Retrieved from Entertainment Weekly’s ‘Shelf Life’ blog
I caught this bit of news while researching review blogs for my upcoming releases. This makes me happy on a bunch of levels.
David Levithan is a hugely talented author who helped bring a wave of LGBT fiction to young adult readers in the new millennium, along with authors like Peter Cameron, Malinda Lo and Alex Sanchez. I really enjoyed Levithan’s near-future, political drama Wide Awake, and his titles are always fluttering around my reading queue. With so many fantasy books for me to catch up on, I just haven’t had the time to read more of his work. But Two Boys Kissing, with its groundbreaking cover, will definitely be purchased by me.
To my knowledge (and please correct me if I’m wrong), it’s the first young adult book with a same-sex kiss on its cover, for a traditionally-published title and/or for a title from an author who writes mainstream, literary fiction.
So yeah, there’s some qualifications there, and I don’t mean to suggest it’s less important that small press or indie or young adult-romance authors/publishers may have portrayed same-sex love just as explicitly on their book covers prior to Levithan’s book.
In fact, here’s one recent kissing cover I retrieved from a search of Bold Strokes Books’ young adult Soliloquy imprint. It’s from an anthology of gay romance stories.
Retrieved from Bold Strokes Books webstore
The mainstream publishing industry is inherently more conservative and resistant to change. That’s why I think it’s a bold and an important move by Levithan and his publisher Knopf Books to feature a photo of two boys kissing on Levithan’s book cover. It breaks what feels like a perennial double standard.
While young adult books are sensibly less sexually-graphic than adult books in terms of cover art, boy-girl kisses don’t raise much of a ruckus; and really, what’s the matter with portraying an innocent kiss?
A quick survey of some upcoming young adult releases turned up this cover from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Retrieved from GoodReads
Not quite a kiss perhaps, but the suggestion is pretty apparent, and it’s hardly making Entertainment Weekly news for pushing boundaries within young adult lit. (There are a ton of boy-girl kisses on young adult romance book covers, but I wanted to go with a more contemporary, literary title comparable to Levithan’s Two Boys Kissing).
I hope the cover for Two Boys Kissing will usher in a trend of more romantic LGBT-young adult cover art. I think about my own experience searching for books about gay teens way back when I was coming out, and wondering if other people like me existed, and if romantic love was possible between two boys. It took a lot of guesswork browsing libraries and bookstores, wondering if a slightly fey or troubled-looking guy on the cover might mean that there was a story in there that related to me. I think it’s a huge sign of progress that our stories no longer have to be coded and tragic.
There’s an interesting story on the making of the cover for Two Boys Kissing. You can read about it in Entertainment Weekly’s article here.
Do you have a favorite young adult same-sex kissing cover you want to share? Let me know, and I will happily post it!
