by John Donovan
Almost every person spends his or her teen years navigating the treacherous waters of identity formation, but unlike gay kids, most heterosexuals don't do it completely alone; they don't do it in a world where plenty of adults and other authority figures are telling them blatant lies about who they are; and if they make a mistake, the stakes usually aren't nearly as high.
(This is why I'm always amused when people accuse me of writing my 2003 gay teen novel, Geography Club, solely to further some kind of political agenda. The truth is, I thought, as I'm sure John did, that it would make a terrific story. Who doesn't love the story of an underdog? And trust me, very few people are more of an underdog than a gay teen. It's frequently the case that the whole world really is against them: their friends, their family, their society, and even their religion.)
With the death of his grandmother, Davy moves in with his tempestuous, alcoholic mother-an untenable living situation that is leavened only slightly by his touching relationship with his father, his mother's ex-husband, the only other person in the world who understands what it's like to live with his unpredictable mother.
But Davy's closest relationship, by far, is with his dog, Fred. Given that he even makes friends with the stuffed coyote at the Museum of Natural History, this is a pretty good indication of an emotional disengagement with other human beings.
On some level, even Davy knows that it's not enough to just love dogs. He has a dream halfway through the book. In John's perfect thirteen-year-old patois, Davy tells us the dream isn't important to the story, that we can skip right over it if we want. Unreliable narrator that he is, we ignore him, because we know instinctively that we're about to hear something that's key.
And we absolutely do. In the dream, Davy is running down a beach that is at first familiar, but soon becomes some place new and different. Before long, even Fred gets left behind, and Davy is all on his own. Then he's naked and being buffeted by a violent wind and stinging sand, and it's all he can do to will it to stop. Eventually he does, and everything is made right again. Or is it? When Davy wakes up, he realizes that it's already too late to go back to the familiar beach of his grandmother's house. His old life is dead and gone, and the only way left is forward, into the unknown beach, a place of wind and stinging sand-a place where Fred can't come.
In other words, the author is telling us that things are going to get a lot worse for Davy before they get better. (And he's also telling us: whatever you do, don't get too attached to that dog! If you've read children's literature at all, you know, as a general rule, dogs in children's books almost never fare well.)
Which leads us to what makes this novel particularly notable for its time-why we're still talking about it all these years later: Davy's relationship with his friend Douglas Altschuler-referered to simply as Altschuler. It's a pretty good tip to the reader that Altschuler is going to seriously shake things up in Davy's life when he rewrites the ending of Julius Caesar. "Life is filled with surprises," Altschuler says. It's no coincidence that Altschuler is dealing with a life-transforming death of his own-that of his former best friend, Larry Wilkins.
When Davy and Altschuler's simple friendship turns into something "more," John cleverly has it be initiated by Fred himself, who licks both boys' faces, back and forth, until they finally kiss each other. Fred knows the score.
This being 1969, and planet Earth, reality must eventually intrude on their innocent little love affair. Reality is represented very realistically by Davy's mother, who catches the two of them asleep together on the floor.
When she demands to know what's really going on, Davy replies, "What's so important about the truth?"
The truth does eventually come out-and it has its usual serious consequences. That's the scary thing about change: once it starts, you have no idea how far it will spread, how much havoc it will wreak. In Davy's case, it's the death of Fred. The reader knows that the dog has fulfilled his literary function and, therefore, it was time for him to go, but try telling that to Davy, who is heartbroken and blames himself for the death, for daring to want more than just a dog for a friend.
But even now, things are never anything but realistic in the world of I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip. When Davy's father learns what's going on with Altschuler, he turns out to be surprisingly understanding. It seems that he is all-too-familiar with the intolerant and narrowminded.
In the end-in the last few pages, in fact-Davy (and, it seems, the author, who has been very circumspect until now) finally gets the courage to talk about the "queer" issue.
It's impossible to overstate how melodramatic the whole conclusion to this story might have played in the hands of a less gifted writer. If you're curious, watch the ridiculously over-the-top final scenes of The Children's Hour, the 1961 film version of the Lillian Hellman play about two female teachers accused of lesbianism.
There are no similarly simplistic answers in I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip. The book ends on a hopeful, but ambiguous note. Wherever the "there" of the title is, Davy hasn't arrived yet. How could he? It wasn't possible in the world of 1969, not for a thirteen-year-old boy.
But with this simple emotional truth, John was still far ahead of his contemporaries, not just in children's literature, but in other entertainment mediums. A year after John's book was published, in 1970, movie audiences could see The Boys in the Band (based on Mart Crowley's 1968 play). The work has its own kind of emotional truth, but unlike I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip (and like The Children's Hour), The Boys in the Band is decidedly backward-looking, all about defeatism and self-hatred. This wouldn't be the first time that teenagers, and the books written for them, would be far ahead of adults.
Meanwhile, we wouldn't really see significant nonhomicidal fictional gays on television until the 1972 television movie That Certain Summer. In 1967, CBS ran a documentary that featured real-life gay men, but none dared to show their faces-they were filmed in shadow, and one was famously interviewed from behind a potted plant. Correspondent Mike Wallace kept the status quo firmly in place by dutifully informing the viewer that gay men are "incapable of a fulfilling relationship with a woman, or for that matter with a man."
