Where is reality?

For this week, our class has read Boy Meets Boy a story that depicts the rocky dating road of a teenage boy who is gay. The issues within this book are not ones that are unrecognizable to a heterosexual female when remember the high school dating scene, however what kept catching me was the atmosphere of the high school in which the main character, Paul, functions in. The high school has a quarterback who is also a "drag queen" and many other students are open about their sexual orientation.

For me personally, it was difficult to read Boy Meets Boy because I could not wrap my head around the idea that there is a community within our current society that is so open and comfortable with people who identify as either gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans-gender or queer. As an optimist, I hope that some day all people while find the recognition and acceptance within our society as a whole that they as individuals deserve; however, as a realist, I didn't like reading Boy Meets Boy because I didn't know how to approach the novel because I didn't know what genre to place the book in--did Levithan intend for the book to be fantasy or did he intend the novel to be read as realistic fiction?

I was personally bothered that I had a difficult time wrapping my head around a community built on tolerance and acceptance and to get a better understanding, I visited David Levithan's website as was suggested in the "About the Author" portion of the book. Levithan says that when writing Boy Meets Boy he wanted to challenge the normal treatment of gay teenagers within literature as the tormented person in the student body at a high school and to my great dismay, when asked if his work is a work of realistic fiction or fantasy Levithan's reaction is that it is both--a story written on a line going straight down the middle of where we are and where we are going ( http://davidlevithan.com/about_davidlevithan.html ).

How unsatisfying to my constant need for having a clear cut answer, but now I believe that I understand the reasoning of Levithan for writing this story in such a way, when you look at our current society, we has such a long way to go in order for the high school that Paul attends to become a reality and yet, when you look at our past, we have come a long way in making it possible to dream that acceptance is a possibility. This is the reality and reality is rarely clear just as in Boy Meets Boy.