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ed-staters be warned: in today's teen fiction, it is way okay to be gay. As the author of two novels and editor of the boundary-testing Push imprint at Scholastic, David Levithan is one of the genre's stars. In a market that made its name in the '70s by addressing the real-life problems of adolescents (think menstruation, wet dreams, junkie runaways — oh, Ponyboy!), the time has come for a sunnier take on teenage lives. In Boy Meets Boy, Levithan portrayed a gay teenage protagonist as well-adjusted and even happy, a pleasant change in a market that, well into the '80s, saw gay boys and girls as tortured misfits who paid dearly for their sexual preference.
    Levithan's second book, The Realm of Possibility, is written in the kind of pained confessional poetry that so many of us poured into our high-school notebooks. Told from twenty-one points of view, the novel portrays an anorexic girl, a gospel-singing Christian, and a pair of boys in love. Easygoing in a Death Cab for Cutie T-shirt, Levithan spoke with Hooksexup about the brave new world of teen lit. — Sasha Watson Gay characters used to get run over by buses so that everyone around them could realize they needed to be more tolerant, right?
Actually, some of them got run over by buses just to send them to hell. So we've come a long, long way from that. How has teen fiction gotten from there to a point where you can write about two boys falling in love?
First, it was a matter of not killing off the gay character. Then it was not having to make them injured, or miserable, or in most recent history okay with being gay, but banished to a permanent role as an outsider. Now we've gotten in step with society, and we can show two boys or two girls having a romance where their sexuality is secondary to the love story. Is there still some hair-tearing?
Sure. But less and less and less. Gay characters get to experience some heaven instead of being sent to hell. But do you get resistance to your books too?
There's some resistance. But as a whole, everyone has been incredibly supportive. Teen librarians are a wonderfully activist group, and they know the books their kids need. So they fight the good fight when they have to. Why do you think people are responding so well to your books at just the moment that conservative America is ganging up on gay couples?
You can't stop progress, hard as you might try. I think there are a lot of tolerant people out there, and a lot of gay and straight teens who are ready for this to be a part of their literature. There's a huge generational shift when it comes to queer issues — kids are so much more tolerant than their grandparents. So I think it's natural for teen literature to really show honest and hopeful portraits of gay teens — because that's how a lot of them are living now. In the late '60s and early '70s, Judy Blume and S.E. Hinton wrote about teen issues that had never been addressed before. Now you're writing about teen sexuality without treating it as a problem. What do you think the next step forward might be for teen fiction?
We need to hear more voices in teen literature. Judy Blume was fantastic in breaking down barriers as far as subject matter was concerned. But we still have a way to go as far as hearing about many, many different kinds of teens from very different backgrounds. Books like Born Confused, which was really the first major novel about a contemporary South-Asian-American teen, are the wave of the future. As our country grows more diverse, its literature must follow. Are teenagers today less conservative than they were when you were a teenager?
Depends on where you are, really. I think in general their culture is much less conservative and much more tolerant. There are thousands of gay-straight alliances in high schools now — that would have been beyond unheard of when I was in high school fifteen years ago. It's amazing. There are a lot of memoir-style books being written by teenagers right now: Marty Beckerman's Generation S.L.U.T., Zoe Trope's Please Don't Kill the Freshman. Do you think this a particularly fertile moment for adolescent writers?
Well, I think every generation has its adolescent writers — S.E. Hinton or Joyce Maynard a while ago, Zoe Trope and Billy Merrell and Marty Beckerman and others now. Teens want authenticity in their literature. And what's more authentic than an honest teen voice? Right now I'm editing a book called Heavy Metal and You by Christopher Krovatin, who's nineteen. And he just nails what its like to be music-obsessed and in love and in confusion — it's like reading the diary of Nick Hornby's metalhead younger brother. You can't fake that. You need the voice to be true. How do you, as an adult, get to that true adolescent voice?
I honestly have no idea. Either it comes or it doesn't. You can't try too hard — readers (especially teen readers) can always sense when you're trying too hard. I think it goes back to finding your own voice from when you were a teen and adapting it to a new character — having your own truths and observations underneath, then spinning into variation. Some of those voices are pretty adult. Melissa P's 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed is basically erotica and she's an eighteen-year-old writing about her high school years.
Adults' Lolita fixations don't really have anything to do with teen lit — and thank God for that. I haven't read Melissa P's book, so I can't talk about it specifically. But I think the main difference between a teen book and an adult book is that a teen book bears a certain responsibility to its reader, and an author of teen books shouldn't try to exploit their teen characters or use them as vehicles for titilation. Adult books obviously don't have such constraints. What's up with teenagers and confessional poetry?
I think teenagers think more in fragments, images, and moments instead of long storylines — that's why their writing is so much better suited to poetry than novels. It's the immediacy and the emotion of the thing. They're not as interested in plot as discovery. Do you consume pop culture that you wouldn't if you didn't write for teenagers?
You mean my office subscription to Seventeen? Yeah, I probably wouldn't have that if I were an accountant. But I probably would still have seen Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen on opening day.  n°

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