Bill Konigsberg's Blog, page 16

The Journey

So today I am in Billings, Montana. That’s about 1,500 miles from Phoenix, and I’ve driven here in three days. Today I’m researching my next novel, The Porcupine of Truth, by sitting at a coffee shop, Off the Leaf, where two important scenes take place. I’ll also head over to the zoo, to confirm what I recall from my first visit, three years ago: that the Billings Zoo has no animals.

I also found a place for my protagonist’s estranged, dying, alcoholic father to live:

 

Bleak, eh?

Tomorrow morning, my friend Debbie and I will head off on a great adventure. More research for the novel. How great is my life?

See, my characters take a journey in this book. It leads them from Billings, through Wyoming and Utah and Nevada, and it culminates in California. Having never driven that route, I will drive the same route with Debbie.

Along the way, my characters have a bunch of adventures. What are they, you ask? I can’t tell you. What I can tell you, however, is that we’ll be stopping at a trailer park, a foundry, a temple, a drive-thru church, a casino, a Cathedral, and a dog park. I’m also staying very open to whatever happens to us on this journey. Since the journey has a spiritual components for my characters, I feel like it is important to stay open to whatever messages the universe sends me/us during this trip. 

What else? We’re couchsurfing! I have never done this before, and neither has Debbie. We’ve set things up with some very nice-sounding people along the way, and we will stay with them. What an opportunity to get to know total strangers! I’m so looking forward to getting to know who they are, and whether they may play a role in the novel. My characters will couchsurf their way across the country too, so we’ll see what that’s like.

What can I say? I’m pumped. Just from being in Billings this morning, I’ve gotten a richer sense of the setting than I had from my memory. I lived here for a year three years ago, and memories fade. Nothing like experiencing the real thing!

Great Review of Openly Straight from Horn Book Magazine

It’s a couple more weeks until the release of Openly Straight, and reviews are coming in… I could not be more happy with the response we are getting!

Here is the review from the May edition of Horn Book Magazine:

Rafe is sick of being the poster child for all things gay at his uber-liberal Colorado high school: no matter how accepting everyone is, it feels like they only see one part of him. When he gets into a Massachusetts boarding school for his junior year, he decides to reboot himself as “openly straight.” By refraining from volunteering any information about his sexuality, he reasons, he will be able to live a “label-free life.” Soon he’s on the baseball team, increasingly torn between worlds as he enjoys the boys’-club camaraderie he finds on the team but also bonds with his prickly misfit roommate Albie, whose best friend is gay. Most complicated of all, Rafe’s growing friendship with sensitive, thoughtful teammate Ben turns into a profound crush. Rafe is an effective blend of earnest, perceptive, and flawed, and the deepening hole of deception he digs for himself infuses the plot—a well-constructed web of interpersonal dramas—with almost unbearable tension. Konigsberg eviscerates the “don’t ask, don’t tell” philosophy, slyly demonstrating just how thoroughly assumptions of straightness are embedded in everyday interactions. For a thought-provoking, creative, twenty-first-century take on the coming-out story, look no further.

-Claire E. Gross

Thanks to the reviewer, and thanks to Horn Book Magazine for this thoughtful review!

Early Praise for Openly Straight

So Openly Straight is now, depending on whom you believe, due to come out in either 18 or 22 days!

I am so excited! I love this book, and I’m eager to share it with the world.

What’s great is that so far, just about everyone whose reviewed it loves this book, too. I am so glad. When you write a book, you have to forget about your audience. That means that at moments as you’re writing, you have a keen sense that what you’re writing won’t make a lick of sense. That’s exactly how I felt many times during the writing of Openly Straight.

Thanks to Cheryl Klein, my awesome editor, and Linda Epstein, my awesome agent, even if it didn’t make sense at one point, it does now.

Here are a few of the things people are saying about Openly Straight. I promise that when I am allowed to share the full reviews, I will.

