Two Boys Kissing (23 page)

Forty-two. Thirty-four. Twenty-six!
The crowd calls out numbers on minute-wide intervals. They filter around Harry like the temperature, but he has to stay focused on the kiss, on making sure his lips stay on Craig’s. He is sure that if Craig lets go of him, he will fall to the ground.

Twenty-two! Nineteen!

A car pulls up to the side of the George Washington Bridge, and Cooper’s parents come running out. They find their son sitting in a security booth, a traffic cop at his side, allowing him his silence. It should not be the case, but at that moment, they have never loved him more.

Seventeen! Sixteen!

Merrily, merrily, a blue-haired boy and a pink-haired boy
row on a quiet river, serenaded by their own conversation. This is now their place. They will return here many times.

Thirteen! Twelve!

We wish we could have been there for you. We didn’t have many role models of our own—we latched on to the foolish love of Oscar Wilde and the well-versed longing of Walt Whitman because nobody else was there to show us an untortured path. We were going to be your role models. We were going to give you art and music and confidence and shelter and a much better world. Those who survived lived to do this. But we haven’t been there for you. We’ve been here. Watching as you become the role models.

Ten! Nine!

Neil and Peter call out the numbers along with everyone else. They hold hands, feel like they are witnessing something monumental, something that could change things. It won’t, but that feeling, that spirit will live on in everyone here, everyone who sees. The spirit will change things.

Eight! Seven! Six!

Tariq sees that there are almost half a million people, around the world, who are watching this. Then he stops looking at the computer and looks straight at life.

Five! Four!

We’re going to do this
, Harry thinks.

Three! Two!

I am alive
, Craig thinks.

One
.

We watch you, but we can’t intervene. We have already done our part. Just as you are doing your part, whether you know it or not, whether you mean to or not, whether you want to or not.

Choose your actions wisely.

There will come a time—perhaps even by the time you read this—that people will no longer be on Facebook. There will come a time when the stars of your favorite teen TV show will be sixty. There will come a time when you will have the same unalienable rights as your straightest friend. (Probably before any of the stars of your favorite teen TV show turn sixty.) There will come a time when the gay prom won’t have to be separate. There will come a time when you will look at someone younger than you and feel that he or she will know more than you ever did. There will come a time when you will worry about being forgotten. There will come a time when the gospel will be rewritten.

If you play your cards right, the next generation will have so much more than you did.

Cooper will live to meet his future self.

You should all live to meet your future selves.

We saw our friends die. But we also see our friends live. So many of them live, and we often toast their long and full lives. They carry us on.

There is the sudden. There is the eventual.

And in between, there is the living.

We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust.

That’s all we ask of you. Make more than dust.

On September 18, 2010, college students Matty Daley and Bobby Canciello kissed for thirty-two hours, thirty minutes, and forty-seven seconds (longer than the characters in this book) to break the Guinness World Record for longest continuous kiss. I am just one of many people who were inspired by what they did. While the characters in this book are not in any way based on Matty and Bobby, the story is certainly inspired by what they did. I am grateful to Matty for telling me what it was like, and for continuing to inspire.

On September 22, 2010, four days after Matty and Bobby’s kiss, another student named Tyler Clementi killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. He went to a college about a half hour away from Matty and Bobby. While this juxtaposition certainly informed this novel, I want to be clear that with the exception of the bridge, none of the circumstances of what happened to Tyler Clementi are meant to be portrayed in this book. That is his own story, and one that I would never presume to know.

At some point in 2008, Michael Cart asked me to be a part of a new anthology he was putting together. He was gathering authors to write about LGBT life today, and as soon as I said yes (which was a foregone conclusion—I would write just about anything for Michael Cart), I felt the challenge of the
assignment. In the end, I decided to write a story about the generation of gay men that went before me looking at the generation of gay men that came after me. (My gay “generation” is a very short one—I came of age in the five or six years that existed between the height of the AIDS epidemic and the proliferation of the Internet, the former defining the generation before me, and the latter defining the generation after me.) The voice of this book and its first few pages began as that story, in the anthology that would ultimately be titled
How Beautiful the Ordinary
. This novel would not exist if Michael hadn’t asked me to write the story. He has been such a gracious advocate for my writing over the years, and now I have one more reason to be grateful for him.

