honor to have been asked to take on the job, a position I may have been chosen for simply on the basis of my leather jacket.


Seriously, though, I'm assuming that the students who asked me to advise them did so because I maintain a gay-friendly collection in the library, adding books that address all sorts of relationships and complications that teenagers face. There is a TON of excellent young adult fiction available about gay characters--and it's not all After School Special-y "this is how I dealt with being gay" stuff. Much of it is about kids living through other issues--regular problems with parents, teachers, alien life forms, etc.--and they just happen to be gay.


The Screwed Up Life of Charlie the Second by Drew Ferguson is about being gay and surviving high school, but it isn't a "problem" novel. It also is not, alas, a Young Adult novel, and despite its incredibly funny, wise voice, lovable main character, and sweet love story, it won't be going in my library because it also contains quite a bit of explicitly explicit sex. Censorship? Maybe. I like to call it self-preservation. You wanna fight for Charlie, you come on down to farm country and argue the merits of the multiple naked guy-guy wrestling scenes to members of a community who just erected a giant "silo" in their new roundabout.


Charlie, who is tormented by his father, First, is pretty resilient and upbeat despite the odds, and when he falls in love with his soccer teammate Rob, his life gets immeasurably better, despite the initial, universal roller-coaster of he's cute-does he like me-he does-he doesn't-oh my god-he might that it takes for them to get together (territory we'll all recognize...some of us as a distant junior-high memory, others of us as, well, yesterday).

But Rob's mother's slow deterioration from ALS, Charlie's parents' marital troubles, and his teammates' harrassment and squeamishness complicate what might otherwise be a charmed coming-of-age for Charlie. Of course, without complications, there is no story. The beauty of any story, well-told, is that the particulars of those characters' complications are, nevertheless, universal. We meet. We are attracted. We wonder if it's mutual. We test the waters. We find out. We go swimming. We win the triathlon. Or we drown. Or, like Charlie, we finish somewhere in the middle of the pack--wet, with sore muscles, but a little bit of new knowledge we can apply to the the next race we enter.