在她的每月列,yore yore，Frankie Thomas拍摄了第二张定义了一代人的书。

Here’s the mystery of安妮在我的脑海里，1982年的南希花园的年轻成人小说：我从未遇到过一个读它的直接人。据我所知，只有奇怪的女人读它 - 然而我从未遇到过一个想到的人。它只偶然地谈到了我们。

我知道，我是概括的。但是为自己测试它。问你最喜欢的女同性恋者她是如何遇到的安妮在我的脑海里, and you may well hear something like这个亚马逊评论from the year 2001: “Someone gave me this book when I was 17 and wondering who the heck I was. I read it in one sitting, flipped it over and read it again.” Orthis one，从2009年起：“我正在走下去，只是有这种有趣的感觉来拔出这本书。称之为疯狂，但它觉得我在想让我读过它之前从未见过的书。“仿佛通过魔法，小说往往以伪装成那些不知道他们需要的人的方式。

It found its way to me in the summer of 2000, when I was thirteen, via the Union Square branch of Barnes & Noble. Back then YA fiction took up just one small shelf, consisting mostly ofFrancesca Lia Block.andBeatrice火花的恶作剧, so I was quick to notice a book I’d never seen before. The tagline intrigued me: “Liza never knew falling in love could be so wonderful … or so confusing.”

Why did I assume that Liza was in love with a boy, when the book gave no such indication? Its front cover depicted two girls holding hands, their eyes closed, their foreheads tenderly touching. Its back cover, which was a soft-butch shade of salmon pink, featured a short excerpt in which Liza’s mother asked, “Have you and Annie done more than the usual experimenting?” But these things have a way of hiding in plain sight from anyone not actively looking for them. We see what we expect to see. Annie was Liza’s best friend, I thought; the two of them were experimenting with boys. What else could they be doing?

The other possibility, of course, is that I did know. On some level, perhaps, I knew right away.

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Has there ever been a novel with a more misleading opening sentence thanWeetzie Bat? Francesca Lia Block’s 1989 debut begins:

The reason Weetzie Bat hated high school was because no one understood.

On the basis of that sentence alone—its stale familiarity, its clunky syntax (“the reason was because”), its pandering parents-just-don’t-understand gloss on adolescent alienation—you’d expect the most formulaic of young adult fiction. On the basis of that sentence alone, you probably wouldn’t keep reading. Certainly you would never guess what follows:

They didn’t even realize where they were living. They didn’t care that Marilyn’s prints were practically in their backyard at Grauman’s; that you could buy tomahawks and plastic palm tree wallets at Farmer’s Market, and the wildest, cheapest cheese and bean and hot dog and pastrami burritos at Oki Dogs; that the waitresses wore skates at the Jetson-style Tiny Naylor’s; that there was a fountain that turned tropical soda-pop colors, and a canyon where Jim Morrison and Houdini used to live, and all-night potato knishes at Canter’s, and not too far away was Venice, with columns, and canals, even, like the real Venice but maybe cooler because of the surfers.

Surprise!Weetzie Batis not a novel of teen angst but a novel of teen delight. It’s a novel whose heroine makes a wish to a magic genie to meet “my secret agent lover man” and pages later meets the love of her life—whose actual name, with no explanation, is My Secret Agent Lover Man. It’s a novel that, halfway through, contains this sentence: “And so Weetzie and My Secret Agent Lover Man and Dirk and Duck and Slinkster Dog and Fifi’s canaries lived happily ever after in their silly-sand-topped house in the land of skating hamburgers and flying toupees and Jah-Love blonde Indians.” Weetzie isn’t too cool for school, or too deep or too smart, but simply too happy. She’s bursting with joy to be alive, right here, right now. Even the English language can hardly contain her exuberance.

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在她的每月列yore yore，Frankie Thomas拍摄了第二张定义了一代人的书。

这是一个寓言，但这也是如此：我在切尔西长大，曼哈顿街区当时是纽约同性恋生活的中心。我们在1989年在那里搬到了那里，当时我两个。我是我邻居唯一的孩子之一。从我的建筑物街对面有一个公园，但只有生长的男人在它中挂出来，我不被允许在那里玩。我被夏季悬挂在窗户中的彩虹旗帜，但我无法让任何成年人告诉我他们是什么。“兄弟情谊，”我的学龄前老师告诉我，然后拒绝回答任何后续问题。在小学，我们有一位公开生活的艺术老师艾滋病，每个圣诞节他让我们装饰纸礼品袋，以捐赠给饭菜艾滋病耐心。当他去世时，1996年，我九岁，仍未听到这个词gay. I was in middle school when I first began to encounter it, but only from classmates, and only as an insult. I was thirteen when I was finally deemed old enough to be told who in our family was openly gay. (My late grandfather, for one. Long story.) I told my ten-year-old brother and got in trouble for upsetting him; he was too young, I was chided, to handle such things.

这是九十年代的同性恋周围的文化认知不分散。说这是一个过渡时期，并不开始捕捉成长的奇怪性，内化同性恋人们应得的权利，值得社会接受，并越来越不恰当地讨论孩子面前。这种悖论在the 1993Seinfeldepisodethat gave us the catchphrase “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” That episode won aGLAADaward. So did the first season ofFriends, in which every utterance oflesbian遇到了骚动的罐头笑声,好像word itself were raunchy and daring—and it was, in 1995.

Gay people were, of course, nonexistent in children’s entertainment. In the nineties, theScholastic industrial complexwould sooner have published a bomb-building manual than include an openly gay character. But the paradigm shifted so rapidly in the mid-2000s that even I am occasionally tempted to judge the books of my childhood by the standards of subsequent decades—hence my long-held, largely irrational grudge against Ann M. Martin.

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