There's one thing Jay Collier knows for sure—he's a statistical anomaly as the only out gay kid in his small rural Washington town. While all his friends can't stop talking about their heterosexual hookups and relationships, Jay can only dream of his own firsts, compiling a romance to-do list of all the things he hopes to one day experience—his Gay Agenda. Then, against all odds, Jay's family moves to Seattle and he starts his senior year at a new high school with a thriving LGBTQIA+ community. For the first time ever, Jay feels like he's found where he truly belongs, where he can flirt with Very Sexy Boys and search for love. But as Jay begins crossing items off his list, he'll soon be torn between his heart and his hormones, his old friends and his new ones...because after all, life and love don't always go according to plan.
I genuinely wanted to love this book. I could not make it happen. I, however, did not hate it. To be fair, my expectations coming into it were different, so I had to meet it where it wanted to be, not where I thought it was.
I'll start with what I liked: the concepts. The open communication and sex positivity was great to see, and the normalization of important conversations about sexuality and gender amongst youth made my heart sing. The overblown drama of youth was heartwarming, and some of the ideas Jay, Albert, and Max came up with throughout the book had me both facepalming and snickering. I truly loved all of this, it's just the execution that really kept it from shining.
From my understanding, Jason June is attempting to insert a queer story into the high school rom-com meta narrative. And he succeeded at that, just for the 2005 meta narrative, not the 2021 one. Part of this had to do with the out-of-touch language, which I struggled to push through. Rarely did I find a sentence— spoken or from Jay’s narration—that felt authentic. Swears and other words were censored into frick or, even worse, gawd, and they were used so often they became more grating than endearing. But fuck was used a couple of times, at more important, argument scenes. So it wasn't a “we can't publish this thing,” it was a “let's choose to have every high schooler in this book use cringey alternatives to bad words” thing. The plot was also predictable and formulaic, following meta narratives from a variety of Disney films I watched as a child. Which brings up the subject that I believe gets to the core of why this book didn't shine that much for me: the audience.
Jay’s Gay Agenda is a sex positive book; it's marketed that way for a reason. Virginity and safe and casual sex are both talked about constantly in relation to Jay’s sexuality. He comes from a rural area where he was the only queer person at his school. Now that he's in Seattle, with more queer people around him, he wants to be able to act on his sexuality. He wants to be desirable, to be in relationships with other queer men, to do the kind of relationship things he's heard so much about from both straight and queer media. In order to really safely and ethically talk about this, Jay being eighteen is kind of necessary. Kids do have sex before the legal age of adulthood, but writing about such can be tricky, especially for queer books, which are often persecuted for sexual content (even if it's not there). This book was published before the don't say gay fight reached its peak, but it was likely made with similar historic pushbacks in mind. So, as a business precaution it's very likely HarperTeen pushed for a YA book with legal adult teenagers. It's also could have made June for comfortable; I certainly don't know how I'd feel writing sex scenes involving minors. But the sex positivity is not the issue. The issue is that this book's plot, style, and tone read as Middle Grade, and it was honestly hoarding and exhausting to read YA content in that way. It completely pulled me out of everything. The naivety of the characters was not relatable or endearing, and created a big gap between real teenagers and those in the book.
If you go in knowing all of this, it'll be a great book. It's a rom-com at its core, with tropes and laughs galore. For every queer kid who missed out on seeing themselves in Disney romances, this is the book. You just have to understand all the things this book is trying to do, and everything it's also trying not to be.
Jason June (it's a two-name first name, like Mary-Kate without the hyphen or the Olsen twin) is a genderqueer writer mermaid who loves to create picture books that mix the flamboyantly whacky with the slightly dark, and young adult contemporary rom-coms full of love and lust and hijinks. When not writing, JJ zips about Austin, Texas. He loves dinosaurs, unicorns, Pomeranians, and anything magical that takes you to a different world or time. JJ is a tried and true Laura Dern stan, and he is actively looking for an Andalite friend. His picture books include WHOBERT WHOVER, OWL DETECTIVE, illustrated by Jess Pauwels, and PORCUPINE CUPID, a queer-inclusive Valentine’s Day story, illustrated by Lori Richmond, both from Margaret K. McElderry Books/Simon & Schuster. For under-the-sea whimsical adventures, check out the MERMICORN ISLAND chapter book series from Scholastic!
June’s newest book, Out of the Blue, is out now and available for purchase at your local bookstore.
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