“Konigsberg has written an exceptionally intelligent, thought-provoking, coming-of-age novel about the labels people apply to us and that we, perversely, apply to ourselves. … Openly Straight is altogether one of the best gay-themed novels of the past ten years.” – Booklist (starred review)

“Rafe is an effective blend of earnest, perceptive, and flawed, and the deepening hole of self-deception he digs for himself infuses the plot — a well-constructed web of interpersonal dramas — with almost unbearable tension. Konigsberg eviscerates the “don’t ask, don’t tell” philosophy.” – Horn Book Reviews

“Very well written, funny, and believable.” — Publishers Weekly

“A complicated, poignant story of a teenage boy trying on a new skin. An eye-opening story of wish fulfillment.” – Kirkus

Can’t wait to share this book with the rest of the world!

Oh, those pesky showers!

I haven’t blogged in a while, and I apologize for that. I’ve been hard at work on a couple projects.

So, Jason Collins. Wow! That was a beautiful article. I’m proud of Jason and appreciative of his courage. It’s been 12 years since I wrote the article by which I came out at ESPN.com and asked “what if” an athlete were to come out. Now we know some of the answers.

Mostly no one’s head exploded. Mostly earth continues to spin on its axis. Some go so far as to call this a “non story,” but I think those people are kidding themselves. As I say in my essay, “Being gay in sports shouldn’t be a big deal, but until someone does it publicly and shows they can do their job, do it well, and be known as gay, it simply will be a big deal. Before we can say it doesn’t matter, we have to accept the fact it exists.“

By far the best essay I’ve read on the subject came from author and generally awesome human Sherman Alexie. His take on the shower situation is both hilarious and heart warming. It’s also dead on, and in some ways more honest than my own take, a decade ago, on the “dreaded shower argument.”

If I had to write that piece again, I might change it some. It is still true that when I was a reporter in professional sports locker rooms, I was the guy staring at the ceiling while players changed out of or into their clothes. I was trying to do my job, and I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable by being a perv and staring.

But I might be a bit more honest about the entire shower issue. It still bugs me when people argue that this is a major issue, because I don’t think it is. But I would admit that perhaps once in a while I have “snuck a peek” while showering in a locker room. I’m human. I’m not attracted to all men, but to the perhaps 5-10% of men to whom I am attracted, yes, I’ve sometimes looked. I can control myself, but heck, wouldn’t you look too, if you were a straight man showering with a woman you found attractive?

My point, and Alexie’s point as well: So what? Why is that such a big deal? Why is it an affront to any man to be looked at? Attractive women have been looked at by men for centuries. Leered at, even.

Could it be that for some men, the concern is NOT being looked at? That they might not be as attractive to openly gay men as they’d like to be? Not from a sexual standpoint, but from a self-esteem standpoint?

I have to wonder. Because if I had to shower with a bunch of openly straight women, and they weren’t ogling my middle-aged bod, I might be a little hurt. Not for the lack of opportunity to follow through on the attraction, but simply because, as Alexie concludes, “Truly, when it comes down to it, don’t we all want to be universally desired?”

The evolution of LGBTQ characters in Y.A. lit

There’s a great piece in The Atlantic about how LGBTQ characters have changed over the years. We no longer live in a society where all books about and for gay kids have to focus on the coming out process, or understanding that some people are gay and some are not. Homophobia no longer dictates every story.

I was interviewed for the piece, written by the excellent Jen Doll. We had a fascinating conversation about how this change has happened, and why.

I am no scholar, believe me, so pardon me for the oversimplification of this concept. But what I see are three distinct phases of the modern LGBTQ novel for teens. None of these phases should be seen as judgments; to me they simply illustrate where we were/are as a society at any given time.

1 – The Birth. There were LGBTQ novels for teens years before this, but the proliferation of these novels occurred back in the early 2000s, when Brent Hartinger wrote Geography Club, Alex Sanchez wrote the Rainbow Boys series, and Julie Anne Peters wrote Luna. Among others.

