Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg
“Straight people have it so much easier. They don’t understand. They can’t. There’s no such thing as openly straight.”
Rafe is a high school junior from Boulder, Colorado who has been out and proud since eighth grade. Unlike so many other gay youth, he’s never been bullied nor has he been made fun of because of his sexuality. Rafe knows how fortunate he is to live in a welcoming community and to have such an incredibly supportive family, but he’s starting to feel like the fact that he’s gay is the only thing that people really notice about him. This leaves him wishing that he could start over...
...so he decides to move across the country and attend an all-boys boarding school in Massachusetts and, most importantly, keep his sexuality a secret. Given his love of writing, Rafe is encouraged to keep a journal about his experience by one of his teachers who knows his secret. Given his love of soccer, Rafe immediately finds himself in an athletic clique and loves how his classmates think of him as jock.
Everything starts to get a bit complicated with Rafe’s experiment when he falls for one of his teammates. His teammate, Ben, is rather dreamy in how smart, articulate, and sensitive he is, but he’s straight. Or is he? The unique friendship that develops between them transcends labels, but is it all meaningless if Rafe can’t tell Ben the truth?
This book is refreshing in its approach and in how it encourages you to think about your own identity. Anyone that has ever struggled with labels, be they related to their sexuality or not, will identify with this incredible novel.
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“Tired of being known as "the gay kid", Rafe Goldberg decides to assume a new persona when he comes east and enters an elite Massachusetts prep school—but trying to deny his identity has both complications and unexpected consequences.”
Konigsberg, B. (2013). Openly straight. New York, NY: Arthur A. Levine Books. ISBN: 9780545509893; Hardcover; $17.99.