The blind date with the boy in seventh grade who tucked his shirt into his underwear, and his pants into his socks, just to be 'more secure.' The boy at sleep-away camp who giggled whenever I used an adverb. "More the funny stories than the pained ones.
"I tell Noah about Kyle - how could I not? - and about some of the other disastrous dates I've had," says the book's protagonist, Paul, who is on a first date with a boy named Noah. More refined, but with echoes of his high school self, a strong, engaging and intellectual stream of consciousness. And then, a few weeks ago, and years after I'd last heard his name, I discovered David's new young-adult novel, "Boy Meets Boy." As I read it, I heard David's voice again. I heard, vaguely, that he'd come out, and that after college he had become an editor at Scholastic Books. I lost touch with David not long after he went to Brown University in the fall of 1990. The only literature for teens with gay characters was terrifying: Sandra Scoppettone books from the 1970s that ended in brutality, or the early 1980s classic "Annie on My Mind," by Nancy Garden, in which two girls fall in love but everything falls apart in the end when they're busted by a morality squad. This was the 1980s, and there was nary a gay role model on the horizon: Melissa Etheridge and K.D. Bush winning straw polls and Jim Florio considered by a majority to be a liberal, evildoer governor. Because at Millburn High School in 1989, "queer" was far from a friendly epithet.Īs far as we knew, there were no gay kids at Millburn High School. But you certainly wouldn't have said so back then. Today, in the era of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," and "Will & Grace," you might say that David had a queer aesthetic - good taste, an eye for new trends. He was smart and funny in a meticulous and offbeat way. He would cut out designs from construction paper and frame the song titles, making art that enhanced the 10,000 Maniacs or Julia Fordham tape you had just received.
He made mix-tapes with music you might not yet know.
He wrote long loopy notes to friends and passed them off in the hallways, lines upon lines of erudition written in a tiny but consistent hand. He read Anne Tyler novels and was in love with Anna Quindlen. When I first met David Levithan, he was the editor of my suburban New Jersey high school newspaper.