These novels, all excellent in their own right, served to educate and to illustrate the struggles that gay teens were having at that moment. Those kids needed to see those struggles reflected in their literature.

2 – The Slant. Think of the late Perry Moore’s Hero, in which a teen superhero must deal with his sexuality. Or Peters’ Pretend You Love Me, in which a lesbian must struggle with her attraction to a straight girl. Or my own Out of the Pocket, in which a high school football player must deal with his sexuality when he is outed against his will. I call these novels “Slant” novels because they add a slant to those original stories in a way. Yet at the center of each one is dealing with sexuality.

 

3 – The Modern. I refer to Modern Family as much as I do to “modern” as in contemporary, because what is modern today will be old tomorrow. I simply mean to point out that in these new books, being gay is simply one aspect of the protagonist’s personality, as is the case in the sitcom Modern Family (note: in the most recent episodes of that show, the writers seem to be moving in a disappointing direction with regard to Cam and Mitchell, the gay couple. Another subject for another time).

These books, all coming out later this year, could not have been written without the books that came before. For example:

In Alex London’s futuristic and fabulous “Proxy,” Syd is a proxy in a world where the rich people are patrons. When a patron who “owns” a proxy screws up, Syd gets punished. Syd happens to be gay.

 

 

 

In Malinda Lo’s sci-fi thriller “Adaptation” (came out last year), a web of conspiracies and bizarre happenings includes a secret treatment at a military hospital and an ensuing lesbian relationship that occurs seemingly out of the blue.

 

 

In Aaron Hartzler’s amazing memoir “Rapture Practice,” Aaron describes growing up in a deeply religious household. While it is a coming of age story and the main character does begin to come to grips with his sexuality, it is not at the center of the novel. Questioning his own beliefs plays a far more central role.

 

 

In David Levithan’s “Two Boys Kissing” (I haven’t read yet but can’t wait!), two boys take part in a 32-hour kissing marathon while a Greek chorus of gay men lost to AIDS narrates.

 

 

 

In my book “Openly Straight,” Rafe Goldberg just wants to be thought of as a person. His sexuality is not a big deal to him, but it feels as if it’s the headline to everyone else.

 

 

 

What do these “Modern” novels have in common? It’s hard to say at first glance. But to me, they all feel like they take the LGBTQ teen novel to a new place. David’s book cover shows two boys kissing. As he says in the article, ”It’s no more gratuitous than straight people kissing. It’s crossing another line, but that’s what we keep doing.”

I am fascinated by how this process happens. We authors don’t always sit around and talk about this… We had no meeting in which it was decided to “move things forward” regarding LGBTQ Y.A. books. To me, this growth is organic and individual in each author, and it reflects the changes in society. I was able to write something that hadn’t been written before with Openly Straight only because I had already written my “Slant” book, Out of the Pocket. I could delve into an issue that I hadn’t seen before because I had unpacked my own slant on the coming out novel. I’d be curious to know how this played out for Malinda, or David. What led them to this particular point in time in their own writing?

Anyhow, what do you see as common themes in these and other current Y.A. novels dealing with LGBTQ protagonists?

 

The Gay Jackie Robinson: Who Will Be First?

Some pretty interesting nuggets about the whole “gays in sports” thing recently.

Mike Freeman at CBSsports.com reported that he’s been hearing rumblings about a current NFL player who is ready to come out and who plans to keep playing after doing so. If that were to happen, that player would be the first in one of the four major male team sports in America to play while being openly gay.

Meanwhile, over at USA Today, there’s a story about the vastly improved atmosphere at Major League Baseball. Many top players and managers are now on record saying that they would be supportive of a player coming out.

My friends Cyd and Jim over at outsports.com are up on these and all stories related to gays in sports. No one has covered this issue better than they have, and they continue to do so.

