Angst in their pants: includes review of Boy Meets Boy
Angst in their pants
Guardian, UK -
Adolescent relationships are troublesome for straight and gay boys alike, but they're still preferable to being cast into hell for eternity. Hephzibah Anderson rounds up the latest teen fiction
Sunday March 27, 2005
The Observer
Few adult love affairs rival the tortuous intensity of adolescent crushes. Boys, still pimply and popping with hormones while their female classmates blossom into young women, seem to have it especially tough, as the tongue-tied male protagonists of three new teen novels would agree.
With girls being such bad news, boys might wonder if they're not better off sticking to their own kind, something that Paul, the hero of David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy (HarperCollins £10.99, pp223), understood long before he learnt the word 'gay'. Its all-American backdrop is a school, the harmonious toleration of which permits the homecoming queen and star quarterback to be one and the same: Infinite Darlene, a 6ft 4in drag queen formerly known as Daryl.
Although not all Paul's friends are as easy with their sexuality as he is (there's Tony, whose evangelical parents are in denial, and Kyle, who wouldn't mind being either gay or straight but can't bear that he's bi), this is essentially a schmaltzy high-school love story, as escapist as they come.
posted by Tom Jackson @ Sunday, March 27, 2005
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