Source of book: Borrowed from the library
This book was my selection for Banned Books Week this year. If you want to check out my banned books reading since I started this blog 15 years ago, the list is here.
Previously, I limited my reading to books literally outlawed by governments. However, this year, I have expanded to include a book that isn’t fully banned, but is instead restricted in several states. In the Trump Era, with a bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court, book banners have been emboldened, seeking to limit discourse on topics related to their bigotry.
In essence, they have enacted shadow bans. Not outright, but by keeping these books out of schools and behind locked doors at libraries, they have made them inaccessible to low income people, and the children who most need them.
As I have previously written, “parental rights” is really just another term for “I own my children and have the right to control everything about them.”
I believe children have an increasing right to information as they get older, and that hiding information about human sexuality and gender from teens is abusive behavior.
So, I decided in this case to select a book which has consistently been at the top of the banned book list since it was published.
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The first thing I want to say about this book is that the fact it has been banned is an utter travesty.
This is an excellent book, full of literary merit, deeply personal, and one that I think would be helpful for any LGBTQ kid to read, particularly one from the African-American community.
It would also be great for everyone else to read. People should read this book and encourage others to do so.
What is it? It is an autobiography. The author tells of his experience as a gay black kid and young adult, up to his graduation from college.
It is also, in a very real way, a love letter to his family: his mother and father, his younger brother, and especially his maternal grandmother.
It is intended to be at the high school level, although I think the writing style is simple enough that younger kids could read it without difficulty.
While the book deals with some heavy topics: sexuality, gender, bullying, AIDS, cancer, sexual assault - it does so with a warmth and gentleness of spirit which is admirable. Johnson really bares his soul, in some cases even describing the process of deciding if he should write about an incident or not.
Johnson discusses all of the topics and events with plenty of nuance, refusing to see things as simple good versus bad. For all the bad things done, he is able to see how circumstances and trauma can contribute. It’s a very human and humane book.
Now, we all know what the official reason given for the bans is. Repeat after me:
“It’s sexually explicit.”
Because that is always the official reason. I’m not going to spend much time in this post on the American tendency to be freaked out about sex and bodies, but we all know we Americans have a serious Puritan hangover, which we feed by indulging in recurring moral panics.
In the case of this book, though, it is pretty obvious that the real reason for the freakout is that it is so gay. It treats being gay not as the epitome of evil, but as a normal way of being human.
(Spoiler: it is a normal way of being human.)
It isn’t about keeping the kiddies from accidentally knowing how sex works, but about making it clear that LGBTQ people are evil monsters who should be excluded from society and left to starve. That’s what the book bans are about.
That said, I am happy to talk about the more explicit scenes in the book.
The first are the accounts of Johnson’s experiences with sexual assault, one by his older cousin, and another by a fellow high school student.
The others are a couple of brief accounts of Johnson’s first consensual (and safe) sexual encounters while in college, after he finally was willing to admit he was gay.
In all of these cases, “explicit” may be too strong of a word. The facts are told fairly clinically, and none of them will be particularly titillating. I mean, you will find FAR more sex in any number of modern novels. Johnson gives the basic facts, but doesn’t dwell on them, giving what I would consider an age-appropriate treatment for any kid who has started puberty. And probably before that.
I want to note here that Johnson is absolutely correct in his introduction when he notes that his target audience has likely already experienced sexual assault or has a friend who has. A quarter of all girls are sexually abused by age 18, and a sixth of all boys. A shocking number of those abused were first abused by age 8.
So it is safe to say that the problem isn’t that a book talks about sexual assault (and gives solid advice about reporting it) - the problem is that adults sexually abuse children. Full stop.
Likewise, by the age of 18, 55 percent will have had sexual intercourse. I would imagine that very few teens are unaware of oral or anal sex, unless they were raised under a rock, completely isolated from other humans.