As someone who has been in and around the world of pro sports as a writer for more than a decade, all of this chatter is extremely heartening to me.

I remember back in 2002, when ESPN The Magazine got interested in this story. This was a year after my own coming out at ESPN.com. I was actually asked to consult for the magazine, asked to visit major league clubhouses and find out what was going on and whether a player was willing to come out. I am not making this up.

For a few months, I was paid to visit locker rooms and talk to players about gay issues. It never amounted to anything, once it became clear that it was challenging to get players to open up to an “outsider” about such issues. Without me becoming a regular in one clubhouse, unless I became a trusted friend over time, why would players trust and open up to me?

But before I stopped, I spoke to several players about this issue, including my friend Billy Bean’s former roommate, Brad Ausmus. Brad was a really nice guy, and I was appreciative of him taking the time to chat with me about what he perceived. He said he thought it would be a challenge, but that things were getting better.

Anyhow, I think I would have a far different experience going into locker rooms to talk about this subject today. Eleven years later, I think society has changed so much that I would have much less trouble broaching the subject. Might there be a Chris Culliver out there who would give me grief? (By the way, Chris has been volunteering for The Trevor Project, so he deserves some props for being open to learn from his own mistake). Sure. But the fact is, eleven years ago these two articles would have been impossible.

I think what’s going to happen is that someone will come out in the next year. After that, there will be a deluge of other players coming out in every sport. Once it is clear that the player is going to be supported by teammates and not skewered by the media or fans, others will follow.

Is there trouble for that player? Will there be homophobic remarks? Most certainly. A glance at the comments on the NFL article make it clear that there are still a lot of assholes out there who are deeply afraid of their own sexualities or deeply ignorant about the fact that gay people are exactly like straight people in almost every way. The latter — ignorance — is fixable. Fear, on the other hand, is almost impossible to combat.

But the overwhelming support of fans and teammates will overcome all that. The player will be fine, he’ll be free, and his impact on our society will be extraordinary. And that’s something a closeted gay player should realize.

Not everyone has such a golden opportunity to change the world.

Texting and Driving

I’m taking a quick timeout from LGBTQ issues and teen issues and writing issues to talk about something that has long bugged me. I’ve decided to issue a challenge to my readers, and that challenge is to see if we can in a small way do something about texting and driving.

I know. It’s terrible when people text and drive. We see the guy next to us doing it, and it pisses us off. But once in a while, when we’re on the highway and there aren’t too many cars around and that chime sounds, we grab our phones and sneak a peek.

We do it because, well, we’re special.

We are REALLY GREAT drivers and we can do two things at once. Even if those two things involve operating a deadly weapon whizzing down the road at 70 miles per hour while not looking at the road ahead of us.

Here’s the deal, everyone. Myself included:

We are NOT SPECIAL.

No one is that special, really. We all possess the same DNA, and we all may be pretty darn great drivers. But no one can say they are beyond making a mistake. And the mistake may not even be ours. It may be someone an eighth of a mile ahead of us running out of gas or getting a flat or our neighbor veering over one lane because of a piece of tire in the middle of the road. We simply cannot know.

You know I’m right. And you also know that I do the same damn thing I’m talking about. Not every day, because I think texting and driving is wrong. But sometimes I do sneak a glance. And sometimes when I feel particularly sure about where I am and what’s around me, I will even write a one-syllable response so that someone knows I’ve seen their text.

Here’s what I am suggesting: For one week, let’s make a pact. NO PICKING UP OUR CELL PHONES while driving. Not at all. Not at stop lights, not in standstill traffic. Never.

The reason for the strict rule: we are addicted to picking up our phones. You can’t deny it. I am for sure. Whenever I’m at a light, I swipe the seat next to me for my phone.

What in the world for? Am I so important that I have to see if any emails or texts have come in during the last five minutes?

Nothing is that important. And if I stop doing it at lights, it will help me not do it when I’m driving.