While I was in college in the 1990s, my uncle Bobby came extraordinarily close to dying from AIDS. Now, twenty years later, I can stand on Broadway with my best friends, and a stylish, smiling man will breeze by on his Segway, on his way to work, and one of my best friends will say, “Look, it’s Uncle Bobby!” Bobby has already written some of his story—when you do the Google search, call him Robert Levithan, not Bobby—and I have no doubt he will write much more of it in the near future. I very much look forward to reading it.

On November 12, 2010, my best friend, Billy Merrell, legally married his already-husband, Nico Medina, in the District of Columbia. After the ceremony, the wedding party went to see HIDE/SEEK, the first ever queer-and-billed-as-queer exhibit in the history of the Smithsonian. One of the paintings in the exhibit was David Hockney’s
We Two Boys Together Clinging
. The title, as the placard next to the painting explained, came from
a Walt Whitman poem. I immediately thought of Matty and Bobby’s kiss—so much so that I later remembered the phrase as “We Two Boys Kissing,” which became the inspiration for the title of this book. A misremembering of Whitman filtered through Hockney, a wedding day, and a thirty-two-hour kiss … I am often asked where my ideas come from, and this is a pretty good representation of what the answer might look like.

In 2012, while I was working on this book, I did something that I’d never done before: I read it to someone out loud as it was still coming together. That someone was Joel Pavelski, and those readings took place in many fine public spaces in the city of New York, with a finale overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Thank you for listening, Joel. And thanks as well to Nick Eliopulos and David Barrett Graver, who both gave meaningful feedback on the book when it was still in manuscript form; to Melina Marchetta, who was the exact right dinner companion to have on the day I most needed to talk about my ending; and to Libba Bray, for being Libba Bray.

My editor, Nancy Hinkel, is a better reason to jump for joy than a pretty boy in his underwear … and that is, as Stephin Merritt knows, saying a lot. I have, as of this writing, ten years of thankfulness for her and for the whole team at Random House, including (but in no way limited to) Lauren Donovan, Isabel Warren-Lynch, Stephen Brown, Adrienne Waintraub, Tracy Lerner, and Lisa Nadel. I am also thankful for the efforts of Bill Clegg, Alicia Gordon, Shaun Dolan, and everyone at WMEE. Thanks to Evan Walsh for perfectly capturing the book with his cover photograph.

This isn’t a book that I could have written ten years ago.
And as much as I’d love to credit that to my growth as a writer, I know it’s not really that. Instead it’s because of all the people I’ve met and talked to as an author. And, just as important, it’s about all of the things I’ve been exposed to as a reader, particularly of YA fiction. I am so lucky to be a part of a community of writers that constantly inspires me to write whatever I want to write, no matter how hard it seems. My peers are my role models, and my role models are my peers. Which is extraordinary.

Thanks as always to my parents, my family, my friends, and my readers.

Finally, thank you to all the role models I never got to meet.

For more information and a list of books that inspired and informed this novel, go to
davidlevithan.com/twoboyskissing
.

David Levithan is the author of many acclaimed novels, some of them solo works, some of them collaborations. His solo novels include the
New York Times
bestselling
Every Day
,
Boy Meets Boy
,
The Realm of Possibility
,
Are We There Yet?
,
Wide Awake
,
Love Is the Higher Law
, and
The Lover’s Dictionary
. His collaborations include
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
(written with John Green),
Marly’s Ghost
(illustrated by Brian Selznick), and
Every You, Every Me
(with photographs by Jonathan Farmer), as well as three novels written with Rachel Cohn:
Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist
,
Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List
, and
Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares
. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, and spends his days in New York City, editing and publishing other people’s books.