Without subject headings, it’s sometimes hard to tell if a new novel has any GLBTQ content before you read it. Take Hold Still, a first novel by Nina LaCour that I just received as a pre-publication copy from Dutton. The jacket art shows an older teenage girl heavily made-up but wearing a Harriet-The-Spy-style hoodie. Both her pose and her expression spell “tortured romantic.”

And here are the first few lines of the synopsis:

That night Ingrid told Caitlin, I’ll go wherever you go. But by dawn Ingrid, and her promise, were gone, and Caitlin was alone. Ingrid’s suicide immobilizes Caitlin, leaving her unsure of her place in a new life she hardly recognizes.

Hmm, sounds like a lesbian novel to me, albeit a rather old-fashioned one.

And then there’s the note about the author: “A San Francisco Bay area native, Nina lives in Oakland, California.” Okay, a-hem, yeah, but lots of straight people are born in San Francisco. If she had been born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and then re-located to San Francisco, this piece of evidence might be a bit stronger.

A final clue comes in last bit of the author’s note in which she singles out one woman: “Thank you for reading every word of every draft, and for crying at all the right parts. Most of all, thank you for making me so happy. Without you, this would not have been possible.“

Okay, that clinches it. I’m reading it. And I’ll let you know.

Phillip Clark gives The Westing Game a rainbow read.   Well, Ellen Raskin did live in Greenwich Village — on Gay Street.

It’s another interesting example of how queer kids will take what they need from the books they have.

Shields, Charles J. I Am Scout: The Biography of Harper Lee. Henry Holt, 2008.

Taken from his adult biography of Harper Lee, Mockingbird, published in 2006, Charles J. Shields’ work is edited for young readers. As with the adult version, his focus is on her early life, the only book she ever published, and on her lifelong friendship with Truman Capote.

Harper Lee (known as Nelle to her family, friends and Mr. Shields) is famously reclusive. That that she has never married and has always maintained a fairly butch persona, have led to speculations about her sexuality. But someone as private as Harper Lee is unlikely ever to talk about this aspect of her life when she won’t even talk about why she’s never published another book.

Contrast this with her friend Truman, the inspiration for Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird, who as an adult was always flamboyantly and unapologetically open about being gay, even in a time when most gay men and lesbians were closeted.

Both Harper Lee and Truman Capote realized as children that there was something different about them that gave them a special bond. Young Truman even made up a word for it: apart people.

Although no overt mention is made of the sexual orientation or gender identity of either one, Shields’ frequent descriptions of Lee’s masculinity and Capote’s effeminate characteristics may cause young readers to wonder. Concerning Lee, it seems to be the only thing people in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, recall about her, or at least the only recollection Shields finds worth reporting. Here’s a small sampling of how she is described:

p. 1: Nelle had a reputation as a fearsome stomach-puncher, foot-stomper, and hair-puller who “could talk mean like a boy.”

p. 2: She was a “sawed-off but solid tomboy with an all-hell-let-loose wrestling technique,” wrote Truman of a short story character he later based on Nelle.

p. 2: Her eldest sister, Alice, 15 years older, later admitted that her little sister, the youngest of four children, “isn’t much of a conformist.”

p. 3: It was true she was tough and independent. She preferred wearing a scruffy pair of overalls to a dress and hanging upside down from the chinaberry tree in her yard to sitting quietly in church.

p. 19: So if Nelle — the tomboy, the roughhouser — resisted the normal expectations for her gender, perhaps it was because they seemed too limiting. “She was just like a boy!” enthused Taylor Faircloth, a resident of Atmore, Alabama, where Nelle spent summers. “She got rid of all her surplus hair in the summer time, and she could climb tall trees. When we played ‘capture the flag’ at night, she held on longer than anybody!”

p. 22: “Whatever his imaginative gifts, however, at first glance Truman hardly seemed the ideal candidate for friendship with a girl like Nelle. She was a female Huck Finn, with large dark brown eyes and close-cropped hair. Whereas he — as surely as every kids at Monroe County Elementary knew that night followed day — was a sissy, a crybaby, a mama’s boy, and so on.”

And so on, indeed. These sorts of descriptions of Lee and Capote continue throughout the first two chapters that describe their childhood in Monroeville. Even in her college years, Harper Lee was remembered mostly for her unconventional masculine attributes:

p. 53: And to many of the girls in Massey Hall, Nelle’s appearance was the last straw. She did not wear an ounce of makeup, only brushed her hair instead of curling it, and evinced no interest in indulging in any kind of beauty regimen.

p. 54: “I didn’t have anything in common with her because she was not like most of us,” said Catherine [a college classmate]. “She wasn’t worried about how her hair looked or whether she had a date on Friday night like the rest of us were. I don’t remember her sitting around and giggling and being silly and talking about what our weddings were going to be like — that’s what teenage girls talked about. She was not a part of the ‘girl group.’ She never had what we call in the South ‘finishing touches.’”

p. 54: “I noticed her physically,” said Mary Benson Tomlinson, another freshman. “She had a presence. I remember her better than I do anyone else at Huntington, except my roommate and maybe one or two other people. Everything about her hinted at masculinity. I think the word ‘handsome’ would have suited her.”

p. 63: On Friday and Saturday nights, when the other Chi O girls were bustling around, trying to be ready for dates or dances, Nelle never had any plans. No one recalled seeing her with a boyfriend. Practically every weekend, she tromped through the living room, golf clubs slung over her shoulder, heading out for a few rounds. The way she dressed for the golf course, just jeans and a sweatshirt, raised a few eyebrows. “That wasn’t the way we dressed,” said Jane Benton David. The pronouncement on Nelle’s outerwear was that it was “very different.”

“I am ashamed to admit that we made fun of her,” said Barbara Moore, a member of Phi Mu soroity. “Never around her, but behind her back.”

Okay, my gaydar is registering off the charts reading about what Harper Lee was like in college. Such descriptions are bound to lead to speculation but it can never be more than that. It strikes me as odd, however, that the author places such an emphasis on Lee’s boyish/mannish characteristics without ever uttering the L-word or, for that matter, when it comes to Truman Capote, the G-word. Instead, the author would have us believe that they were both somehow damaged psychologically because of their distant, uncaring mothers.

What year is this again?

To me, that’s a far more malicious speculation in a book for teens than one about sexuality would be.

Take a look at these two as young adults and see if they look like family to you. The photo of Harper Lee appeared on the book jacket of the first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird. It was taken by the person who probably knew her best, Truman Capote.