jflackFor satisfying and in-depth reviews we turn once more to Jerry Flack

In this issue he reviews Alex Sanchez' So Hard to Say
and
Barbara Kerley's Walt Whitman: Words for America
(Illustrated by Brian Selznick)




 Jerry Flack is a retired professor of education from the University of Colorado. He lives in Denver, Colorado with his partner of fourteen years, who is also a retired educator. He loves reading, especially gay literature, and watching gay cinema (current favorites are "ROAD TRIP" and "GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN"), and traveling throughout the glorious Southwest, especially in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, and the Colorado Rockies. E-mail

SoHardSo Hard to Say
by
Alex Sanchez

Hardcover: 240 pages, $14.95
Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
1st edition  (October 1, 2004)
ISBN: 0689865643

GLBT characters have become more frequently and prominently seen in mainstream and cable television programs and in best-selling young adult books such as Alex Sanchez’s Rainbow bookends, Rainbow Boys and Rainbow High, also published by Simon & Schuster.

Ironically, the cacophony of anti-gay rhetoric from TV gospel preachers across the land and the fanaticism of homophobic politician’s positions on gay marriages have almost certainly provoked young people to examine their feelings about their own and the opposite sex in both greater numbers and at earlier ages. A year ago USA Today reported the coming out of nine- and ten-year-old children, and a friend recently told this author he knew he was gay as early as the age of four years. It was not because he wanted a Barbie Doll for his birthday, either. He is strictly a G. I. Joe kind of guy!

With youths questioning their sexual feelings at ever earlier ages, it seems entirely appropriate that best-selling author and former school counselor Alex Sanchez shift his focus from the high school seniors in his Rainbow Series to middle school students in this newest novel, So Hard to Say.

Sanchez’s writing approach is much the same as in his earlier novels. Alternating chapters of first person narratives work especially well when focused upon the southern California middle school milieu. The youthful, thirteen-year-old voices add a kind of verisimilitude to the proceedings that an adult third-person narration would completely miss.

“My all-time favorite thing is to laze is bed, talking on the phone with friends – hopping from one call to the next. I think Call Waiting is the best invention ever.”

When spoken by eighth-grader XIO – pronounced C.O. (it rhymes with Leo.), one of Sanchez’s two leading character creations, these words and her other passions: BOYS, her circle of friends, school gossip, her single and dateless mother, her pesky younger brother Stevie, and her obsession with horoscopes, readers will almost certainly believe they are truly hearing the voice of a vivacious, effervescent, and even “hot” (according to some of the macho boys on the cusp of their own sexual young manhood) eighth-grade girl overflowing with life.

Xio is a gutsy, big-hearted, vulnerable, yet resilient and irrepressible heroine that all readers, straight or gay, are going to love. She is a wonderfully literary creation. Indeed, her voice is so strong and sure and she is such a successfully realized character – especially adept at storytelling -- that readers will swear she is real and that Alex Sanchez has taken a sabbatical and turned this novel over to her. When Xio speaks, everyone listens.

Xio is thirteen, goes to San Cayetano Middle School, is desperately waiting for a BOYFRIEND, and for awhile destiny seems to have come her way.

 “Today a new boy arrived in first period – white, kind of small, with kick-butt blue eyes and sandy blond hair spiked in front that made me want to whoosh my fingers through it.”

Xio’s best friend is Carmen who does have a boyfriend, Victor, the hunky super stud of the eighth-grade set. Victor is tall, athletic, dark, and handsome and definitely finding it easy to be the #1 guy in his middle school. Victor is the captain of the after-school soccer team and he has a throng of admirers from both sexes.

Xio belongs to a special group of friends who call themselves Las Sexy Seis (the Sexy six). Besides Xio and Carmen, they consist of Nora, the brain, Maria, the conscience of the group, and Josefina or Jose, for short, the circle’s most butch and athletic member. Technically, the Sexy six are now only five as their friend Gloria has moved away over the summer.