Hear me? No cellphones while in the driver’s seat. One week. After a week, those of us who wish to continue, may. Those who hate it, you can go back to looking at stop lights.

Who is with me? And who is willing to get your friends to do the same? Let’s start a movement. These things don’t start with laws: they start with us. Let’s be the change we wish to see in the world. According to the US Department of Transportation, 3,000 people were killed in 2011 in accidents caused by a distracted driver. Let’s see if we can help lower that number.

Labels

I am a gay man. I am a Colorado Rockies fan. I am a lover of the show Arrested Development.

All of these things are labels. Together they paint an (odd) picture of an entire person. Each time I take one out and replace it with another (remove Rockies fan, add Donna Summer) an entirely different picture emerges.

I’m interested in how these labels intersect. 

I want to know how people choose their labels — which are mandatory and which are the ones they choose to utilize. 

In fact, I do love Donna Summer. (R.I.P.) Her music evokes a more innocent time in my life, and every time I hear a song like Sunset People or Heaven Knows, i am transported there. That is true about me.

But if you put the labels “Gay Man” and “Donna Summer Fan” together, am I, Bill Konigsberg, what you’d expect to have emerge? 

We control some of the labels that are put on us. For instance, if I don’t want anyone to think that I am a “Disco Dolly,” I could hide the fact that I love Donna Summer (too late). Other labels we can hide, but the repercussions are major. If I hide the fact that I’m a gay man, bad things can happen for me. And of course, if they are found out, then I have the label of “Closeted Gay Man,” which comes with all sorts of other meanings and images.

These are the issues that drew me in as I wrote “Openly Straight.” What is a jock? What is a geek? Can you be “Label Free” or is that just a fantasy? If you have no discernible labels, to people just “fill in the blanks” and make them up for you?

What labels do you choose to give yourself? Which ones are hoisted upon you?

What I learned visiting schools

I’ve just returned from a week of school visits in the New York area. In five days, I visited five schools. I’m exhausted and I have a lot to accomplish this week, but I wanted to start the week by sharing some of the lessons I learned from the visits.

1) Kids are great. I guess I didn’t learn this, but I re-learned it. There is so much to be hopeful for in our future. When I hear people talk about “the kids these days,” I want to laugh. It’s the same garbage we heard when I was growing up. There is amazing talent and there are open hearts and minds in every generation and this one is chock full of both, from what I see. The problems we are dealing with now will be solved by this younger generation. As a good friend of mine often says, we just have to wait for some people to die.

2) LGBTQ issues are different for this generation. Again, this is not new information. It’s just that I learned it again, and more profoundly. A lot of the work that needs to be done is not in telling kids that LGBTQ people exist, but in educating them about what it means when a person has a different sexual orientation or gender expression or whatever else the letters stand for. They’ve seen gay characters on TV. Tons of times. What they haven’t necessarily done is thought about what it means for a person to be “different” in that way. Many of the kids I encountered wondered what the big deal was. It’s a good question. My answer is that until it really isn’t a big deal, until we all have the same rights and we all are equally safe walking down the street and identifying as something other than heterosexual is not seen as a negative, it simply is a big deal. We have to create a world in which difference is celebrated before we can pretend that differences don’t exist.

3) Younger kids are ready to talk about these issues, or at least hear about them. A few years ago, when I was doing school visits, it would never have occurred to me that I would speak to anyone who wasn’t in high school or college. This trip, I spoke to 4th and 5th graders at two different schools. I spoke to 6th graders at four of the schools. For these age ranges, LGBTQ issues need to be addressed in two ways:

a) Bullying. Is it okay to be different? Is it okay to make fun of someone who is different? Has anyone ever made fun of you? How did it feel? What do you do when someone makes fun of someone else in your class? The fourth and fifth graders I met were very ready to talk about this. Beyond that, I identified myself as gay by explaining that I have a husband and a puppy. Sadly, this may now mean that there are fourth and fifth graders out there who believe all gay people have puppies.

