Rafe Goldberg grew up in very liberal Boulder, Colorado with his very liberal parents (they met at Oberlin), so when he told his parents that he was gay, they were fine with it. More than fine. They threw him a party, complete with paper hats that said, "Rafe is Gay, yay!" But with such a big to-do about his sexuality and his mother becoming the president of PFLAG, Rafe became labeled as The Gay Kid. And he didn't care for it. So in his junior year of High School, he moved across the country to Natick, Massachusetts to attend an all-boys boarding school where he planned not to tell anyone he was gay so that he could shed the label and just be Rafe.
The book raised a lot of questions about what it means to be yourself. If you don't tell anyone you are gay but you've already come out, are you still in the closet? If you say you accept yourself as gay, but you hide that part of yourself from others, are you really okay with it at all? Are you really lying to someone if you hide a part of yourself, or not?
Rafe has to deal with all of these questions as he joins the soccer team, makes friends with nerds and jocks alike, and falls in love.
I think this would make a really great book for group discussion with High Schoolers. The writing is witty, funny, and genuine. I felt like I was going through all the same epiphanies as Rafe as he had them near the end, which was really touching.
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