The alternating narrator is Frederick — (not Fred or Freddy, or Rick or Ricky) — “It’s Frederick.” Frederick moves to southern California from Wisconsin. He initially misses his small collection of middle school drama club buddies (San Cayetano Middle School does not even have a drama club.) Janice, Marcie, and William with whom he remains in electronic communication for awhile, but the two-hour time difference between Wisconsin and California effectively isolates Frederick even more and he hears less and less from his former small support group. His mother is an accountant who is over protective of her asthmatic only child and Frederick’s father is a chemical engineer, easy going, and an avid golfer.

Frederick is timid and even fearful of his inner thoughts. Why, for example, does he fear the set-up romantic interludes with Xio and think only of Victor when he is forced to kiss Xio for 15 minutes behind a closed door at her party or holding hands with her at the movies?

Both Frederick and Xio have strong extended families and even if they are not perfect, family holidays are major turning points in the evolving plot of the novel.

Thanksgiving is a super critical happening in the evolving drama of Frederick’s life. His parents cannot afford a trip back to Wisconsin to visit his grandmother, friends, and share beloved holiday traditions, and he is not even allowed to settle for a fiesta-like celebration with Xio’s family at her invitation. No, Thanksgiving must be spent at the home of his parents’ realtor, a fate that causes Frederic great fear and anxiety because the realtor’s younger son Iggy is widely ostracized as THE FAGGOT at San Cayetano Middle School. Even in his own home Iggy’s older brother Juan yells to him, “Hey, faggot!” ordering him to greet Frederick and his parents when they arrive for Thanksgiving dinner. What will his new friends such as Xio and Victor say when they learn he spent Thanksgiving with Iggy? Frederick cannot even stand the thought of holding Iggy’s hand during the communal prayer of Thanksgiving. But, after dinner Frederick surprisingly finds out that he likes Iggy when he discovers not only their shared interest in drawing but that Iggy is friendly and a genuinely nice guy who also has an awesome pet, a fun and talkative parakeet named Pete.

Christmas means a trip to cold and chilly Eau Claire for Frederick while it is a burst of beautiful Mexican holiday traditions in Guadalajara, “the pearl of western Mexico,” plus a visit to grandparents and cousins for Xio. Both of Xio’s parents were born in Mexico, but met and married in California where she and her brother were born. Xio believes her Mami has gone without romance for so long that her heart is turning cold. Her Papi has mysteriously moved out of their family home and into a new life with another man in San Francisco.

With the end of the traditional holiday season and the return to school in the new year, a confrontation between the ever maturing and infatuated Xio and the insecure and doubtful Frederick is inevitable. 

The circumstances in the lives of the two key characters of So Hard to Say are not as complicated nor as involved as those of Jason Carrillo, Kyle Meeks, and Nelson Glassman in Sanchez’s Rainbow Series, but in other ways his latest novel is even more satisfying.

Sanchez has at least three positive qualities working for him in So Hard to Say. First, he has a marvelous ear for middle school language. The dialogue and the characters’ interior monologues are terrific. The voices of Xio and Frederick ring so very true. It is obvious that Sanchez has been a school counselor and has been both an attentive and sympathetic listener to the ever-changing, gradually maturing middle school voices. He has perfect pitch when it comes to the authority of middle school speech. The voices of Xio and Frederick seem even more authentic than those of the more mature Jason, Kyle, and Nelson in Rainbow Boys (Simon & Schuster, 2001).

Second, Sanchez never loses an ounce of respect for his hero and heroine. Yes, they are only 13 years-old and Xio is definitely prone to be over the top. The onset of her sexual development is beginning to go off like July 4th rockets, yet he never belittles the emotional depth of the feelings of any of these wonderful flesh and blood young middle school youths who are initially discovering the vagaries and complications of life that precede adult maturity and wisdom. Sanchez obviously cares deeply about Frederick, Xio, Victor, Carmen, and his other characters and their passions, and by extension the emotions and attitudes of millions of real-life younger people who are going down similar pathways.

Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, the novel is filled with Sanchez’s third gift, an adroit sense of humor. Xio’s irrepressible exuberance and Frederick’s often awkward handling of her advances when she zeroes in on him as her primary love interest will, at the very least, produce knowing smiles, if not outright laughter. But the humor is never mean-spirited; it is shared mirth with every reader knowing he or she has been down the same difficult, awkward road of surviving the impossibly frustrating age of thirteen! Sanchez laughs with his characters, but never at them.

One particular criticism. In Rainbow Boys (Simon & Schuster, 2001), Sanchez and his publisher devoted substantial space at the end of the book to provide GLBT youths with valuable information about homosexual issues, support groups, and advocacy. Perhaps the publisher believed middle school students are too young for such information, but the exact opposite is true. Middle School students need positive and supportive information far more than older and wiser high school seniors do. When a seventh-grader hears a frenzied minister use God’s pulpit to tell him God hates gays and that all gays will burn in Hell for eternity, he is far more impressionable than high school seniors such as Jason or Nelson or Kyle.

Moreover, undirected, unsure, and fearful gay middle school students are apt to land at gay porn sites if they simply enter the words “gay” or “lesbian” in Google or Yahoo! searches.  Middle school students need to be directed to EXACT postal and web addresses that will lead to healthy and highly positive messages of love, acceptance, and reassurance. A few pertinent suggested web sites about positive gay news stories, issues, and age-appropriate chat rooms addresses would have done this age group of students a world of good and even perhaps saved some lives. It is a shame they are missing. Indeed, it is even more of a surprise since near the end of So Hard to Say, the self-accepting gay youth Iggy tells the confused and bewildered Frederick that although he has no friends at school, he has lots of friends his own age that he has met on the Internet.  “There’s even a girl in Alaska,” he cheerfully adds.

The closest thing to sex in So Hard to Say is kissing (or the reputed but unsubstantiated claim of Carmen that she bared her breasts for Victor’s visual pleasure). Sanchez gives all his central characters love, caring, and sympathy for their shared pangs of growing up. Hence, there is really no reason why this novel should not be read by a wide audience of middle school youth. It will be a shame and disservice to students if this novel is widely banned by community bigots because of the significantly important but relatively small amount of print space devoted to homosexuality. The feelings, dreams, hopes and just plain survival of middle school is so very well handled in the So Hard to Say that it should be required reading for everyone who passes through adolescent angst, and who doesn’t? This novel will be terrific for focus group discussions about human variety and differences as well as the inherent capacity to love that young people should learn to cultivate and trust.

Frederick’s courage is to be applauded just as Xio’s love of life is to be saluted and embraced. These are two young characters who really seem to come alive for readers and these same readers are going to remember and truly care about them for a long time to come. Sanchez leaves readers of all ages with much to ponder. Who could ask for anything more?
—Jerry Flack, Denver, Colorado
WhitmanWalt Whitman: Words for America
by Barbara Kerley,
Illus. by Brian Selznick

Hardcover: 56 pages, $16.95
Scholastic Press  (October 1, 2004)
ISBN: 0439357918


A children’s picture book biography may appear to be an unusual choice for a book review in The Independent Gay Writer, a GLBT adult publication. But all groups of people deserve their noble history to share among themselves, with their children, family, and friends and the majority culture has too often robbed not only minorities such as Native Americans and African Americans of their heroes, but also hidden from history great women such as Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to be nominated by a political convention to run for president of the Untied States in 1872. Perhaps more than any other class of the population, the GLBT population has been denied its history and its heroic contributions to world culture and history. GLBT persons have both a need for and a right to proudly salute gay men and women who have made America and the world great.

It may never be proved that Walt Whitman, the father of American poetry and the nation’s greatest poet was a gay man, but he wrote the first homoerotic poetry published in the nation and he is increasingly accepted by historians to have been gay. Whitman never married and he engaged in what appear to have been committed long-term romantic unions with at least two younger men, Peter Doyle and Harry Stafford. Some historians say he even presented Stafford with a wedding ring. Before visiting famed naturalist John Burroughs, Whitman wrote to his host that he and young Stafford would need to share the same bed and bedroom. He met with both Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter in America and carried on a correspondence with John Addington Symonds. These three men were the most influential, prominent, and famous 19th century British homosexuals.