Talk about John Donovan being ahead of his time! Sure, the author or artist who is the "first" to break through with a theme or topic often gets a lot of attention for his or her work. But how often is that work truly the "best" on that theme? John's was absolutely one of the best children's books published in the 1960s-and the best children's book about homosexuality for many, many years to come. But while the book was well received in 1969, at least in literary circles, few recognized its true import-except perhaps its many homophobic critics, who somehow sensed it was a sign of things to come.
This was John's second big achievement: opening the door for more books on the topic, works like Isabelle Holland's provocative The Man Without a Face the following year, and the lesbian-themed teen classic Annie On My Mind, which didn't hit the scene until 1982.
Things had changed a lot by 1991, when I tried to sell the first draft of my own novel that would eventually become Geography Club-but they hadn't changed that much. I was told again and again by editors that, as much as they liked the book, there wasn't any market for it: schools wouldn't buy it because it was too controversial, and libraries and bookstores wouldn't stock it because it was too much of a "niche" market (in addition to being too controversial). A few editors took the book to acquisitions-and were told by the accountants all the things that other editors had been telling me.
I had one editor take me to lunch in order to tell me, "We don't have any slots on our list right now for books with low sales projections." This took me aback, not just because I didn't project the sales of my book would be low, but also because it sounded like they sometimes did publish books that they didn't think would sell-but that all those slots just happened to be full up at the moment!
Later, I landed an agent, Jennifer DeChiara, who literally promised me
that she would sell the book (she's since told me that she's never made that promise again, and she never will). But she had no better luck than I'd had on my own. She once told me that we'd been rejected by a total of seventeen editors-a figure that I once cited to an audience during a joint talk she and I were giving. The second I said that, she looked over at me and said wryly, "Oh, you were rejected by a lot more than seventeen editors-I just told you that to soften the blow!"
The editor who did finally buy it, Stephen Fraser at HarperCollins, had to move heaven and earth to buy the book, but it all paid off the in the end. Within two weeks, it had already gone into a third printing, and there was soon a play and movie version in the works.
The conventional wisdom about gay teen books-that there was no market for them-turned out to be flat-out wrong. So much for conventional wisdom.
Better still, my book was part of a massive wave of other gay teen books, many of which turned out to be "surprise" bestsellers too. Some were edgy, some were genre, some were funny, and some were literary-and many were downright excellent, the undisputed "best" in the teen canon.
Which brings us to "now." What did I mean at the start of this essay when I said we had arrived at the "there" that John refers to in the title of his book? It's not that antigay prejudice is gone-not by a long shot, although we've finally entered an era where anti-gay bigotry must be preceded with some variation of, "I don't have anything against gay people-some of my best friends are gay!" That's something, I suppose.
Still, the era of "gay teen books" is over-has been over for several years now. Ask any editor. We're now in the era of "books where the characters happen to be gay." A character's homosexuality is usually no longer the central "problem" for the main character-the thing that's not resolved until the last few pages, or never resolved at all, as in I'll Get There..., because it couldn't be resolved in the world of 1969.
Instead, a character's gayness is usually simply something that reinforces whatever the book's central theme happens to be, the other thing that has to be resolved. It sounds like a small shift, but it's not. It's huge.
By the same token, books don't get rejected out-ofhand by publishers anymore if they have a prominent gay character (although good luck getting them into Scholastic or any of the other major book clubs!).
Anyway, this changing of the genre is absolutely not a bad thing. In fact, it reflects the experience of actual gay teenagers. Let me be clear: being gay is usually still a challenge. But it's not the issue that it was. For one thing, resolution is now at least possible, maybe even likely.
At least in the U.S., we no longer live in the world of I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip., because actual gay teens no longer begin their own stories completely alone. At the very minimum, they now know there are other gay people in the world-that other kids are going through exactly what they are going through. The Great Lie that's been told to gay and lesbian teens for centuriesthat they're the only gay person in the world, the only person who has ever felt like they do-has been exposed. The truth is out. And it's out, in large part, because of John and all the books he inspired.
Remember what Davy's wise old grandmother told him: that it's better to be part of a winning team than to win all by yourself?
If the genre of gay teen literature was a sporting event, John was on the winning team. It was a relay race of sorts, and I'm thrilled and proud to have personally carried the baton for one brief leg of it.
But let's give credit where credit is due: it was John who started this race in the first place.
Brent Hartinger is the author of many novels for kids and teens, including the gay teen paranormal thriller, Shadowwalkers, coming from Flux in 2011. Visit him online at www . brenthartinger. com.
The Trip of a Lifetime
BY MARTIN WILSON
As a teenager growing up in Alabama in the late 1980s, I knew I wasn't like most of the other boys around me, with their raging libidos, confident swaggers, and often harsh insistence on their male-ness. In retrospect, it is obvious why this was so: I was gay. But I didn't realize it at the time, or perhaps I didn't want to admit it. I was too young to know what or who I really was. It didn't help that there were no role models walking around in plain sight.
