Guest post by author L.C. Rosen
Us queers find each other.
In high school, we had the GSA, and through that I found many of my close friends. We talked with each other about queerness, we bonded over the way the straight world hit us with homophobia ranging from getting spat at to being told to “tone it down” by people who loved us, and we of course talked about sex and hot guys.
Many kids today have it even better, because so many of them are coming out earlier and earlier, so there are more and more of them. We’ve always been everywhere (some recent studies show that a third of people under 25 identify as some kind of queer), but now we can more readily talk to each other about who we are. It’s not self-segregation, but rather a way to find people who understand the issues we’re going through.
Which is why it’s so important we start showing the liveliness and diversity of the queer community in YA novels. It’s not just about the one out kid anymore. The one voice. It’s a symphony of queerness, and not showing that is a disservice to teens, because it shows a world without the joy of the queer community, and without the influence of it.
My new book, Camp (out May 26th 2020), takes place at a queer summer camp. Every character in the book is queer except a minor one and the kids’ parents when they show up at the end to pick their kids up. Being in that queer space influences how these queer kids talk to each other. They discuss gender norms, microaggressions, gay sex, stuff queer teens don’t often talk to their straight peers about (unless those straight peers have been deemed honorary gays). And it lets me show something we don’t see that often in YA: platonic friendship between two queer kids. Not every gay boy falls in love with every other gay boy. As a gay man, sometimes when I read gay YA, it often feels like that what we’re there for. That’s our story: the only two gay boys in the world fall in love. Sometimes there’s one more gay boy, but he’s more of a threat, someone who comes along after our protagonist has fallen in love to compete for the love interest, or sometimes a warning character, who gets abused for their queerness, thus scaring the protagonist. But seldom do we see genuine queer friendship. Kids who watch RuPaul’s Drag Race together. Kids who actively seek out queer history. Kids who roll their eyes at straight people in love (we all absolutely do that, sorry not sorry). And that’s so important for queer kids to see!
Growing up, I often felt as though every other queer guy I met had to be evaluated as a potential love interest, that that was the only role we could play with each other. I’ll admit that part of that is just being raised a man in a patriarchal culture where lust, ownership and value are often conflated—but part of it was that straight people were always so eager to pair me off.
“I know another gay guy! You’ll be perfect!” they would say about someone I had nothing in common with. It wasn’t until college that I really understood that other gay men were also available to be FRIENDS with. And those relationships changed my life, because suddenly I had someone to talk to about my crushes, about homophobia, about this feeling that straight people wanted to pair us all off.
So writing the queer friendships in this book was a relief to me, partially because I know queer teens today have friendships like that, and partially because those who don’t yet will now get to see them! Fictionally, but still. Yes, Camp is a romance at heart, but the friendships in the book are what make it joyful. Queer love is great, but we all hear so much about it all the time, we know it should be celebrated. But queer, platonic friendships? That needs to be shouted about more, about how vital and wonderful it is to have a queer friend who really understands you. And I’m happy my book could do part of the shouting.
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