BOOK REVIEW -- *The Boy in Makeup*
Apr. 7th, 2023 01:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahunter3Cory is a fifteen-year old, bright, gay, friendly, but a bit wary of the other kids because he has been called a freak. And it hurts. The hostility and ridicule hurt. He's also lonely, and pines for the someday when he would have a boyfriend. The loneliness hurts, too.
The Boy in Makeup, by Anthony Connors-Roberts, is a cute, warm tale in the gay coming-of-age genre. It's aimed at a young adult audience and does a good job of showing what it's like to be a marginalized identity without too much graphic violence or excessive darkness. In fact, it's a pretty optimistic and welcoming view.
Cory's crush Ben is sweet and kind, his parents and his best friend Lizzie are totally supportive. There are hecklers and harassers, but they are background, people without fully developed characters. Just stuff you have to endure.
The one major exception is Mr. Harris, the faculty member with the intense hangup about male students wearing makeup. Cory has to avoid him as much as possible or be confronted with the demand that he remove all the cosmetics from his face. Which is something he hates to do, because it's a major part of his self-expression.
There's enough tension and frustration around that to stand in for a more general canvas of disapproval and nonacceptance. And while my memories of being fifteen, and those of lots of gay guys my age as well, involve much more hostility, all signs point to genuine progress, and it is nice to see so many characters who take being gay in stride as a part of the normal world.
Structurally, there is a context-switch rather late in the story, where after more than a hundred pages of seeing events from Cory's perspective, we're briefly watching things unfold from Ben's viewpoint instead. It's more typical that an author either starts alternating contexts early on or sticks with one character. I didn't find it jarring, though. Roberts is explicit in doing so, and while I was surprised by it, it didn't throw me out of the story.
- p. 6
I have to get on my soapbox now. Reluctantly, because The Boy in Makeup is such a sweet little book that being critical of it feels like attacking kittens or something.
But although the book makes a gesture or two towards inclusivity for the myriad other identities on the LGBTQIA spectrum — for instance, the introduction of the transgender girl Jenny — it participates in the ongoing conflation of being femme (or of behaving and being seen as one of the girls rather than one of the lads) with being a gay guy.
The narrative could have, for instance, included at least one gay guy who isn't discernably feminine. Cory's love interest, Ben, although introduced as a football playing masculine boy, is depicted throughout as joyful and smiling, interested in makeup if not quite to the same degree as Cory, and only doing football to please his dad.
And hey Anthony, why would wearing makeup mean that you're necessarily gay?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not oblivious. I understand that if you grow up attracted to males, and you also have the mannerisms and personality traits that are associated with girls and women, you're going to be called sissy and fag, you're going to be marked as a girlish male who is homosexual, because the world doesn't distinguish between feminine and gay when the person in question is male. So since both of the things you're regarded as are true, they'll seem connected to each other for you, too.
But, so? For the cisgender heterosexual mainstream world, being male means you're expected to be attracted to the girls and to be masculine in your various personality and behavioral traits, so to them that's all bolted together as a single identity. But when they go around asserting that this is what being male is all about, it erases gay guys, it leaves you on the outside of how they're defining male, and marks you as an anomaly, as weird, as, well, queer.
And in a similar way, whenever I encounter "does girl things" = "gay", it erases me, a heterosexual femme, and makes me feel unincluded and marked as a peculiarity that can be ignored, doesn't count.
It doesn't have to be that way. Jacob Tobia's book Sissy is from the standpoint of a gay male who is femme and who likes makeup much like Cory does... but it's about a second coming out, what Tobia refers to as a "coming of gender", of making a separate identity-statement about being one of us femme people. (2019 review)
Anthony Connors-Roberts. Amazon: The Boy in Makeup eBook and paperback. 2023 (self-published), 197 pgs
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My third book is deep in second draft, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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The Boy in Makeup, by Anthony Connors-Roberts, is a cute, warm tale in the gay coming-of-age genre. It's aimed at a young adult audience and does a good job of showing what it's like to be a marginalized identity without too much graphic violence or excessive darkness. In fact, it's a pretty optimistic and welcoming view.
