Ifear this comparison I’m about to make between two gay romance narratives will perpetuate queer people being too overly critical of their own community.
So let’s just make this clear now: I’m about to talk about two lovely stories. My placing one against the other is purely due to the circumstance of my having read one right after the other. What I say here speaks to my feelings regarding the current state of what is and is not represented in queer pop culture in general.
Nothing can represent everything for everyone, but when you haven’t seen enough of one kind of representation and too much of another, unintended lack of inclusion can feel more pointed than it is.
Let’s start with Bloom, a cute YA graphic novel written by Kevin Panetta and illustrated by Savanna Ganuchaeu.
I liked Bloom. It’s cute. A post-high school romance in which two boys, Ari and Hector, bond over baking. I liked the characters. The art was crisp and effective. But the story also felt too light, like a meal without enough nutritional value.
There’s a subtle depth to the writing — I especially liked its treatment of quietly dysfunctional friend groups — but every conflict has a sitcom-like ability to be resolved easily and conveniently. Difficult topics like economic hardship are resolved in an easy wish fulfillment kind of way, when I feel like they ought to be more complex and open-ended.
Ari is a realistic, sometimes irritating, relatable protagonist, but Hector is a little too perfect. His charm and contrast with Ari giving the impression of depth where, once you think about it, there isn’t enough. I wouldn’t call him a Manic Pixie Dream Boy, but he’s not enough of his own person in the story either.
In all Bloom gave me a nice warm buzz when I finished it, but it was a fleeting feeling.
More than anything, it triggered questions for me about what we want to deal with when we read queer romance narratives. Like, I’d like to see more queer narratives actually deal with questions of identity more on the page.
Again, though, this lack is endemic to queer literature in general — particularly work aimed at YA audiences.
In a romance between two boys, the word “gay” isn’t mentioned once in Bloom. Nor bisexual, nor queer, nor any other such identifying term. My inner-rebuttal is “Well, do straight romances have to mention the word ‘straight’?” No, but having queer characters not engage with their queer identities on the page feels disingenuous to my real, lived experience.