Two Boys Kissing

I started reading this book by accident, and I am so glad I did. I had no idea Levithan could write such beautiful prose, but there are passages in Two Boys Kissing that are just poetry. (I do not have a copy of the book with me right now, so I can not quote any, but I would love to.)

The book is structured interestingly, being narrated in a first person plural omniscient voice, “We” being a cloud of men who died of AIDS before the disease was really studied and workable treatments were found. I am old enough that I know some of those men in the “We” who narrate. One of them is my friend and house mate Kent, who committed suicide by starvation when his HIV diagnosis was changed to full-blown AIDS. He didn't want to endure the misery of it, and he didn't want to deal with the humiliation of the health care system he would have been subjected to as a poor person. Other friends of mine who are part of that voice are persons I lost track of briefly (really not long at all), and on calling or hunting them up, found out they had sickened suddenly and died.

Although my story is not like any of the characters in the book, Levithan makes them so immediate and so real that I can identify with each. Some reviewers complain that the characters were not fully developed, but I think maybe they just wanted a different book than the one the author actually wrote. He's not giving us action or adventure, or even much character development, but rather a series of extended vignettes in which we may see ourselves, or perhaps not.

I am grateful for the beauty of the words and for the chance to hear my own generation speaking to a younger one, the kids on whose behalf I have been as quietly vocal as I have been, so that they would be born and grow up in a different environment than I did, than did the men who died and who went on to narrate this book.

Be strong, pink-haired boys and kissing boys. I hope you won't need quite as much strength just to stay alive as some of us did, so you can use your strength to flourish. It's still not all the way good, as this book testifies, but IT GETS BETTER, so hang in there, don't jump, have hope. I'm rooting for you.