Cory's crush Ben is sweet and kind, his parents and his best friend Lizzie are totally supportive. There are hecklers and harassers, but they are background, people without fully developed characters. Just stuff you have to endure.
The one major exception is Mr. Harris, the faculty member with the intense hangup about male students wearing makeup. Cory has to avoid him as much as possible or be confronted with the demand that he remove all the cosmetics from his face. Which is something he hates to do, because it's a major part of his self-expression.
There's enough tension and frustration around that to stand in for a more general canvas of disapproval and nonacceptance. And while my memories of being fifteen, and those of lots of gay guys my age as well, involve much more hostility, all signs point to genuine progress, and it is nice to see so many characters who take being gay in stride as a part of the normal world.
Structurally, there is a context-switch rather late in the story, where after more than a hundred pages of seeing events from Cory's perspective, we're briefly watching things unfold from Ben's viewpoint instead. It's more typical that an author either starts alternating contexts early on or sticks with one character. I didn't find it jarring, though. Roberts is explicit in doing so, and while I was surprised by it, it didn't throw me out of the story.
Last year I came out as gay to the school. Hardly anyone was surprised, mainly because I had been wearing full-on makeup for a while, and I had never been one of the lads
- p. 6
I have to get on my soapbox now. Reluctantly, because The Boy in Makeup is such a sweet little book that being critical of it feels like attacking kittens or something.
But although the book makes a gesture or two towards inclusivity for the myriad other identities on the LGBTQIA spectrum — for instance, the introduction of the transgender girl Jenny — it participates in the ongoing conflation of being femme (or of behaving and being seen as one of the girls rather than one of the lads) with being a gay guy.
The narrative could have, for instance, included at least one gay guy who isn't discernably feminine. Cory's love interest, Ben, although introduced as a football playing masculine boy, is depicted throughout as joyful and smiling, interested in makeup if not quite to the same degree as Cory, and only doing football to please his dad.
The reporter smiled. "But Ben, why the need for makeup to tell everyone that you're gay?"
And hey Anthony, why would wearing makeup mean that you're necessarily gay?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not oblivious. I understand that if you grow up attracted to males, and you also have the mannerisms and personality traits that are associated with girls and women, you're going to be called sissy and fag, you're going to be marked as a girlish male who is homosexual, because the world doesn't distinguish between feminine and gay when the person in question is male. So since both of the things you're regarded as are true, they'll seem connected to each other for you, too.
But, so? For the cisgender heterosexual mainstream world, being male means you're expected to be attracted to the girls and to be masculine in your various personality and behavioral traits, so to them that's all bolted together as a single identity. But when they go around asserting that this is what being male is all about, it erases gay guys, it leaves you on the outside of how they're defining male, and marks you as an anomaly, as weird, as, well, queer.
And in a similar way, whenever I encounter "does girl things" = "gay", it erases me, a heterosexual femme, and makes me feel unincluded and marked as a peculiarity that can be ignored, doesn't count.
It doesn't have to be that way. Jacob Tobia's book Sissy is from the standpoint of a gay male who is femme and who likes makeup much like Cory does... but it's about a second coming out, what Tobia refers to as a "coming of gender", of making a separate identity-statement about being one of us femme people. (2019 review)
Anthony Connors-Roberts. Amazon: The Boy in Makeup eBook and paperback. 2023 (self-published), 197 pgs
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My third book is deep in second draft, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
no subject
Date: 2023-04-07 09:46 pm (UTC)The central conflict of Camp is that the femme main character made himself into a more masc-presenting gay to attract the masc4masc boy at summer camp -- but the only reason that boy is masc4masc is because of internalized homophobia.
It's...I don't know what it says about me, but I feel more represented by boy's novels from the 1960's than I do by ostensibly queer ones from today.