The Rainbow Room

Phil Bildner, well-known for his baseball stories, has put a new spin on the been there, done that "girl wants to play baseball" plot. In Playing the Field, the popular high school senior Darcy Miller will do anything to get on the baseball team...even if it means pretending that she's a lesbian.

It's a long story, and a stretch of the imagination. Darcy's boyfriend Brandon tells his father (who incidentally happens to be the high school principal) that Darcy is a lesbian in order to get her on the team. Brandon's dad is a bit squeamish when it comes to discussing sexual orientation, but in his way, he is a gay-friendly man. He allowed Darcy's friend Josh to build a Gay Straight Alliance at the school, and he also believes that lesbians, at no cost, should be denied playing men's sports. At the same time, Brandon's dad feels that he must pay off Darcy in some way so she will not reveal his affair with her mother to the entire student body.

Don't expect Darcy to learn what it's like to be a lesbian in this book. The student population teases her more for her mother's affair with the principal than her feigned lesbianism. No girls approach her with puppy dog eyes, and her presence at Gay Straight Alliance meetings is looked upon with scorn. On his father's orders, Brandon is forced to attend a Gay Straight Alliance meeting as well. Out of the blue, he distributes well-researched pamphlets to the group with statistics on hate crimes, teen suicides, etc...would the modern day straight captain of a high school sports team do such a thing?

If anything, Bildner plays up gay stereotypes in this book to get cheap laughs from his audience. He paints Darcy's gay friend Josh as a hysterical, obsessive drama queen, a tyrannical president of the Gay Straight Alliance who has the biggest crush on hopelessly heterosexual Brandon.

It is difficult to imagine a seventeen year old girl madly in love with boys and popularity to accept the proposition of pretending to be a lesbian in order to play sports. It is also insulting to all of the real high school lesbians who actually do want to play on high school sports traditionally reserved for boys, and are never given this opportunity by their high school principal. I would be extremely curious to hear the Milennial Generation's reactions to Playing the Field. Straight kids might laugh at this book, but at whose expense?

Sloan, Brian. Tale of Two Summers. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers: 2006. 244 p. 15 and up.

Two best friends--one straight, the other gay--spend their first summer in different parts of the state. They decide to keep in touch through a blog, sharing their learning experiences and adventures in attraction, romance, and sex. Although the boys do not see eye to eye on all subjects, their blog reflects that they are protective and supportive of each other in a funny, touching way that many teenage boys in real life might have a tough time to express.

Although the boys spend their fifteenth summers quite differently, their experiences have much in common. Chuck, the straight guy, is ironically "the drama fag". He spends his fifteenth summer at theater camp at UMD, where he is completely wrapped up in rehearsals and new friendships with his fellow drama freaks. Gay Hal, on the other hand, would rather watch movies with fart jokes than musicals. He is stuck in their hometown of Wheaton, Maryland, where he takes driver's ed. Both boys have a mission--to find "summer love"--and their foibles nearly mirror each other's. Both lose their heads over exotic, foreign students, both make similar mistakes in attempting to forge a relationship and physical intimacy. The boys' entries make it quite clear that there is no difference between straight and gay kids when it comes to love and sex.

It is extremely touching to read Chuck's clumsy attempts to understand Hal's attraction for other guys. Chuck means no offense when he asks Hal why he doesn't go after "certified homos" and why gay guys like asses so much. He also wonders if Hal ever had been attracted to him. Hal often gives sharp, defensive responses to Chuck's questions, but no love is lost over them. In theater camp, Chuck notes that his room-mate Charles (aka "Chaz") is gay, and thinks that Hal might like him because he is a good looking certified homo. Chuck even goes so far as to attempt to match-make the two. Angrily, Hal asks Chuck, "If a girl has two eyes and two tits, does that mean she's automatically for you?" Chuck gets it. These probably are the questions and comments that boys would have for each other, complete with all of the snarky cynicism, rank-outs, and "self inflicted moping" that would accompany them. It is also testament to the high comfort level that the boys share with one another.

The writing flows so well that only the most tech-savvy Millenial might flinch at the author's idea for the boys to share a blog to record their summmer exploits. Although a lot of kids do have blogs, they do not use one blog for two way communication. They either use email, IM, text messaging, Skype, or a combination of all four. Email is normally the mode of communication that two friends would use to share long, detailed, private messages. In spite of this misunderstanding of teen communication, Tale of Two Summers will be a classic for years to come.

There aren't many works of fiction out there about intersexed and transgender teens. At the same time, no librarian has published any research findings on the information seeking behaviors and user needs/desires of intersexed and transgender teens. Are they looking for books about kids like them, and if so, what would make such a book attractive to them?

A recent visit to three public libraries with large LGBT collections revealed that, in their YA sections, non-fiction books about sexuality barely touch upon the intersexed or transgendered. In the adult non-fiction section, books about transgendered people, transsexuals, sex changes, and the intersexed are in a section of the library that many people would shy away from: the 616s. According to the Dewey Decimal system, 616 is the call number assigned to medical practice, diseases of different systems in the body, and medical operations. 616.4 deals with hormones and the endocrine system, 616.5 deals with dermatology, skin disease and lupus, and 616.6 deals with human genitalia and their related disorders. Books about intersexed people, transgendered people, and the transitioning/sex change process are clumsily catalogued among books about urinary tract infections, the urinary system, and prostate cancer.

How would a kid feel to be sent to those shelves to look for a book about hirself? What feelings would an adult have while browsing through the same section? Would they experience the same feelings that gays and lesbians did decades ago, when books about homosexuality were catalogued with those that dealt with mental illness? After reading, they might feel more frightened than they had before visiting the library. They might even feel disgusted, ashamed, and more isolated than before. This is why it is so important to encourage research on the perception of library resources and services for and by the transgendered, transsexual, and intersexed. Librarians and teachers need to know how to reach this population as well as any other.

Lisa Lees devotes herself to re-educating young adults about gender, sexual orientation, and gender variance. She has created some great resources on her website, including an archive of
"coming out" letters written by transgender and intersexed people. Her writing reflects deep passion for her subject, as well as great knowledge, but it does not translate well in her fiction.

I was first extremely puzzled by the cover art of A Queer Circle of Friends. The amateurish, quasi-anime characters colored in bright pastels--with the title in glowing pink bubble letters--did not seem like it would appeal to teenagers. I showed ten different people this book, and they all commented that the cover would attract little girls between four and seven years old. I don't think the "My Pretty Pony" crowd is quite ready for this story.

Then again, most teenagers would not be ready for this story. In the first chapter, one of the main characters comes home and angrily spews a tirade against the binary gender system. Would the average intersexed teenager--or any teenager--even understand what that meant? Lees assumes that all LGBTQI kids attend queer youth support groups and have an academic understanding of their issues. It is too much information, too soon, without the benefit of backstory or any kind of character description.

Characters. There were a lot of characters in A Queer Circle of Friends, but in the attempt to represent different types of gender variance, Lees made it hard for a reader to focus on an actual plot. Having so many characters in the story also made it difficult to see them as multidimensional people. Lees' own sketches of the characters did not help me to visualize or understand the characters much better, as many of her drawings looked the same.

Writers of fiction face a double challenge when writing for and about special populations. Of course the writers must know their subject, but they also must know what will entice a person to read their book, and what will keep their readers engaged. A novel should be published not only for its subject matter, but also for its literary quality. Even the title and cover of the book should attract the right sort of audience who would get the story. For all of those reasons, I am not sure that Lisa Lees' novel A Queer Circle of Friends would willingly be read by teens or adults.