Now, role models is not a term I am fond of-it seems pat, preachy, even sentimental. But for gay kids, especially, role models are crucial. If you don't see anyone like yourself-be it on television, in a book, or even next doorthen it's hard to make sense of what makes you different. The only gay people I had come across-as far as I knewwere effeminate and prissy. Obvious types you might saynot that there's anything wrong with that. But because I wasn't like that, then I thought there was no way I was gay, despite countless crushes on male classmates, fascination with other boy's bodies, and complete disinterest in the female anatomy. It wasn't until after college that I admitted to myself-and to others-that I was gay.
Times, for many teenagers, have changed drastically. Nowadays, gay teens can see mirror images of themselves all over the place: in movies, on sitcoms and reality shows, in the news, and of course in books. Indeed, the gay YA novel is now commonplace, offering an abundance of titles each year, everything from "high lit" to frothy fun. But it wasn't always this way-and certainly not in 1969, when John Donovan published I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip. Donovan's editor, the legendary Ursula Nordstrom, knew what a groundbreaking and controversial novel I'll Get There... would be. As she wrote him in a letter, "We're going to meet a lot of resistance to this book and we will be eager to fight that resistance as intelligently and gracefully as possible."
I only found out about the novel after reading a review of Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, in which many of her letters to Donovan appear. As an aspiring writer, I thought the realm of YA was largely off-limits for the kinds of stories I wanted to tell-that is, stories about gay adolescents. So I was shocked that this book-about a gay teenager in New York City, published way back in the dark ages-actually existed. How had I never heard of it?
I was determined to track down a copy. I checked online and saw that the novel was out of print. Then I combed the shelves at used bookstores, to no avail. I finally ordered a copy from an out-of-print bookseller over the Internet. A few weeks later, my copy arrived, a battered ex-library edition that to this day still maintains that wonderful dusty smell of an old library book.
Reading I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip. was a revelation. Because not only was the novel about a young gay teenager struggling with those first pangs of confusion and homosexual attraction, but it was also-to my surprise-a beautifully written book. What had I expected? Probably not much more than a mediocre, white-washed novel full of preachy lessons and corny and outdated world views. Sadly, even at that time I wasn't aware of how sophisticated and brilliant so much of young adult literature actually is. For some reason I only recalled books where teens said "gee whiz" and "shucks" and always learned a valuable moral at the end. I certainly don't remember coming across curse words in YA books. Sure, there were a few Judy Blume books that I had stolen peeks at, the sex scenes in Forever and the period talk in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. But the Blume books seemed like an exception, a daring anomaly in a field of idealized versions of adolescence where less-seemly aspects of adolescence have no place. That this wasn't even the case didn't matter. My perceptions of YA lit were all that mattered, enough to discourage me from reading, much less writing, such work. So, surely such a novel couldn't deal with homosexuality in a convincing and compelling way. And surely this out-of-print novel couldn't be, well, art.
It was a joyous occasion to realize that I was wrong on both counts.
Davy Ross is an appealing narrator, both sardonic and sensitive, projecting a toughness that masks an almostheartbreaking loneliness. Davy's loneliness is relieved mostly by his lick-happy dachsund, Fred, perhaps one of the most vividly evoked dogs in all of literature. But then, at his new school, Davy meets Doug Alts
chuler, the class jock, and slowly but surely the two become friends-and, eventually, much more.
And what of this relationship between the two boys? I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip. isn't an explicit gay love story by any stretch. Davy and Doug have a few homosexual encounters, which are treated tastefully and subtly in the book-rolling around on the floor, roughhousing that leads to kissing. While not explicit, these encounters are not sugarcoated and glossed over. Donovan honestly evokes Davy's constant state of confusion, and also his fears about what has occurred between him and his friend: "There's nothing wrong with Altschuler and me, is there? I know it's not like making out with a girl. It's just something that happened. It's not dirty, or anything like that. It's all right, isn't it?" But even by the end of the novel, Davy is still confused by what is going on inside himself. Much like I was at that age, and even on into my twenties. Whether you're growing up in Manhattan or Tuscaloosa, Alabama, realizing you're a homosexual is rarely something one arrives at without pain, bafflement, and fear. Isn't adolescence awkward enough when you're a heterosexual, attracted to whom you're supposedly supposed to be attracted to? How, then, do you account for the fact that your eyes are drawn to the football player's butt and not the head cheerleader's? At thirteen, Davy still has no clue that he is gay, even if the reader realizes that he most likely is. In 1969, this is totally understandable. At age thirteen, again, this is totally understandable. Actually, it's still understandable today, at any age and in any place.
I think this is what some contemporary critics of Donovan's novel have a problem with: That Davy isn't out and proud at the end of the book. That the novel isn't some "go shout it on the mountain" affirmation of homosexuality. Sadly, such critics miss the point. Davy is on a journey, and by the end of the novel he has grown and matured in countless ways. But he's still a kid. He has a ways to go. I mean, look at the title of the book. He'll get there one day-whatever "there" is.