Sexual Fantasy: The Queer Utopia of David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy

By re-casting the young adult romance with a same-sex couple at its center and by setting his novel in a utopian town in which gay and transgendered students are accepted and even celebrated, David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy effectively subverts the paradigm of compulsory heterosexuality in young adult fiction while creating a new template for the gay young adult novel. Boy Meets Boy is a utopian novel: it functions effectively as a romance novel, a genre critics have called utopian, and also draws upon and extends conventions of homosexual representation found in “traditional” gay-themed young adult literature and gay pornography to depict a distinctly utopian world of sexual liberation.