October Books: Gay Fictions About Growing Up and Coming Out Gay

Growing up and coming out as a gay teenager or young adult is a staple of gay fiction. After all, every gay adult has gone through some form of adolescence and the coming out process. It’s a universal experience that allows us to empathize with the books’ youthful characters long after we’ve passed puberty.

Over the years that experience has been captured in classics such as The Boys on the Rock by John Fox and A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White to more contemporary classics by Steve Berman and Brent Hartinger.

Last year was a very good year for gay youth books, with novels by Berman, Hartinger, André Aciman and Timothy James Beck, and 2008 promises to be a banner year as well.

We already reviewed Robert Leleux’s The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy and Band Fags! by Frank Anthony Polito, two books that combine fact and fiction in various degrees.

Marc Acito made his first contribution to the gay youth genre way back in 2002 when he released his first novel, How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater (Broadway Books; $10.95), a comic romp that introduced the world to gay teen/aspiring actor Edward Zanni (just seventeen in 1983) and his many zany friends. Now Ed Zanni and his pals are back in Acito’s second novel, Attack of the Theater People (Broadway Books; $12.95). Set in 1986, Attack of the Theater People is not quite a “gay youth novel” for Zanni is now twenty, out, and on his own. Still, Attack of the Theater People manages to outdo its predecessor as a comic novel, if not as a gay youth novel.

Marc Acito

In How I Paid for College, the teenaged Zanni schemed to raise money to pay for his tuition at Julliard. In Attack of the Theater People, our older but not necessarily wiser hero is kicked out of drama school for being “too jazz hands for Julliard.” Finding it necessary to makes ends meet in the Big Apple, EZ lands a job as a “party motivator,” rubbing elbows with batr mitzvah boys and Wall Street insiders.

Among all this Zanni tries to get back into Julliard, falls in love, gets into trouble and once again seeks the help of his friends from HIPFC. Acito takes advantage of his book’s New York setting to poke fun at eighties Gotham, though his recreation is not as full of the pop artifacts and cultural name drops that we enjoyed in Band Fags! But who cares? Attack of the Theater People is plum fun to read, no matter what the decade is.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell is best known (to us anyway) as a columnist for OUT magazine and author of the memoir I Am Not Myself These Days, which details Kilmer-Purcell’s real life experiences as the drag queen Aquadisiac. In Candy Everybody Wants (Harper Perennial; $13.95), K-P moves from fervent fact to fun fiction while maintaining his own quirky style.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell

As with other recent books in the gay youth genre, there is a lot of autobiography in Candy Everybody Wants, though perhaps not as much as we might think there is. No one could invent the town of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, where Kilmer-Purcell spent much of his youth and where his fictional hero coincidentally grew up. In fact there is so much of Kilmer-Purcell in 15-year old Jayson Blocher that we might think  is actually K-P’s second memoir, but it isn’t.

CEW is set in 1981, which would make Jayson two years younger than Acito’s Ed Zanni and Polito’s Jack Paterno. (If anyone is keeping score.) Though he is not as talented as EZ, Jayson is even more determined to break into show biz, going so far as to film his own soap opera (“Dallasty!”).

Jayson’s dreams of stardom come one step closer to reality when his Mom ships him off to New York City to live with his natural father, acting legend Oscar Harlande. Though “Harley” is indeed Jayson’s dad, he is also a faded has-been who makes ends meet by pimping Broadway chorus boys to discerning gentlemen.

When a disgruntled john tells the vice squad about Harley’s operations, Jayson is forced to make ends meet on the street, where he is ably assisted by former child star Devlin Williamson (who happens to be Jayson’s personal idol). But it’s not long before Jayson gets an opportunity to break into showbiz, and the rest is history.

As a gay youth novel, CEW tries hard and almost succeeds, if we allow for a cast full of over-the-top characters (Jayson included) and for a plot that often deviates from reality. On the other hand, Kilmer-Purcell matches Acito in his exploration of 1980s New York pop culture and its cult of celebrity.

Those of us who lived through the eighties might remember it mostly as a dark age of political reaction and wholesale death. However, to those who were just teenagers then, the “Me Decade” was a time of endless opportunities. Acito and Kilmer-Purcell (and Polito) manage to capture the lives of young gay men (or at least the white, middle-class ones) as they were lived during the Reagan years.