They would not be entirely wrong.

b) A family issue. Meaning, who makes up a family? What if a family has two moms or two dads? If it turns out that a person is gay or lesbian, can they have a family? Who will they have a family with? Simply explaining that I have a husband and a puppy helped the kids understand that I have a family too. It was powerful to hear the questions the kids asked. These kids simply need to put a face to the idea. It becomes a lot less scary to know that some people are this and some people are that when they know people who are both this AND that.

4) Hate is often a disguise. I visited a school in New Jersey. This inner-city school is not a safe place for LGBTQ people, at least not yet. While speaking in two assemblies there, I had to deal with some hostility. Some of the kids were clearly not comfortable hearing my story, and they showed that with laughter, pointing, and mean words. 

But beneath that, some other things were going on. One example: A boy at the school was part of a group of kids who were really acting out during the first assembly. Someone from his group (possibly him, I’m not sure), told me it would be better if I was dead. This was hard to hear, sure. But what happened next was more important. He and his buddies got up and left after the assembly, but he came back and listened again.

I don’t want to make assumptions about why he did this, but the point is that he needed to hear something I was saying. He may have never heard someone like me speak before, someone who was there to say that it’s okay to be gay, and that you can be happy and healthy and gay. 

So I think behind hatred is a lot of other stuff that can be more complicated to unpack. Fear, for sure. Ignorance obviously. But what about inquisitiveness? Maybe in some schools it’s easier to show hate than to ask a real question. What about insecurity? Sadness? Confusion?

As a postscript: I heard from the woman who invited me to that school this morning: I am heartened by her feedback. Among other things, she said, “We were having trouble solidifying our version of a GSA and your visit brought us together, directed us, and instilled a new sense of urgency.”

If that’s the case, then the visit was more than worth it!

5) Finally, the most interesting lesson I learned is that you have to find ways to not carry the energy with you. When you talk to groups of people (I spoke in front of thousands of people last week), you have to find ways to scrub away other people’s stuff. By stuff, I mean: Fear, excitement, anger, insecurity, sadness, all that karmic stuff people carry around. I truly believe that I was walking around shouldering other people’s energy last week, that it must have flown off them and onto me as a part of the sharing process. Nothing else I can think of could account for the exhaustion I felt every day leaving a school. It’s an incredible feeling to be able to possibly help so many people, and yet at the end of the day, you have to leave their stuff with them. 

Next time I do this, I’m going to figure out a way to do that. I hope!

Better Nate Than Ever

Books excite me. There, I said it. I’m a book nerd.

I get especially excited by books that take me to new places, as well as books that introduce me to characters I really want to spend time with.

Enter 13-year-old Nate Foster in Tim Federle’s fantastic debut novel “Better Nate Than Ever,” which this weekend was featured in The New York Times (go, Tim!) From the first page, I knew I’d found a new friend.

The book follows Nate as he travels to New York City from Western Pennsylvania to audition for E.T., The Musical on Broadway. The fast-paced narrative will have you yearning to turn the page before you’re done reading, but hold back… you’ll want to savor each moment. You’ll mourn the final page, but the good news is that a sequel is coming.

I knew I wanted to read this book when I saw Tim’s bio on Amazon. It starts with, “Tim Federle is the author of over seven hundred emails.”

This novel reminded me quite a bit of a middle grade version of “How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater.” (If you haven’t read this novel by Marc Acito, buy it and read it pronto). In both novels, the character’s sexuality takes a back seat to his bubbly personality. While there is an acknowledgement of Nate’s burgeoning sexuality during his trip to New York, it is not the highlight; when Nate sees two men kissing, he is awed to notice that no one punches them. Nate is Nate, and he is not surprised that he is Nate. I found this light touch refreshing.

If you want to laugh with and root for an underdog, read this book! I can’t wait to see what happens in the sequel.