The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

How to be Remy Cameron
BY Julian Winters
Duet/Interlude Press, 2019
Five stars

Young adult books are a special, delicate sub-set of contemporary fiction. I guess, in theory, anyone who’s ever been a teenager could write one; but not every former teenager can write a good book. Julian Winters seems to have the gift, since “How to be Remy Cameron” is as good as “Running with Lions” was. It presents a dilemma each of us experienced as a teenager—the sometimes overwhelming crisis of identity. This book pulled me back into the angst and panic of my eighteenth year, when I was just grappling with the enormity of being gay in a world where teenagers still didn’t come out. Almost never.

Remy (short for Rembrandt) has an altogether contemporary dilemma. The gay part isn’t really a problem, although the description of his coming out at fourteen is both smile-inducing and poignant. It’s just that Remy Cameron is a more, um, complicated teenager than I was. He’s not just gay; he’s Black, he’s adopted, and he has a seven-year-old sister born ten years after his adoption. He’s one of a handful of Black kids in his suburban Atlanta high school, and he’s also haunted by the constant presence of his ex – his first boyfriend, who set him aside and moved on.

So, this story hit home in an entirely different way. My husband and I adopted two non-white kids twenty-five years ago, and our son is brown-skinned. Both of us white Ivy-leaguers understand something about the identity crisis of a non-white kid. No matter how much you love your children, you can’t see the world through their eyes, especially if they don’t look like you.

Winters handles the teenage stuff brilliantly—to the point where I was grasping at details to try to identify everything from the lingo to the fashion choices. He captures the sense of created community that Remy and his friends—a clutch of “diverse” kids in a largely white school—have formed. Winters also parses with painful precision the complicated differences in the way Remy relates to each member of his friend circle. Just because you care about someone doesn’t make it easy to deal with them, right?

Another aspect of this book I really love is how much Remy loves his parents. This is a happy family. That drives the point home even harder—misery and confusion don’t have to arise from an unhappy family situation. Remy, in most ways, really does “have it all,” unlike some of his friends. That fact that he’s struggling doesn’t make him ungrateful, it makes him a teenager.

There are many little story lines in this book, and two special ones that I’ll let the readers discover on their own. These are rich veins in the narrative, and worth savoring; but they are by no means the whole story. Winters orchestrates this very small-world plot in such a way that its emotional enormity for the not-quite-kids at its center can be fully appreciated. It is an emotional roller coaster that had me teary-eyed quite a lot.

I loved this book for reminding me of the teenager I was many years ago; and for shining light on my own children’s struggles to make sense of themselves and their family in today’s America.