"We Taught You How to Dance": Cultural Inheritance in David Levithan's Two Boys Kissing

What does queer futurity look like?¹ According to José Esteban Muñoz, queerness itself is always found on the horizons. Following Muñoz's trajectory of a queer future that is found "then and there," this essay proposes that queer YA literature functions as a beacon on this distant horizon. In addition to the visions of queer futurity that YA texts offer, these works might also be viewed as the vessels that can transport us there. In this essay, I focus on David Levithan's Two Boys Kissing (2013), examining the paths toward a queer future that this work sets out. Finally, I identify a number of ways in which queer YA texts fall short in the visions of futurity they extend, looking to Levithan's novel as a means of responding to and overcoming many of these (generic) shortcomings.

In a survey of contemporary Young Adult literature, Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth B. Kidd observe that homosexuality "has now become nearly a mainstream topic in YA literature" (5). Companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble have both confirmed and capitalized this trend in categorizing works under headings like "Teen & Young Adult Gay & Lesbian Fiction" and "LGBT and Gender Identity Teen Fiction," respectively.² Although scholars have been remarking on this growing body of work since at least four decades ago, the number of Young Adult novels that center around queer themes and characters published in recent years warrants not only comment, but serious scholarly attention. Furthermore, despite the widespread praise these works have garnered, very little scholarship has examined what exactly this increasing trend means for its readers.

Caroline T. Clark and Mollie V. Blackburn offer a useful starting point for understanding what these texts might accomplish. They conclude their 2009 publication "Reading LGBT-Themed Literature with Young People: What's Possible?" with the insight that readers are often drawn to YA texts by the "sense of queer youth in queer communities"³ that saturate their pages (29). This term "queer communities," however, is richly enveloped within theoretical debates: what does it mean, and how do queer YA works foster it?

Although many scholars have critiqued the existence of such a thing as "queer communities" (addressed below), David Halperin has certainly made a compelling argument in its favor, first belaboring the existence of "gay communities."⁴ Joining a range of other scholars (as well as most laypeople), Halperin observes "that what makes gay men different from the rest of the world is something that goes well beyond sexual preference or practice" (11). In How to Be Gay, Halperin traces this difference not only as an aspect of queer communities, but in what he refers to as "homosexuality as culture" (italics mine, 13) or as "the cultural practice of homosexuality" (italics in original, 13). Expanding on this idea, Halperin states that the culture of gay men operates differently from the cultures of other minority groups "defined by race or ethnicity or religion"; clarifying this claim, he states, "[G]ay men cannot rely on their birth families to teach them about their history or their culture" (7). Unlike members of these other groups, gay men "must discover their roots through contact with the larger society and the larger world" (7).

While Halperin's work expertly portrays how cultural inheritance functions in gay communities, it may be worth contextualizing this term in the evolutionary discourse from which it is borrowed. "Cultural inheritance" made an early appearance in a 1973 article by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (a geneticist) and Marcus W. Feldman (a professor in biological studies). They define this idea as "the transmission from generation to generation of information. It includes, or at least influences, behavior, social customs and language" (42). An important aspect of their definition is that it is not a passive act. As Halperin states, it must be taught, but Halperin goes on to say that anyone can be taught. Although gay individuals may certainly have a proclivity toward these practices or at least an extra initiative for joining in them, they are theoretically available for anyone to...