Saturday, December 21, 2013

Two Boys Kissing, by David Levithan

Two Boys Kissing, by David Levithan 208 pages

This is such an important book to have in the teen LGBT canon.  I found it very powerful and emotional.  The book is narrated by the ghosts of men who died from AIDS, who watch the struggles and triumphs of present-day gay young men, and compare how some things are radically different while others are exactly the same.
The terror experienced by a community of men in the 1980s and 90s who learned to celebrate their sexual identity, only to have it serve as a focal point for a horrible epidemic, as well as the awful reality of the early AIDS deaths, is something that so many young people don't even think about twice.  They forget about the generation of gay men who came before them and how much they sacrificed.  I guess this was too close to home for me- I ended up sobbing at multiple points in this short work of powerful fiction and had to put it down.  It wasn't the greatest book I've ever read, but it is an important book, and one that I'm really glad exists.

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