The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

The State of Us (For Love or Country?)
Shaun David Hutchinson
Published by Harper-Teen, 2020
Five stars

In the wake of the post-election bizarroworld in late 2020, and particularly after the events of Epiphany 2021 (January 6), this book was a balm to my soul.

Shaun Hutchinson’s books have all hit me in the heart, and have taken this sixty-five-year-old back to the early 1970s, when he was a teenager struggling with his identity. Hutchinson channels the voice of teen angst with both great humor and razor edge that sometimes hurts.

This book’s premise was uncannily timely. The story focuses on the reluctant meeting of Andre (Dre) Rosario, the seventeen-year-old son of the nation’s first Mexican-American presidential candidate, and Dean Arnault, the seventeen-year-old son of the conservative Republican woman running against him. Forced to spend time together during a security blip in the course of a public event, the two boys, so different from each other, find that they actually share a lot—mostly the annoyance of being dragged into their parents’ presidential aspirations during their senior years in high school.

These boys are a study in contrasts, however, the only congruity being their attractiveness and charm. Dre is a free spirit, openly gay, and deeply into Dungeons & Dragons. He’s the right kind of son for his father, a dark-horse candidate reminiscent of Barak Obama. Dean, on the other hand, is the ultimate Wasp boy, combed and buttoned-up and preppy as one would expect of the son of a woman who brings to mind Amy Coney Barrett, our newest Supreme Court Justice.

The whole point of YA novels is to focus on emotional development, and here we have these two boys, who live on opposite sides of the country (Colorado and Florida) building a friendship over a secure app known as Promethean. Triggered by their initial enforced proximity, Dean and Dre discover a friendship based on words and ideas, sharing themselves in messages and jokes across thousands of miles. During chance meetings when their candidate parents’ paths cross, they discover other things—things that make both of their lives even more awkward than simply being teenagers. There is important stuff here, which I will not delve into to preserve the pleasure for anyone who reads this book.

Two critical pressure points are the love each boy feels for his candidate parent. Dre is very close to his father, and misses that closeness as he’s dragged constantly into the harsh spotlight of politics. He feels that he’s losing his father, and that his feelings toward Dean will only damage his father’s hopes for the White House. Dean is very close to his mother, devoted to making her happy, making her proud of him, her “perfect son.” And, obviously, you know that’s a problem. It also hit me in the gut, because when I was seventeen, I was totally caught up in the “Best Little Boy in the World” syndrome (for which read John Reid, aka Andrew Tobias’s fictionalized memoir of that name, published in 1973. I kept it under my pillow at college).

And, just to make it all crazier and more fun/painful: there’s a spoiler candidate, a billionaire entrepreneur named Jackson McCann, who threatens both candidates and horrifies both Democrat and Republican boys equally. Yeah, there’s some wishful thinking here, but I’m so glad to see this in a novel, especially, as I noted, given the events of the first week of 2021 in Washington, DC

Interestingly, the denouement of the book is a bit anticlimactic, and after pondering it a while, I came to understand why the author did this. There really isn’t a way to give teenagers the kind of Happy Ever After that older protagonists get. You want to believe in high-school sweethearts, but you also kind of know that to assume it would be disingenuous. Hutchinson handles this deftly, and left me feeling unsettled but hopeful. He also does something at the end that is obvious, but surprisingly subtle—and of course I can’t talk about it because I want you all to experience it.

This book was a great way to start 2021.