Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan (review)

The two boys of the title could be Harry and Craig, the former couple, now good friends, who decide to challenge the world record for kiss length in a publicly captured event. But the title could also refer to Peter and Neil, established boyfriends who still must negotiate the occasional obstacle; it could be Avery and Ryan, who meet and fall for each other at the gay prom and who are tentatively embarking on a relationship; it could be Cooper, pressed by his parents' rejection to the brink of suicide and despising his online hookup for actually wanting a relationship with him. It's also an iconic view of young gay men, an emblem of the possibility—and risk—inherent in the act of kissing, and a focus of the narrators, a Greek chorus of ghostly men who died of AIDS just as the cultural closet door was swinging open. As a result, this is both celebratory and elegiac, an Our Town mourning loss of the dead and marveling, longing for, and cheering the possibilities for the living; it's the bittersweet counterpart to Levithan's joyous Boy Meets Boy (BCCB 9/03), foregrounding the painful context that that book utopianly took off the field. While some of that context is undeniably adult centered, the generational focus conveys the cultural lines of descent, the social family, that these teens are heir to in way that identifies them as part of a larger, connected, invested group rather than the isolates they sometimes feel. That's no surprise with Levithan, who's always a tender poet of human connection; in addition to the link between the lost and the present, the book rejoices in the bonds between the living: the friends and family who support Craig and Harry, the sister who pushes Neil's parents to acknowledge who their son is, and even the rejecting parents who embrace a nearly lost Cooper with gratitude and relief. The cast is multicultural, multi-experiential, and queer on various axes (Avery is a transman), offering multiple points of entry for readers seeking identification. There's much to discuss here about identity, about social media, about community—and it would be a particularly stellar choice for a multigenerational LGTBQ-focused book club.