So I strongly doubt that anything in this book will come as a shock to its intended audience. As the author puts it:
This book will touch on sexual assault (including molestation), loss of virginity, homophobia, racist, and anti-Blackness. These discussions at times may be a bit graphic, but nonetheless they are experiences that many reading this book will encounter or have already encountered. And I want those readers to be seen and heard in these pages.
This is why I say that the real point of the ban is directed at the idea that being gay is a normal way of being human.
For those of us who live in reality, not in the Right Wing Fantasy World, we understand that LGBTQ people exist, have always existed, and will always exist, notwithstanding the persecution they experience.
Thus, I would say this is actually an excellent book to give a gay kid. And to kids who know a gay kid - even if they don’t realize it.
By the way, one of the reasons I love this book is because Johnson’s family is delightful. Everyone pretty much knew he was gay starting very young - as the title suggests, he wasn’t gender-conforming. And yet, they were accepting and affirming and just decent human beings. Good people, as we say.
Johnson notes that he had the family that he wishes all LGBTQ kids could have. And I agree. I want to be that family too, both for my own kids and for the kids that do not have kind and decent birth families.
I know both the pain of being rejected by my parents and the joy of having an LGBTQ kid.
Anyway, the book is great. It shouldn’t be banned. People should read it. Let’s get into it a bit.
First, I always am curious when an author uses a middle name or initial. Sometimes, this is just to distinguish between the other authors with the same name. That might be the case here, as George Johnson is common enough.
But there is another reason, which we discover in the book. Johnson’s middle name is “Matthew,” hence the M. During his childhood, his family called him Matt. There’s a whole story about why in the book, and it’s amusing. However, when he went to Catholic school for high school, he had to use George.
Within the book itself, the author sees himself alternating between the names, just as he code-switches between his true gay identity and the heterosexual persona he tried to put on in public, to avoid being bullied.
It wasn’t particularly successful, as George couldn’t help “acting gay” from a young age. (Hence the title.) One interesting discussion in the book is how LGBTQ people (and black people) have invented their own lingo, which occasionally goes mainstream. At which time, everyone seems to forget the origins of the words.
I also want to mention a line in the book that hit home for me:
We often talk about bullies in school, but rarely when they are in our own families.
While it is likely that more boys are bullies than girls - cultural conditioning, etc. - I can attest that girls can very much be bullies as well, and are often not recognized as such, because, again, cultural conditioning. In my case, it is my sister who was and is the bully in our family, and who has been particularly cruel to her sisters-in-law.
Another passage that stood out is this one:
You’ll find that people often use the excuse “it was the norm” when discussing racism, homophobia, and anything else in our history they are trying to absolve themselves of. Saying that something was “a norm” of the past is a way not to have to deal with its ripple effects in the present. It removes the fact that hate doesn’t just stop because a law or the time changed. Folks use this excuse because they are often unwilling to accept how full of phobias and -isms they are themselves - or at least how much they benefit from social structures that privilege them.
And that, I believe, is one of the lines that made right wingers furious that this book exists. And man, is that line the truth.
At various intervals, Johnson switches from telling his story to writing open letters to members of his family. And, as I said, these are love letters to his family. Here is a bit from the one he wrote his brother Garrett, who remains his close friend.
You are living proof that it really isn’t as hard as most think to get along with and enjoy the company of people from different sexual identities.
Honestly, most of what is in this letter are things I could say about my own brother, who is likewise a genuinely good person, who has been accepting and affirming of my LGBTQ kids from the beginning. We too remain good friends as adults.
Johnson also notes that he was far from the first LGBTQ kid in his family.
Growing up, I had a transgender cousin named Hope, as well as other lesbians and gays within the family. My grandmother watched Hope grow up and transition, and I think that helped her to understand what she was seeing in me. She had also seen the damage that happens when children who are “different” aren’t nurtured and loved the same way other kids are. When she says, “I love each of you differently,” she doesn’t mean I love you less, she means, I love you whole, and as you are.
I wish all kids could have families as accepting and loving as Johnson’s. Unfortunately, as Johnson notes, many families are unloving to the kids who are “different.” That is why LGBTQ kids have a horrifically high homelessness rate.
