#sam halse

Georgia Warr- Loveless by Alice Oseman

Sam Halse- Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo 

Pyrrha Dve - The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir 

I LOVE how first Eddie and then Andrew need to go back home to Tennessee before they can discover and accept their queerness. It’s not enough that they are inseparable and that they love each other. Eddie can’t begin to accept himself – to any degree – until he understands himself, which he can only do by going back home, to where the land calls for him. For Eddie, Home means a questionable legacy from his wealthy land-owning family and a rich tradition of folklore that he is personally part of. For Andrew, Home means being surrounded by bittersweet personal hauntings but also by real living people who are like him and who share his culture. And both of them need these aspects of Home to understand who they are as people.

I think a lot of queer narratives tend to (for obvious reasons) paint queerness as essentially incompatible with rural cultures – but Eddie, Andrew, Sam and Riley are all both queer and fundamentally rurally Southern. When Eddie and Andrew go home, they find themselves back in a culture that makes sense to them because it runs (literally) in their blood. They find a small community where being queer isn’t this other, distinct identity but has been made to naturally fit and blend into the local lifestyle that they love (which ok, for these guys, consists mostly in racing very fast cars and taking many drugs, with some ghost tales thrown in. Good for them, you only live your 20s once).

This is not to say that the book ignores queer oppression – Riley’s parents disown him for being trans, Sam throws these ragers that he invites homophobes to, Andrew immediately gets into a fight over a homophobic slur, there is a sense that both Riley and Sam are forced to look beyond their immediate community for romantic partners. But still, despite the oppression that these characters face, the narrative has them all unquestionably BELONG - and part of the process of belonging is them figuring out how to make their own community at home, without hating where they are from OR hating themselves.