Schoolboy Romance: Queer Identity and Same-Sex Desire in the Contemporary Boys' School Story

My study examines the contemporary (post-1969) boys’ school story, locating its construction of queer identity and male homosocial desire in the genre’s roots in nineteenth-century works such as Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). I suggest that that the genre represents a continuum stretching from what I term the canonical school story to a selection of contemporary variants in which the patterns queer desire and expression remain largely unchanged since the genre’s Victorian-era popularization. My analysis reads this continuum through the lens of Queer Theory, drawing upon Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Elizabeth Freeman to examine how queer identity and desire is represented in an environment that is often prohibitive towards such expressions. I also look at some of the ways in which childhood and adolescence is constructed in the contemporary era to show how the ways in which we continue to imagine young people in various spaces reflects anxieties about queer youth. My selection of texts ranges across several forms of media, reflecting the popular consumption and reception of contemporary stories about youth: Gordon Korman’s Young Adult series collectively known as the Bruno and Boots novels (1978-1995), the film My Bodyguard (1980), Shura’s music video for her song “What’s it Gonna Be?”, and Bill Konigsberg’s linked pair of Young Adult novels Openly Straight (2013) and Honestly Ben (2017). I conclude by arguing that the representations of queer identity in these texts leave a space open for more diverse representations of queer youth going forward.