How could one family get so right what the world has gotten so wrong? We should have been the rule. Not the exception. Instead, the rule looks more like “I’d rather have a dead child than a gay child.”
Yeah. And that sucks. One of my cousins unalived himself after his parents made it clear that they would prefer him dead to being gay. So many parents - and I will very much include my own - firmly hold to that idea. At minimum, they would prefer to have no relationship with their child to accepting who they are.
There is another passage that comes at the end of the chapter in which Johnson is molested by his cousin. After describing the abuse, he reflects on the complexity of what happened. Yes, he is clear that it was abuse and inexcusable. But he also has compassion for his cousin, who never was able to publicly come out, and who was probably abused himself. And who died tragically young, while defending a female cousin who was being assaulted.
The observation he makes is, I think, profound, and touches on the experiences of all of us who are gender non-conforming in some way, from the poetry-loving violinist boys like me who never measured up in “masculinity” to the girls like my wife who preferred talking about cars with the boys to talking about babies with the girls.
The same masculinity and manhood ideology that forced you and me to hide our identities is the same masculinity and manhood ideology that got you killed.
That in a nutshell is MAGA, and particularly toxic masculinity cosplayers like “Whiskey” Pete Kegsbreath. It’s this idea of manhood being primarily being defined by violence and a lack of empathy, a brutality toward all who don’t measure up to that sick and artificial standard. It hurts all of us.
I absolutely love and am definitely stealing the term “masculinity and manhood ideology.” It’s spot-on.
Another passage worth mentioning is related to why books like this are so important. Even our better sex education (and I actually received a pretty good one from my parents) fail to acknowledge certain things, and thus fail to fully educate people. Here is a bit of why:
Being taught sex as a way of producing children rather than as an act of pleasure stripped me and others of our ability to fully comprehend what we were getting ourselves into.
For Johnson, another gap was that the specific acts that gay men engage in weren’t even mentioned, let alone taught with the specific knowledge needed for safe practice. He notes that LGBTQ people of color - and particularly black people - have high rates of STIs, particularly AIDS. Part of reducing the risk is being taught about sex as pleasure rather than babies.
I do want to clarify that my parents did acknowledge sex as pleasure, and I did get better education than most if not all of my peers. I am thankful for that. I wish they had been able to understand the reality of LGBTQ people and reject the toxic religious beliefs that lead to hate.
Ideally, however, all children would be educated about more than just heterosexual reproductive acts, as well as the risks and risk-lowering options associated with each. And that would have to include education about the existence and lives of LGBTQ people.
I’ll end with why Johnson wrote this book. He was worried that writing a memoir, particularly at his young age, was narcissistic self-indulgence. He worried too much. This is a book that is a positive contribution to the world of letters. Anyway, here is why he decided to go ahead and write it:
There were no books for me to read in order to understand what I was going through as a kid. There were no heroes or icons to look up to and emulate. There were no road maps or guidelines for the journey. And again, because I know there wasn’t and still isn’t much out there, I made it my original goal to get this right.
In working on this book, I’ve brought to life a lot of stories involving a Black family dynamic that isn’t often talked about, a family that is queer-affirming while still learning about and navigating difficult spaces. I released the deepest and darkest things about my past in the hopes that someone might see a reflection of themselves in the words and know that they are not alone, and they too can grow and thrive. And so that they may not make the many missteps I took along the road.
That’s it in a nutshell. Children need stories that help them understand their own lives and experiences, and by banning books like this, we deny them what they need.
No cishet kid is going to be “turned gay” by reading this book. (And, let me check…yep, I’m still cishet too!) And no gay or transgender kid is going to be turned cishet by being kept from this book.
But a queer kid who reads this book will likely find aid and assistance in navigating the world and growing into their best self.
For the rest of us, this book is a fascinating story, and might just build empathy for people different from us, whether queer, black, or both. And it certainly is an antidote to the manhood and masculinity ideology behind much of what is wrong with our world.
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