Bill Konigsberg Online

It’s a couple more weeks until the release of Openly Straight, and reviews are coming in… I could not be more happy with the response we are getting!

Here is the review from the May edition of Horn Book Magazine:

Rafe is sick of being the poster child for all things gay at his uber-liberal Colorado high school: no matter how accepting everyone is, it feels like they only see one part of him. When he gets into a Massachusetts boarding school for his junior year, he decides to reboot himself as “openly straight.” By refraining from volunteering any information about his sexuality, he reasons, he will be able to live a “label-free life.” Soon he’s on the baseball team, increasingly torn between worlds as he enjoys the boys’-club camaraderie he finds on the team but also bonds with his prickly misfit roommate Albie, whose best friend is gay. Most complicated of all, Rafe’s growing friendship with sensitive, thoughtful teammate Ben turns into a profound crush. Rafe is an effective blend of earnest, perceptive, and flawed, and the deepening hole of deception he digs for himself infuses the plot—a well-constructed web of interpersonal dramas—with almost unbearable tension. Konigsberg eviscerates the “don’t ask, don’t tell” philosophy, slyly demonstrating just how thoroughly assumptions of straightness are embedded in everyday interactions. For a thought-provoking, creative, twenty-first-century take on the coming-out story, look no further.

-Claire E. Gross

Thanks to the reviewer, and thanks to Horn Book Magazine for this thoughtful review!

So Openly Straight is now, depending on whom you believe, due to come out in either 18 or 22 days!

I am so excited! I love this book, and I’m eager to share it with the world.

What’s great is that so far, just about everyone whose reviewed it loves this book, too. I am so glad. When you write a book, you have to forget about your audience. That means that at moments as you’re writing, you have a keen sense that what you’re writing won’t make a lick of sense. That’s exactly how I felt many times during the writing of Openly Straight.

Thanks to Cheryl Klein, my awesome editor, and Linda Epstein, my awesome agent, even if it didn’t make sense at one point, it does now.

Here are a few of the things people are saying about Openly Straight. I promise that when I am allowed to share the full reviews, I will.

“Konigsberg has written an exceptionally intelligent, thought-provoking, coming-of-age novel about the labels people apply to us and that we, perversely, apply to ourselves. … Openly Straight is altogether one of the best gay-themed novels of the past ten years.” – Booklist (starred review)

“Rafe is an effective blend of earnest, perceptive, and flawed, and the deepening hole of self-deception he digs for himself infuses the plot — a well-constructed web of interpersonal dramas — with almost unbearable tension. Konigsberg eviscerates the “don’t ask, don’t tell” philosophy.” – Horn Book Reviews

“Very well written, funny, and believable.” — Publishers Weekly

“A complicated, poignant story of a teenage boy trying on a new skin. An eye-opening story of wish fulfillment.” – Kirkus

Can’t wait to share this book with the rest of the world!

I haven’t blogged in a while, and I apologize for that. I’ve been hard at work on a couple projects.

So, Jason Collins. Wow! That was a beautiful article. I’m proud of Jason and appreciative of his courage. It’s been 12 years since I wrote the article by which I came out at ESPN.com and asked “what if” an athlete were to come out. Now we know some of the answers.

Mostly no one’s head exploded. Mostly earth continues to spin on its axis. Some go so far as to call this a “non story,” but I think those people are kidding themselves. As I say in my essay, “Being gay in sports shouldn’t be a big deal, but until someone does it publicly and shows they can do their job, do it well, and be known as gay, it simply will be a big deal. Before we can say it doesn’t matter, we have to accept the fact it exists.“

By far the best essay I’ve read on the subject came from author and generally awesome human Sherman Alexie. His take on the shower situation is both hilarious and heart warming. It’s also dead on, and in some ways more honest than my own take, a decade ago, on the “dreaded shower argument.”

If I had to write that piece again, I might change it some. It is still true that when I was a reporter in professional sports locker rooms, I was the guy staring at the ceiling while players changed out of or into their clothes. I was trying to do my job, and I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable by being a perv and staring.

But I might be a bit more honest about the entire shower issue. It still bugs me when people argue that this is a major issue, because I don’t think it is. But I would admit that perhaps once in a while I have “snuck a peek” while showering in a locker room. I’m human. I’m not attracted to all men, but to the perhaps 5-10% of men to whom I am attracted, yes, I’ve sometimes looked. I can control myself, but heck, wouldn’t you look too, if you were a straight man showering with a woman you found attractive?

My point, and Alexie’s point as well: So what? Why is that such a big deal? Why is it an affront to any man to be looked at? Attractive women have been looked at by men for centuries. Leered at, even.

Could it be that for some men, the concern is NOT being looked at? That they might not be as attractive to openly gay men as they’d like to be? Not from a sexual standpoint, but from a self-esteem standpoint?

I have to wonder. Because if I had to shower with a bunch of openly straight women, and they weren’t ogling my middle-aged bod, I might be a little hurt. Not for the lack of opportunity to follow through on the attraction, but simply because, as Alexie concludes, “Truly, when it comes down to it, don’t we all want to be universally desired?”

There’s a great piece in The Atlantic about how LGBTQ characters have changed over the years. We no longer live in a society where all books about and for gay kids have to focus on the coming out process, or understanding that some people are gay and some are not. Homophobia no longer dictates every story.

I was interviewed for the piece, written by the excellent Jen Doll. We had a fascinating conversation about how this change has happened, and why.

I am no scholar, believe me, so pardon me for the oversimplification of this concept. But what I see are three distinct phases of the modern LGBTQ novel for teens. None of these phases should be seen as judgments; to me they simply illustrate where we were/are as a society at any given time.

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Some pretty interesting nuggets about the whole “gays in sports” thing recently.

Mike Freeman at CBSsports.com reported that he’s been hearing rumblings about a current NFL player who is ready to come out and who plans to keep playing after doing so. If that were to happen, that player would be the first in one of the four major male team sports in America to play while being openly gay.

Meanwhile, over at USA Today, there’s a story about the vastly improved atmosphere at Major League Baseball. Many top players and managers are now on record saying that they would be supportive of a player coming out.

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I’m taking a quick timeout from LGBTQ issues and teen issues and writing issues to talk about something that has long bugged me. I’ve decided to issue a challenge to my readers, and that challenge is to see if we can in a small way do something about texting and driving.

I know. It’s terrible when people text and drive. We see the guy next to us doing it, and it pisses us off. But once in a while, when we’re on the highway and there aren’t too many cars around and that chime sounds, we grab our phones and sneak a peek.

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