What If It's Us

I know I'm being a little tough on this book. It's not a bad book, it's fine; pleasant to read, and fairly well plotted. But I'm going to use this book to open a question that I have been thinking about when I read gay YA romances: what is their purpose?

OK, that's a little disingenuous. There's a part of their purpose that I know extremely well, and I know it because of it's absence during my childhood and adolescence. Sometimes my head swims when I think about what that time would have been like if there were stories like this available to me in libraries, and not just the one scary “issue” book about being young and gay. Instead, I had to gather bits and pieces of interior experiences from other kinds of stories, like a crow gathering bits of tinsel and shattered glass. Family alienation and distrust from Sharon Creech's The Wanderer and Edward Bloor's Crusader. How to let crushes smoulder from Katherine Paterson's Jacob Have I Loved and Carol Fenner's Yolanda's Genius. And for how to get close to others when what is inside you is so big and what we show to each other can be so small, I loved E.L. Konigsburg's The View From Saturday.

Here I am, getting lost in memories of my own identity formation.

S0 let's get to my real question: are LGBT YA romances just low-fat, low-cal romances, with younger protagonists and a less steamy helping of sex? Or is there still some part of YA literature that is didactic, helping young people with these kind of stories in their own life to navigate their way through?

I don't miss the didactic-only era of children's literature, which seemed to go away in the 70's and 80's in favor of a more interior-experience focused way of telling stories (except for maybe utility picture books and books for therapists and religious books). Those weren't very fun, and once the cultural morés that produced them went away, there was not very much charm in them either.

But I'm also left a little unsatisfied by What If It's Us. There's so much going on! One narrator's parents are in a strained marriage, is away from his friends. The other is struggling with school. They are both navigating having sex for the first time. One of them is obsessed with Broadway musicals, particularly Hamilton. And yet we don't really get to see how all of these factors affect them on the inside. How does one boy's parent's fighting affect how comfortable he is experimenting sexually? We don't know, because these parts of the story are siloed off from each other. Why does he like Hamilton? We don't know, and so although we know a lot about his preferences, we don't get the chance to have those preferences illuminate what is inside him.

Maybe the representation is enough. It certainly would have meant a lot to me. But I can't help but thinking that when stories are told all on the outside and we don't see enough of the inside, our noses pressed up to the glass of a room we can't enter, we might end up thinking that the only thing that matters is outside too.