{"id":503,"date":"2016-11-20T02:59:44","date_gmt":"2016-11-20T07:59:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/?p=503"},"modified":"2016-11-20T03:28:33","modified_gmt":"2016-11-20T08:28:33","slug":"on-the-outside-looking-in-lol-get-it-because-out-like-coming-out-but-also-like-an-outside-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/2016\/11\/20\/on-the-outside-looking-in-lol-get-it-because-out-like-coming-out-but-also-like-an-outside-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Outside Looking in (lol get it because “out” like “coming out” but also like an outside perspective)"},"content":{"rendered":"

At first glance, I think David Levithan\u2019s Boy Meets Boy<\/em> and Julie Anne Peters\u2019 Luna<\/em> are two very different texts. Levithan\u2019s Boy Meets Boy<\/em> is a utopian young adult novel. We see the idealistic world in which Levithan\u2019s characters live through the eyes of our protagonist Paul, an exceptionally self-assured gay teenager, growing up in a town where, as Paul recalls in a memory of his coming out to his parents, coming out as gay is equivalent to just adding a word to your vocabulary. In Paul\u2019s world, there is no coming out narrative, at least not like what we’ve come to expect, where coming out is preceded and followed by years of self-doubt and internal as well as external struggle. However, despite this utopian setting, through Paul\u2019s words and thoughts we are still able to catch glimpses of the struggles caracters in young adult novels typically face\u2014Tony struggles to gain acceptance from his strict religious parents, who find it abhorrent to have a son interested in the same sex. Joni struggles through navigating the landscape of the adolescent world of dating. Julie Anne Peters\u2019 Luna<\/em> brings these archetypal struggles to the forefront. The book\u2019s namesake, Luna, is a transgender woman (biologically male, with the given name Liam), whose parents\u2014particularly the father\u2014would not accepting of Luna\u2019s eschewing of gender roles or the gender binary. Luna must hide her true identity and is limited in freedom of expression to literally one small area of her house. In this way there are clear discrepancies between Luna and Boy Meets Boy.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

However, like Boy Meets Boy<\/em>, we again see the struggle faced by those in the LGBTQ community not through the eyes of those experiencing it, but through the eyes of our main character, Regan. In Luna<\/em>, we are witnessing a coming out story from a third person observer, as we see with Tony in Boy Meets Boy<\/em>. This tactic allows the reader to analyze these character\u2019s struggles from a more objective (although not impartial) perspective. The reader witnesses the coming out narrative from\u00a0the outside-looking-in. I think both novels thus offer an important alternative perspective from which we can analyze the role of environment and society on the personal experiences of members of the LGBTQ community during the incredibly formative period of adolescence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At first glance, I think David Levithan\u2019s Boy Meets Boy and Julie Anne Peters\u2019 Luna are two very different texts. Levithan\u2019s Boy Meets Boy is a utopian young adult novel. We see the idealistic world in which Levithan\u2019s characters live through the eyes of our protagonist Paul, an exceptionally self-assured gay teenager, growing up in … Continue reading On the Outside Looking in (lol get it because “out” like “coming out” but also like an outside perspective)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3235,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111423],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3235"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}