A review by ellioteverafter
All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson

dark emotional hopeful inspiring sad slow-paced

4.0

To deny the queer community a basic sex education as teens is to perpetuate the prevalence of those statistics.

I cannot imagine how difficult this must have been to write. Difficult, but oh-so necessary. All Boys Aren't Blue is a thought-provoking piece that put to words a lot of similar experiences to what I went through growing up queer. I adored the incredibly strong theme of family in this, and was so glad to see a perspective from someone with a family who loved and accepted him when he came out. Those stories still unfortunately rare for those in certain communities.

What stopped me from rating this higher was the section on Hope. I don't think it was at all appropriate to broadcast her deadname, especially given that she wasn't around to give consent to that. I felt fairly uncomfortable reading that section because there was quite a lot of misgendering (which I understand was how Hope was seen at the time, but that still isn't necessary) and it all came from the perspective of a cisgender man. I think many people still have a lot to learn about how to treat trans people fairly, unfortunately. That's not to say that Hope's section was disrespectful, but that it definitely could've stood to have been looked at by a few more trans people before going ahead.

Overall, I am going to be recommending this book to a lot of non-black people and a lot of queer people, too. I definitely don't think it's a piece that's above critique by any means, but it is an incredibly solid work that needs to be read by a much wider audience.
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