42 pages • 1 hour read
Juno DawsonThis Book is Gay
Nonfiction | Book | YA | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: Young Adult Self-Help
This Book Is Gay is a young adult (YA) self-help book. Self-help is a nonfiction genre written by an author who is an expert in one general area of life that others might be struggling with. For example, a marriage counselor might write a self-help book for people with marital issues. Young adult self-help aids young readers in navigating a confusing world that does not educate them properly on certain aspects of life. Topics explored in LGBTQ+ YA self-help include history and general definitions, as well as practical advice about coming out, engaging in safe sex, and cultivating safe relationships. LGBTQ+ issues are a popular subgenre of YA self-help because these topics are generally not covered at home or in school, even in cases where young people have access to sex education. These books are written by older LGBTQ+ community members, who oftentimes use their life experiences to educate younger people. Broader acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community has led to an explosion in the popularity of LGBTQ+ young adult self-help books since the 2010s.
These books often include the author’s account of their negative experiences as a young person. In This Book Is Gay, Juno Dawson shares anecdotes from her life that illustrate her own lack of education in LGBTQ+ issues as a child. For example, she believed she had to grow up and marry a girl named Kelly in her class (Dawson did not begin transitioning until she was 33 and was perceived as a boy while in school) (10). Dawson writes, “Even a book like this would have been unthinkable ten years ago,” implying that there was a severe lack of conversation about LGBTQ+ people in her generation (88). In the Introduction, David Levithan, a YA author, wonders what his life would have been like if he had a book like This Book Is Gay as a teenager (vi). LGBTQ+ young adult self-help books are educational primers for a neglected area of human experience. These primers are motivated by a desire to end generational cycles of ignorance around the LGBTQ+ experience.
Because these books push back against long-held stigmas and stereotypes, they are frequently the targets of book bans. This Book Is Gay was banned by the Wasilla Public Library in Alaska shortly after its release because residents “didn’t want ‘gay books’ or books about gay people in the library” (“Banned Books 2022—This Book Is Gay.” Marshall University Libraries). Since 2021, many US states have passed new legislation banning books in public libraries and school systems, 41% of which include LGBTQ+ characters or topics (“Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools.” PEN America, 19 Sep. 2022) According to PEN America, This Book Is Gay was banned in school districts in eight states between July 1, 2021, and June 30, 2022.
Critical Context: The Narrow Meaning of “Gay” in This Book Is Gay
This Book Is Gay is meant to be an educational crash course in some of the more prominent identities in the LGBTQ+ community. However, many of the experiences discussed, advice given, and topics covered focus exclusively on the experiences of cisgender, allosexual, gay men. LGBTQ+ young adult self-help is often written from the author’s lived experience, and Dawson presented as a cisgender gay man while writing This Book Is Gay. With this, the book’s point of view is often limited to cisgender, allosexual, and gay experiences.
Dawson presents This Book Is Gay as equally applicable to all of the LGBTQ+ community, yet writing about the cisgender, allosexual, gay experience sometimes results in confusing and contradictory information in other contexts. For example, Dawson groups several identities under the transgender umbrella that were considered offensive to transgender people in 2014 and still are today, such as “transvestite.” “Drag” is also used while defining the term transgender in Chapter 2, but drag performers portray larger-than-life personas without necessarily identifying as women. Trans people can do drag, but doing drag does not make somebody transgender. Additionally, Dawson defines asexuality as a refusal to label one’s sexuality, which is not an accepted definition by the asexual community. These incorrect definitions show an unfamiliarity with these experiences.
This lack of familiarity is reflected by a general lack of coverage of these identities within the book. Penile condoms are mentioned repeatedly as a requirement for safe sex and as a means of preventing the spread of STIs, yet dental dams (a kind of condom for performing oral sex on a person with a vagina) are mentioned once and not explained. The over-emphasis on penile condoms implies that sex involving penetration with a penis is the norm for the LGBTQ+ community. Grindr, a sex-centric app used almost exclusively by gay men, is repeatedly used as an example of an online space to meet other LGBTQ+ people despite only being relevant for a specific section of the LGBTQ+ community.
The stated goal for This Book Is Gay is sometimes undermined by incorrect or shallow information in areas that do not concern the cisgender, allosexual, gay experience. Dawson is aware of this shortcoming, stating that her experience cannot represent every LGBTQ+ person’s experience, but this awareness does not always translate into presenting correct information on the vast array of LGBTQ+ identities. With this, This Book Is Gay should be treated as a surface-level educational primer for LGBTQ+ identities as a whole. It is a more complete and in-depth educational primer for cisgender, allosexual, gay experiences, although the book’s backmatter provides a starting point for deeper research into LGBTQ+ experiences and identities. Dawson also takes a closer look at transgender identity in her follow-up book, What’s the T?: The Guide to All Things Trans and/or Nonbinary (2021).
