Summer Lovin'

I've been on a reading hunt recently. Well... more of a side quest, really. I've been trying to find a good book with a gay main character that isn't the story of a closeted man coming out. I've found it a surprisingly difficult pair of boxes to check. As soon as you move a novel's "token gay character" off the periphery and into the spotlight, the plot inevitably seems to be about a slow journey to self acceptance. I want a book in which the protagonist simply is gay as a matter of course, just as every other book doesn't spend pages on having the main character "coming to accept" being straight. I peruse Goodreads.com, read synopses, and try to find likely candidates.

Imagine my thrill when I cracked open Something Like Summer, by Jay Bell, and was greeted with this opening sentence to Chapter One: "This is not a coming-out story."

Let me say first that I did enjoy this book overall. But that said, this opening line is not entirely truthful. The story unfolds over a seven year period, following protagonist Ben Bentley from age 17. The novel is strictly limited to his point of view, and he is (as promised in that opening line) already out at the start of the story. (A rather remarkable notion for a teenager in Texas in the year 1996, the time and place the story begins.) So no, this story is not about Ben coming out.

But it is a story about Ben's interactions with two "great loves" of his life, and one of them - the one who appears in more of the book -- is very deeply closeted. As a result, much of the tapestry of this story is woven with the patterns of a coming-out tale. It is, at times, not really what I was looking for.

At other times, though, it's very much what I was looking for. The other man in Ben's life is every bit as self-actualized as he is -- and actually comes across more likeable than Ben himself. This may be because the novel, coming from Ben's point of view, let's us in on every noble and ignoble thought in his head. That leaves his love interest more closed off to the reader, and seen only through Ben's adoring lens. Of course he's going to be likeable.

With the bulk of the story set in Ben's teens, the book does often have a distinct "Young Adult Fiction" vibe. There's nothing wrong with that; I've read plenty from that category before. But it made me aware that maybe what I was originally looking for was part "not a coming-out tale" and part "not about 'kids.'" (This, of course, made me feel old.)

Still, the book was written well enough, and pulled me along at a brisk pace. The author has more in a series of these, and I've made a mental note to circle back around to one (probably after I've found the book I'm really after). I'd give Something Like Summer a B+.