In the 1860 version of his grand opus Leaves of Grass, Whitman included a section titled “Calamus” that contained the poem “A Glimpse” in which he unashamedly describes tenderly holding hands with a young man and of their silent love for one another. Intriguingly, Whitman referred to male love with the term “adhesiveness.” Three recent works of gay scholarship claim Whitman as a GLBT notable. Steve Hogan and Lee Hudson outline the poet’s homosexual life in Completely Queer: The Gay and Lesbian Encyclopedia (Henry Holt, 1998), and Paul Russell lists Whitman in the number six position in his series of homosexual profiles, The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present (Citadel Press, 1995).  Gary Schmidgall’s Walt Whitman: A Gay Life (Dutton, 1997) was a best selling biography. When concerned citizens in Dallas, Texas founded one of the first high schools in America for sexually diverse students it was called Walt Whitman High School.

Walt Whitman: Words for America is essentially three books in one. First and foremost it is a sophisticated picture book biography of Walt Whitman, focusing particularly attention on his Civil War service as a volunteer nurse. Whitman’s homosexuality is not discussed in the book but his work as a caring nurse to critically injured men during the Civil War is the center point of the biography in which Whitman is portrayed as a compassionate, loving, and unbelievably kind man. Second, the book contains appended scholarly material about both the life of Whitman and Lincoln’s presidency as well as substantial reference notes about how both the author and the illustrator chose Whitman for their subject and how they conducted and documented their exacting research. Finally, a minimum of eight of Whitman’s greatest poems, including, “Song of Myself,” “O Captain! My Captain!” and “I Sing the Body Electric” are enclosed in this beautiful tribute.

The biography of Walt Whitman for children is quite enjoyable and highly informative for readers of all ages. Many readers, for example, are aware that Whitman served as a nurse during the Civil War, but few are likely to realize the extent of his tireless bravery. He was not so much a pacifist as simply too elderly —nearly 42—to join the Union Army when war commenced on April 12, 1861. His beloved younger brother George did, however, march off to war in his Union Blue. Whitman at first contributed his part to the Union cause by writing military verse such as “Beat! Beat! Drums!” and wrote a book of Civil War poetry entitled Drum-Taps.

Whitman scanned papers daily to see if George’s name was listed among the dead or wounded. When a notice about George finally did appear, Whitman immediately began a trek to Washington D.C., and not finding him there joined southward-bound troop trains to battle fields where he served as a nurse to tend the horribly wounded men. He eventually found his brother George at Falmouth, Virginia, patched his wounds, bivouacked with George’s comrades-in-arms, tended their wounds as well and returned to Washington to work endlessly as a nurse for critically wounded men, black and white, Union and Confederate. 

He exhausted himself to the point of worry on the part of doctors about his own health. (He was forced by doctors to rest in 1864.) He never regained the full body masculinity and robust health he had enjoyed prior to the war. As a nurse, he fed, bathed, changed bandages, and spent hours with lonely, dying soldiers. Whitman stayed up all through the night with dying men, time and again soothing their fevered brows, gently talking to them, and after they were gone, he would write loving and compassionate letters to the victims’ families so they knew their sons had not died abandoned and all alone.

Whitman was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln.  Both had traveled the length of the nation, had witnessed slavery first hand, and were emotionally torn. Each believed that slavery was an abomination, but also believed that dissolution of the Union would be a great tragedy. Whitman glimpsed Lincoln when he visited New York City on his way from Springfield to Washington, D. C. to be inaugurated as president. Later, during his service as a nurse in Washington, Whitman on his daily walks often saw and nodded to President Lincoln who frequently went for morning horseback rides. He came to worship Lincoln and wrote two masterpieces of poetry about the president following his assassination. Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” remain the most beautiful elegies ever written about the martyred Lincoln. Whitman traveled by train from New York to Washington to view Lincoln’s body one final time.

In a curious bit of historical coincidence, Lincoln’s Illinois law partner purchased an early copy of Leaves of Grass that Lincoln loved to read. He took it home to read at his leisure, but barely rescued the copy from the flames of the enraged women of the Lincoln household who thought the book was obscene. From that time forward, Lincoln only read Whitman’s masterpiece of poetry in his office!

