_Freakshow_ Response

Freakshow by James St. James is a young adult novel that chronicles the senior year of high school of Billy Bloom, a teenage drag queen who has moved from a life in Connecticut where he was pretty happy, if not 100% out about his sexuality and gender play, to a conservative school in Florida that supposedly has no need for a Gay Straight Alliance organization because it has never had a gay student.  The horrific torment Billy experiences for being gender variant in this environment is deeply disturbing, but Billy perseveres, transforming himself into the heroic Superfreak and attempting to unite the school's silent outcasts and impact the school on a large scale.

In a broad sense, the story line is familiar - Glee is the most recent example I can think of of this outcast-seeks-acceptance-and-everyone-learns something plot.  But it's well done here, with the narration of "relentlessly fabulous" Billy drawing us into a story that may be a little clean and tidy, but takes on a difficult and important subject with style that goes beyond over-the-top.  The familiarity of the plot may help some readers work this into their ideas of the kinds of stories that are told about teenagers and schools all this time.  This one has a lot more sequins.

A big question that I'm left with after reading is what happened with Billy's mother, who was his confidante and partner in crime until she abruptly sent him off to live with his father.  From the way she is described throughout, I have trouble believing and understanding how she could turn on him like that upon discovering him dressed in drag.  I guess that's St. James's point, that her seeming open-mindedness had very finite limits.  Even her son being in a coma after being beaten nearly to death did not sway her.  As a parent, this was so sad to me.

Billy spends much of the book in confined spaces: a sink cabinet, underneath his bed, and even closed into a pullout couch.  He clearly had some mental health issues that were completely separate from his gender identity, though I think they were exacerbated by the fear and cruelty he experienced at school.  Part of me wants to read this symbolically, like his feeling of being confined by social limits and needing to break them was balanced by a psychological need for physical limitations.  But I don't know if I'd stand by that interpretation.