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(I read half of this book earlier in the day, but am putting all the minutes together now.)

David Inside Out by Lee Bantle

Trying to figure out how to put the moves on a girl for the first time can be hard. "Was I supposed to touch her knee now?... Should I just drop my hand on her? Were you supposed to squeeze?" wonders David. But David has an extra problem... Kick, the girl who pretty clearly wants to be his girlfriend, isn't nearly as attractive to him as someone else -- his track teammate, Sean.

David is determined not to give in to his feelings. "This wasn't me. It couldn't be. Not gay. Anything but that." He makes a list of ways to be more straight, correcting himself with a snap of a rubber band on his wrist whenever he has a wrong feeling. Then Sean invites him to fool around, throwing all his best straight intentions out the window. David is scared of being out to his friends, but ready to be in love--but Sean refuses to admit he likes anything but getting off. "I don't kiss or write love poems... I don't put it in my mouth." Sean, David will find, is far more determined not to be gay than he could ever be.

Fast-paced and plot-focused, this sympathetic coming out story will probably have the most appeal to readers who are also struggling with their sexual identities. I found myself most interested in the characters other than David, whose actions and motivations are something of a puzzle to him, complicating his life. Sean has the private sex rules designed to prove that he's not really gay. Kick betrays his confession to her and then deliberately seduces him, perhaps in a misguided attempt to "cure" him, only to wind up hurt. Only his oldest friend Eddie, who recently came out himself, is really straightforward about who he is and what he wants... an excellent role model for the newly self-aware David.

The story has a small amount of graphic language and quite a few brief, non-explicit but not coy sex scenes. I was bothered that condoms are only mentioned in a heterosexual context, though it would have been quite narratively easy to have the person David talks to at a gay hotline drop a word about safe sex -- considering Sean's secretive, denial-filled approach to sex, he strikes me as a highly risky person to have unprotected encounters with. Recommended for mature readers. (15 & up)


R: 1 hour, 46 minutes
B: 43 minutes
RB: 4 minutes

Note: this review is of the original 2000 edition; I haven't had a chance to see the new edition. As far as I can tell, it's unchanged except for the cover and a new foreword by the author.



Pedro and Me written and illustrated by Judd Winick. Henry Holt, 2000 (0-8050-6403-6); 2009 (978-0-8050-8964-6) $16.95

I started reading this nonfiction graphic "novel" less than thrilled with the heavily detailed, semi-realistic style of the drawings, but when I got to Judd's exquisitely grumpy portrayal of himself as "an unhappy kid," I was hooked. And though there continued to be elements of the artistic style that I found unattractive, overall it is a wonderful marriage of words and pictures, just what a graphic novel should be.

Pedro and Me is the story of how Judd Winick become involved in one of the most important relationships of his life: as a cast member of MTV's "The Real World," he found himself rooming with Pedro Zamora, a gay, HIV-positive AIDS educator, who did an excellent job of educating the tense and naive Judd about the realities of living with someone with HIV. Tragically, that reality also included Pedro's death at the age of 22.

I've never seen "The Real World" so I don't have much of a sense of how "real" any of it actually felt to viewers. (Winick highlights the falseness of the situation from the insider point of view by showing his first meeting with Pam, who would later become his fiance, and then showing the same scene from a further perspective which includes three hovering cameramen.) But Pedro and Me is both joyfully and painfully real. Winick skillfully uses cartooning technique to drive home emotions, sometimes with humor, as in his nervous vision of the AIDS virus walking around on two legs saying "Mornin,'" and sometimes with extreme pathos, as in the final scene of Pedro's death, a small white box against a background of blackness. Biographies of himself and Pedro help us understand how the two of them got to that particular place in time, with an especially germane depiction of the adolescent Pedro willingly being used by older men for sex because he so desperately longed for love. Finally, Judd shows how several chance encounters with strangers helped him grieve for Pedro and understand how important Pedro's short life had been. And he amply fulfills the goal of making even people like me, who had never heard of Pedro, understand and be touched by him as well. (14 & up)

© 2009 Wendy E. Betts

reading: 8:20-9:10, 9:20-9:30 (1 hour) 151 pages
writing: 10:50-11:20 (30 minutes)

So I chose this book because I needed something light after the last few. Hahahahahahahaha.






grl2grl by Julie Anne Peters. Little, Brown, 2007 (978-0-316-01343-7) $11.99 pb

Ten short glimpses into the lives of young lesbians (and one transgendered girl to "boi") make up a thoughtful, compelling and sometimes harrowing book. From the seemingly mundane (daring to strike up a conversation with an intriguing stranger) to the unspeakably awful (living with the brutal sexual abuse of a father), these are sympathetic and emotionally vivid portraits of girls at significant moments in their lives. The level of pain revealed is sometimes intense; even a tender story about unspoken love has a surprise twist that punches the gut. By the time the last story ended happily, I was almost ready to cry with relief.

Peters writes with exquisite attention to language and detail, making each first person narrative feel distinct and individual. The different emotions each girl--and boi--experience all come to vivid life, and it can be hard to let the characters go after just a few pages, especially when some of them have hurt so much within those pages. I would love to see Peters expand some of these stories, especially "Stone Cold Butch" and "Boi," in order to give those characters a chance to move beyond the events told here, and find some happiness. (14 & up)

Yea!  I"m back to making regular writing time.  I managed to revise three chapters of George's story yesterday before the Boy Scouts arrived.

This was their first meeting in three weeks, so of course, we had serious business to take care of.

We gathered our tools:



Followed the directions given in our handy Boy Scout Manual:





And fired marshmallows at each other!





Catapults!  They're right up there with the yoohoo boats!!!