Whitman was born May 31, 1819, one of eight children. His father was a carpenter both on Long Island and in Brooklyn and the family moved often. Whitman attended school for a short time but was primarily self-educated. At the age of eleven he became an office boy and he was apprenticed as a typesetter by age twelve. Ever enterprising, by the age of nineteen, he wrote, typeset, printed, and delivered his own newspaper on Long Island prior to the Civil War. In addition to his newspaper career and war service as a nurse, Whitman was a versatile and hardworking man who at various points in his life was a carpenter, school teacher, clerk, and poet. He created hand-stitched notebooks that he used to note observations of America on his many travels by foot. In 1855, he typeset and published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. He would edit and enlarge his masterpiece eight times before his death on March 26, 1892.

As fine a biographer as Kerley is, the grandeur of this book truly belongs to the artist, Brian Selznick, who is a genius of both illustration and the art of book design. The illustrations are both rich in variety and sublime in their beauty. He creates sweeping spreads of the Civil War, intimate yet impressive portraits of Whitman and Lincoln, and incredible miniature illustrated daguerreotypes of soldiers of every race, age, and army served.

Selznick previously collaborated in 2001 with Kerley on another picture book biography of the 19th century British scientist who created the first-ever models of dinosaurs, The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins (Scholastic, 2001).  The book was the recipient of a Caldecott Honor Medal (Best American picture book of the year). He has also collaborated twice with author Pam Munoz Ryan to fashion outstanding biography picture books of Marian Anderson, When Marian Sang (Scholastic, 2002), and Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride (Scholastic, 1999), the latter being a memoir of a particular incident drawn from the lives of Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart. Both of the latter biographies are rendered in striking monotones with exacting details and bold, sweeping panoramic scenes.

Selznick believes in absolute authenticity, especially in picture books for youths. For his memoir of Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart, he spent six months in Washington, D. C. researching period newspapers, aviation archives, and White House records to uncover such miniscule details as the exact wall paper, curtains, china pattern, and silver that was used when the First Lady entertained Amelia Earhart for dinner at the White House in the 1930s.

For Walt Whitman: Words for America, Selznick followed in the footsteps of Whitman’s life. He learned the trade of mid-nineteenth-century type setting and discovered that printers of Whitman’s day placed capital letters on the upper shelves of their trays of type while all other letters were kept on the lowers shelves, hence the derivation of the words “uppercase” and “lowercase” used today in describing type and print sizes. Selznick visited the rare book rooms of the New York City Library and held in his own hands the handmade, hand-stitched notebooks that Whitman made for himself in which to keep both notes as well as compose Leaves of Grass. He visited Whitman’s final home in Camden, New Jersey, held in his hands the shoes Whitman had worn to travel American north and south, and stood beside the bed where the great poet died. A short distance away, he visited Whitman’s grave. Selznick, the artist, with his superior and rigorous commitment to accuracy is very nearly as fascinating as his subjects. It is stirring to discover a creative artist who is so rigorous and religious about accuracy and detail in his work.

The book design is phenomenal as well. The handsome forest green hardback front cover features a die-cut oval in the center allowing the cover to serve as a Victorian-style picture frame for the masculine, full body watercolor illustration of Whitman that is actually printed on the front endpaper. (The back endpapers display Whitman’s grave where gifts continue to be left to this very day.) Selznick’s genius continues as he utilizes 19th century typeface for the title page and then truly pulls out all the stops by symbolizing Whitman’s early work as a typesetter through the creation of an opposing page that is a perfect mirror (or reverse) image facsimile of the title page.

Yes, a children’s picture book may appear to be an uncommon choice to appear in the fine pages of The Independent Gay Writer, but the next time a young or old visiting relative or neighbor refers to a subject, action, or behavior with the snide words, “Oh, that’s so gay,” sit down with that person and read together Walt Whitman: Words for America. If they remain unmoved, quickly call 911 for they surely must be minus both heart and mind.

—Jerry Flack, Denver, Colorado

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