"This Book is Gay"

     Juno Dawson's work, This Book is Gay, is somewhat of a riff on the standard puberty books most adolescents receive upon entering middle school. These books are meant to be easy-to-read, user-friendly, and conversational texts that can provide young children with the information and the proper vocabulary to use concerning the changes that are occurring to their bodies as they enter puberty. Noticeably, however, these books often gloss over or entirely omit LGBTQ+ issues, such as only discussing heterosexual love and sex, not explaining the differences between "sex" and "gender," etc. Dawson seeks to remedy this egregious oversight with her book, conceiving of This Book is Gay as a one-stop shop for kids to be educated on queerness and the history and culture of the queer community. While the book is mainly intended for kids who are exploring or discovering their queerness, it is not exclusionary of cis / straight people and is also aimed at educating them about queer issues.

    As she educates her audience throughout This Book is Gay, Dawson also explains not only why this book is unique, but also why this book's existence is incredibly important, acknowledging the ongoing crisis of the derogation of the queer community and the censorship of information on queer issues. Dawson often uses personal anecdotes to elucidate the significance of this book for young queer people, confessing that much of what she had to learn about queerness in general as well as her own identity first as a gay man and, now, as a trans woman she had to learn on her own, either through hearsay or through personal experience. This is exactly the problem which she hopes to solve with her book; she aims to provide a credible source of information on queerness so that kids, both queer and straight, can be more educated on these issues before they encounter them themselves, and Dawson is cognizant of the fact This Book is Gay may be a child's encounter with the idea of queerness. While the author's diction often borders on the painfully-millennial / chronically-online, this book is nevertheless an extremely accessible and valuable educational resource for queer and straight people alike.

    Dawson's This Book is Gay, in all its unabashed queerness, has come under much fire by the conservative right for being "inappropriate for children" and for depicting "sexually explicit content," even though the puberty books which many of us received were also sexually explicit in that they were educational tools about human biology. There is, however, a clear and present danger for the well-being of queer children and queer people which is being posed by the sweeping threats to ban this book and others like it. Dawson explains this in her section on the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and how censorship and disinformation were intentionally weaponized by conservatives in order to stoke fear in the hearts of the public around the existence of gay men. These disinformation and fear campaigns not only drummed up hatred against this marginalized group, which resulted in a sharp uptick in hate crimes, but it also allowed the disease to run rampant through the community. This ultimately resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and countless destroyed relationships, and these shockwaves are still felt today, even though the stigma around homosexuality and AIDS has lessened and treatments for the disease have been developed. There is immeasurable power in information, and Dawson's This Book is Gay is perfectly designed to empower queer people through education.

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