Pride Month, Representation, and Rainbow Boys

Being honest, I don't remember any of the details of these books...

It's June, which means two beautiful things occur at the same time: the American public school system unleashes screaming children back into the wild for summer break, and it's Pride Month! 🌈💖

Despite having been out as bi for five years and my friend group being unintentionally but predominately queer, I do very little to celebrate Pride Month. In complete spite of my apparent apathy, Pride Month always manages to bring me happiness--seeing my friends get excited about it and the general high-energy of the LGBT+ community during Pride Month puts a smile on my face and gives me a chance to reflect.

I picked up my first LGBT+ read when I was about 10 years old. I had stumbled into my sexuality at what now seems like an impossibly young age, and kept it to my chest for a long time. I found Sanchez's RAINBOW BOYS and the rest of the trilogy--RAINBOW HIGH and RAINBOW ROAD--at a bookstore that, stringing itself along after the '08 recession, was going out of business.

Even with the store selling all their YA paperbacks at a depressing $0.25 apiece, I was convinced that my dad would never have agreed to buy me these outright. Being a family of bookworms, my "clever" solution was to convince my dad to let me buy as many books as I could carry (at a quarter apiece, convincing him wasn't a difficult task) and sneak these three out in the middle of the stack, sandwiched between books about mermaids and dramatic high school mysteries.

Whether or not they were noticed additions, I got the books home. Except to read them, the books stayed stashed between socks and swimsuits in my dresser.

The books themselves weren't particularly impressive--they tell a standard, albeit dated, story of three queer boys, their relationships with each other and those around them, their internal relationships with their sexualities, and the challenges they're faced with as they come out. It's an honest but predictable coming out story. I would never have read any of them if they weren't openly queer--but they were. I was thrilled to sacrifice quality for representation. These books gave me a simple message: even if I was painfully young and closeted, I wasn't alone.

That's a message that's worth a hell of a lot more than $0.25.

Before RAINBOW BOYS, my LGBT+ representation had consisted of the Simpsons episode "There's Something About Marrying"--I still love that episode--and a few movie characters that were inevitably buried. Now, it's hard to throw a stone without hitting a queer #ownvoices book, especially in the YA realm. The landscape of LGBT+ representation has undergone rapid metamorphosis. We're no longer relegated to burials and coming out stories: the literary and entertainment spheres are coming to the understanding that queer people can take on any role. There's no need to sacrifice quality for representation. We can have both. We deserve both.

I no longer keep queer stories in my sock drawer: I keep them front and center in my Word documents, where I'm creating them.

Happy Pride Month, and happy June!